To the editors: I was fortunate enough to attend one of the Chamber Opera Chicago performances of Madame Butterfly and feel I must respond to Dennis Polkow’s ludicrous review [June 2] of my colleague Lauren Miller in the title role. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Normally, I would assume that a bad review of any good singer could be attributable to the fact that no single voice can please every taste....
As an actor (in numerous plays at Steppenwolf, Remains, and other theaters, and in the forthcoming film Singles), Jim True knows that the key to words isn’t just what they mean, it’s how they sound–their assonance, alliteration, rhyme, and rhythm. Those are the elements True explores in his work as a composer; his texts include poems and monologues by Dylan Thomas (“And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” “Youth Calls to Age”), William Butler Yeats (“I Am of Ireland”), E....
Guitarist John Fahey survived what Utah Phillips called “the great folk music scare” of the 60s to establish himself as a contemporary virtuoso of traditional acoustic guitar. He’s probably best known as a blues musician, archivist, and scholar; he was instrumental in the rediscoveries of Bukka White and Skip James, his Takoma Records eventually became a prized collectors’ label, and he himself is a walking compendium of southern acoustic blues styles....
Those who saw Lee Shot Williams’s torrid performance at the 1988 Chicago Blues Festival know that this underrecognized vocalist is among the most polished and entertaining on the contemporary scene. He arrived in Chicago from Mississippi in 1956, and he’s been a favorite of aficionados since the early 60s, when he departed from gospel music and broke into the local blues and R & B circuit. Williams was one of the many vocalists given employment by guitar master Earl Hooker, and there remain elements of Hooker’s brilliant emotionalism in Williams’s passionate delivery....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » MoMing is a presenting rather than producing organization. That is, they bring in existing outside ensembles to present programs, rather than maintaining their own resident ensemble. This helps to create audiences for dance, music, and visual arts citywide. When The Oriana Singers presented a single piece for each of two programs there in 1988, nearly 200 new patrons heard us....
Animator Michael Sporn remembers the problem with Abel’s Island: “There were maybe 50 little black-and-white sketches in the book,” he says, “but we had to make the film feel like William Steig. So we got all of his books and tried to figure out how he would draw a winter scene, and how he would draw summer.” Sporn was making a half-hour animated movie from Steig’s story about a shipwrecked mouse, and he needed the books as references for the things Steig wrote about but didn’t illustrate....
Lead Story Last September, after a monthlong hiring freeze and the heart attack suffered by a staff embalmer, Maryland’s Anatomy Board was down to one person, Ronald S. Wade. Before the state provided emergency relief, enough cadavers piled up to create a public health hazard. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On page 31 of the Defense Department’s annual report to the president and Congress last year, Michigan’s Sawyer Air Force Base is shown in Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is labeled as belonging to Canada....
Peter Brotzmann is not only one of the very best saxophonists alive–he may also be the most dramatic. Though little known in America, he’s been a crucial figure in Europe’s homegrown jazz renaissance since the late 60s, when he exploded onto the scene with his own incendiary version of Albert Ayler’s already inflammable music. Over time a remarkable instinct for structure asserted itself in his music; I suspect that the styles of expatriate Chicagoans such as Roscoe Mitchell may have encouraged him....
THE BIG SHOE The play–an incredibly silly meditation on psychiatry, fear, and hopelessness–is a mess. It takes place in a mental ward where the innovative head shrink, a fellow named Goddard, pummels his patients in order to modify behavior. Christopher, his latest victim, has been brought to the ward after being found babbling to a hill of ants in an alley next to his house. He’s been contemplating suicide. To make matters weirder, he keeps talking about a “big shoe....
A Name We Can Trust We have been following the Sun-Times’s search for a new Miss Lonelyhearts, and the other day we thought we met the one. Her name was Emily True, and as soon as we heard it we wanted to pour our heart out. “Dear Miss True, all is confusion and turmoil. Please advise.” It’s a major marketing decision. What do the people want? What will they pay to read?...
