Tap dance is a tenacious art form, with roots in the brothels and loading docks of 19th-century America and branches today in such big-ticket Broadway productions as Jelly’s Last Jam and Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk. But the visibility of the venue or the performer is far less significant than the fact that the form keeps resurfacing in young people who fall in love with it–and by necessity with its history....
Christopher Carter Messes With Your Mind, at ComedySportz, through June 10. Given all the psychic hot line nonsense and postmodern magic acts, it’s become increasingly difficult to buy into anything remotely supernatural. However, I challenge anyone to sit through this performance without suspending a tiny bit of disbelief. With toothy charisma, “mentalist” Christopher Carter explains that he is no wizard but has simply studied–and now knows how to access–the powers of intuition....
Fans holding their breath for more of the immaculately crafted cynical pop that put Elvis Costello on the map have already gone blue in the face ten times over: Costello has spent most of the last decade making a garish display of his alleged artistic range, collaborating with the likes of Burt Bacharach, the Mingus Big Band, Bill Frisell, Anne Sofie von Otter, and, on a forthcoming project, the London Symphony Orchestra....
The Casual Family Hermit at the Curious Theatre Branch Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s difficult to say which of the plays is hardest to take. They all indulge in gratuitous mystification: nonsensical language, unmotivated interactions, unexplained premises, relationships and situations rendered incomprehensible by the careful elision of crucial information. Brian Torrey Scott’s Understanding Shyness, for instance, is a series of short vignettes that seems at first to dramatize the small adventures of two men struggling with painful inhibitions....
A friend who saw these New Yorkers at their first local gig a couple years ago told me he’d hoped they’d sound more like real Gypsies–though Lord knows where he got that idea, since they describe their music as “Ukrainian Gypsy punk cabaret.” Lunatic front man Eugene Hutz was born in Kiev, but his family fled the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986 and resettled in rural Ukraine. He spent time in refugee camps across Europe before coming to the States, where he became a naturalized citizen, and along the way he discovered Gypsy music and punk rock–two genres shaped by outsiders–and made the natural connection between them....
Thank God there always seem to be young dancer-choreographers to fill in the ranks thinned by minuscule budgets and flagging aspirations. Instruments of Movement is a new group formed by Cameron Jarrett, formerly a dancer with Momenta Performing Arts Company and Melissa Thodos & Dancers, and James Morrow, who does African, hip-hop, and break dancing. Since this loose band of friends and acquaintances comes from so many different backgrounds, they’re calling their first show Shape Shifters, an evening of about an hour with some nine sections by different choreographers, all roughly addressing the theme of male-female relationships, with a focus on women....
Jon Rauhouse has been Bloodshot Records’ first-call pedal steel player since 1995, when his old band the Grievous Angels first recorded for the label. His bright tone and liquid licks have appeared on countless records by the Waco Brothers, Kelly Hogan, Neko Case, and Sally Timms, but he didn’t step into the spotlight until this year, when Bloodshot released his solo debut, Steel Guitar Air Show. Backed by guitarist Tommy Connell and two swell rhythm sections (Joey Burns and John Convertino of Calexico and locals Tom Ray and Kevin O’Donnell), Rauhouse plays a dozen instrumentals that by turns recall Roy Smeck’s buoyant Hawaiian guitar themes, Bob Wills’s infectious western swing, Walter Wanderly’s umbrella-in-yer-drink lounge jazz, and Santo & Johnny’s shimmering desert strolls....
I read with interest your feature story on the proliferation of cell phone antennas and concerns with public health expressed by neighbors in the immediate area surrounding them [“Antenna Invasion,” July 23]. As both a cell phone user and an expert in the field of radio and antennas, I am dismayed by the inability of the writer to separate scientific facts from ignorance. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, my qualifications....
Next Big Thing? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With the release of his first full-length, One A.M., last month, the word on Diverse is spreading far beyond New York and Chicago. Featuring collaborations with an eclectic crew, including MCs Jean Grae and Lyrics Born and producers Prefuse 73, Madlib, and RJD2, the album is one of the year’s finest and most forward-looking hip-hop recordings....
Hellhound on My Trail It’s tempting to dismiss Johnson’s confounding scenes as outdated dabbling in late-modernist absurdism. But Pinter, whose work is still often misread as absurdist, actually communicates the power of withheld information and of characters living under some unnamed constant threat. Moreover Pinteresque blank bits on the theatrical canvas heighten rather than compromise the sense of real life onstage. After all, people caught up in crises don’t have time for the kind of exposition we’re asked to accept as realistic in the traditional well-made play....
