Art, said Tennessee Williams on Christmas Eve 1944, “is experience remembered in tranquility. And I find no tranquility in Chicago.” But the playwright’s preopening jitters were dispelled when the city warmly embraced The Glass Menagerie, which opened at the Civic Theatre two days later in a pre-Broadway tryout. Williams’s first major triumph was heralded in Claudia Cassidy’s famous Tribune review: “If it is your play, as it is mine, it reaches out ....
We’d each had a lumpy day, what with parking tickets and pushy colleagues, misplaced snapshots, bad news. By the time we settled into a sidewalk table at Cassis, we were ill prepared to savor the season’s first sultry evening. But some alchemy of olives and Bordeaux coaxed us into the giddy illusion that summer vacation had set in. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Owners Roger Greenfield, Ted Kasemir, and Giovanni Garelli, united as the Restaurant Development Group, have been serving basic fare at Surf and Turf, Kinzie Street Chophouse, Bar Louie, and Saloon for some time....
Mere heterosexual males are not the primary audience for the Sacred Naked Nature Girls, an all-women experimental performance collective: their workshop earlier this week and first evening of performance, Thursday night, are restricted to women. Still, I find there’s something witty and liberating about their show Untitled Flesh, an hour-long collection of sketches, rituals, and dance-theater pieces boldly breaking ground where lesser performers fear to tread. Not the least of the taboos they break is the one against appearing nude (for the duration of the show!...
Chicago’s bookselling business lost a leader late last month when Pat Peterson resigned as general manager of Barbara’s Bookstores and moved to Normal to become associate director of the Dalkey Archive Press, a small but well-respected publisher of serious fiction. Though Peterson will continue to serve in an advisory capacity on the Barbara’s board of directors, now that she’s no longer a Barbara’s employee, her stake in the company will revert to owner Don Barliant and his wife, Janet Bailey, who live in Santa Fe....
The most surprising fact of the entire Bob Watch experience for me has been that in this column’s 18-month history, nobody has ever written in defending Bob Greene. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the Republican convention, Bob hies himself across the country, tut-tutting those people on the plane wearing tank tops on the way. Once in San Diego, he ignores the convention, outside of watching a sound check....
FRIDAY 5 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Court Theatre artistic director Charles Newell and Shakespeare scholar David Bevington have conflated scenes from Willie’s two Henry IV plays to create King Henry IV: The Shadow of Succession, a look at the relationship between the king and his son, Prince Hal. Previews begin tonight at 8 and the production runs through February 11. Show times are 7:30 on Wednesdays and Thursdays, 8 on Fridays and Saturdays, and 2:30 and 7:30 on Sundays....
CHUCK HEDGES SWINGTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For all the phony boosterism that characterizes discussions of Chicago jazz, you don’t hear much in the local press about clarinetist Chuck Hedges, who does what he does better than anyone else. (That’s anyone, anywhere.) Hedges exemplifies the liquid, breezy, seemingly effortless and casually elegant approach to his instrument that Benny Goodman made famous 60 years ago....
COMMUNICATING DOORS Communicating Doors starts out like an unusually kinky episode of Are You Being Served?, a 70s British sitcom that airs here on Channel 11. The initial encounter between a frail old man and an S and M hooker named Poopay (the name is French for “puppet,” she insists) leads us to expect an evening of smarmy sex comedy based on the gulf between desire and performance, a staple of British music-hall humor....
ENSEMBLE MODERN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps the most versatile and least doctrinaire of all the midsize groups devoted to promoting contemporary music, the Frankfurt-based Ensemble Modern is embarking on its first U.S. tour, with a cutting-edge program whose title, “From Adams to Zappa,” identifies two of its seminal collaborators. The Bay Area minimalist John Adams began working with the 20-musician ensemble–which was founded in 1980 under the auspices of the German Youth Orchestra–about three years ago when he attended its recording sessions in Los Angeles for Frank Zappa’s The Yellow Shark CD (on Barking Pumpkin), an assortment of the rock innovator’s forays into “serious” music....
When Alice Stephens came to Columbia College to teach film in 1993, she quickly decided that the school needed a festival of African films. “They have a humanness,” says Stephens, who has a PhD in psychology. “The storytelling tradition is very powerful there. We need to expand our view. It’s very limiting if you’re just getting Cineplex Odeon movies.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last year she organized the first African Film Festival, and it drew more than 3,000 people over one weekend....
