AIN’T IT NICE Ain’t It Nice, a collection consisting primarily of originals, is Kent’s first recording for Bob Koester’s Delmark label–perhaps a signal that Delmark will record more contemporary blues artists. The recording has rough spots–some the result of the way Delmark chose to program it–but this disk should gain Kent wider public recognition. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kent is a surefire crowd pleaser, but he’s a challenge to record....
Years of hard work and harder gigging have made Scruffy the Cat one of Boston’s best bands. But they remain one of its best-kept secrets. Maybe it’s because their clever, unpretentious songcraft isn’t scruffy enough for membership in Boston’s garage-revival fringe (the DMZ/Lyres school) and isn’t catty enough for membership in its experimental art fringe (the Mission of Burma/Throwing Muses school). But don’t even bother to try to find them a pigeonhole....
I am enclosing a copy of a recent column in Parade magazine by Marilyn vos Savant, who supposedly is listed in the “Guinness Book of World Records Hall of Fame” for “highest IQ.” A writer asks Marilyn for an answer to the following riddle: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “My father loved this one too, but I didn’t get it then, and I don’t get it now....
MAKING MR. RIGHT With Ann Magnuson, John Malkovich, Ben Masters, Laurie Metcalf, and Polly Bergen. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shorn of her lover and number one business problem, she’s doubly free when she’s approached by the executives of Chemtech, a firm that wants her to mount a public relations campaign for their new product, a robot that’s being prepared for deep-space exploration. Frankie agrees, only to be dumbfounded by the discovery that the robot is a human-appearing android designed in the image of its creator, Dr....
The costs of staging a full-scale musical with professional singers and instrumentalists are prohibitive for all but a handful of large theaters in the area. For those audiences (and performers) who want more musicals than they’re getting, one alternative is a concert staging, in which the cast and orchestra perform the script and score of a show, while leaving the visual elements to the imagination. Concert stagings are fairly frequent in other cities, but not here: hoping to fill the gap, Marshall Productions is making its debut with a one-night-only concert version of A Little Night Music....
For almost three years students in several overcrowded Rogers Park public grade schools have been relegated to makeshift classrooms in cafeterias, auditoriums, and washrooms, while their parents have pleaded unsuccessfully with Board of Education officials for relief. New construction requires money. And board officials, wary of opposition to tax hikes even for noble causes, dillydallied on the issue, often refusing to meet with parents or even return their phone calls....
A PRELIMINARY INQUIRY INTO THE METHODS USED TO CREATE AND MAINTAIN A SEGREGATED SOCIETY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The resolutely balanced cooperation behind this production contrasts notably with the hostility and confusion that dominate the content, which ranges from the rhetoric of white racists and black militants to ingenuous pronouncements by politicians and pop singers. Much of it’s presented in random and chaotic fashion, inadvertently illustrating the murky misunderstanding that continues to bolster American-style apartheid....
SHIRLEY VALENTINE With Pauline Collins, Tom Conti, Julia McKenzie, Alison Steadman, Bernard Hill, Joanna Lumley, and Tracie Bennett. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This appreciation of character is more than just a staple of English theater. It’s also an essential aspect of English cinema, and it helps explain why that cinema as a whole has rightly been called “uncinematic.” (Even a recent and uncommon masterpiece such as Distant Voices, Still Lives, which is uncharacteristically cinematic in both form and style, draws on some of the resources of this taste and tradition....
If you listen to local school-reform activists, the October 9 elections for positions on some 500 local school councils were a triumph of school reform. That is also the central conclusion of the controversial foreword Orfield has written to a study recently completed by U. of C. student Peter Scheirer. The study, entitled “Poverty, Not Bureaucracy: Poverty, Segregation, and Inequality in Metropolitan Chicago Schools,” examines the relationship between poverty and performance on standardized mathematical achievement tests....
The top of Jeanna Hasan’s worktable out on her sun porch is filled with paintbrushes, small tempera bottles stacked on top of each other, and several drinking glasses full of water. Popsicle sticks used to mix paint sit in another glass, and a bottle painted with angels lies in the middle of the table on top of newspapers. Within easy reach are two cigarette lighters and an ashtray brimming with butts....
