I imagine that Colin Meloy was once the sort of arty, trench-coated high schooler his classmates wanted to either seduce or cram into a locker. His Portland-based indie-pop combo, the DECEMBERISTS, inspires a similar ambivalence: Meloy’s hyper-literary leanings often muck up an otherwise decent tune or engaging tale, and when he’s at his cloying, old-world-romantic worst, he leaves me cold in the same way a lot of Elephant 6 acts did in the 90s....
Divine Comedy Rock bands get away with murder: plenty of us love the music these artists make, and even sing along, without really knowing what they’re saying. But when I put on a record by a singer-songwriter, I find that I demand more from the lyrics. It’s not that I don’t appreciate it when a troubadour comes up with a surprising chord progression, a clever arrangement, or a haunting melody, but I won’t get attached to his work if I can’t relate to what he’s singing about at a personal level....
Early in 1885 Chicago’s elite West Side Philosophical Society invited 37-year-old Albert Parsons, a Confederate veteran turned labor organizer, to speak. Parsons started out ironic, noting that his usual constituency was shabbily dressed, yet their labor enabled the better-off to dress well. “Are not these charitable people–these sans-culottes–very generous to you?” he asked his well-heeled audience. But, he added, the 35,000 Chicagoans who went hungry every day wouldn’t be generous forever: “Listen now to the voice of hunger, when I tell you that unless you heed the cry of the people, unless you harken to the voice of reason, you will be awakened by the thunders of dynamite!...
Written by Angus MacLachlan, this indie drama explores the lingering tension between north and south with vinegar and precision. A cosmopolitan young Brit (Embeth Davidtz) who sells outsider art in Chicago ventures south with her new husband to acquire the work of a fundamentalist fanatic and to meet her in-laws, a seriously dysfunctional North Carolina family who regard her with varying degrees of alarm. The characters are beautifully written and played, from the meekly passive father (Scott Wilson) to the suspicious mother (Celia Weston) to the brother’s pregnant and none-too-bright wife (a superb Amy Adams)....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jazz saxophonist Dewey Redman, a long-time associate of Ornette Coleman and a key exponent of his music, died on Saturday at the age of 75. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Redman met Coleman as a teenager and played with him in their high school band. But it wasn’t until the tenor saxophonist moved to New York in 1967 that he made a mark with the free-jazz pioneer, performing on a series of brilliant recordings for Blue Note....
Lots of indie bands with a couple of albums under their belts dream of playing Coachella, but hardly any actually get to. So you can imagine just how surprised the Octopus Project must have been when they learned they were tapped to play the fest this year, especially since they had no clue they were even in the running–the Austin electro-rockers were picked from a list of more than a thousand nominees in a contest on MySpace....
Sita Ram Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s a different matter with Lookingglass’s new musical, Sita Ram, whose run is sold out (though standby tickets are available). This show makes Indian dance accessible by putting it in a Western context. But today the stakes are much higher than getting an underexposed genre some respect. With religious wars raging across the planet, many people have come to see religion in any form as only a source of murderous conflict....
Paper Crane Theatre offers gleeful mayhem in its 45-minute show, scheduled to appear at several pubs over the next month. The revue made its first stop at Wicker Park’s Rodan, where the playing area was so small–eight by ten feet, tops–patrons got splashed during the water-ballet number, when Lauren Brenner mixed martinis in an inflatable pool, then went for a swim. For sheer inventiveness you couldn’t beat Kate Mulligan’s reverse striptease–a sensual dance in which she dresses–or Laura Grey’s improvised serenades to audience members after gleaning a few details about them in brief interviews....
The original title for Aka Pereyma’s show at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art was “The Egg Came First,” and she did learn the traditional Ukrainian art of Easter egg decoration from her mother. There’s only one basket of these eggs, Pysanky, on display, but eggs are frequently represented in this exhibit of 110 paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, and textiles. All of Pereyma’s work grows out of her Ukrainian background even though it looks as much like high modernism as folk art, ranging from delicate abstracted drawings to paintings full of sturdy, forceful forms....
On October 20 more than 400 people packed the Loyola Park field house to rail against a Park District proposal to build a marina on the lake just east of Devon Avenue. One by one they rose to make the usual arguments–the money would be better spent on existing local parks, the project would mean lots of construction noise and congestion, no community need would be served, because few Rogers Park residents own boats....
