The athlete’s first struggle is almost always with the self. To be sure, there are sports prodigies who benefit from not thinking, from their utter lack of self-doubt; but for some reason they don’t often find themselves playing for Chicago teams and they aren’t highly prized by the fans on the rare occasions that they do. Chicago fans are more intrigued by the thinkers, the head cases, even the chokers, those paralyzed by their immense abilities....
John Patrick Shanley’s romantic comedy about two urban castaways who find solace together begins in a bar and ends in a bedroom. In this Slimtack Theatre Company production, both settings are part of director Michael Rice’s apartment–to make scene changes, the actors and audience move from one household area to another. Since this salon-theater show takes place near Broadway and Lawrence, the play’s ambience is enhanced by streetlights shining through the windows and by the low rumble of the Red Line (substituting for the boats mentioned in the script)....
Frasca Pizzeria and Wine Bar Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At FRASCA, a month-old place featuring small plates and pizza from a brick oven, our youthful server enthusiastically raved about each of our “great choices.” We wisely chose the olive oil flight, three extra virgins served with semolina bread for $5, and discriminatingly sampled the prosciutto-wrapped fontina–though it’s hard to go wrong with meat and cheese on a stick....
Three Ukrainians–a butcher, a wedding singer, and a grave digger–are sitting around a table, giving each other good-natured hell, when a Puerto Rican punk rocker walks in. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kordiuk, who’s 42, likes to tell people she’s lived in the same zip code her entire life. She grew up near Campbell and Augusta, and remembers a community in which “everything was centered around the church....
Maureen Gallagher’s absorbing play about photojournalism and its discontents gets a nearly perfect world premiere. Gallagher doesn’t avoid all novice-playwright pitfalls–the ending is a bit pat–but she makes us care about the central characters, a quartet of photographers (and the girlfriend of the wildest among them) covering the end of apartheid. Darrell W. Cox as Furey gives one of his most restrained performances, just as engaging and persuasive during the character’s collapse as during his ascent....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The list of offenders is interesting. Hot Doug’s, Sweets & Savories, sure, but Connie’s? BJ’s Market? And where is this mysterious and unimaginatively named restaurant “Pizza”? My biggest question is what sort of person takes the time to rat out these places? Most weren’t trying to hide anything but now that they’ve been so publicly outed, will the anti-foie forces rally and flood the city with subsequent complaints to force fines?...
Presented by the Music Box and Movieside Film Festival, this 24-hour marathon of horror movies begins at noon on Saturday, October 14, in the Music Box’s main theater, 3733 N. Southport. Tickets for the whole marathon are $24, and ticket holders may leave and reenter the theater. A costume contest takes place at midnight. Showtimes are approximate; for more information call 773-871-6604 or visit www.musicboxtheatre.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
I was here for a client party a few years back, and when it was over I walked up to what looked like another closed party and asked the bouncer, “What’s going on?” He said, “It’s a private party for some New York City police officers who are in town for the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, but come on in.” So I walked in–I was by myself–and I met a couple of really nice New York police officers and was having such a good time....
The Chicago musical community lost three great men on Thursday. Michael Dahlquist, John Glick, and Doug Meis were killed at an intersection in Skokie while on their lunch break from their day jobs. The outpouring of emotion from their friends and peers in the last few days is testament to what terrific guys they were. One of them, Dahlquist, was like a brother to me, as he was to a lot of people, and I wanted to say something publicly about him....
This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe, coproduced by Curious Theatre Branch and Prop Thtr, runs through 11/4. This year features two full-length trilogies, “The Madelyn Trilogy” by Beau O’Reilly and the “Danger Face Trilogy” by Idris Goodwin. Admission is $15 or “pay what you can,” except where noted. Performances take place at the Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, and the Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, and elsewhere as noted below....
Samsung’s new music-playing phone, the Juke, was probably named after old-timey record playing machines and not the Chicago post-house music style or its namesake dance move. But as Brendan I. Koerner notes in a guest spot at Gizmodo, Samsung’s ad people are willing to play up the association; they’ve made a commercial built around a footwork routine set to a soundtrack that pretty well approximates Chicago juke. Koerner estimates “0.005 percent of viewers” will take issue with the fact that the song isn’t, strictly speaking, juke, and that it comes from a non-Chicago source, the Bay Area duo HardNox....
