“Everybody’s interested, young or old, male or female,” Pat Lohenry says. “You can imagine you’re little. So many people will say, ‘Oh, I wish I was this big so I could live in that house.’ It’s a fantasy world. I always loved houses. Big houses. I’d say, ‘I want that pretty house.’ Now, I can build that. Maybe I can’t buy that house, but I can make a small one like it....
“A poem is wonderful because you can take a moment of your life and spin it around in a million directions. But with a play you could look at a week in your life, or a year, and . . . connect all the dots.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Directed by Shelly Carlsen and adapted by Okita, In One Art, Out the Other makes up the first weekend of “Poetry Under the Lights,” an eight-weekend series produced by another collaboration–this time between Live Bait and City Lit Theater....
Want to avoid cancer? Shrink. Men’s Health (February 1989) reports that a recent study showed that the shortest 25 percent of the more than 12,000 people studied had only half as much cancer as the tallest 75 percent. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A capsule history of the last 25 years, from Citizens Utility Board president Josh Hoyt in CUB News (Winter 1989): “Remember when Ralph Nader told off the Detroit automobile moguls back in 1965?...
No, this is not a “band” concert in the modern sense–it is one of the world’s leading period instrument ensembles making its Chicago debut at long last. The British Hanover Band (band was a common 18th-century designation for an orchestra) is known primarily in this country through its many award-winning recordings under a variety of names: the Philomusica Antiqua of London, for example, its moniker for its 1985 recording of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with soloist Anthony Newman....
My blue shoes were kind of beat-up and scruffy-looking, but they were so comfortable I didn’t want to throw them out. So when they started to fall apart, I took them to a repair shop in Old Town. When the elderly clerk told me this simple repair would cost seven dollars, I considered giving the shoes to the Salvation Army, but then I told him to go ahead. “How about a little polish?...
Lee Hoiby is probably best known to local audiences for the Chicago Opera Theater’s 1980 production of his sultry adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play Summer and Smoke. An inventive traditionalist, Hoiby has worked out a pleasing lyrical style derived from Puccini verism by way of Samuel Barber, Ned Rorem, and Giancarlo Menotti (who was his tacher). Much of his music–be it operatic, choral, or chamber–is emotional, evocative, and thoroughly accessible....
Yesterday’s News: The Wrong Man in Jail? Said a police lieutenant afterward, “He was obviously traumatized and confused by the entire incident.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Arrested six months later in a burglary attempt–clearly a very troubled teenager, Heirens was a habitual burglar–he was questioned by police for six days before being charged, no lawyer at his side much less a parent. To make him open up, the police illegally injected him with sodium pentothal....
Don’t let the “Blues Boy” fool you–Artie White is no slavish B.B. King imitator but an important veteran vocal stylist in his own right. He specializes in a soulful, horn-drenched contemporary blues sound, the requisite combination of dusky soul passion and blues fire, and his warm professionalism provides a welcome contrast to the arrogant superstar strut affected by many of his contemporaries. White’s originals are well crafted and deeply emotional, and his versions of standards sometimes become definitive: “Jimmie,” an impassioned remake of Little Beaver’s “Joey” that White recorded in 1985, has become a mainstay on the Chicago scene, a staple in the repertoires of Magic Slim, the brilliant but short-lived band Hurricane, and several others....
Friday 13 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » During the second annual Around the Coyote festival–more or less named for the Tower Coyote Gallery, in the flamboyant art deco Northwest Tower Building, which anchors the intersection of North, Milwaukee, and Damen. (you can still see the green neon coyote sculpture in the window)–painters, computer artists, photographers, sculptors, and other artists will open their homes, studios, and galleries to show off their stuff....
CAST ON A HOT TIN ROOF And now there’s a new slant to Chicago’s most popular form of group comedy—literary parody. The Free Associates, students of the Second City Training Center, the Improv Institute, Boston’s Angry Tuxedos, and ComedySportz, devote the first half of their Thursday-night offering, Cast on a Hot Tin Roof, to a one-act improvisation in the style of Tennessee Williams. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Certainly Williams is fair game—as anyone who saw the Illegitimate Players’ superb The Glass Mendacity knows....
Pauline Oliveros, like her more famous soul mate John Cage, is one of those all-around artists who change our ideas about music and performance. For Oliveros and her group of collaborators, the Deep Listening Band, music–or rather assemblages of sounds–should be but one aspect of an aesthetic experience. She constructs her scenarios, which always invite audience participation, from theatrical props, spoken words, film clips, prepared audiotape, and other assorted and sometimes ad hoc ingredients....