Geffen Loves Lucy Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » During a galvanizing performance opening for Elastica at the Vic a week or two back, Loud Lucy’s Christian Lane tried but finally despaired of keeping his guitar in tune. Most rockers in his position would simply change guitars, but Lane didn’t have an extra–this due to both the band’s relative penury and its frequent habit of wrecking its instruments at the end of shows....
Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yes, it is true that every death is a tragedy, particularly deaths that are avoidable. As I read his self-righteous thoughts, Wyman is apparently most upset because Garcia, a 53-year-old musician, did not deserve to take heroin since he was past his prime musically, or “moribund,” as Wyman put it. I guess Wyman feels that Garcia was not cool enough to do something so alternative as heroin, which no doubt he feels only folks like Kurt Cobain, Perry Farrell, Johnny Thunders, and River Phoenix are “entitled” to do in the name of their art....
JESSAMINE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bored by the smothering, inflexible structures of rock in the last few years, the indie fold has come to include a growing flock of loose-limbed experimenters and improvisers. While most have been ham-fisted or just plain inept, a few interesting contenders have emerged from the mess. On its brand-new second album, The Long Arm of Coincidence (Kranky), Seattle’s Jessamine continues to cop from Krautrock, particularly the hypnotic locked groove of Can, but seems to be growing beyond its influences....
“Women come into Domestic Violence Court not knowing anything about what’s going on, and a lot of times they leave not knowing anything. . . . They’re shuffled through, usually with inadequate representation. The men get off too often, even if they’ve repeatedly violated an order of protection. And the darker-skinned you are, the more often you’re treated unfairly.” Phil Murphy was a cop. By all accounts, he was an effective cop....
Dear Greer Larson Savage: My future seems uncertain. I’m scared, I’m afraid. I don’t feel safe on the streets. I hate everything and I don’t know what I hate. I’m angry. I’m worried I may have the flesh-eating disease but I’m not yet showing symptoms. People don’t return my phone calls. Should I buy a gun? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Consider this: A few weeks ago I found myself in a section of the city that had become barren of faeries....
Little Milton has come under fire in recent years for the increasingly slick direction his music has taken, but his live shows can still embody the essence of contemporary big-city blues revues. His band is versatile and endowed with both sensitivity and punch; he combines sophisticated charm with direct emotional honesty; his voice has deepened over the years, bringing new realms of warmth and intimacy to what was already one of the more expressive vocal styles in blues; and his too-infrequent guitar playing almost always finds that elusive groove between slick professionalism and raw honesty....
LOVE LETTERS, at Royal George Theatre Center. In a world where glitz sells, it’s almost reassuring that audiences will pay top dollar for a show without spectacle, just two actors at a desk reciting other people’s love letters and never looking at each other until the end. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But here it’s not so noble. Here the spectacle is the husband-wife team of Robert Wagner and Jill St....
Anyone who thinks plans to build a third airport died with Mayor Daley’s dream for Lake Calumet should have been at the Holiday Inn in Harvey last week for the luncheon of the south suburban chamber of commerce. That’s how Mayor Daley sees it, anyway. “They’re selling this as a boon for the south suburbs and it’s not,” says Lisa Howard, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Aviation. “Any development spurred by the airport will be miles from these communities that need it the most....
If you’re into gospel and blues, you’ll enjoy this tribute to Thomas A. Dorsey enormously. At a time when black music was rigidly categorized as “sacred” or “profane,” Dorsey (who died in January at 93) fused a bluesman’s bumptious earthiness with a churchman’s rapturous religiosity to create a distinctive form that came to be known as gospel; this musical biography by Jackie Taylor and Jimmy Tillman joyfully reflects its hero’s pleasure in the worldly and spiritual elements of song....
Everyone has a favorite Greektown restaurant–Santorini is hot these days, the Greek Islands and Parthenon still have their longstanding partisans. But there’s general agreement that the strip’s wildest personality is Petros Kogiones. He of the former Dianna’s Opaa, the vast room done up like a Grecian village, who kissed about 85 percent of all the “ladies” and led his customers through acrobatic Greek dances, a water glass balanced on his head....
