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Dance Review: THE TIMES ARE RACING (Joffrey)
FEATS OF RACING FEET Just when we’ve forgotten what green looks like, a mid-winter shakeup in Chicago seems essential. Supplying that stimulus in quantum doses, the winter program of the Joffrey Ballet is warming up the Auditorium Theatre through February 23 with five well-contrasted ballets by four enterprising choreographers, a mixed repertory that features three…
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Music Review: WEILL’S VIOLIN CONCERTO WITH SALONEN (The Weimar Republic: Germany 1918-1933)
ONCE IN A WEILL The Weimar Republic’s pyrotechnic explosion of the fine arts in the 1920s produced much “new” music before being deemed “decadent”, and dashed by the rising Nazi regime in the mid-1930s. Two programs by the LA Phil and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen at Disney Hall — one last weekend and one upcoming —…
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Theater Review: I DECIDED I’M FINE: A ROACH PLAY (The Attic Collective at Studio/Stage in Hollywood)
PASS THIS ROACH After a convoluted build-up, there’s a late scene in I Decided I’m Fine: A Roach Play that actually works. In it, Ellen (Veronica Tjioie), a trauma-stricken hoarder, exposes her “dirty secret” by welcoming outsiders into her shockingly cluttered home. If one can get past the improbability of such a willing invitation, the…
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Theater Review: LADY DAY AT EMERSON’S BAR & GRILL (Ebony Rep)
AT DAY’S END Thanks to Lanie Robertson’s bedrock-basic script, Wren T. Brown’s dedicated staging, Karole Foreman’s extraordinarily vulnerable performance, and Stephan Terry’s elegant piano playing, Ebony Rep’s 90-minute revival of Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill pays full homage to Billie Holiday’s heroism and heartbreak. Unlike her famous “God Bless the Child,” Lady Day…
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Opera Review: MADAMA BUTTERFLY (Lyric Chicago)
A BUTTERFLY BOTH VULNERABLE AND MARVELOUS Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904) is another one of those incredibly popular operas, like Mozart’s Don Giovanni, that is rendered increasingly difficult and problematic by the passage of time. Cio-Cio-San, the titular Madama Butterfly, has often been seen as a strong, independent, even heroic, woman. And in some respects…
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Film: INGLORIOUS BASTERDS (directed by Quentin Tarantino)
NOT YOUR TYPICAL WAR STORY Mind the spelling, Mr. Tarantino calls this his “bunch of guys on a mission” movie. Set in 1944, the film follows two parallel stories that quickly converge. In the first, an American group of Jewish soldiers called “The Basterds”, led by Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), plans terror attacks against German…
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Theater Review: EMMA (Chicago Shakespeare Theater)
EMMA PLOTS, THIS TIME IN SONG Nobody knew better than Jane Austen how love could get lost in the social maze of Regency England, where social distinctions quickly become psychological barriers. Any successful matrimony required sexual politics and emotional intrigue. There were too many artful simulations of actual affection for the real deal to compete…
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Theater Review: BUG (Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago)
BUG GETS UNDER YOUR SKIN Nineteen years ago, A Red Orchid Theatre launched the Midwest premiere of Bug by Pulitzer-winner Tracy Letts. It unleashed a ferocious Michael Shannon and a self-destructing Kate Buddeke in the title roles. Back then I thought the play just an excuse for excess — the shock effects of wacko lovers dissolving…
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Theater Review: RIVERDANCE (25th Anniversary Tour)
STILL STEPPING This Irish extravaganza is celebrating its 25th anniversary, a quarter century of Celtic thunder as thousands of feet have pounded countless floorboards. What Stomp offered to percussive street-dancing and Forever Tango did for Argentina’s national cooch dance, Riverdance breathtakingly delivers to Irish dance and its cultural spin-offs. Wowing rapt crowds in a tour to mark…
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CAN WE USE MUSIC TO INCREASE OUR STUDYING ABILITY?
CAN MUSIC INCREASE OUR STUDYING ABILITY? Can music affect our ability to perceive and remember information? How does music affect our brain and psycho-emotional state? Well, we can divide all musical works into activating, tonic, and relaxing, soothing. The perception of music is closely connected with mental processes; it requires attention, observation, quick wit. Music,…
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Film: FILMMAKING AS A PROFESSION: WHERE TO STUDY?
