WHO SHOT JFK? “We have a palmprint . . . we have discovered a palmprint on the rifle.” –Curry, shortly after Hoover’s memo Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bob Harris’s Who Shot JFK? is not what you usually think of as theater. If it were a scripted show–with fictional characters spouting fabricated dialogue and with such a bizarrely intricate plot–you probably wouldn’t find it believable....
THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER (Has redeeming facet) Directed and written by Peter Greenaway With Richard Bohringer, Michael Gambon, Helen Mirren, Alan Howard, and Tim Roth. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » None of these contributions, moreover, can be regarded as wasted: the film is beautifully lit, dressed, upholstered, mounted, acted, shot, scored, and color-coordinated. Why then do I find it so tedious, mechanical, and even conceptually ugly–downright irritating, in fact?...
= recommended This view is of necessity also that of the audience. But due to the disconcerting directness of Ouedraogo’s story telling and that of the villagers themselves, the boy’s questioning of the conventional wisdom of his society takes place within a calm acceptance that neither demands nor precludes change. Denys Arcand had his first worldwide hit in 1986, with the intellectual sex comedy The Decline of the American Empire, although this smart and witty Quebec director is no novice....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I still remember those good ole days of knowing who was going to Hell and who wasn’t. God was always waiting around the corner, just waiting to pounce on some unsuspecting soul for breaking a minor infraction of the Divine Law. God had a bad temper back then and Mary was kept busy trying to hold back his wrath....
DOG EXPLOSION Nor would this gentle, understated comedy ever be confused with the black comedies that filled both stage and screen in the 60s and early 70s–Little Murders, The Ruling Class, I Love You Alice B. Toklas, and Harold and Maude–comedies that earned our nervous laughter by scraping off society’s polite veneer and exposing the dark side of the status quo. In Peter Barnes’s The Ruling Class, for example, the elite consider a man mad when he thinks he’s Jesus but sane when he’s convinced that he’s Jack the Ripper....
For Alan Melzer the final straw was the $20 ticket he got for parking at an expired meter near Michigan Avenue. Actually, he says, the meter had not expired–it was broken. So he shouldn’t have been ticketed. Daley’s new parking enforcement program, enacted last September, has drastically reduced the time violators have to pay off their tickets. “Previously, you were given the option of going to court six to eight weeks after you were ticketed,” says Holden....
On Easter Sunday the weather warmed, the sun came out, and the golfers returned. So did the joggers, tennis players, dog walkers, bicyclists, sunbathers, and roller skaters. The Waveland Avenue section of Lincoln Park came alive after almost six months of winter hibernation, except for Brett’s Waveland Cafe. The ivy-covered one-room restaurant remained shuttered. It finally opened on April 21–three weeks late–but only after a protracted three-month struggle that was petty and bizarre even by Chicago standards....
There’s a strain of grim expressionist satire in the music of Hans Koch and Martin Schutz: new-age music grows vicious and nasty, minimalism turns frighteningly maxi, modern musical conventions turn inside out–if you’re suspicious of the Age of Aquarius and the New World Order, this pair from Switzerland may be just for you. They play free improvisation on a very high level indeed, framed by long, ingenius jazz themes or set upon classical music elements or strange rock beats....
MIXED EMOTIONS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This Equity production, which was created by a team of theater veterans, would have no trouble being licensed in my friend’s theater utopia. After all, the production team had money and clout enough to attract a Name, the once-famous I’ve Got a Secret panelist Betsy Palmer, and to win the presence at their opening of both Roy Leonard and Norman Mark....
WORKS BY DORIS HUMPHREY A new spirit is making its presence felt in dance these days. More accurately, I suppose, I should say that this new spirit is the past–the nearly lost, nearly forgotten dance of the past, which is being restored to life on stages everywhere. For too long, dance troupes of all disciplines were so involved with making new dances that they arrogantly dismissed older dances as disposable, not worthy of preservation....
