In the ebbing summer heat of 1988, the Chicago Tribune laid bare the forces of obstruction that are running the city into the ground. The series ended a week later with an overview in the Perspective section. Said the headline: “The timid city–As coalition taunts, inertia rules the roost.” “Taunts”? Has anyone seen this crowd that stands by whistling and hooting as Chicago sinks into the muck? Best of Chicago voting is live now....
The 60-some one-acts (three per night) in this six-week program, produced by Cecilie Keenan for Bailiwick Repertory, range from plays and musicals to performance art and monologues; some are well-established classic and contemporary selections, while others are brand-new pieces. They’re mounted by a slew of directors, most of them little known, who are looking for an avenue to showcase their work and get their names out to the public. See? It’s working already....
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA Such sentiments were perhaps not altogether foreign to those who bugged out early from the opening-night presentation of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra at the Lyric Opera. In all justice, those who fled before the end of the first act and during the intermission should have had the patience to hang on to the end; it was a very short evening, after all, and it’s not likely that they will ever see this work performed again....
Friday 17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Quilombo tells the story of Palmares, a breakaway nation of African slaves in 17th-century Brazil; though constantly challenged by Dutch and Portuguese colonists, Palmares held on to its autonomy for 100 years. The film was directed by Carlos Diegues, with a score by Gilberto Gil; it shows tonight at 7 in room 254 of DePaul’s Schmitt Center, 2323 N....
I worked in a hospital, briefly, when I was young. I remember the feet, gnarled, twisted, misshapen, painful, worn-out from years of standing on cement factory floors. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now I am a teacher. The year before last, the next-door first grade joined my first grade for a morning. Among the other frightened children, Danton was remarkable for his clothes: T-shirt too big, torn, and dirty....
To the editors: The Endangered Species Act has proven itself a dismal failure. Of the 1,227 domestic and international species that have been listed under the ESA, only 17 have been “rescued” from the list. Of these, 7 were delisted due to extinction, 4 were removed because of “original data error” and 3 others recovered naturally, independent of the act. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There is another issue to be addressed here....
Guitarist Fareed Haque is still young (in his mid-20s), still hungry (playing small clubs and the occasional wedding)–and one of the best-known jazz musicians still living in Chicago (thanks to two albums of his own, sideman stints with Paquiito D’Rivera and Sting, and a solo shot on David Sanborn’s TV jam session). The acclaim is deserved and even timely, for despite Haque’s tender years, he has already begun to shape an individualistic voice on his instrument....
FRATERNITY After seeing Stetson’s Fraternity, I’m still wondering about his integrity, but now I also have questions about his judgment and common sense. I mean, what kind of playwright would include both a full-length sermon and an entire campaign speech? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fraternity is about the two alternatives that, as Stetson sees it, face black people today: they can join the white establishment, or they can hang on to the passion and purpose of the early civil rights movement....
LABOR RELATIONS Where, he wonders in the play, did he go wrong? All he did was create a company town, itself called Pullman, out of a marsh eight miles south of Chicago. There he set out to save his workers the trouble of worrying about anything but working for him the rest of their lives–on whatever terms and for whatever wages he dictated. There wasn’t even the mockery of self-government found in South Africa....
LISTEN TO MY SONG: KURT WEILL’S THEATER MUSIC With almost no spoken dialogue to set up the songs or flesh out the characters, it’s hoped the 42 selections will flow spontaneously from one to the other to create a self-contained conversation, patterns of juxtaposition sparking a sort of enlightenment by association. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But to do that, the performances must really make up for the lack of dialogue....
MASQUERADE FOLLIES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Only a few numbers into the program Joey Brooks appeared in the guise of Dolly Parton, although he looked more like a cross between Tammy Faye Bakker and Meat Loaf. Drawing on Dolly’s homespun, gregarious nature, Brooks made a rehearsed attempt to rally the little audience. He would have done better to call it an evening right then and there....
RAGGED DICK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s clear from the start that playwright Neal Bell desperately wants Ragged Dick to be a deep play, an important play. But it is also clear that his desperation prevents him from achieving that. Ragged Dick is so filled with “deep meaning” and portent–poetic monologues, brooding conversations, characters who are also symbols–that the story and even the intent of the play become murky....
Next month Chicago will hold the most wide open elections in the city’s history. All adult Chicagoans, not just those registered to vote, will be welcome at the polls–even undocumented immigrants. And any adult can run for office without trudging around to collect ballot petitions. Indeed, those without previous experience are not only allowed to run, they’re being sought out and encouraged to run by scores of businesses and community groups throughout the city....
“If a mother’s physical presence makes children happy, then the most contented people in the world should be 50-year-olds,” writes Marcia Loy in Today’s Chicago Woman (September). “Their mothers were home. That’s my generation and I don’t believe we’re particularly happy or well-adjusted. My daughter’s generation grew up with many working mothers and an absurdly high divorce rate. I believe she’s been consistently happier at each stage of her life than I was…....
THE COLLAGE PROJECT The program offers the first clue as to how much this work has been pondered, analyzed, and processed: every cover has its own individual collage, and the thick program includes a quote from James Joyce, program notes by three different writers, a poem by Marc Smith, a xeroxed collage centerfold, and an earnest description of all this as “a collection of one-act plays within a context of related works....
THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLE No, it’s not the latest TV special from Geraldo Rivera. But in its wittily purposeful examination of romantic, political, military, and moral ironies, The Devil’s Disciple, George Bernard Shaw’s 91-year-old comedy about unlikely heroism in the American Revolution, is a far more advanced piece of work than much of what passes for modern today. Written in 1897, and originally produced not in England but in the United States, Shaw’s first commercially successful stage work continues to delight with its pointed analysis of the vagaries of human behavior....
The Man With the First-Class Body Coldren, a Jim Thompson appointee, had been wondering when Edgar would get around to replacing him. Obviously his number was now up. So Coldren, who was following events by phone during a vacation, called in February 5 and resigned. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Coldren’s downfall was his girth. He is very fat. When questioned–and he was questioned frequently over the years in appropriations hearings, which is why if Edgar didn’t know Coldren’s transit habits he might have been the only person in Springfield who didn’t–he always explained that he was simply too big for a coach seat....
VEGETARIANS GO APE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In using comparative anatomy to determine what man was “meant” to eat, we should look at the species most similar to man, namely the anthropoid apes–chimpanzees, gibbons, gorillas, and orangutans. Of all animals, man’s digestive organs and teeth most closely resemble these apes. In captivity, some of these animals will eat meat if forced to rather than starve to death....
MUNA TSENG DANCE PROJECTS Tseng is an American of Chinese descent who was born in Hong Kong and lived there until she was 13, when her family moved to Canada. She danced with choreographer Jean Erdman, the wife of mythologist Joseph Campbell, for seven years, and has been showing her own work in New York for the last ten. Though her technical training has been exclusively Western, she has always, as she said in an interview, “drawn unconsciously from the Asian part of my psyche....
Here’s a rare opportunity to see a true blues original. Willie Cobbs’s “You Don’t Love Me,” first recorded in 1961 on the Mojo label out of Memphis, has been a blues-rock standard ever since the Allman Brothers’ cover version, but Cobbs’s talents go much deeper. Cobbs was born in Arkansas, and he lived in Chicago for a while during the early 50s, absorbing the driving urban sounds being pioneered by Muddy Waters et al and even, by some accounts, working locally with Waters’s band....
