Local talents fill 'Local Wonders'

Theater

12/15/2010

Local Wonders: A Play with Songs, an eloquent, gentle new show that just opened on the Near West Side, employs homespun humor and wisdom and lots of fine poetry in a strong celebration of life’s joys through original folk music. It’s like “Walden” meets “Lake Wobegon” and begets a musical.
Read More...

New film transports literary classic to Chicago

Cracks in the dream

12/08/2010

Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 novel, Winesburg, Ohio, is one of 20th century American literature’s finest moments. Through a series of 22 vignettes, the book follows the fractured lives that inhabit a small, fictional burg, particularly a young man as he grows into adulthood and his interactions with his family.
Read More...

Inside a musical wonderland

Snarks, Boojums and more Lewis Carroll nonsense hit the stage

12/01/2010

Lewis Carroll is known best as the mind behind some of the world’s most loved written works — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.
Read More...

Memories for the highest bidder

New play uncovers lives bought, sold and hidden

11/24/2010

We have too much stuff. Shelves, basements, closets, drawers and garages are loaded with threadbare books, yellowed magazines and newspapers, decade-old fashions, busted-up salt and pepper shaker collections, musty comic books, chipped vinyl records, ripped baseball cards, stray buttons from long-gone coats ... the examples can go on for days.
Read More...

Siskel Center revives wonderful Muppet madness in Chicago

Magic lives on

11/17/2010

Jim Henson, the man behind the Muppets and a host of other puppet wonders, would be 74 years old this year. His sudden death in 1990 robbed the world of a true pioneer whose impact stretched from the world of children’s educational programming to feature films and beyond.
Read More...

A new class of veterans has their say about war

Intrusive thoughts

11/10/2010

There is a reason warriors returning home have throughout history kept to the edges of their society. For some, thoughts and memories of things done and seen on the battlefield confuse the comparably mundane existence of everyday.
Read More...

Serious people and freaks hijack Millennium Park

Entertainment or politics?

11/03/2010

Saturday morning Bob Ohmen donned his Ku Klux Klan robes, grabbed a homemade anti-Republican rally sign and headed for Millennium Park to preach about GOP wrongdoings and to tell tale of President Reagan’s connection to the great racist kingdom.
Read More...

Field Museum exhibit shows precious metal's sway over human culture

10/27/2010

There is nothing else like it. Nothing else in human history can occupy the space held by gold as the symbol of wealth, beauty and power. The rise of civilized human history and its collective drive to build great empires, and their storied collapses, are intrinsically tied to element 79 on the periodic table.
Read More...

The documentary you missed

'Living Downstream'

10/20/2010

Tuesday a great documentary film played for an audience at the Museum of Contemporary Art. That most of you missed it is in line with the underlying subject of Living Downstream, part biography, part chemical expose, part history lesson and part ode to environmentalist Rachel Carson, author of the groundbreaking 1962 book Silent Spring.
Read More...

Two years after fire the Chinese-American Museum reopens with three exhibits

Rebuilding a history

10/13/2010

The keeper of the Chinese-American experience in Chicago reopened its doors following a two-year hiatus after a devastating fire that burned some of the Chinese-American Museum of Chicago’s collection and tried to destroy the rest.
Read More...