Friday 5/4 – Thursday 5/10 5 SATURDAY In the 1950s Thomas E. Warner’s father, who suffered from sickle-cell anemia, lived in Alabama and had trouble getting transfusions because of restricted blood allotments for African-Americans. Warner lived in Chicago and worked at Michael Reese Hospital; when the hospital got wind of his father’s situation it arranged to fly blood down south. Warner’s mother would pick it up at the airport and take it to his father in the hospital....
Cycles of Life That question came to mind as I watched Shakura Ensemble Ritual Theatre’s Cycles of Life, being remounted after its premiere in September. It’s a tricky proposition to turn religious rituals–here Native American–into theater. There are no big numbers in the American musical about transubstantiation. Though rituals have an undeniably theatrical and performative quality, taking them out of their usual context tends to strip them of their power and render them academic curiosities....
On her 1998 debut album, 29 Nights (Decca), Danni Leigh sent a current of rockabilly sass rippling through neotraditionalist honky-tonk and was quickly pegged as “the female Dwight Yoakam.” But that formula, so successful for Yoakam, wasn’t enough to score her radio play; the record stiffed, and she soon parted ways with the label. Early last year she released A Shot of Whiskey & a Prayer on another Nashville major, the Sony-owned Monument, and the production by Emory Gordy Jr....
“They loved me in America–loved me to death,” says Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in the one-man play Do Not Go Gentle. Presented by Chicago Shakespeare Theater in association with Canada’s Stratford Festival, Leon Pownall’s monodrama explores Thomas’s conflicted identity as one of the 20th century’s great writers of verse and short stories and as a dissolute hedonist enabled into an early grave by his admirers. The show is performed here by Geraint Wyn Davies, a highly regarded classical actor whose roles range from Hamlet to Henry Higgins–though he’s best known as the star of TV’s Forever Knight (“that vampire thing,” he calls the series, on which he played undead detective Nick Knight)....
Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » MSI is the granddaddy museum of corporate-sponsored exhibits, where they abound. Abbott Labs sponsored their new genetics exhibition and Petroleum Planet was supported by BP Amoco. Like most museums, MSI needs financial help to plan and build exhibitions, and the Pfizer money was critical to help update and travel Women’s Health to the nine science museums who worked on it, including MSI....
Composer and tenor saxophonist Russ Gershon started the Either/Orchestra in 1985, inspired by Sun Ra and Gil Evans. But the notion had already been brewing for a couple years–in the early 80s he’d played in a student big band at Harvard run by visiting professor Illinois Jacquet, and not long after he’d taken a Berklee class on the music of Charles Mingus. By using creative voicings and independently moving lines, Mingus could make a band sound bigger than actual size, and Gershon has developed a similar economy: the E/O gets close to a big band’s punch or Evans’s orchestral breadth with ten pieces....
Drawing War Yet in the tradition of The Iceman Cometh, All My Sons, A Streetcar Named Desire, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Buried Child, Neveu’s play exposes festering secrets barely masked by a facade of normality, family, and friendship. Set on one long Christmas day in a small town somewhere in the midwest, Drawing War charts the actions of a seemingly typical family, the Brauns, as they plod through the rituals of the holiday: going to services, opening presents, visiting relatives, exchanging Christmas cookies with the neighbors, paying respects at the grave of a loved one....
Tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist Leif Ove Andsnes–two extraordinary young artists who’ve been performing and recording Schubert together since 2000–are in the middle of a world tour performing the haunting Winterreise. In this hour-long song cycle, a setting of 24 poems by Wilhelm Muller that was written near the end of the lives of both poet and composer, a recently scorned lover flees his beloved’s home in the middle of winter, revealing his anguish as he describes the world he passes through....
Solaris It’s easy to scoff at Monarch Notes, but before I quit graduate school in disgust I reached for them every time I thought a professor might be ruining a literary masterpiece for me–and vowed to read the work later, on my own time, for my own reasons. As a teacher, I also used them when I suspected a student of plagiarism, and they did help me spot an offender or two....
NEW PORNOGRAPHERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s a bit of a stretch to call a band featuring members of assorted Canadian indie-pop acts a “supergroup,” but this one sure made a super record–a giddy tumble of pure pop whose frothiness is balanced by a density worthy of Phil Spector. The hook-crammed Mass Romantic (on the Vancouver label Mint) was made under the direction of Carl Newman, whose old bands (Zumpano and Superconductor) never sounded this powerful....