Set mainly in and around a lakeside establishment called the Blue Water Grill in Texas, this is a small film, but within its own terms a delightful and virtually perfect one. The characters–the dreamy grill owner (Gene Hackman), who compulsively watches home movies of his long-vanished wife; his grumpy yet serene father-in-law (Burgess Meredith); a slightly retarded handyman (Elias Kotias); and a bus driver (Teri Garr) who has her sights set on the grill owner–all seem to come out of Erskine Caldwell and Tennessee Williams, but Bill Bozzone’s capable script, Peter Masterson’s deft direction, and Fred Murphy’s handsome photography all show them off to best advantage, and the movie’s playlike story moves effortlessly....
A session teaming Chicago blues patriarch Sunnyland Slim with Muddy Waters’s legendary guitarist Jimmy Rogers is a rare treat in itself; the addition of John Primer on guitar makes this one of the most intriguing bookings we’re likely to see for a while. Primer was educated in the Ivy League of Chicago blues: his teachers and mentors include the unheralded guitar genius Sammy Lawhorn, Muddy himself, and Magic Slim. From Lawhorn Primer picked up his profound melodic sense and crisp, supple phrasing; with Muddy he honed his slide technique to stinging perfection and enhanced his vocal capabilities, learning to do equal justice to traditional Delta blues and his own contemporary Chicago style; now as Magic Slim’s regular second guitarist he’s added a dash of declamatory fire to his playing, while sacrificing none of his trademark tasteful musicianship....
THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN With John Neville, Eric Idle, Sarah Polley, Robin Williams, Oliver Reed, Uma Thurman, Jonathan Pryce, Winston Dennis, and Valentina Cortese. With Cybill Shepherd, Robert Downey Jr., Ryan O’Neal, Mary Stuart Masterson, and Christopher McDonald. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Part of what’s disconcerting about all of Gilliam’s movies, in fact, is the combination of metaphysical aspirations with small-scale slapstick, almost as if he were combining the contrary impulses of two other American directors who have spent most of their careers in England, Stanley Kubrick and Richard Lester....
More Poster Problems at CTA Here’s the CTA’s position, spelled out in a letter written late last month by deputy executive director Ernest Sawyer, chairman of the Advertising Review Committee: “In our judgement, the graphic depiction of violence, i.e., one person with a face blown off, another with a mutilated chest, a third whose missing leg is draped across another body would be offensive to the sensibilities of the people of Chicago, and could be considered obscene....
To the editors: It was the redoubtable Brad Sellers, not Scottie Pippen, who made the in- bounds pass to Michael Jordan for the Bulls’ last-second victory over the Cavs [Sports Section, May 12]. Said Doug Collins, Sellers showed “good patience” by waiting for MJ to get open. I’m surprised you blew this one, especially since you wrote that you “never grew tired of watching, through the postgame, the late-night news shows, the sports extras” the Bulls’ play of the year....
New York Says No to Hauptmann Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The producers decided to go with the May 28 opening even though they sensed another potential problem brewing uptown, where a busy Broadway season with hit shows such as Guys and Dolls, Jelly’s Last Jam, and Falsettos was diverting media attention from off-Broadway and its lower-key productions. With their small advertising budget, Hauptmann’s producers could not mount much of a fight against the Times’s cool assessment....
NIGHTHAWKS Blake paints his dramatic world in broad strokes. Nighthawks, set in a diner in 1943 (Hopper’s painting was created in 1942), brings together what the playwright refers to in his press packet as B-movie types: Gil (Dean Kharasch), the small-time hustler; Donna (Joy Ovington), the woman with a rough marriage and feelings for another man; Jimmy (John Randy Hoole), the squeaky-clean soda jerk; and Wray (Elliot Wimbush), the stranger. Using Jimmy as a sounding board, the characters spend an hour revealing their struggles against the emptiness and routine of life....
Holly Hunter’s best performance since Broadcast News: here she plays an Italian American still neurotically tied to her parents (Danny Aiello and Gena Rowlands) who’s looking for romance in her hometown of Boston. It’s a comedy with tragic undertones well scripted by Malia Scotch-Marmo and effectively directed by Lasse Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog); Laura San Giacomo plays her just-married younger sister, and Richard Dreyfuss plays the vulgar, assertive condo salesman from a Lithuanian family background who sweeps Hunter off her feet....
In the days after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, two Chinese doctoral students at the University of Chicago, Sanyuan Li and Hui Yun Wang, wanted to do something to help the quelled democracy movement, something that was more than just a gesture. They saw no point in trying to tell Westerners what the Chinese government was doing–for once, Western journalists were crawling all over a China story, even if they couldn’t seem to see beyond Beijing....