Quitting While They’re Ahead? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cohen and producing director Geoffrey Barr founded Naked Eye in 1998 and were joined early on by other theater-world youngsters like lighting designer Jaymi Lee Smith and dramaturge Sarah Gubbins. “A few of us were working together at the Goodman,” says Cohen, who was an intern at the time. “Our first production was in the studio there....
Hear me out. You’ve pushed the idea that everyone must be GGG, or “good, giving, and game,” and that people in relationships must be sluts for each other, and that women must perform oral sex. I agree that sexual satisfaction for both parties in a relationship is important. I think that is what you are trying to express. But that is not the message straight men are hearing. Straight men are hearing that they are entitled to whatever they want, whenever they want it, whether the women they’re with like it or not....
In 1930, sitting at his breakfast table in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Grant Wood sketched his sister, Nan, and his dentist, Byron McKeeby, on the back of an envelope. Practically everyone’s familiar with the painting that resulted: the dour man in overalls gripping his three-pronged hay fork, the weak-chinned woman with a cameo and a center-parted bun, and, looming behind them, the white clapboard farmhouse with its famed Gothic window. Now, in time for the painting’s 75th anniversary, Steven Biel, head of Harvard University’s program in history and literature, tries to bring those iconic sour faces to life....
Tokyo 21 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At TOKYO 21 they’ve pimped out a stylin’ room lined with pachinko machines and supermodel types, and the Osaka-style sushi is similarly flashy: pristinely fresh fish and rice in a square mold sprinkled with flakes of gold. Sushi standards metamorphose: chirashi (sashimi on vinegared rice) is deconstructed to become a mushroomy rice tower in a Zen garden of flower-shaped fish slices dotted with rainbow-colored roe; lobster roll surprises with mango and cilantro....
Constance Congdon imagines a research team of interstellar visitors delivering an illustrated lecture on the “lost” species of Homo sapiens. The cheerful extraterrestrials completely misunderstand the vignettes they present of suburban anomie, adolescent angst, miscommunication, dislocation, and dead jobs and dreams. But we get the pain, hard and fast, in this dark and glum 1984 comedy. There are so many ways earthlings can get lost, literally or not, and Congdon spares us few....
NThe Big Yellow Bus | Every week a core cast performs a different type of long-form improv with guest improvisers and musicians. At the show I saw the audience suggestion was a place, Antarctica, and every scene was set there. The performers meet once just before going on, which gives a frenetic unpredictability to their bits and leads to prankish pushing and pulling, some of it offstage. It also produces occasional fumbling to discover others’ sensibilities and therefore some hesitance and flat dialogue....
This edition of the Chicago Jazz Festival delivers the usual tributes to a handful of jazz greats, living and dead–underappreciated local pianist Willie Pickens in the former category, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Oscar Brown Jr., and recently deceased trumpeter Malachi Thompson in the latter. And this year’s artist in residence is genius alto saxophonist Lee Konitz. A native Chicagoan and key acolyte of pianist Lennie Tristano who played with Miles Davis on the legendary Birth of the Cool sessions, he’s been one of the most distinctive voices on his instrument since the late 40s....
Unlike Strawdog’s superior current production, Robert Tenges’s modern-dress adaptation is crude and unfocused, lacking any sense of time, place, or purpose. Taking the play’s theme of paralysis too far, it has a rootlessness that infects the lackluster performances. More like outtakes from a Friends episode than a Chekhov play, LiveWire Theater’s revival suffers from terrible acoustics, bad projection, aimless blocking, gratuitous screaming, and no costume or lighting design. Director Chris Arnold fatally forgets that Chekhov’s universality comes from the transitory details of a fragile world–and bellowing “fucking retard” for no reason other than shock effect doesn’t facilitate entry into that world....
A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil assaulted by bears. —The Gashlycrumb Tinies, 1963 When the inevitable question arose as to what lurking horrors could possibly explain his work, he was less forthcoming. He always politely acknowledged that it was reasonable to wonder, but bapped away intimations of early trauma. “I’m sure mine was happier than I imagine,” he told one interviewer who asked about his childhood....
Playwright Samuel Morris has a modestly clever idea: a backstage farce a la Noises Off that features Romeo and Juliet as the onstage production. Then he combines it with the simultaneously bizarre and uninteresting notion that Shakespeare’s play should be about a death cult. All the goings-on in this witless world premiere by a new company seem designed to permit Morris, who also plays Romeo, to thrust his hips and make pseudo-Shakespearean pseudobawdy remarks....