ROBERT BARRY & FRED ANDERSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve been listening to tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson for about 30 years, and I can’t recall a more joyful, liberated, lyrical example of his playing than his latest disc, Duets 2001 (Thrill Jockey), with drummer Robert Barry. Anderson has already proved that his broad tone and epic solos can stand out in all kinds of crowds–from his 70s sextet (which launched the careers of Douglas Ewart, Chico Freeman, and George Lewis) to Edward Wilkerson’s Shadow Vignettes (a group of almost 30 that Anderson guested with at the 1998 Jazz Festival) to the trios and quartets he leads today....
Think you might be haunted? Local psychic Ruth Berger knows the warning signs: an inexplicably cold area in your house, mysterious sounds like knocking or banging or someone calling your name, and TVs and radios that pop on by themselves. Shaking beds are a sign, but only if you’re sleeping. If you have a sudden chill, feel queasy, dizzy, and out of balance, it’s either the flu or a message from the other side....
From early spring to late summer, Brett Bittenbender of McCall, Idaho, commutes via parachute, leaping out of planes at 1,500 feet to land in clearings adjacent to raging forest fires. On the ground, the lanky 42-year-old subsists on Spam and coffee and sleeps on bare earth, often for just a few hours a night. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Asian Longhorned Beetle Cooperative Eradication Project, established in 1996, puts the smoke jumpers at the service of local governments....
Last month the Daley administration announced it intended to hold the line on litigation in order to save the city desperately needed cash. Yet on December 4 lawyers for the city announced that they were appealing a ruling that went against them in a two-year case involving Mark Weinberg, the public-interest lawyer who’s been waging a one-man campaign against Blackhawks owner Bill Wirtz. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And who could blame them?...
At a Public Storage facility on Devon near Pulaski, two sweaty movers are staring at a full storage locker. A household of belongings is stacked in here like layers of sedimentary rock or 1-2-3 Jell-O. On the bottom layer are furniture and heavy items; book-filled cardboard boxes are stacked atop each other like building blocks. Above them are items of medium weight–the base of a futon, a fortress of empty file cabinets....
Rock, Pop, Etc. JELLO BIAFRA Benefit for the Chicago Green Candidates Fund (see www.14thDistrict.org for more information). Thu 3/13, 8:30 PM, Skyscraper Auditorium, Loyola University, 6525 N. Sheridan. 847-492-0495. ERASURE, COOLER KIDS Sold out. Mon 3/10, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State. 312-443-1130 or 312-902-1500. HELLO DELI with Eileen Berman & Dan Detloff. Sat 3/15, 6 PM, TenHoeve Center, Oakton Community College, 1600 E. Golf, Des Plaines. 847-635-1900. NAKED & SHAMELESS Sat 3/15, 10 PM, Wing & Groove Theatre, Flat Iron Building, 19351/2 W....
Rock, Pop, etc. NICHOLAS BARRON’S GALAXY 5 performs as part of the MCA’s “First Fridays” reception. Fri 10/4, 6-10 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago. 312-280-2660. DUVALL, THE GHOST Fri 9/27, 8 PM, Turner Conference Center, Student Resource Center, College of DuPage, 425 Fawell, Glen Ellyn. 630-942-2712. KIMI HAYES Free concert. Fri 10/4, 12:15 PM, Randolph Cafe, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. 312-744-6630. LUCKY DUBE, DUB DIS, URAS, BONNIE JACKSON, DEVON BROWN Sat 10/5, 10 PM, E2, 2347 S....
Writer-performer Tom Mula’s swaggering, nebbishy George W. Bush opens his ersatz cabaret fund-raiser singing the praises of Texas, where “We all love our mamas / We all read the Bible / And we’re all rich and white.” This simplistic bit of satire sets the tone for the ensuing 100 minutes, as Mula trots out all the familiar gripes against our “Texas kind of prez”: caters to the wealthy, tramples the environment, lacks brainpower....
In Orlando I got a job at the ration board. I used to work late sometimes. There was a janitor, a black janitor, and he would be sweeping the floors. One night he said to me, “You’re from a northern state aren’t you?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I had many experiences with black people in Orlando, and I decided that we treated them much better in Chicago....
Frustrated by the long wait for a license, partners John Sanchez, Felix Bustamante, and Chris Storey finally opened MOONSHINE, which pays homage to the prohibition era, without stocking so much as a single bottle of liquor. The red and orange backlit walls behind the bar are noticeably empty until the owners get word from the city. The rest of the room isn’t quite so bare: after months of salvaging old wood from a barn on a Wisconsin farm–“They were gonna tear it down, so we offered to tear it down for them,” says Bustamante–the resourceful group had it milled and used it to detail the interior....
