After a while, you start to notice what Bob Greene doesn’t say. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Then there’s Baby Richard. You’d think that by now no idea has gone unexpressed in Bob’s endless keening for the lad. Not true. Bob keeps listing the names of those five Illinois Supreme Court justices, over and over again. “James D. Heiple, Michael Bilandic, Charles Freeman, John Nickels and Moses Harrison II....
MAY If you sometimes catch yourself murmuring something about “poisoning pigeons in the park,” you’re probably an unrepentant fan of Tom Lehrer, the Harvard math professor who established an unlikely second career writing and singing smart and funny songs at the piano. Chicago’s Close Call Theatre has exhumed a 1980 musical tribute to Lehrer, Tomfoolery, originally staged by Les Miserables impresario Cameron Mackintosh. The show debuts tonight at 10:45 at the Red Bones Theatre, 4147 N....
Eleventh Dream Day are the best rock band to come from Chicago since Bo Diddley helped invent the genre here, but bad luck and bad timing may have consigned the group to obscurity. When they started in 1983 Chicago was a rock ‘n’ roll backwater; their incendiary live shows and splendid first album, Prairie School Freakout, helped return the city to the rock map. But pioneers rarely reap the rewards of their efforts, and an inept record company kept Eleventh Dream Day sidelined while their contemporaries became stars....
When I was 12 my know-it-all teenage brother took it upon himself to inform me that the evening “star” I’d been making wishes on for years was actually a planet. He claimed that due to this error on my part none of my past decade’s wishes would come true. I pretended this piece of new knowledge didn’t affect me one bit and continued chanting the lines “star light, star bright, first star I see tonight” just as I always had whenever the evening star came out....
HOW TO GROW BEANS . . . AND OTHER CONSIDERATIONS Raven Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is the Thoreau Tom Drummer plays in Allan Bates’s excellent one-man show How to Grow Beans . . . and Other Considerations: literate, witty, opinionated, bubbling over with heartfelt convictions, but totally uninterested in collecting disciples. “This is how I grow beans,” he explains at the beginning of the show....
Iris Moore and Christina Cobb at Randolph Street Gallery, February 18 and 19 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But I don’t want to give the impression that her work is narcissistic: among Chicago’s performance artists (yes, I know she moved to Portland a year ago, but she still seems rooted here), Moore is the most intuitive, the most anticipatory. Yet she’s not a deliberate trendsetter....
JIMMY MCGRIFF & HANK CRAWFORD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jimmy McGriff and Hank Crawford swing soulfully along that sweet fault line that runs between down-home blues and uptown jazz. At the heart of their sound though is the uplifting ecstasy of the spiritual tradition that helped give rise to both: Crawford’s alto wails like a gospel singer over the vibrating vocals of McGriff’s famous Hammond B-3 organ, then drops into lower-register purrs and moans that make it sound as if he’s been overcome by an intimate relationship with a very funky spirit....
MAKING FACES At some point, however, the aging process might indicate to the person involved less the onset of wisdom and more the onslaught of decrepitude and death. Ed Paschke may be reaching that point. The wrinkles on his face are apparent at 20 paces, the jowls are settling, the hair is white. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The best of these works, including Facade, in which Paschke has left nine vertical hatch marks in the center of his face, and the double portrait The Decision, are private rather than personal....
Shirley Mordine recently announced that she doesn’t want to rely on her previous success with “the well-made dance.” And judging by the excerpts from Edge Mode shown at an open rehearsal, her newest work is open-ended, intuitive, and a little frayed, rawer and less dancerly than many of her recent efforts. Dardi McGinley spends long, intense, spellbinding moments crouched in a spotlight and quivering, almost vibrating, like an instrument registering slight, threatening changes in the atmosphere....
Over the past decade the Newberry Consort, led by violist da gamba Mary Springfels, has taken concertgoers on numerous delectable educational journeys back to the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. Florence, Rome, Venice, London, and Paris have been frequent stops, with an occasional excursion to Spain and Germany. But the northern countries have been mostly bypassed. This curious neglect is being redressed at the Newberry’s season opener, with a program from 17th-century Holland....
In 1987 Harry Meislahn was a man with too much time on his hands. Settling into an easy chair for an afternoon of pleasure reading, he picked up the latest copy of the New England Journal of Medicine, where he saw an article about pain response in newborns. In an attempt to prove that newborns have feelings too, the authors, K.J.S. Anand and P.R. Hickey, had referenced over 200 observations of pain, biochemical changes and heart rate among them....