Bob Aikens looks intently at the man lying two stories above him. The man has his legs wrapped around a narrow steel beam, part of a nearly finished building frame, and is struggling with another beam that is hanging from a hoist. He is trying to ram a bull pin–a heavy, tapered steel tool–through a hole in the loose beam and into a hole in the beam he is lying on....
This appearance of harpist Alex “Easy Baby” Randall is an important event: although still a Chicago resident, Easy Baby has been virtually unheard for years. He’s a member of that vital second echelon of Chicago blues artists who made solid reputations for themselves in neighborhood clubs, cut a few records and influenced younger musicians, but have remained unknown outside their own communities and a small circle of collectors and aficionados. Easy Baby’s voice is taut and quivering in a way reminiscent of a slightly more relaxed Elmore James, and his harp style–sparse and melodious, with a sweet-toned intensity that brings a sense of purpose to his occasionally chaotic phrasing–though staunchly in the postwar Chicago tradition, is still distinctive....
Friday 14 Saturday 15 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The trouble with arguing with religious wackos is that the minute you start, you’re on their turf–they win even if they lose, if you see what I mean. Case in point: a free lecture today by the Reverend Ralph B. Conrad, who’ll debunk the biblical passages that antigay fundamentalists use to condemn homosexuality. He assures you that God Says It’s OK, if that’s what you need to hear, at the Metropolitan Community Church, 615 W....
Despite the increasing Japanese presence in the city, the music of Japan is still rarely performed–and, no, I’m not counting the peppy drivel that passes for Japanese music in karaoke bars. This recital, organized by the consulate general of Japan, offers a timely introduction. Featured are five certified virtuosos of traditional instruments: Hozan Yamamoto plays the shakuhachi, a vertical bamboo flute; Yuriko Makise and Masateru Ando are masters of the koto, a 13-stringed relative of the zither; Hidetaro Honjo is a specialist of the sangen, a banjolike instrument with three strings; and Roetsu Tosha is well known as a Kabuki musician playing on the kotsutsumi, a double-headed hand drum....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » John Moynihan helps to put the “Girl in Trouble” in historical perspective. As recently as 25 to 30 years ago, there were throughout the Western world what were called foundling homes and orphanages, filled with the infants and children of unwed mothers and others who could not care for their children, institutions that hold few happy recollections for those who grew up in them....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Leving seems incensed that the legal system now takes child support more seriously than it used to. But, in the first place, this development is scarcely the result of any overwhelming pro-woman or pro-mother sentiment on the part of our legislators. Child support enforcement is a pro-taxpayer move, since many of the children whose fathers will not support them end up on the welfare rolls....
The people in Villa Park put up with the strange animal in their toolshed for about as long as they could. They didn’t know exactly what it was, but they knew that anytime they opened the door of the shed, they heard nasty growls and hissing noises. And the smell, a powerful musky odor, was enough to drive you off all by itself. They had reason to believe that the animal, whatever it was, had raised a litter of young in the toolshed....
For five years the 40-unit apartment building on North Waller Avenue in Austin sat vacant but was not boarded up. Its landlord didn’t pay property taxes, and prostitutes and drug dealers used it for their headquarters. That happy twist of fate came after two years of lobbying, politicking, and pleading by the Coalition for Housing Court Reform, a citywide network of almost 50 groups whose members are fighting the war for low-income housing....
GRANDMA GOES WEST No, really. Even little what’s-his-name, the two-year-old, ended up loving it–though he was seriously disconcerted by some arty bits early on, where the show’s Wild West theme and flavor are established. Moody evocations of the primeval plains sent him scrambling right up over my shoulder. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Pedro Reis’s “cloud swing” act, where he rides a rope like a trapeze, along with some fancy balloon popping by the company clowns helped loosen the kid up....
METHUSALEM Goll (aka Isaac Lang) slaps styles and subjects against each other with an exuberant, violent, vulgar impunity. Building on Jarry and Dada, anticipating Ionesco and Brecht, he sends his audience bouncing across a string of absurd, recklessly digressive vignettes detailing Methusalem’s dirty progress through the class wars. This is kitchen-sink drama in the sense that it hands us everything but. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Still, the digressions are often the best parts....
