Friday 23 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last year at this time you could have seen a surreal sight–more than 7,000 people standing on the banks of the Chicago River, cheering on a flotilla of rubber ducks. Mass infantile regression? No, just the first annual Greater Chicago Duck Race, designed to raise cash for CAUSES (the acronym for Illinois Masonic Medical Center’s child abuse unit), the WGN Children’s Fund, and the Hull House Association....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » McCarron’s insistence that we are without leadership but suffocating with community input sounds like the kind of table pounding that the owners of the Tribune did over the lights at Wrigley Field. Of course, the historical record points in another direction. McCarron has many friends, as we have seen. Some of those friends voted for Mayor Sawyer at 4 a....
String quartets exclusively devoted to 20th-century music have become fashionable in recent years. With all the hype surrounding the Kronos Quartet, and all the underground respect for the Arditti, it’s more than a little surprising that the quartet to emerge as the unparalleled master of interpreting Bartok quartets should be the Emerson String Quartet, a group that often dips into the 18th and 19th centuries as well as the 20th. Their recently released set of the complete Bartok quartets is among the most revelatory interpretations of those masterpieces one could hope to encounter, and luckily Bartok forms the centerpiece of their appearance here this weekend as well....
ESCURIAL The Mosaic Theatre Company would have been hard-pressed to find two more jarringly dissimilar plays: Escurial is a violent, iconoclastic, hyperstylized play by Belgian symbolist Michel de Ghelderode, and Door Number One is a loosely structured, casually acted comedy sketch by Alicia Burns. But though they’re at opposite ends of the stylistic spectrum, the two works do have a common agenda: they examine woman’s place in a male-dominated society. And while the evening as a whole proved shaky, Mosaic did demonstrate two unusual and admirable qualities: first, the courage to tackle a difficult and seldom-produced script–and what could be more difficult to stage than symbolist drama?...
In his classic book A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold wrote of how winter might look to various animals in cold climates like ours. For a meadow mouse, our warm, nearly snowless January would have been a disaster. Meadow mice spend the summer collecting grasses and storing them in caches on their home territories. These caches are their principal winter food. They scurry from cache to cache along runways on the ground....
If our species has developed anything like a collective conscience, it’s to the extent that we know our past. History doesn’t just measure our growth, we also need to know the crimes we’re capable of. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ragged Dick is not meant to embalm an ugly past, as Steppenwolf’s reverent Grapes of Wrath did Steinbeck’s survivors. To Bell, who teaches play writing at New York’s Playwrights Horizons, the greedy past is too close to the 1990s....
PREMIERES BY JOHN EATON The instrument can best be described as three 49-note keyboards stacked on top of one another, each attached to a computer. The electric sensors on the keys allow them to respond in a variety of ways to a finger’s pressure–with a sensitivity not possible for an organ or a piano. The triple keyboards add to the extensive sound possibilities, and playing them requires the dexterity of an organ virtuoso–which Eaton hopes will discourage dilettantes and pop performers from commercializing his new instrument....
During Royal Trux’s opening set for Sonic Youth at the Riv a while back a friend of the band’s leaned over to opine, “They sound a lot better without a bassist.” He was making a sophisticated comment about the group’s history, but I just had to laugh. To a lot of people, Royal Trux would sound better without a bassist. They would also sound better without the out-of-tune organ blaring, even better if the lead singer stopped caterwauling, and close to OK if the guitarist and drummer stopped too....
THE PUPPET MASTER With Li Tien-lu, Lin Chung, Cheng Kuei-chung, Cho Ju-wei, Hung Liu, and Bai Ming-hwa Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Talking about Hou’s films isn’t easy in a country as cheerfully indifferent to the rest of the world as ours–a country so shamelessly ethnocentric that the worst, most compromised, and least interesting film of John Woo gets 50 times more press coverage than his others simply because it was made here and not in Hong Kong, and a country so juvenile that a director like Woo, who makes fantasies for 11-year-old boys about masses of people getting sprayed with bullets, receives 50 times more attention, even in publications for grown-ups, than a director like Hou, who makes realistic movies for grown-ups about the way people live....
