Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We are all related,” writes Pinker — “not just in the obvious sense that we are all descended from the same population of the first humans, but also because everyone’s ancestors mated with everyone else’s at many points since that dawn of humanity. There aren’t enough ancestors to go around for everyone to have a family tree of his or her own....
Rather than featuring the final 120 seconds of each Ibsen play, this new show conceived and directed by Greg Allen for the Neo-Futurists sometimes consists of summaries of the great dramatist’s work and focuses more on final scenes than by-the-clock excerpts. Running the 26 pieces in chronological order, Allen provides irrefutable proof that anyone—well, any genius—can improve as long as he sticks with writing for 55 years. Ibsen’s turgid historical epics give way first to the seminal verse drama Peer Gynt and then, even more astonishingly, to the revolutionary A Doll’s House, wisely played straight here....
Nuyorican poet, playwright, and self-proclaimed “junkie Christ” Miguel Pinero, who died of cirrhosis in 1988 at the age of 41, still inspires controversy. Champions see him as a kind of Lower East Side Genet, a defiant voice of the Puerto Rican underclass. Detractors say the addict and unapologetic ur-gangsta merely reinforced a host of racist stereotypes. Either way Pinero had a hustler’s authenticity, which comes through in UrbanTheater Company’s electric production....
It’s funny how just five or six years ago “emo” meant you were fey, tender, midwestern, and poor. Now it means you’re macho, riffing, from one of the coasts, and paying off a mortgage. These Orange County dudes have been around since the late 90s, but they’re definitely in the latter category. They started out playing metallic popcore for the punk label/nonprofit fund-raiser Sub City, making a name for themselves by touring their asses off....
Few musicians sound more at home with the idea of globalism than New York singer and guitarist Arto Lindsay, who embodies the “cultural cannibalism” of Brazil’s late-60s tropicalia movement. The son of missionaries, he was born in the U.S. and grew up in northern Brazil, and perhaps as a result he’s a true polyglot, with an extraordinary ability to absorb cultures. The sensual, electronics-kissed tracks on his most recent album, last year’s Salt (Righteous Babe), have subtle, jazz-flavored melodies, but he also revisits some of the sounds he first made in the influential no-wave trio DNA, adding his trademark guitar squalls....
Like the bloodthirsty hero of Sweeney Todd, the lost souls in this stark musical revue worship a “dark and angry god.” Here, however, in Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s meditation on presidential assassins, the murderous urges aren’t played for laughs (usually). Sondheim and Weidman portray the whole rogues’ gallery from Booth to Hinckley, making room for a trio of oddball failed killers from the 70s (Sam Byck, “Squeaky” Fromme, and Sara Jane Moore)....
Last October Cafe Tacuba celebrated its 15th anniversary with a pair of Mexico City concerts that were recorded for the new Un viaje (Universal Latino). An energetic and stylish testament to the band’s uncanny range and pop smarts, the two-disc set (a limited-edition version adds a third disc and a DVD) cements Cafe Tacuba’s rep as one of the finest rock bands in the world. Every facet of the group’s history is here–tunes from its covers EPs, instrumental experiments from 1999’s Reves/Yosoy, loving tweaks of regional styles from its 1994 breakthrough album, Re, and straight-up alt-rock from its latest studio disc, Cuatro caminos (2003)–and the performances are characteristically sharp and effervescent....
After releasing Travels in the South last June, Chris Stamey–the pop auteur best known as coleader of quirky trailblazers the dB’s–spent an August weekend jamming with his old Hoboken friends Yo La Tengo and improv keyboardist Tyson Rogers. Though they’d planned to cut just a few songs, by the end of the session they had enough material for a whole album. Until Travels, a lovely if overly fussy collection of originals, Stamey hadn’t put out a solo record in a decade, instead devoting his time to producing artists like Le Tigre, Sue Garner, and Whiskeytown....
Dus has this boy’s arm twisted behind his back and is grinding his cheek on the hot sidewalk. Dus’s sister Bea watches with satisfaction. Her hair hasn’t been combed in days. She had promised this boy that her brother would get him. Dus always makes good without asking why. He feels how hot the sidewalk is through his jeans. The crew is always staked out at the house with the most action and the least parental supervision....
Devin Davis opens the door to his belowground apartment in Wicker Park. “This is where the magic happens,” he says, leading the way through three dim rooms littered with beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays and cluttered with well-loved guitars, drums, keyboards, amps, cables, and mixing consoles. Between 2001 and 2003 Davis spent much of his time here alone, working on his album Lonely People of the World, Unite! He played almost every instrument, and when the disc came out in the fall of ’04 it was on his own label....