FILMMAKING AS A PROFESSION: WHERE TO STUDY? Cinema is a world of dreams, illusions, and fantasies. That is why any girl dreams of becoming a movie star. However, everyone who connects their lives with cinema faces the problem of choosing a university. A primitive lever drives a rotating disk and, with a chatter, translates a…
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Theater Review: RED BIKE (Moxie Theatre Company)
WHERE WILL THIS RED BIKE TAKE YOU? Red Bike immediately presents a huge challenge to a director. Caridad Svich’s script contains no stage directions (and little punctuation, even) and reads like a lengthy poetry slam. This creates both a tremendous burden and glorious opportunity for a director to bring her verse-like prose to life. Moxie…
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Opera Review: EURYDICE (LA Opera)
MYTH INTERPRETATION MacArthur Genius Grant-winning composer Matthew Aucoin called up playwright Sarah Ruhl, the Pulitzer Prize finalist who had achieved said nomination with a play about vibrators. But it was in reference to another work of this other MacArthur Genius Grant-winner, a 2003 play called Eurydice. Did she want to make an opera about Orpheus,…
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Theater Review: THIS SIDE OF CRAZY (Zephyr Theatre)
HYMN-DINGER Sweet lovin’ Jesus, Del Shores is back, and he’s brought a band of gospel singers with him. In This Side of Crazy, writer/director/producer Shores introduces us to a Southern family comprised of the Christian singing trio, The Blaylock Sisters, and their gospel legend momma, Ditty Blaylock. These Christian ladies — well, one’s now an…
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Dance Review: ASTAIRE DANCES III (American Contemporary Ballet)
TOP HATS OFF TO ACB With Astaire Dances III, American Contemporary Ballet recreates several iconic routines evolved by the great Fred Astaire and his choreographer Hermes Pan, and executes them with charm and grace. But the evening is about so much more than presenting a few meticulously copied dance numbers; the audience is treated to…
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Theater Review: ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (La Mirada)
THERE’S ARSENIC AND LACE; BUT IT DOESN’T FEEL OLD Serial murder, euthanasia, slasher psychopaths, bodies buried in a crawl space, face-lifts for people trying to change their images, the cyanide poisonings of innocent strangers — it’s a click-bait tabloid-rotten world we live in. Not like the good old days, when crime didn’t pay and virtue…
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Theater Review: DO YOU FEEL ANGER? (A Red Orchid)
I DON’T FEEL YOUR PAIN Lately a chronic lack of empathy–sensitivity to the feelings of others–threatens to become a liability as great as any budget deficit. Compassion has never felt less contagious. So maybe it’s time for Do You Feel Anger? No indignant expose of sociopathic alienation, this 2019 drama by Mara Nelson-Greenberg, now in…
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Music Review: ALL-STRAUSS (Philippe Jordan, Gautier Capuçon, Teng Li, Los Angeles Philharmonic)
STRAUSS RELIEVER A few years ago, I saw Richard Strauss’s opera, Elektra. Let me just say that even with moments of beautiful, chilling music it veered into atonal territory, sounding like a disjointed, anticlimactic Danse Macabre, but without the dance. The vocal lines skewed towards the upper range which not only grated on the ear,…
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Theater Review: UNTIL THE FLOOD (Center Theatre Group at the Kirk Douglas Theatre)
AFTER THE FLOOD Until the Flood lasts only 70 minutes. But its concentrated running time delivers a devastating drama. A ton of truth-telling now on tour at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, this 2016 one-act is the creation of actor, poet and oral historian Dael Orlandersmith. She becomes the partisans, witnesses, survivors and, above all, inhabitants…
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Theater Review: SOPHISTICATED LADIES (Porchlight Music Theatre at Ruth Page Center for the Arts)
SOPHISTICATED SWING FROM KING ELLINGTON Some shows are just pure pleasure, delivering unpretentious delight with no plot to process or points to proclaim. Much like Ain’t Misbehavin’, an infectious romp that salutes the music and mirth of Fats Waller, Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Ladies is a 1981 confection conceived by Donald McKayle that enthralls audiences with two dozen hit numbers…
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