I was several weeks late catching up with El mariachi, a fine little action picture in Spanish that’s been playing at the Water Tower (and opens this week at the Biograph and Bricktown Square). Judging from all the reviews and press stories I read beforehand, an essential part of the movie’s meaning–almost treated as if it were part of the plot–is that its 24-year-old writer-director, Robert Rodriguez, made it for $7,000 and, now a client of Hollywood’s International Creative Management agency, has a two-year contract with Columbia Pictures, the movie’s distributor, that includes plans to shoot a $6 million English-language remake....
Why does metal catch on fire in the microwave? –Maura McCormick, Rockville, Maryland Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Can’t say I’ve come across any cases of metal actually catching on fire in a microwave, though my experiments in this respect haven’t been as extensive as I’d like, owing to Mrs. Adams’s refusal to sacrifice (potentially) the household microwave to the cause of science. What you do see is sparks, which may pit the metal....
The U.S. premiere of a beautifully inflected 12-minute jazz fable by Charles Burnett. It’s distinctly different from his recent The Glass Shield and closer to the feeling of Killer of Sheep, his first feature, though the poetic narration represents a real departure. This is one of those rare movies in which jazz forms directly influence film narrative: set in Los Angeles, the slender plot involves a good Samaritan trying to raise money from ghetto neighbors for a young mother who’s about to be evicted, and each person he goes to see registers like a separate solo chorus in a 12-bar blues....
COMBUSTIBLE EDISON (BAR/NONE) The most potent out-of-time, out-of-place passion currently going is for some of the more mundane aspects of 50s culture, from “tiki bars” and simulated Hawaiian luaus in suburban backyards to beatnik bachelor pads equipped with plush-consoled hi-fis. Urge Overkill genuflect before the well-made martini, posing with skewered Spanish olives in publicity stills and sipping carefully balanced cocktails in some of their videos. Recordings by once-discredited performers like Les Baxter, Martin Denny, and Esquivel, up until recently found only in moldy thrift stores, are now highly sought collector’s items, valued for their garish Technicolor sleeves depicting various exotic scenes, many of them variations on a theme of a voluptuous woman in form-fitting clothes and strange jewelry or hats....
When I ran into writer-performer Danny Thompson last week at a play reading, his face was buried behind Newt Gingrich’s sci-fi thriller, 1945. “I love this,” he gushed. “Turn to any page and it’s terrible.” Gingrich, the techno-legislator who looks forward to presiding over a virtual Congress one day (as if he doesn’t already), would probably say something similar about Thompson’s Big-Tooth High-Tech Megatron vs. the Sockpuppet of Procrastination, an hour-long high-camp skewering of America’s love affair with technology....
For the better part of nine years, the unsinkable saxophonist Ed Petersen has appeared every week at the Green Mill, helming a band that matches his intensity and versatility–which alone would place it among the best bands in town. At the beginning of this week, during his penultimate Monday-night performance, Petersen called the catchy but booby-trapped Thelonious Monk tune “Criss Cross” and then proceeded to play a novella: his solo broke down into individual chapters of specific action, but the characters and themes still retained their integrity....
Anachronisms You’d be hard-pressed to find two more different living playwrights writing in English than Harold Pinter and Sam Shepard. Yet here they are together, each represented by two one-acts, in Azusa Productions’ “Perfectly Pinter” at 8 and “Late-Night Shepard” at 10. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Pinter’s world yes means no, and no means fuck off. Sometimes even yes means fuck off....
Grant Park’s Loss On the verge of its 60th season and just as it’s about to hit an impressive new stride, the venerable Grant Park Music Festival has been left leaderless. Last week Catherine Cahill, the festival’s general director and artistic director for the past three years, announced her impending departure for the New York Philharmonic, where she’ll serve as general manager, reporting to the orchestra’s highly touted executive director Deborah Borda....
Gypsy, Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This 1959 masterpiece fuses a wisecracking but substantive script and unmatchably snappy songs into theater that’s both entertaining and psychologically probing, a refreshing reminder of how great a musical can be. Based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee, it traces her development from vaudeville kiddie-show second banana to the classiest stripper in burlesque under the guidance–and the thumb–of her mother....
