Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “So we must ask of the NFL what we must ask of any entity with the ability to touch our souls and shape our lives: Does it have our best — and our children’s best — interests at heart? Is there good evidence that it even knows our best interests? More particularly, to what lengths will it go to create a wholly faithful, devoted congregation, er … ‘fan base’?...
Last of the Boys Few productions are as timely as those being presented at Steppenwolf Theatre and the Goodman on the nature and purpose of war. But on this subject above all others rigor is essential–sorting truth from falsehood to prevent storytelling about war from turning into misleading mythmaking. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But regretting the past–that it is past, that it didn’t measure up, that the present doesn’t measure up–isn’t in itself a dramatic activity....
The two one-acts on this program have potential but ultimately fall apart. Buried in Kalena Victoria Dickerson’s unfocused, cluttered The Gunslinger (and a Baby) is an interesting examination of our desire both to be protected and to feel needed. Though Brian Lobel’s staging is occasionally tight and cohesive, he never really settles into the play, and Marc Chevalier’s set and lights make Breadline’s small space feel sprawling, further hindering our ability to make sense of this ambitious work....
In Agatha Christie’s adaptation of her novel, ten strangers converge on a secluded island retreat at the invitation of the owner, whom no one has met in person. As they begin to die off–in a fashion consistent with the “Ten Little Indians” nursery rhyme–and seeing no one else on the island, they start to suspect one another. Despite the chemistry between Heath Howes as rakish Philip Lombard and Lilia Vassileva as secretary Vera Claythorne, low energy and some wildly uneven British accents on opening night prevented the tension from building....
I’m probably alone in this, but I think inconsistency is more compelling than the ability to drop an amazing record every year. Two albums ago Animal Collective put out Sung Tongs, an instant touchstone that made the band both the Beatles and the Stones for art school kiddies (note the recent landslide of bands copying their strums and meowing through the choruses). Then came Feels, which was, like, hippie, please!–all wild trash and sloppy, hookless New Age drudgery....
First in a series devoted to Chicago restaurants offering regional dishes At Birrieria Reyes de Ocotlan (1322 W. 18th, 312-733-2613) in Pilsen, the Reyes family has offered birria and little else for about 25 years, serving it in soup and tacos. For the soup the cooked goat is added to a rich tomato broth seasoned with chiles and cloves and served with chopped onion and fresh cilantro; the dish isn’t highly spiced, but on each table are bowls of toasted chile arbol, common in Jalisco....
The 23rd Chicago International Children’s Film Festival continues this week with programs ranging from collections of short films suitable for preschoolers to dramatic features for school-age kids. Among the features are the Estonian feature Ruudi, about a boy’s quest to tour a Viking longboat (Sat 10/28, 11 AM, Facets Cinematheque); Wild Soccer Bunch 3, part of a series of German sports adventures (Sat 10/28, 1:30 PM, Wilmette); Winky’s Horse (2005), about a Chinese girl whose family has moved to the Netherlands (Sat 10/28, 1 PM, Facets Cinematheque; Sun 10/29, 10:30 AM, Wilmette); and the Israeli feature Little Heroes, about a young telepathic Russian immigrant (Sun 10/29, 1:30 PM, Wilmette)....
Resurrecting a custom of its first music director, Theodore Thomas, the CSO is offering its first “audience choice” concert since 1902–music selected by the people, or rather the several hundred who called or e-mailed Symphony Center. Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony, From the New World, emerged early on as a clear favorite, and for good reason. It has driving Slavic rhythms, Beethovenian intensity, one gorgeous theme after another, touching tenderness, and the composer’s most famous melody....
The brilliant but neglected satirist Frank Tashlin once defined his subject matter as “the nonsense of what we call civilization,” and these three features, which open a rare, monthlong retrospective at the Gene Siskel Film Center, encapsulate two sides of his genius. Realism dominates in The First Time (1952, 89 min.), a black-and-white comedy about new parents (Robert Cummings and Barbara Hale); Tashlin evokes Tristram Shandy by having the baby narrate, but the details about parenthood and its economic squeezes are painfully authentic....