They bill themselves as a “multiple woodwind trio” which gives you some idea of the program; but fundamentally New Winds ask the musical question, “How wild and woolly can three like-minded virtuosi get without bass, without drums, and without losing their intrinsic musicality?” The answer is pretty far; to show your work, though, you have to factor in the 15 or 16 instruments these three employ, including five different clarinets and some rarely heard outcasts of the flute family....
It took Louis Summers, who is deaf and physically disabled, more than three years to prepare himself to live independently. But it took only a single directive issued by the state one day last February to keep him dependent in a nursing home. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The irony is not lost on state officials, who acknowledge that roughly 4,000 disabled residents have lost the right to a personal assistant since the freeze went into effect in February....
SEASCAPE WITH SHARKS AND DANCERS Don Nigro’s Seascape With Sharks and Dancers is very much in the spirit of such adolescent male fantasies. A pathetically passive and lonely man–Ben calls himself a writer, but he rarely writes and really makes his living as a librarian–saves a strange woman, Tracy, from drowning and then proceeds to save her again and again throughout the play–from her past, from her misconceptions about life, and from her own fears....
They’d never been to Schaumburg. They weren’t sure of its location, knowing only that it was within a geographical construct called “Chicagoland.” They knew that meant it was in the metropolitan area. In planning their trip from New York City, they made no provision for a breakdown in Toledo. They learned: everybody breaks down in Toledo. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Novelty salt and pepper shakers are as different from antique or crystal salt and pepper shakers as the Rockefeller mansion is from the House on the Rock....
SHAY In Shay, the main disease is agoraphobia–a fear of public places–but there’s also a subplot involving anorexia nervosa. The agoraphobic is Shay, a housewife who is so afraid of contact with people that she never leaves the house. Her husband brings home the groceries as well as a paycheck, so she has no need to go outside. And she never lets anyone else in except her two grown children and her sister Marce, who lives next door....
So that’s how the pros do it! Mercantile Exchange futures trader and after-hours chef Robert J. Prosi, on his Big Boss Bar-B-Q Sauce: “I knew Big Boss was destined for success when my 11th batch came out perfectly because 11 is my lucky trading number as well.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Where are the machines to photograph the license plates of the scofflaws who run the tollways?...
The all-time best Rudy Vallee performance is as a gentle, puny millionaire named Hackensacker in this brilliant, simultaneously tender and scalding 1942 screwball comedy by Preston Sturges–one of the real gems in Sturges’s hyperproductive period at Paramount. Claudette Colbert, married to an ambitious but penniless architectural engineer (Joel McCrea), takes off for Florida and winds up getting wooed by Hackensacker. When McCrea shows up she persuades him to pose as her brother....
A half hour after the first sunlight slants into the solar collectors on the roof of the University of Chicago’s physics building, the antifreeze pumping through them hits 130 degrees Fahrenheit. The hot fluid sluices through copper pipes that run into a lab and coil down through an enormous tank, where they begin to heat the water for the building. Monitors on the lab bench next to the tank continuously plot the temperature outside and the amount of sunshine falling on the collectors....
What’s Up at the Loop (Part 2) Dave Logan helped put WLUP FM on the air: Back in 1979, as an afternoon jock and production manager, he created the new aural logo when WSDM (“smack dab in the middle”) became a new beast called the Loop. Logan was with the station through its early 80s heyday, when its “kick-ass rock ‘n’ roll” format rolled up some of the highest ratings ever achieved by a rock radio station....
ANTIGONE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The much longer and unendurable production that followed borrows from both Sophocles’ and Anouilh’s versions of Antigone. To these mismatched sources McCullough has added some original material, recasting the chorus as foreign correspondents and press agents, and setting the action in a third-world country. In spite of the production, using members of the media as the chorus was a brilliant idea, both preserving and cleverly updating the classical function of the chorus as interlocutor, mood setter, and social context....