Jobs even the cops can’t do. South suburban Matteson police detective Richard Walsh, quoted in the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority’s Trends and Issues 91: “I’ve had calls from parents who say, ‘I just can’t handle him. He’s staying out at night, and he won’t go to school.’ Then I ask them, ‘How old is your son?’ And they’ll say, ‘He’s 8.’ Now what the hell do they expect us to do?...
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Friendliness is not the problem with Jay Andres [Hot Type, March 15]. His complete lack of knowledge of classical music is not appropriate for a DJ at WFMT. What reception would I get on WEFM if I announced a Beatles song and then played a New Age selection? CDs usually contain more than one piece. Mr....
WATERSHED The crime of Watershed is that it has very little to say, and manages to say even that poorly. Kenneth (Jim MacDowell) and his wife Kay (Maria Michaels Hughes) both in their mid-thirties, run a summer stock theater company on a southern college campus. Kenneth is the brilliant director at the college, while Kay, apparently, can act. Joining them is Damon (Charles Herbst), an impossibly cynical playwright who once studied under Kenneth....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We read your Neighborhood News story about Nancy Sreenan and the bureaucratic “runaround” she contended with, trying to recycle one Christmas tree [February 10]. In Woodstock, the story would have run quite differently. On December 20, 1988, one City Council member moved that the city recycle the Christmas trees it collects curbside, and declare the annual “Burning of the Green” something of the past....
Friday 21 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your Imaginary Friends–the group that brought you And We Really Hate Each Other, Three Shiksas, a Goy, and Four Jewboys, and Call-Waiting for Godot–tonight opens its latest effort, The Best Lies We Ever Told, “a musical screwball noir about the existential dread of a group of pasty white kids in their 20s” featuring live music by a local band called the Moviegoers....
Clark Terry is one terrific trumpeter, and surprisingly few modern listeners seem to know it. Throughout the 50s he starred with Duke Ellington’s bands, and even among that crew of unique instrumental voices (which Ellington managed to blend into his own unmistakable sound), Terry stood out. But perhaps, as with Dizzy Gillespie, his clownish wit and bumptious good humor got in the way, preventing a fuller appreciation of his speedy technical mastery of trumpet (both open and, especially, muted) and flugelhorn....
Cubby Bear’s Revenge Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sniping aside, there is no denying the Cubby Beam has found its niche in the local concert business, and the man who’s responsible for much of the success–as well as much of the sniping–is Brad Altman, a former messenger boy and bartender. In August 1989 Altman started doing promotion and public relations for the Cubby Bear; later he would take on the job of booking music acts there as well....
It’s a theatrical truism that firelight onstage is effective, whether it’s a candle, a candelabra, or a lit cigarette in the dark: natural burning light magnifies the presence of the performer who holds it. So imagine two dozen dancers holding lit candles as they march from the back of an auditorium down to the stage, which the Ensemble Espanol and the Junior Ensemble Espanol will do as part of the finale in their annual Concierto Navideno (“Christmas concert”)....
EVITA Now, after a decade of scrutinizing people like Nancy Reagan and Imelda Marcos, we may find Eva Peron a good deal less foreign; rather than an extraordinary, aberrant figure we can brush off as the product of a society very different from ours, we can recognize her as the embodiment of a pattern neither foreign nor uncommon: an ambitious and amoral woman rises to real power by using her sex appeal and understanding of imagery and symbolism to help propel her man into her nation’s presidency....
In his heart, Reverend James McKendree Wall still knows that George McGovern was right. So do a lot of his liberal Democratic friends. After McGovern’s 1972 landslide defeat, most of them went on to back Democratic presidential contenders in the same mold: Morris Udall (1976), Teddy Kennedy (1980), Jesse Jackson (1984, 1988), Paul Simon (1988), and Tom Harkin (1992). He also learned that those who insist on perfection are often themselves less than perfect....
INDEPENDENT CHOREOGRAPHERS’ SHOWCASE Who wouldn’t feel like dancing after seeing Malika Moore’s Caribbean, a hand-clapping, jazzed-up version of traditional African dance? Maria Lanier-Gandy, Kirby Reed, and Vanessa Truvillion came on and literally shook their necklaces off to Michael Williams’s hopping bongo playing. All three are trained jazz dancers, and they mix Afro-Caribbean rhythms with a sleek, sexy jazz style beautifully. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Tye’s longer Level 21 is a fascinating exploration of feminine strength....
