JUNE Saturday 10 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For its X-Po ’95, Fans of X-rated Entertainment (FOXE) has lined up exotic dancers, a Jell-O wrestling exhibit, a striptease show, demos of new sex products, and even a seminar titled “Sexuality and Spirituality.” It’s today from 11 to 5 and tomorrow from 11 to 4 at the Ramada Woodfield Hotel, 920 E. Northwest Highway in Palatine....
In their three separate monologues Frank, an itinerant healer, his wife Grace, and his manager Teddy agree on only one thing when it comes to that evening in a Ballybeg bar: an incident occurred that would result in two of them committing suicide. Playwright Brian Friel teases us with the details of that traumatic night as he introduces us to the three, each of whom eagerly tells his or her side of the story, allowing us to note the all-too-human deceptions practiced by these loyal but ill-met companions....
HAIR OF THE DOG At its heart Thomas Arthur Repp’s Hair of the Dog, in its midwest premiere at the Avenue Theatre, is a simple, endearing melodrama of cockeyed redemption. Bones is a former music teacher who lost his job after slamming a kid’s hands in a piano when he was on a drunk. Now in his late 40s, he heads a rum-running gang during Prohibition from a ramshackle house across the river from the Canadian border: he and his motley crew of smugglers pose as dog breeders to smuggle booze in dog-food cans into the States....
In its downtown debut Chicago’s newest ballet troupe offers a little something for everyone. For fans of Gerald Arpino, the artistic director, there are three of his classic works; for Chicago chauvinists, revivals of two works by Randy Duncan, former artistic director of the now-defunct Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre. For fans of women there’s the new Legends, featuring choreography from Ann Reinking, Sherry Zunker-Dow, Margo Sappington, Ann Marie DeAngelo, and Joanna Haigood to the singing of Barbra Streisand, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Lena Horne, Bette Midler, and Edith Piaf....
In John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation, the character Paul wins the hearts of a wealthy art dealer and his wife by talking about books. He finds a reference point for the modern malaise in The Catcher in the Rye. Paul notes that three assassins–Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley Jr., and an unnamed Long Island substitute teacher–all cited J.D. Salinger’s book as their justification. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
MARTIN AND JOHN, at Cafe Voltaire. Dale Peck’s 1993 debut novel is an easy book to give up on. Though there’s a pretense of experimentalism, Martin and John is actually a series of short stories, every other one in italics, narrated by a series of Johns in love with a series of Martins, with a few parents named Beatrice and Henry thrown in for good measure. While the circumstances of the stories are widely divergent–in one John is a 16-year-old farm boy literally rolling in the hay with a young drifter, in another a kept dilettante–in style and tone they’re so similar that the stories quickly meld into an indistinguishable blob....
It is unfortunate that the author of your November 8 article “Sins of the Mother” is blinded by the same assumptions that prevent our child welfare system from keeping children safe. She describes the travails of Denise, a mother of two young DCFS wards. Denise has a history of failing to feed her children, leaving them while she turned tricks to get drug money. She also has a pattern of being both a victim and perpetrator of violence, including serving jail time for killing a boyfriend....
Hey, Faggot: Hey, SOS: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your boyfriend isn’t gay, he’s hooked on hand jobs. Mouths and pussies (and butts) are not nearly as tight or precise as fists. Many straight young men when they lose their virginity are surprised at just how unlike their old pal the fist a vagina actually is (very unlike), and how unlike Vaseline pussy juice is (ditto)....
Scalper Scam, Part Two: Tower Pleads Not Guilty Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To recap last week’s column: A largely white and affluent group had gathered early to get tickets for the show, which went on sale at eight. To obviate overnight camping the store–the former Rose Records outlet on Wabash–used little red “carnival tickets” in a lottery system to randomize fans’ places in line....
WHITE ZOMBIE, MELVINS 5/19, ARAGON Plenty of once-twee industrial disco outfits have tried toughening up their acts with an infusion of heavy metal: Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, and most of the old Wax Trax posse, to name a few. White Zombie executed this transformation from the other direction. Once proud psychonoise-metal scumfucks from Brooklyn, after signing a major-label deal they packed their bags for Los Angeles to heighten their acting skills....
