RENE MARIE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Vocalist Rene Marie opens her second Maxjazz album, Vertigo, with two songs that by now ought to elicit a unanimous shrug from a jazz audience: “Them There Eyes” was a frothy novelty when Louis Armstrong first recorded it in 1931; by the time Billie Holiday resurrected it in 1939, it already needed a dose of her gimlet detachment to work....
Narrative dances are always a little odd, more metaphorical than realistic–after all, the characters are expressing their feelings and interactions through movement. Such dances need to be pieced together more than most plays, so seeing one in snippets can be disorienting. Still, a rehearsal of bits and pieces from Kevin Iega Jeff’s Naeemah’s Room by River North Chicago Dance Company revealed a lot of promise. At the beginning, three kneeling dancers creep behind one walking slowly, presumably the central character (reportedly based on Iega’s sister, who suffered an emotional breakdown in the last years of her life)....
This 1965 allegory by writer-director Tadeusz Konwicki, which hasn’t been shown in the U.S. for several decades, might be called terminally Polish, but that doesn’t prevent it from also suggesting at times Tennessee Williams (Orpheus Descending, filmed as The Fugitive Kind) and William Inge (Picnic). Perhaps the best reason for seeing it is actor Zbigniew Cybulski (1927-’67), who’s being honored by the Chicago Cultural Center this week with screenings of three exceptional black-and-white features, including Ashes and Diamonds and The Saragossa Manuscript (see separate listings)....
An elastic chin strap constricted the jowls of 275-pound Jason Yurechko. It held in place the plastic bull horns he was wearing on top of his frizzy red clown wig. A tight black Bulls jersey was stretched over his belly, and he wore red-and-black Zuba pants. Flushed, clammy, and breathing heavily, he yelled “Yeah!” to no one in particular. Then he farted. “Gentlemen, this is an audition!” yelled Luvabull choreographer Kim Tyler....
Volume XII, Plasticene, at the Viaduct Theater. This revival of a 1997 work includes many fine athletic, comic, and intellectual moments–I wish I could recommend it more highly. But though director Dexter Bullard and his players give it everything they’ve got, it never quite comes together. To the accompaniment of fabulously bizarre music by Eric Leonardson on a device of his own creation, Shirley Anderson, Mark Comiskey, and Sharon Gopfert go through wordless scenes suggesting rivalry between the women, the man’s betrayal of each, and love between the women–though that description is way more linear than the experience....
The 20th annual Women in the Director’s Chair International Film and Video Festival, featuring narrative, documentary, animated, and experimental works by women, continues Friday through Sunday, March 23 through 25. Screenings are at the Women in the Director’s Chair Theater, 941 W. Lawrence. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $8, $6 for students, seniors with a valid ID, and members of Women in the Director’s Chair. Festival passes are also available; for more information call 773-907-0610....
Skokie’s Northlight Theatre, which introduced Chicago-area audiences to the work of Martin McDonagh with its 1999 production of The Cripple of Inishmaan, returns to the Anglo-Irish playwright’s work with this dark comedy about life and death in rural Galway. Mick Dowd (Si Osborne) has been hired to dig up old bones in a churchyard to make room for new corpses; among the graves set for recycling is one occupied by his late wife, killed seven years earlier in a car crash when Mick was driving drunk....
Lora Chasteen says that most salespeople at punk shops in the Clark and Belmont area seem to think being surly on the job gives the fishnets and creepers they’re pushing a whiff of authenticity. But she and her husband, Pier Novikov, who own the boutique Medusa’s Circle, request that their employees be attentive and friendly as they help customers select just the right pair of bondage pants. Says Chasteen, “I’ve never fit a mold, and sometimes it’s been kind of lonely....
Last night my wife and I made a pact to stop smoking cigarettes today. This morning, after walking the kids to school, I walked to the gas station and bought a pack. My wife will be pleased when she gets home this evening. She knows, as I do, that we were just blowing smoke last night. At the time of my brother’s call I had been a nonsmoker for six months....
Streamers Vietnam hadn’t yet become a cliche. Later shows, such as Miss Saigon, would regularly play the Vietnam card to add an illusion of depth to shallow stories, and these days references to Vietnam have become a kind of theatrical shorthand. A Vietnam vet is now inevitably damaged and dangerous, a story about Vietnam always involves gratuitous violence and horrifying imagery–including Bruce Norris’s facile and empty Purple Heart, currently running at Steppenwolf....
5 FRIDAY Nowadays “courtesan” is just a fancy way of saying “hooker,” but centuries ago it referred to a prostitute distinguished by her beauty, refinement, and artistry. This weekend’s conference on The Courtesan’s Arts brings together historians, anthropologists, musicologists, and others to examine courtesan cultures such as those that thrived in ancient Greece, precolonial India, and Renaissance Italy. Sponsored by the University of Chicago and the Newberry Library, the three-day event includes talks illuminating the connections between the rise and fall of courtesan cultures and other forms of social change, such as industrialization and colonization....