Friday 1 Video may be taking over the world, but here’s a chance to help your children appreciate what good, old-fashioned film is all about before MTV rots their brains. The Experimental Film Coalition is sponsoring Filmmaking for Kids with award-winning filmmaker Laurie Dunphy leading the class. If you have a junior Orson Welles, this could be his chance. The class is designed for 7- to 10-year-olds and begins today from 1 to 4 at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes in Evanston....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You cannot imagine how many scintillating conversations have begun with: Did you see the Reader’s review of ? Why just the other evening, my friend Baby Jane and I were discussing Albert Williams’ critique of A Dance Against Darkness in your June 24 issue. Mr. Williams ends his first paragraph: Touche, Bill! We have long believed Mr....
It’s probably the gambling. That’s a meeting ground there. And the transience. “Where’re you from?” is always a good opening. People like to talk about their hometowns whether they’re tourists or new residents, and most of the Vegas population is one or the other (and if they’re natives, they’ll be sure to let you know about it). So it’s not the celebrated western hospitality–which is probably overrated anyway–that accounts for the obliging openness of most of the strangers you meet in Las Vegas....
The birds are beginning to settle down at Somme Woods. Somme is the Cook County forest preserve in Northbrook where I have been working with three other volunteers on a survey of nesting birds. We have always had the much-despised European starling, an alien species, nesting at Somme, but this year starlings are moving into parts of the preserve where they had not nested before. Starlings are hole nesters, and one of the reasons bird lovers don’t like having them around is that they are very aggressive in going after choice nest sites, often driving away native birds....
ORPHEUS DESCENDING Whether I read them or see them on the stage, his plays tend to degenerate into melodrama. Some day I hope to see a production that will teach me to appreciate Williams. Unfortunately Zebra Crossing’s Orpheus Descending is not that production. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But then, I can’t imagine a successful production of this play in 1992. Its sordid twists and turns make it something of a down-and-out Falcon Crest....
You may have heard of cyberpunk, a new breed of science fiction that focuses on high-tech lowlifes. If you haven’t, don’t worry about it. “I’m writing about the present,” Gibson told one interviewer. But the assumption, however untrue, that science fiction is about the future–that 1984 is about 1984, not 1948–privileges the genre: it allows it an unparalleled honesty about the present. Too many writers choose to squander this privilege, searching other planets for monsters from the id, but in his fiction Gibson never needs to go beyond the space shuttle’s orbit: he tackles our planet’s most sensitive problems here....
Reshuffling at Art Expo A massive loss of art-dealer support for John Wilson’s Chicago International Art Exposition has led to a major restructuring of the Lakeside Group, the fair’s parent organization. Mark Lyman, previously director of Lakeside’s New Art Forms Exposition, has been named executive director of the Lakeside Group. He replaces Thomas Blackman, who abruptly resigned last month to form an arts-management group that will present Art 1993 Chicago: The New Pier Show next May....
SLUMBER PARTY IN A DANGEROUS LAND Theatre Wyrzuc at Too Far West Coffeehouse Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Theatre Wyrzuc’s Slumber Party in a Dangerous Land, performed at the Too Far West Coffeehouse, is a howling rage. It takes the issue of rape and violence against women and smashes it over our heads. By the end of the evening we know the victims’ acute pain, mixed with an occasional desire for “a proper, perfect revenge....
THE BUTTER AND EGG MAN Kaufman, the American theater’s greatest comic playwright and director, is famous for saying, “Satire is what closes Saturday night.” But The Butter and Egg Man, his sardonically screwball satire of the New York theater industry in which he flourished, was one of his most successful efforts: a long-running Broadway hit, a popular touring production, an international triumph (it was the first American play published in book form in France), and the inspiration for five movie versions (including one starring Ronald Reagan)....
The death of modern architecture in Chicago, as seen by John Whiteman, director of the Chicago Institute for Architecture & Urbanism: “When I first arrived in ChicagoÉ everyone I met had a fragment from one of Sullivan’s dismantled buildings. These they proudly showed me. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ I was asked, repeatedly. Indeed each individual piece was beautiful, but, gazing on fragment after pathetic fragment, I could think only of Sullivan’s sad biography: the loss of his office, the dismissal of his theoretical ideas as ‘transcendental,’ his nervous breakdown after completing the Auditorium, his alcoholism, and his debts....