For years, in a self-promoting form of cultural exchange, the New Zealand government has paid the way for the nation’s athletes to show their stuff on the world’s playing fields. This year the country is getting in on the groundswell of interest in kiwi music as well, by partially funding the Noisyland vs. North America tour, which features three of New Zealand’s better known guitar bands. Headliners Straitjacket Fits are genuine stars in their homeland; little girls swooned when lead singer-guitarist Shayne Carter took his shirt off in the band’s “Done” video....
THE LIGHTS at the Organic Theater Company Greenhouse, Lab Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Lights is not focused, however. Here Korder attempts to make a grand statement about life in big, dirty, nasty New York City and follow the wanderings of two characters–a naif, Lilian, and her boyfriend Fredric. Korder quickly proves, however, that he needs much more time than a two-act play–and a rather long two-act play at that–to really tell his story....
People complain about the lack of baseball–some of them do, anyway–but I don’t know what they’re talking about. Why, just this week I saw Frank Thomas hitting a long homer to right center. There was Greg Maddux sending a change-up dipping into the lower inside corner against a right-handed batter–Matt Williams, I think it was. And what do you know, there was even Ryne Sandberg ranging into short right field to scoop up a grounder, pirouetting, and throwing out the batter at first....
Coach Walt Hriniak urged Frank Thomas to homer on the last of a series of pitches during batting practice last Saturday. “Wherever it’s pitched,” he said, meaning to right if outside and to left if inside. The ball came in low and over the plate and Thomas pounced on it. There was not only the solid crack of bat meeting ball but a hissing quality to the sound, as if whatever moisture remained in the grain of the wood were being pressed out the pores of the bat....
Theaters Seek Young Audiences It’s no secret that some of Chicago’s oldest and most well established theater companies are having trouble attracting audiences in their 20s and 30s. Now a few of those organizations, including Court Theatre on the University of Chicago campus, are beginning seriously to address the problem. Notes Court marketing director Jodi Royce: “Our audience demographic was creeping upward rather than downward, and we felt we needed to do something about that....
Establishment concert presenters and music educators may despair over the lack of enthusiasm for serious music among the under-30 set, but the truth is that Generation Xers have found their own outlets, such as the HotHouse and Green Mill. And contrary to opinion in certain quarters, composers in their 20s are putting out interesting stuff in their search for styles and idioms relevant to the sensibilities of their generation. Brian Leber, Andre Marquetti, and Todd Merrell, three Chicagoans who operate outside the Northwestern-DePaul-University of Chicago axis, have organized this survey of their latest chamber pieces under the topical title “X-Music....
Dear Reader, (i) “If the idea of “brain death’ were rejected, the source of most vital-organ transplants would dry up”; and The central argument of the interview is that the notion of “brain death,” as invoked by physicians, serves to conceal the theft of organs from the still living; and that this is a pattern of contemporary physician behavior. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As physicians, a neurologist and a primary care doctor at a teaching hospital/medical school, we do not feel personally impugned by the general direction of the article or its specific accusations; but rather are saddened by the possible impact of such disinformation on the readers of a popular and usually responsible weekly....
Ballet Theatre of Chicago’s Hot Start Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I expected the quality to be there, but what I didn’t expect was the overwhelming support we received,” says de la Nuez. His surprise is understandable because ballet has long been a tough sell here. For several years de la Nuez and his wife, dancer Meredith Benson, worked with Ballet Chicago and watched that organization struggle to build an audience....
Captured at List: Bisexual Activists’ Discussion List Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Subject: A new twist of censorship I just had to share this with someone. I am visually disabled and use material recorded on tape by Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic. Well, I have been trying to get this book called How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video recorded. RFBD has sent it back twice saying that none of their volunteers wanted to read it....
At age 250, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra is one of the world’s oldest musical institutions. Founded by Leipzig’s town fathers as their answer to court entertainment–and originally housed in a merchants’ exhibition hall called the Gewandhaus–the orchestra has been a source of immense civic pride, even when the city was part of communist East Germany. Over the centuries a long line of illustrious musicans have been assocated with it, including great kepellmeisters such as Felix Mendelssohn (1834-47), Wilhelm Furtwangler, and Bruno Walter....