Though Black Burlesque (Revisited) has an anthropological mission–to discover the continuity and divergences among African cultures and the African diaspora–it’s far from academic. For one thing, the evening-length piece began with New York-based Reggie Wilson’s personal search for roots, which first took him to the Mississippi Delta more than ten years ago. And the work’s distinguishing feature is belief in the mystical power of the visceral, of physical sensation and action....
SUMERIANS 8/15, FIRESIDE BOWL Let’s leave this New York quartet’s headdresses and loincloths and traveling-through-space-for-16-million-years backstory alone for a moment: the music is actually every bit as weird as it should be. It’s wailing, keening, eerie space-rock-meets-surf-rock–you’ll hear strains of both Man or Astro-Man? and Can. Front man Enki-du (his bandmates are Tiamat, Marduk, and Tigris) sings in an otherworldly howl that puts their barbaric message across downright plausibly. Studied indie cool and archaeological geekery alike fall apart in the face of brilliant, devoted silliness like this....
Not sure why this comes to mind now, but is it true that Joseph Stalin was once a seminarian? –Mike Toncray, Joliet, Illinois Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stalin’s authoritarian bent can’t be attributed entirely to his seminary training, though. Fact is, he was expelled. The sickly son of an alcoholic boot-maker who died in a brawl, Stalin was initially sent to a church school in his native Georgia by his devout mother, and at age 14 he’d done well enough to earn a scholarship to Tiflis Theological Seminary in what is now Tbilisi....
Rock, Pop, etc. BARRAGE Thu 2/22, 12:30 PM (free in-store performance), Borders Books & Music, 150 N. State. 312-606-0750. Thu 2/22, 7:30 PM, Fri 2/23, 8 PM, and Sat 2/24, 2 and 8 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport. 773-722-5463 or 312-902-1500. CHILDREN OF EDEN Musical theater production with lyrics and music by Stephen Schwartz. Fri 2/16 and Sat 2/17, 8 PM, and Sun 2/18, 2 PM, Ethel M. Barber Theater, Northwestern University, 1979 South Campus Dr....
Neil Young, Friends & Relatives Alabama Ass Whuppin’ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not counting Rhino’s nine-CD Richard Pryor box set, the best comedy albums of recent months come from a pair of unrepentant rock outfits: upstart Georgia honky-punks the Drive-By Truckers and evergreen road warrior Neil Young. Road Rock, credited to “Neil Young, Friends & Relatives” and recorded during his fall tour, falls squarely into the accidental ha-ha category....
A familiar dilemma facing gallerygoers–which direction to go around a room–is neatly solved by You Kill Me, one of three pieces in D’nell Larson’s show at Bodybuilder and Sportsman: 60 arrows on the walls point in the same counterclockwise direction. Larson says the arrows, made of five different lengths of wood and decorated with Swarovski crystals, represent Cupid’s arrow, among other things, and that her works in general concern “love and the dynamics of romantic relationships....
Ronne Hartfield’s family tree bears an African branch, a Jewish one, a British one, and a Choctaw Indian one. Her heritage is so varied that when a radio producer wanted to recount Hartfield’s family history as part of a series to be pitched to WBEZ, a genealogist had to be hired to help fact check. “My maternal grandfather was a plantation owner who had three children with my grandmother, who was the daughter of a married German Jew” and a half-white woman, says Hartfield....
English kitchen-sink realism isn’t ordinarily my cup of tea, but the way Australian writer-director-coproducer Fred Schepisi follows four friends across 40 years creates such a lovely mosaic, acted with such heart, power, and flavor, that I was hooked from the start. It’s a tale anchored around the delivery of a butcher’s ashes to Margate by three of his former pub mates (Tom Courtenay, David Hemmings, Bob Hoskins) and his resentful son (Ray Winstone)....
(Continued from last week) My shy stalker wrote back a week after I sent him an e-mail telling him to reveal himself. He hadn’t meant to offend me, he wrote; he just meant to be mysterious. He was hugely apologetic, sweet, and sincere–but he still refused to send a photo. I was intrigued, and we started to exchange e-mails. I started plugging his nickname into other services and found his photo, so now I knew what he looked like....
PERNICE BROTHERS, CLEM SNIDE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like waves washing up on a beach, musical trends leave a good deal of litter behind, and in the last five years I’ve heard more stilted alt-country confessionals and Brian Wilson-style pseudosymphonies than I care to remember. But I’ve also heard those two impulses wedded in novel ways–first and foremost by Wilco, but also by the guitar bands on this excellent double bill, both of which combine the morbid wisdom of classic country and the aural imagery of orchestrated pop....
