There are a lot of far-fetched scenarios in the made-in-Chicago Jennifer Aniston-Vince Vaughn vehicle The Break-Up, but none more unlikely than the real-life events that have unfolded around some of the movie’s props since it opened earlier this month. The film, a romance between a sports-addicted schlub and an elegant artist, is mostly set in a vintage condo the couple shares and a sleek art gallery–locations that show off the work of a number of Chicago artists....
Friday 27 ORBERT DAVIS SEXTET When jazz fans around the world think of Chicago, they think of great bassists, grand pianists, and towering tenor saxists–but we haven’t had a strong crop of trumpeters since Ira Sullivan and Lester Bowie left town back in the 60s. That’s one reason Orbert Davis commands attention, but only one; you might also take note of his influence on younger players, who are already forming a solid pack behind him....
Not only is Matt O’Neill’s new play smart and funny, it’s also the sanest thing I’ve seen in any medium for a long time. Ray Shepard is a Chicago cop who’s just killed somebody in the line of duty. While enduring a departmental investigation, he’s also got to deal with a ridiculous dispute over parking spaces at his condo, his affair with the sister of the man he killed, and the bumbling aliens who abduct him every time he turns around....
The animals in Laurie Hogin’s new show (opening tonight at Peter Miller) look the viewer in the eye partly because of one of her childhood preoccupations. “One of my favorite questions,” she says, “was ‘What’s it like to be you?’ People would answer, ‘It’s all right, I guess,’ and I would be frustrated. I meant it literally: what is it like to look at the world from behind your eyeballs? In my paintings, animals look at the viewer–the eye contact implies the relationship of one consciousness to another....
The ninth annual Asian American Showcase, presented by the Foundation for Asian American Independent Media and the Gene Siskel Film Center, continues Friday through Thursday, April 8 through 14, with screenings at the Film Center. Tickets are $9, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members; for more information call 312-846-2600. After the Apocalypse Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Searching for food and companionship, five mute survivors of a nuclear war roam a seemingly deserted urban wasteland....
Tennessee Speaks in Tongues for You (Or the 3 1/2-Character Play) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The play opens with a long monologue by the narrator-playwright–a witty comic send-up of the alcohol- and drug-addled Williams of the late 70s and early 80s, a paranoid, tantrum-prone celebrity who turned on friends and snarled at lecture audiences. (Rick Lazarus does a superb job conveying Williams’s declining genius and chemically induced breakdown....
“Improv as Theater,” the theme of the ninth annual edition of this sprawling showcase of performers from around the world, links improvisation to its roots and emphasizes its potential–and rightly so. When Viola Spolin taught character games to the folks who went on to found Second City, she called the form improvisational theater. This year’s CIF jury members selected participants who exhibit an inclination to experiment beyond standard short-form sketch comedy and long-form montage, including actors, writers, monologuists, dancers, musicians, and video artists....
The program lists one intermission, but the show has two. Light Opera Works’ Web site says New Yorker Michael Montel, who resurrected this 1968 Broadway flop with an ecstatically reviewed 1998 concert reading, is directing, but it turns out it’s staged by artistic director Rudy Hogenmiller. These last-minute shifts, earmarks of a troubled production, might help explain the show’s flatness and timidity. The story is thin but potentially charming: a disillusioned painter escapes the rat race by assuming the identity of his recently deceased butler....
Ethical Amnesia Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reviewing In Good Company in the Tribune on January 14, Allison Benedikt describes a young, upstart executive who’s expected to slash the budget while jacking revenues by 35 percent. “He plans to achieve this through–pardon my French–synergy.” Having established “synergy” as a word that makes her skin crawl, Benedikt tells us the movie’s about a subject “infuriatingly en vogue and ....
For updates, see chicagoreader.com. Umphrey’s McGee a8 PM, 1106 W. Lawrence, 312-666-6667 or 312-559-1212, $65, 18+ CUBBY BEAR Poi Dog Pondering a10 PM, 1572 N. Milwaukee, 773-489-3160 or 312-559-1212, $60 GENTRY ON STATE Collective Soul, Shawn Mullins a9 PM, 329 N. Dearborn, 312-923-2000 or 312-559-1212, $145-$150 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Underground dinner” by reservation only featuring prix fixe menus from chef Shin Thompson....