Through an interpreter–Luna Negra choreographer Eduardo Vilaro–Afro-Peruvian singer Susana Baca tells me during a rehearsal that it feels good to dance in his Mi Corazon Negro (“My Black Heart”). “I love when the music moves and lifts me,” she says. A woman of great serenity, dignity, and authority, she certainly looks happy, even blissful, while dancing. She adds that the dancers’ energy in turn fuels her musicianship: “They make me want to sing more....
Michael McColly’s The After-Death Room: Journey Into Spiritual Activism (Soft Skull) takes its name not from some ghostly limbo but from a brutally corporeal chamber at a Thai AIDS clinic: a “museum” reeking of formaldehyde that contains the preserved corpses of seven of the clinic’s dead. For McColly, a bisexual HIV-positive journalist and yoga teacher, it’s yet another of the callous indignities visited upon the overwhelmingly poor and powerless victims of the pandemic....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I was growing up in the Philadelphia area, and for many years after, the city was hardly a hotspot for interesting music. Oh, there were exceptions, but by and large it always seemed pretty moribund. The situation has been changing in recent years—there are good live music presenters, more record labels, and a much broader and deeper array of musicians, from the psych-folk axis of the Espers crew to the free jazz centered around High Two Records to the giddy pop-rock of Dr....
In 2001 Piotr Anderszewski won international recognition for his third CD, a bracingly authoritative rendition of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations that has since become a touchstone for other pianists. On this recital program he’ll perform Metopes, by the unjustly neglected Karol Szymanowski, a fellow Pole who wrote a spellbinding Fourth Symphony and the noteworthy opera King Roger. The three-movement Metopes depicts characters from the Odyssey–the Sirens, Calypso, and the dancing Phaecian maidens....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An advance of Lock’s Foodie Fight arrived yesterday, just in time to happily distract four of us from a deadly boring meal at Il Fiasco (review pending). You’re right. This is even nerdier restaurant behavior than taking digital pics of your pasta, but we didn’t actually pull out the boards, game pieces, and dice. Once begun however, we couldn’t stop quizzing each other from the question cards, which are divided into six categories: food people; world cuisines and food places; food on film and in print, movies, and art; party planning etiquette and wine pairing; food science; eating out; and cooking techniques....
Theatre Building Chicago hosts its 12th annual showcase of new musicals, offered here in concert readings (with actors at music stands) and staged readings (with the actors moving about while using scripts and scores). The weekend-long festival gives audiences and aspiring writers a chance to discuss the art, craft, and commerce of musical theater as they rub elbows between shows. Stages 2005 runs Fri 8/12 through Sun 8/14 in the north and south theaters of Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Here’s the thing: When a bunch of Democrats talk about themselves in front of thousands of union members, they’re going to spend most of their time listing all the picket lines they’ve joined, decrying the corporate fat cats getting rich while the rest of us struggle, and promising to create more jobs with decent pay and health care plans for all “working families....
This festival of work by black artists from around the world continues through Thursday, August 30, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $9, $5 for Film Center members; for more information call 312-846-2800. Following is the schedule for August 17 through 23; a complete festival schedule is available online at chicagoreader.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Changing the Odds Intended as a contemporary riff on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?...
The enchantment of this 1947 musical begins with its evergreen plot: a mythical 18th-century Scottish town that only appears every century for a day teaches a jaded American the value of simplicity. It continues with Alan Jay Lerner’s witty book and lyrics and Frederick Loewe’s ravishing score. Joe Leonardo’s staging completes the magic: he makes the cross-cultural, cross-centuries love of Sean Allan Krill’s Yank and Abby Mueller’s lovestruck lassie matter. As a cynical sidekick, Sean Fortunato delivers enough sophisticated raillery to balance the unashamed sentiment....
For a long time Daniel Barenboim disliked much of Mahler–but then he became fascinated by the composer’s fastidious notation, which demonstrated, as Barenboim wrote a few years ago, that Mahler was acutely aware of dynamics and was a “delicate and subtle” colorist. Barenboim conducted Mahler’s Ninth Symphony for the first time last October, and one got the sense that he and the orchestra were discovering the work anew, finding an almost Wagnerian ebb and flow in the competing phrases and creating poetry in the final movement’s exquisite farewell....
