Stephen Petronio Company That sentiment is one of the inspirations for Lareigne, Stephen Petronio said in an audience discussion after a performance at the Dance Center. He also said that the title is a pun suggesting that after a reign of heroes will come a reign of heroines. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the superman style of hero died sometime during the 1960s or 1970s, and a new kind of hero emerged from Joseph Campbell’s work on myths....
A cool breeze came off the lake, the sun set in a blue September sky, the Yankees played in Comiskey Park, and vendor Rich Harris cleared $150 in one game selling beer to the fans. “I know I sound like an old-timer talking about the good old days, but this strike has got me thinking how much better the old days really were–at least for vendors,” says Harris, who’s been a vendor since 1983....
PERMANENT RECORD Denise LaGrassa Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps Atlas/Axis intentionally structured Permanent Record in this way, believing that in one state of mind one takes in the performance–absorbs it, so to speak–without being privy to all the nooks and crannies of intention, and in another state of mind studies the program notes. But I can’t imagine why these quotes and musings couldn’t be used in the performance....
Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The article suggests that Chicago on Tap is not including a sufficient number of local dancers and that the fees paid to artists will all be “going back to New York.” This issue was brought to Mr. Lazare’s attention by Lane Alexander and Kelly Michaels, two Chicago artists who were scheduled to participate in the Chicago on Tap Festival but declined due to their unwillingness to be featured in a special evening of Chicago tap talent....
Picking Up the Pieces at Chicago String Ensemble Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now both Heatherington and the Chicago String Ensemble appear to have landed on their feet. With former board member Rosalie Harris returning to the helm as president, the Chicago String Ensemble is embarking on its 20th anniversary season with a renewed sense of purpose and a new musical director, Allan Lewis, who’s also the musical director of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago....
Fit If one more journalist drags me along on a print tour of the new Mercury Theater and gushes about how “intimate” it is, I’m going to puke. In the theater, “intimacy” is a term as empty as “quality” in the automobile industry: it means “not large.” Sure, the Mercury is intimate. So is the basement at Cafe Voltaire. So are most high-rise elevators. About the only theater in town that has to struggle for intimacy is Steppenwolf, with its curious architectural hybridization of Fermilab and the Grant Park garage....
Re: Ben Joravsky’s “Trading Community Policing for Public Relations,” June 28. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I believe that Mr. Joravsky should learn what community policing really is before raising the flag that it will go away. The chief tenet in the community policing strategy is “community” participation and accomplishments. Being involved with a community organization myself, I can appreciate the discomfort when funding is withdrawn....
Before Alexander Scriabin took his love for theosophy and mysticism and developed it midway in his career into a style that’s been called “impressionist atonality,” the Russian composer and pianist was under the heavy spell of Chopin and Liszt. His early works for piano solo are modeled after Chopin down to their titles; his first piano concerto, written in 1897 at age 24, also owes a debt to the Polish romanticist in its athleticism, lyricism, and improvisatory feel....
Chicago aldermen are pretty uninhibited during speeches on the council floor. So much so, they may well huddle together and take truth serum before the opening roll call. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That morning’s papers had reported that Alderman Burton Natarus led things off by demanding, “Are you as good as [former budget director] Paul Vallas?” Aldermen John Buchanan and Allan Streeter favorably compared Aigotti’s physical appearance with Vallas’s....
Hank Williams Jr. has been embraced and vilified in equal measure, but his detractors consistently underestimate the fact that Bocephus has always been that most formidable and unfathomable of opponents–the smart redneck. In his prime he was the quintessential partying id man (“All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight”), the proud and paranoid isolationist libertarian (“A Country Boy Can Survive”), and the depressed, aging realist (“All My Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down)”)....
Just about everybody on the outside–business leaders, school officials, reformers, politicians, journalists–wants incumbent Tom Reece to win the May 20 election for president of the Chicago Teachers Union. But the opinion of the people who’ll actually vote–the teachers themselves–isn’t so clear. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reece declined repeated requests for an interview, leaving those chores to Jackie Gallagher, his chief press aide. “Tom’s strengths are his sensitivity–he is not a grandstanding leader,” says Gallagher....