Over the past 11 years the MO for Charalambides’ eerie music has swung from less to more to a whole lot less–the boomerang they threw at the outset has sailed past them on its return trip. But whether core members Tom and Christina Carter play laboriously constructed compositions or free improvisations, the sounds they make–detailed, introspective, and driven by a drumless ebb and flow–live up to the name of their record label, Wholly Other....
This gritty and absorbing 2000 feature by Spanish director Achero Manas opens with a taut sequence in which schoolkids play chicken in a railroad yard, racing from either side of the track to grab a bottle of water just before a train arrives. The same dynamic plays out in the story, as young Pablo–nicknamed “El Bola” for the ball bearing he carries around–befriends Alfredo, a fellow outcast at school, and Alfredo’s dad enlists the help of a social worker to rescue Pablo from his hateful and abusive father....
Twenty-five-year-old David Gordon Green sometimes comes across like a gifted poet who hasn’t yet mastered prose; his characters and images are memorable, but this story about working-class kids, most of them black, in a small town in North Carolina is elusive and occasionally puzzling (more than one might expect, given that it’s based on Green’s memories of his boyhood in Texas). Working with nonprofessional actors who improvise some of their dialogue, Green seems at certain junctures to be brandishing strangeness like a crown, but the lyricism of his ‘Scope framings, junkyard settings, and extremely vulnerable teenage characters registers loud and clear even when some of his ideas come across as amorphous or self-conscious....
Hfobble, TriArts, Inc., at Stage Left Theatre. The stock characters of commedia dell’arte may seem quaint and exotic now, but they represented types as familiar to 16th-century Italians as yuppies, rappers, and soccer moms are to our society today. The TriArts ensemble have created their commedia-style script in affiliation with the city’s Department on Aging, so it’s no surprise that it focuses on geriatric issues. A misanthropic capitalist vows to destroy all nonprofit enterprises, starting with the Hfobble House Senior Center....
The word on Luna’s Romantica, the sixth studio effort from the New York quartet, is that it’s their, well, “romance” album. I’ll grant that guitarist and vocalist Dean Wareham’s lyrics are more interpersonally oriented than the oddball character studies that dominated 1997’s Pup Tent and 1999’s The Days of Our Nights, and on a few tracks he even verges on debonair. As a pitcher of woo he sounds endearingly silly and foppish: on “Lovedust” he sings, “When candles light themselves / And the air turns creamy / Why not take a photograph?...
MARLENE ROSENBERG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago has borne or nurtured an astonishing number of superb jazz bassists over the years, and many of them–Malachi Favors in the 60s, Rufus Reid in the 70s, Kelly Sill from the 80s to the present–have exemplified a distinct regional style. It’s characterized by balance between tone and syntax–a full, dark timbre, dry and earthy, that never buckles under the speedy technique that has increasingly characterized jazz bass over the past 40 years....
“What a time to be talking about public space,” said Chicago architect Douglas Garofalo the day after the United States went to war in Iraq. But when uncertainty and dread reign, thinking about making things better is a welcome salve, and a large audience had come to the Museum of Contemporary Art to hear Garofalo’s thoughts on what could be done to lighten the effect of the MCA’s hulking tomb of a building on its surrounding Streeterville neighborhood....
In his memoir, Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory (Pitchfork Battalion), underground publishing advocate Mickey Hess uses deadpan humor and pungent observations to describe the price he pays for pursuing a passion–teaching college students how to write. Unlike one friend who chooses medical school for a high-paying career, Hess ekes out a living as an adjunct lecturer at universities in and around Louisville, Kentucky. As a part-timer, he leads a nomadic existence commuting from school to school and working under less-than-ideal conditions–at one job he shares a five-desk office in a dank basement with 40 other teachers for low pay and no benefits....
Pullman’s 1998 debut, Turnstyles & Junkpiles, was a set of chipper acoustic string pieces recorded live, sans overdubs–breezy instrumentals awash in fingerpicking, pastoral landscapes, and pass-the-guitar folksiness. But the band’s core quartet includes Ken (formerly Bundy K.) Brown and Doug McCombs, both restless intergenre explorers, so it’d be foolish to expect Pullman to paint from the same palette on their latest, Viewfinder (Thrill Jockey). Though the acoustic string thing is still the core of the concept–Chris Brokaw and Curtis Harvey, former members of Come and Rex, respectively, pluck or strum a lengthy list of instruments, including dulcimer and bouzouki–the new album adds a drummer, New Yorker Tim Barnes, which gives the music a more obvious (though still understated) grounding in rock....
