UNDER ONE ROOF Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The desperate owners try hard, though. An egocentric young man promptly programs his new “roommate” to be a combination calendar/alarm clock/yes-man: “If I say, ‘I don’t feel well,’ you say, ‘Stay home from work then.’” A jealous brother directs his “mother” to love him more than his sibling. A dominating mother introduces her “son” to a horrified neighbor, saying, “He’s Kevin to me, even if he’s not....
WINNER TAKES OIL I know, I thought it was too. But it’s not. Winner Takes Oil plunges into the gulf at least four times, and the bits leave a weird aftertaste every time. The show opens with a press briefing, for instance: The stiff-necked government man (Ron West) and the maxed-out general (John Rubano) fielding questions from hyped-up funny reporters. The skit has laughs. (“MTV News” got the biggest one.) There’s even a clever song with the usual ironies about the LAPD and the casualty rate in Detroit....
THE NOTEBOOKS OF LEONARDO DA VINCI Adapting such a text for the stage obviously presents enormous challenges. The notebook entries are not unified, and their inherent unevenness means that some fragments will enlighten and others will fail to engage. The same is true of Mary Zimmerman’s original theater piece, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, an intelligent, ingeniously staged, and carefully styled work. Although at times aloof and nearly impenetrable, it has moments of serene beauty and powerful insight....
BOUNCERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Godber’s Bouncers, four doormen re-create a typical Friday night on the job at the Mr. Cinders disco. The evening begins with them waiting restlessly for the pubs to close and the customers to arrive (bars in England open at 5 PM and close some five to six hours later, during which hours the more raffish patrons chug as much alcohol as they can before proceeding to the evening’s entertainment)....
Which Bud Shank is the real Bud Shank? When he first made his reputation back in the 1950s, he was among the coolest of cool jazz players: his alto sax had a pure, limpid sound and his phrases often hesitated behind the best, suggesting a lighter, less intense Art Pepper with something of Lee Konitz’s detachment. In those days Shank also played flute in duets with oboist Bob Cooper, a combination that was about as west coast as you could get....
Bailiwick Repertorys Directors Festival 1992, produced by Cecilie Keenan, offers productions ranging 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. The festival concludes with two “Best of the Fest” programs reprising a handful of shows deemed to be the worthiest of repetition....
If James Brown is indeed the godfather of soul, then he couldn’t have found a better consigliere than Maceo Parker, the alto saxist best known as leader of Brown’s J.B. Horns. Maceo’s sound practically oozes from the horn, and as straw boss he has been able to translate that to J.B.’s horn sections–which have left nearly as big a stamp on super-super-heavy funk as Brown’s own squeals and grunts. Consequently, his charttopping album of last year, Roots Revisited–which also starred fellow J....
Back in September, some of the old-timers at the school system’s Pershing Road headquarters figured the reform movement was like a bad headache that would fade once the local school council elections were out of the way. “The bureaucracy reminds me of the political systems in Eastern Europe,” says William Ayers, an assistant professor of education at the University of Illinois, who played a key role in drafting the Sunrise Statement....
If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times: 19th-century Chicago thrived because it became the commercial crossroads of the nation. But have you ever heard that this happened in part because Lake Michigan runs north and south and not east and west like Lake Erie? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cronon has an ulterior motive. “The book is not an environmentalist tract,” he said in a recent interview, “but it is intended to make environmentalists think very hard about their assumptions....
Mexico produces about 500,000 tons of poblanos, serranos, mirasols, jalapenos, and dozens of other varieties of fresh chilis every year, and this year many of them seem to have ended up on my plate. Chilis are everywhere: a rock group is named after them, superstar chefs are cooking in garish pants decorated with them, and this restaurant critic is sporting a discreet pattern of Maalox stains on her twin set....
Fur-wearing vegetarian Tripti Shah Kasal writes that she has consulted “some of my friends who have the opposite contradiction–they believe in eating animals but not wearing them. I’ve only become more confused.ÉBut in the meantime, while we all figure this one out, I promise that when I walk into a restaurant and someone is eating meat I won’t spray paint his steak, and hopefully he will stay away from my coat” (Today’s Chicago Woman, January 1991)....
THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO The novels of the elder Alexandre Dumas, like those of fellow newspaper serialists Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo, tended to be long, intricately plotted affairs; The Count of Monte Cristo, first published in 1844 in the Journal des debats over several months, took more than 1,000 pages to tell. So how does a theater company adapt such a lengthy tome to the stage without either shortchanging the story or exhausting the audience?...
This being that crucial time of year when candidates across the state hire staff, raise money, and otherwise gear up for the primaries in March–the Democrats are busy committing political hara-kiri. There’s no rational explanation. That’s just the way it is in Illinois. Republicans almost never have a contested primary; when they do, the candidates quickly reconcile once the voting’s done. “There’s a lot of people in the party who want a strong prochoice woman like me on the ticket,” counters Netsch....
KRAPP’S LAST TAPE Cast a cold eye on life, on death. –W.B. Yeats Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The frustrating truth may be that Beckett is impossible to produce. I’ve certainly never seen a production of a Beckett play that came across with more than a fraction of what I understood from reading the script, and Element Theatre Company’s current double bill of Beckett one-acts is no exception....
THE MODERN SOCRATES Still, The Modern Socrates, like its ancient namesake, tosses out some provocative ideas. The historical Socrates, as presented by Plato in the Dialogues, was a paradox: he claimed to know nothing, yet through his incessant questioning he led his fellow Athenians to the logical inconsistencies in their own thinking. The computer Socrates performs a similar function. Its creator, Brandon Turner, a genius in the field of artificial intelligence, has programmed it to absorb vast quantities of knowledge into its data base, from the most arcane physics to Plato’s Dialogues....
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS With Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, Anne Baxter, Edward G. Robinson, Yvonne De Carlo, Debra Paget, John Derek, Cedric Hardwicke, and Vincent Price. It’s a tribute to the power (if not exactly the wisdom) of De Mille’s beliefs that not even the hardiest efforts of the gremlins at Paramount Pictures to muck up his achievement have fully succeeded. They’ve taken this feature made in VistaVision and capriciously stretched it out into an anamorphic ‘Scope format, which means that the top and bottom of every frame is trimmed in order to accommodate the horizontal Band-Aid-shaped format–a familiar shape in 50s movies, but not the one that this picture was shot or originally shown in....
It’s a few minutes before 5:30 on a Saturday morning in May, and Michigan Avenue is quiet. There’s a trickle of cabs, most without fares, and an occasional car. A CTA bus cruises north in the curb lane with only one passenger, and slows for two women who stand about 40 feet apart in front of the Art Institute. Neither woman makes a move to board, and the bus continues past....
COMPLAINT DEPARTMENT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s always the way. Here I am, trying to ease my readers’ burden by cleansing their lives of extraneous details, and some nitpicker comes along and says you forgot to talk absolute zero, Brownian motion, and the influence of William Faulkner. I figured I could skip a discussion of the paramagnetic materials, which are what you’re talking about....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Firstly, I’d like to thank Bishop Griswold [Letters, July 14] for repudiating both the tone and content of the letter written by the anonymous, supposed-employee of the Episcopal Diocese [Letters, July 7]. Never once, over many years of contacts with his predecessor Bishops of Chicago and the clergy and lay staff (then and now) of the Diocese of Chicago, have I experienced anything but genuine warmth and pastoral interest in my spiritual needs....
TV OR NOT TV These six Hipsters really need their TV hook, because little else links their material–unless it’s the cynical premise behind the opening and closing scenes, where Linda Wylie plays an altruist who eventually cools out and becomes, yes, a selfish yuppie. Graduates of the Second City Conservatory, the Hipsters have apparently agreed to steer clear of any harsh satire (unless you count the takeoff on legal eagles who hammer out predate agreements–examples of love in our no-fault society)....