On paper the STARS’ blend of pink-cheeked youthfulness and booze-addled wistfulness sounds risible–it’s hard to take indie-pop musicians seriously when they feel compelled to point out that they drink and do drugs “quite a lot.” But you might change your mind if you give a listen to the third album by this Montreal-based band, Set Yourself on Fire, released last spring in the States by Arts & Crafts (and yes, three members have played in Broken Social Scene, just like practically everybody else in Canada)....
How far over the top can something go before it overflows and spills back down to the bottom? I found out a couple weeks ago when the River West club Reserve suffered an identity crisis, turning into “Captain Morgan’s Tattoo Lounge” to launch the rum company’s new dark variety, called Tattoo. “Chicago’s most influential social tastemakers, VIPs and select guests” would be in attendance, crowed the invite, “only those wearing specially delivered leather cuffs will be granted access....
In Agatha Christie’s classic whodunit (adapted from her book), ten strangers unknowingly linked by a chain of dirty secrets gather at an island estate only to find themselves prey to their unseen host. Director Michael Halberstam and ensemble treat us to an elegant revival–a smorgasbord of diverse complex characters who, as their fellow guests are gruesomely eliminated, gradually turn on one another. Brian Bembridge’s set is the ultimate mood enhancer, creating both a sense of irony–how could something so awful happen in this idyllic spot?...
This perversely sophisticated romantic farce can get physical to the point of knock-down, drag-out raunchiness yet ultimately depends on verbal wit and social observation to succeed. It concerns Vince, who cheats on his gay lover, Frank, with Frank’s ex-wife, Gloria. Frank doesn’t catch the hints of infidelity because he’s fucking his boss, Ben. Authors Greg Beam and Eric Poulin don’t discriminate among levels of humor. They’re as comfortable with chlamydia jokes as with metrosexual satire....
Jerry Weller was running for his sixth term as congressman from Illinois’ 11th District in July 2004 when he announced that he was engaged to Zury Rios Sosa, an outspoken third-term legislator in Guatemala’s congress and the daughter of former dictator General Efrain Rios Montt. “I am thrilled to have found my best friend and soulmate,” Weller stated in a press release. “Our love knows no boundaries.” In the same release Sosa said, “With Jerry, I am starting an eternal springtime....
Caveny Farm On his farm in downstate Illinois, a few miles south of Champaign, John Caveny is tending to his menagerie of rare breeds, among them endangered varieties of lamb, duck, and goose. He has a turkey flock of just under 500 bleating bourbon reds, their backs beautifully feathered in brown and white, their purple heads wrinkled like prunes. Few people have heard of bourbon reds, just as few people know that their Thanksgiving turkey is a broad-breasted white....
Macerate Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Curated by Currency Exchange (Nicole Sorg and Liz Rosenfeld), “Macerate” is largely a showcase for the kind of half-ironic, half-straightforward youth-nostalgic “rocker” art that’s become increasingly common in Chicago’s independent galleries over the past five years. Really, the theme of rocker art is always adolescence–white suburban adolescence, that is–and its commodified symbols of belonging and alienation. An almost self-aware parody of atavistic identity art a la Adrian Piper and Cindy Sherman, rocker art replaces propaganda with nonthreatening, digestible imagery....
Made by the couple Avi Lewis (director) and Naomi Klein (writer), this 2004 documentary chronicles how laid-off workers in Argentina took over some 200 closed factories and started them up again as leaderless co-ops, with every worker receiving the same salary. The filmmakers aren’t blind to some of the contradictions and anomalies of this movement–they interview one co-op worker who’d recently voted for the neoconservative Carlos Menem, which is a bit like an American union worker supporting Bush–but they’re primarily interested in the story’s potential as an inspirational object lesson for the rest of the world....
Rock, Pop, Etc. BODEANS in an acoustic performance; see Spot Check. Thu 8/26 and Fri 8/27, 8 PM, Pavilion, Ravinia Festival, Green Bay & Lake Cook Rds., Highland Park. 847-266-5100. GENERATIONS Fri 8/27, 6 PM, Millennium Plaza, 21 S. Stolp, Aurora. 630-844-4396. KEB’ MO’, MADELEINE PEYROUX, SONS OF THE NEVER WRONG Fri 8/27, 6 PM, Lincoln Park Zoo, 2200 N. Cannon. 312-742-2283. MESS HALL METALFEST features DJs (attendees may bring in CDs and records), video projection, and back issues of metal magazines for perusal....