I was here with a friend of mine also named Chris and we ran into another friend of mine named Chris. I always thought those two should get together at some point, and they ended up clicking that night. I decided to leave them alone and ended up going to another bar. About 5:30 in the morning I got a call from Chris Number One, who told me that after they left the club they were making out under the el tracks when all of a sudden they were held up at gunpoint....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to Delilah’s owner and “beer weirdo” Mike Miller, annually there are around 40 beers in the marketplace specifically identified as “Winter” or “Christmas” beers. There’s no single style that typifies them, but they’re usually brown, sometimes spiced or unpasteurized, and almost always strong, which makes them good, even desirable, for aging. At the end of every year Miller puts the bar’s leftovers in the basement in anticipation of the next Christmas and Winter Beer Tasting....
This exuberant musical satire of civil-rights-era racism, a hit on Broadway in 1970, rates revival. Black preacher Purlie Victorious hopes to get back his church by swindling Ol’ Cap’n Stonewall Jackson Cotchipee, owner of the plantation where Purlie’s parishioners labor in sharecropper servitude. The plot takes a dangerous turn when the lecherous Cotchipee shows an interest in Purlie’s girlfriend and coconspirator, Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins, but Purlie saves the day with the help of Cotchipee’s rebellious son, a would-be protest singer....
This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music runs through 10/31 at the Prop Thtr, 3502-4 N. Elston. Rhino Fest is coordinated by the Curious Theatre Branch and features emerging and established artists from Chicago’s fringe, including Theater Oobleck, the Still Point Theatre Collective, Blair Thomas, Hermit Arts, Cin Salach, Michael Martin, the Rasaka Theatre Company, and Ira Glass as well as the Curious and Prop ensembles. Performances take place in Prop’s north or south theaters, except where noted otherwise below....
Moscow’s Sretensky Monastery was founded in 1395, in celebration of victory over Tartar invaders. In 1917, following the Bolshevik revolution, its monks were exiled to Soviet prison camps. Returned to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1994, it formed its choir not only for worship services but also to revive early Russian music banned by the Soviet regime and to champion new music that had protested that repression. Now the 42-voice male choir, conducted by artistic director Nikon Zhila, is coming to America for the first time, bringing a program of chants, folk songs, and romances....
I haven’t been keeping track but with the remix of Nelly Furtado’s “Maneater” hitting the web today, I think Lil Wayne’s managed to rap over every single song released this year. Seriously, between last December’s Tha Carter II, this summer’s Dedication 2 mixtape, a quasi-bootleg collaborative album with Juelz Santana, a totally legit one with Baby, guest drops on eight official singles (by Wikipedia’s count) and at least a dozen less-than-official guests, and a new mixtape track, freestyle, or internet track every few days, I’m surprised that he isn’t down to rapping over High School Musical beats by now....
Postmodern contortionist Mickle Maher and the spectacle junkies at Redmoon Theater join forces for this redreaming of Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari, the 1919 expressionist film that launched a thousand goth-rock ghost ships. Maher’s lyrical writing is well suited to the material. A better fit with Redmoon’s aesthetic is hardly imaginable. And longtime Maher collaborator Colm O’Reilly–black prince of Curious and Oobleck, whose trembling, portentous, static-shrouded voice is piped in from what seems a thousand miles away–is probably the perfect narrator....
The 2001 live-action Ghost World was the first collaboration involving director Terry Zwigoff, cartoonist Daniel Clowes, and John Malkovich’s production company. Art School Confidential is the second. It’s far more ambitious than its predecessor and suffers from too many ideas rather than too few, making it an inspired, fascinating, and revealing mess. Holding it together is the same anger about the way art is taught that gave so much edgy life to the scenes with Illeana Douglas in Ghost World....
Ten film critics’ polls in Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Toronto, and Washington, D.C., have named Sideways the best movie of the year. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Director and cowriter Alexander Payne has nothing to say about over-the-hill males that we don’t already know or couldn’t find in a sitcom. The main characters, pals driving north from San Diego for a few days of vacation, are a depressive, recently divorced wine snob and schoolteacher (Giamatti) who can’t publish his novel and his former college roommate (Church), a cheerful TV actor the movie eventually discards....
Critics disagree on Tennessee Williams’s 1953 absurdist dream pageant, in which disillusioned romantics Don Quixote, Camille, Casanova, Byron, and G.I. Kilroy molder in an unnamed Latin American police state with various gypsies and drunks. It might be the playwright’s best work (Clive Barnes) or simply dreadful (Harold Bloom). In any case, the script’s avalanche of metaphors and tableaux proves too much for Mom and Dad Productions (and contrary to their assertion, this is not the play’s Chicago premiere–Center Theater staged it in 1986)....