Two years ago writer Steve Fiffer heard about a successful program for hungry students at Evanston’s Orrington School called “books and breakfast.” He convinced his wife, Sharon Sloan Fiffer, that they should replicate it at Kingsley School, where their daughter was a second-grader. Evanston has its share of urban problems but as the Fiffers described their plans to others, many people were surprised to learn that hunger was among them. In fact, students had been showing up to school with stomach aches because they hadn’t eaten anything at home....
Long the butt of smirking stand-ups and snarling critics, improvisation came back with a vengeance in the late 80s as a new generation of improvisers, bristling with energy and ideas, pushed to the fore. Suddenly the scene was brimming with new groups performing fully improvised shows with names like Ed, Pup Tent Theatre, Filmdome, Cast on a Hot Tin Roof, Comedy Underground, Blue Velveeta, The Chris Hogan Show. Out of this blooming, buzzing confusion came Jazz Freddy....
Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was president of the Chicago Council of Lawyers from 1991 to 1993, and previously was cochair of its state judicial evaluation committee. (I was not involved in this year’s ratings.) The Council has been rating judges and judicial candidates for 25 years. The Council was founded in 1969 because of a perception that the Chicago Bar Association was rarely willing to criticize the quality of judges in Cook County....
To most Chicagoans Kenosha’s identity seems inextricably linked to its two outsize discount outlet malls, which actually aren’t in Kenosha at all. The unincorporated areas near the malls have become a commuter-bedroom area, dismissed by one downtown merchant as “yuppie West Osha,” yet the city itself has a rich ethnic and architectural diversity. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Farther up the highway more of what one mall manager described as “Wisconsin’s number-one attraction for out-of-state visitors” shimmers into view: the Factory Outlet Centre (I-94 at Highway 50, exit 344; 414-857-7961)....
Coryell Agonistes. Last year, when the hyperactive guitarist hooked up with bassist Larry Gray and drummer Paul Wertico for one weekend at the Jazz Showcase, I hoped for the best. I got more. So did Coryell, who left the stage after one set muttering, “These guys are really pushing me! I haven’t played like this in years.” Indeed, virtually all of his recordings over the last decade–including his misconceived 1993 release on CTI, Fallen Angel–pale in relation to his work with the expansive Gray and the explosive Wertico (both of them leaders with recent albums of their own)....
LILLIAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the start Lillian warns us, “The tales of former children are not to be trusted.” History is pliable in the hands of memory, and admittedly her father’s unmarried but unspinsterlike sisters, her stern and beloved nanny, and her mother’s money-obsessed brothers, who made Sunday dinners “full of open ill will,” are part fiction. But the way she remembers her past is more than mere entertainment: it reveals Lillian at various stages of her life, as a precocious child, a self-righteous young woman, an anxious first-time playwright, and finally a middle-aged woman afraid of her lover’s impending death....
When the Velvet Underground’s contributions to rock and roll are tallied, drummer Maureen Tucker doesn’t usually get the credit she deserves. At a time when rock was slouching toward a dubious “more is more” aesthetic, she pioneered an egoless, minimalist percussion concept drawn from an adolescence spent drumming along to Bo Diddley records and her day job as a keypunch operator. Her artless vocal delivery also made her the perfect vessel for Reed’s “Afterhours,” a song his cynicism would have ruined....
This multidisciplinary performing arts festival, hosted by the Pilsen area’s Blue Rider Theatre, runs through December 17, with shows most Fridays and Saturdays at 8 PM and Sundays at 7 PM, as well as children’s matinees on selected Saturdays and Sundays at 3 PM. Most evenings feature two or more artists, with intermissions between each act. Blue Rider Theatre, 1822 S. Halsted, 733-4668. Tickets: $10 a night except where noted in the listings below; $60 for a festival pass (good for all performances); some student and senior discounts available....
The best Ken Loach movie I’ve seen, this energizing and subversive English tragicomedy (1993) about an unemployed Catholic man on the dole in a Manchester suburb–a scammeister who, along with an unemployed friend, specializes in petty thefts and small jobs such as cleaning drains to support his family–deservedly won a special jury prize at Cannes and was an audience favorite when I saw it at Locarno. Inspired by the real-life experiences of screenwriter Jim Allen, the plot hinges on the hero’s desperate efforts to retain his self-respect against all odds after his partner’s van is stolen....