When The Break-Up, the new comedy filmed in Chicago, had its local premiere at the Music Box on Memorial Day, Governor Blagojevich and Illinois Film Office managing director Brenda Sexton were celebrating more than the attendance of Vince and Jen. Blagojevich was also presiding over a signing ceremony for legislation that will extend and vastly expand the state’s film production tax credit. Sexton says that since the bill was passed by the General Assembly early last month some of Hollywood’s most successful producers have come calling....
Part Charles Addams cartoon, part Sweeney Todd, part homage to the nightclubs of early 20th-century Europe and to Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret, Scott Keys and Robert Hartmann’s Halloween-oriented musical revue takes on assorted gruesome subjects: murder, suicide, hauntings. But the clever lyrics and a preference for parody over genuine horror guarantee the show never gets flat-out scary. Porchlight Music Theatre Chicago director Matthew Gunnels and his crack corps of singing, dancing actors consistently emphasize the material’s comic side; the show, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary, looks and feels like a Second City comedy revue might if it were written and performed by people who were goth musical-theater geeks in high school....
Dear Mr. Thompson: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You write that Remote is a satire on reality television. I admit, if I thought that I had written a show satirizing such an already-laughable medium, I would agree with your opinion. However, Remote has as much to do with reality television as Romeo and Juliet has to do with speaking in iambic pentameter. The reality-TV framework is merely a telling device, made simple and recognizable to engage an audience....
Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In June near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Mark Papkey’s plan to propose to Holly Barnes on a hot-air balloon went awry when the balloon drifted off course into a state forest and ran out of fuel. The pilot landed safely in a clearing, but darkness fell before they could make their way back to civilization; Papkey wound up popping the question while the three of them spent the night under a tree....
Benjamin Chickadel Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Craft techniques have never been completely absent from fine art. But the influential Arts and Crafts movement, first prominent in the 1880s in England and the United States, may have been the last time anyone really bothered to come up with what could be called a “theory” of handicraft. British artisan William Morris held what appeared to be, given the unstoppable tide of technology, an increasingly nostalgic belief in the dignity of labor....
A good boss at a bad time for the Sun-Times, John Cruickshank restored a lot of the dignity that had been tossed aside by Conrad Black and David Radler. Circulation fraud was owned up to; the editorial page stopped carrying water for the paper’s business interests. An unfortunate legacy of the Cruickshank era is that this sort of story became the Sun-Times’s idea of page-one news. Yet Jennifer Hunter, who’s married to Cruickshank and has been following Obama around for months, never wrote anything about the naked lapel herself....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The reactionary world has a contagion theory of homosexuality — gayness is something you are ‘infected’ with, and by moral weakness are seduced into. In the view of the reactionary world — and we see this in modern day Africa where traditional societies are firm in their belief that there were no homosexuals in Africa until Europeans arrived — being gay is something that one catches from other people....
Scoop Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Stefani Greenfield and Uzi Ben-Abraham opened the first Scoop in New York ten years ago, the idea was to create the “ultimate closet–the best of the best of the best.” That meant, in their view, a mix of high and low west-coast-influenced styles. Now they’ve brought their terrifically successful retail formula to Chicago. The key word here is formula–the only difference in what they order from store to store has to do with seasonal merchandise....
Chicago’s been pretty good to Todd Dills. Since he moved here from South Carolina eight years ago, he’s earned an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia College, founded a successful literary broadsheet, The2ndHand, gotten married, and written his first novel, Sons of the Rapture, published by local Featherproof Books in mid-September. Yet just at the point where he could sit back and savor his status as a respected player in the local literary scene, he’s leaving to move back down south....
In the past 12 months Califone has played only one show in Chicago–a January benefit at the Hideout for soundman Gary Schepers. In fact in the past year they’ve played just three shows total, notwithstanding the Thrill Jockey reissue of their debut album, Roomsound, in February; the other two were in March at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The next 12 months will be different, though: the band has completed what will be its first studio disc in nearly three years, Roots & Crowns, due on Thrill Jockey in early October, and will begin touring heavily come autumn....
The former owners of the Reader explained when they sold this paper last month that it was facing financial challenges they felt too old and spent to tackle. One of the most exhausting of those challenges was personal: the owners who spoke for the Reader were being sued by a founder they’d stripped of operational authority some 20 years earlier. This was Tom Rehwaldt, a frequent minority of one at board meetings of Chicago Reader, Inc....
