Hats on Fire/Shoes on Fire Klown: The Children’s Show Christensen, and Alburt Williams Are Big Fat Idiots The Chicago-based comedy troupe Die Hanswurste will doubtless go down in theater history for the hoax they pulled off two years ago, when they pretended to be a German company trained in the secrets of “German clown work” by a mysterious, publicity-shy director named Veidt. But given their success what could these guys do for an encore?...
The comeback of Chicago trumpeter Malachi Thompson–from stalled creativity (on the artistic plane) and cancer (on the physical)–makes for one of the most satisfying stories in recent years, and no aspect of his music symbolizes that comeback better than his big band, the Africa Brass. Thompson’s small bands, for all their spirit, tend to have a certain clunkiness; yet on last year’s album Lift Every Voice (Delmark), the Africa Brass successfully exploits that very quality, through audacious arrangements and the blatant, untrammeled power of nine horns in flight....
Frances Whitehead By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whitehead’s most dazzlingly precise work consists of two glass vessels hung, one above the other, from metal cables. Each vessel was custom blown for Whitehead by students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; she’s added metal snouts with tiny holes to the funnellike bottoms, which release liquid one drop at a time. The upper vessel contains absinthe, the lower water, which is turning cloudy as the absinthe mixes with it....
Verdi’s middle-period curiosity Simon Boccanegra, whose sprawling narrative almost defies synopsis, features one of the most vivid male protagonists in opera. A plebeian elected to rule 14th-century Genoa, Boccanegra is a farsighted, compassionate hero. It’s a great baritone part, with enough psychological complexity and musical depth to rival some of Verdi’s later creations. However, because Boccanegra delves into Byzantine political machinations at the expense of its love story (Boccanegra’s reconciliation with his long-lost daughter packs a more powerful emotional wallop than her love for a plebeian partisan) the opera hasn’t been among Verdi’s most popular....
ADAM & THE ANTS 12/26, EMPTY BOTTLE These Chicagoans have dedicated what presumably will be a short career to re-creating the career of the original new-wave war-paint warriors. Their “press releases” are copies of the originals, as are their albums, which they “release” on the anniversaries of the original releases; they play only on dates when Stuart Leslie Goddard himself originally stood and delivered Antmusic. So if you can tell the difference, they’re doing something wrong....
This 1976 Soviet film–the last one Larissa Shepitko completed before she died in a car crash at age 40–concerns Russian partisans struggling against German occupiers in the winter of 1942. The narrative centers on two fighters: one will do almost anything to save his life; the other endures brutal torture in silence. By telling much of the story in brooding close-ups (which caused some critics to refer to Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc), Shepitko focuses attention on character psychology....
The Naughty Professor Janeway summoned his employee. Hafferkamp recalled, “Number one, he revealed that he hadn’t seen it.” But he’d heard. “He said, whatever you do in your private life is one thing, but never connect the two, the university and Libido. And I said, “I understand that, but the way you’re saying that suggests I should in some way be ashamed of what I’m doing there. And I’m not. I think that what we do there is useful and valuable....
Plunder is the last refuge of many musical scoundrels; bereft of good ideas, they lift someone else’s to pump new blood into tired careers. Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, on the other hand, gives eclecticism a good name. The San Francisco-based quintet blends folk and rock, improvisation and structured songcraft, acoustic and electric instruments, and high- and low-tech recording methods into a pastiche that embraces the sublime and the ridiculous with equal fervor....
Abdullah Ibrahim Trio The trio has been one of the most durable and versatile groupings in jazz. It’s served as a musical home for players ranging from the delicate pianist Bill Evans to the muscular tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins to the cutting-edge alto saxophonist Henry Threadgill. Two recent concerts at HotHouse demonstrated its power and range. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The boundaries between music’s three basic elements–melody, harmony, rhythm–dissolved in the hands of this trio....
TWELFTH NIGHT But seeing the play in director Dai Parker-Gwilliam’s considerably more conventional European Repertory Company production, I’m not sure the Bard himself doesn’t deserve some of the criticism lobbed at Bartlett. Written as a Christmastime court entertainment for Elizabeth I, Twelfth Night is less a fully functioning drama than it is two half-finished plays–one a funny/depressing meditation on love, the other a grab-ass grab bag of silly shtick and comedy bits–cobbled together into two hours or so of more or less acceptable entertainment....
With Student Rebels in Burma The Shan, known to us as “Mosco,” was the regimental adjutant. He lives down below in the Thai frontier town of Mae Hong Son, where he scrounges the rice and other staples that keep the tiny post alive. In truth, Mosco despises the desolate life of the mountains and will do anything to avoid it except forgo the chance to lead tourists up at $60 a head....
It was a good thing, explained Deborah Gibson, sales associate at the new Barbra Boutique, that the design people came last week to spruce up the shelves. Because since Barbra “got rid of her laryngitis or whatever it was she had and came out of hiding,” demand for items in the Marshall Field’s boutique had risen 50 percent. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It was a beautiful display, but it’s all messy now,” said Gibson as she restacked $20 blocks of notepad paper with Streisand’s likeness on the sides....
Bi Bi Love The two greatest curses of contemporary theater are the Secret Drama and the Sitcom Play. Some very accomplished playwrights with urgent stories to tell, like Sam Shepard and Neil Simon, have made these genres work, and now students practice them in playwriting classes and workshops. They’ve become theater’s main formulas. And heaven help us, now the genres are blurring together to create a new form–the Secret Sitcom Play....
Induction into the country outlaw club doesn’t always translate into name recognition and record sales. Case in point: Billy Joe Shaver. For more than 20 years this roadhouse rocker and consummate songwriter has resided on the obscure side of the Waylon and Willie equation. Best known for penning the bulk of Waylon Jennings’s 1973 classic Honky Tonk Heroes, Shaver later put out a few of his own albums, and they went nowhere on a fast train....
JEFFREY Bailiwick Repertory Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The difference is the nature of the worries Rudnick raises. Instead of marital infidelity, unreciprocated love, or indecision about maintaining virginity, the characters in Jeffrey are concerned about AIDS. They’re gay guys in the Greenwich Village fast lane, where the death of young men is a fact of daily life. Fucking’s no longer fun, decides handsome young Jeffrey, whose onetime dedication to scoring (“I’m not promiscuous....
Beast on the Moon Reminiscent in theme and symbolic subtlety of Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass, a heavy-handed drama of emotional and physical paralysis in the face of the Holocaust, Beast on the Moon addresses the plight of Armenian immigrants who survived a Turkish-led attack in 1915 (Kalinoski claims that Hitler used the Armenian genocide as a model for the Holocaust). Set in 1920s Milwaukee, the play takes its title from a historical incident in which Turks allegedly tried to shoot the “beast” that was blocking the moon during a lunar eclipse, then turned their rifles on their Armenian neighbors....
Jimmy Baker, a gangly middle-aged man with a spidery mustache, a friendly smile, and no fingers, ambles north on State Street toward the Harold Washington Library. He lives in the New Ritz Hotel, a walk-up SRO about five minutes from the library, and he knows lots of people on State. Baker was once a blues guitar player. He was born in East Saint Louis in 1942, but grew up in Mississippi and attended high school in South Bend....
Independent Label Fest Comes Up Lame Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why, indeed? The music business is overcrowded. Flip through thousands of CDs by bands you’ve never heard of at any record store, particularly in the cut-out bins, and it’s clear that there’s a serious glut in the market. As for rock-biz confabs, there are already two huge ones–CMJ, in New York, and Austin’s South by Southwest–and the death of the original, New York’s New Music Seminar, would seem to indicate that the industry can’t support many more....
BIG BUTT GIRLS, HARD HEADED WOMEN Big Butt Girls, Hard Headed Women is Jones’s tribute to the women she met in prison. In a series of monologues and dancelike segments, this versatile performer impersonates various people she met in her classes: the naive Doris, the crackhead Lena, the hard-bitten Regina, and the wise but cranky Mama Pearl. Where some performers might be content to create characters by changing their voice, the tilt of their head, and perhaps some key article of clothing, Jones throws her whole spine, pelvis, and soul into her performances....
Lead Story The Economist magazine reported in January on one of Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary’s success stories about government research scientists doing work for civilian businesses: Argonne National Laboratory helping McDonald’s find a way to speed up french frying. A team headed by physicist Tuncer Kuzay, who interrupted his work on photons, placed sensors inside the frozen fries, then designed special frying baskets to deal with the effect of steam created by melting ice crystals and to cut 30 to 40 seconds off the frying time of each batch....
