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Playing Around
Lip Service
"People need theater, they just don’t know it yet." David Perez is a staunch believer that Pavement Group, the budding company for which he serves as artistic director, has the play to turn the minds of the masses. Their second full-scale production, "Lipstick Traces" is a punk-rock extravaganza that flips history on its side and has been known to make theatrical believers
(2008-05-06)
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Tip of the Week
Golda's Balcony
"Survival is the synonym for Jewish," says Golda Meir in Pegasus Players’ brilliant production of William Gibson’s "Golda’s Balcony." During Israel’s 1973 Yom Kippur War, Meir details the painful lengths that she and the fledgling state would go to survive
(2008-05-06)
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Playing Around
Poetic Justice
Since 2005 Links has dedicated a quarter of each year’s programming to three month-long performance series, curated by invited Artistic Associates. The final installment of the program for the 2008 season begins May 2—a Poet’s Theater Showcase entitled "Returning from One Place to Another," curated by poet and essayist (not to mention former Newcity contributing writer) John Beer
(2008-04-29)
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Looking Ahead
Chicago Opera Theater spans the dawn of opera
When it comes to opera in Chicago, opera-goers have two choices: go with the crowd over to big-budget Lyric Opera and its La Scala West repertoire centered on Italian operatic warhorses, or go with the opera cognoscente over to the smaller Chicago Opera Theater, the more innovative, discerning and adventurous of the two companies whose broader repertoire not only extends well beyond Lyric’s Italian base but spans the dawn of opera up through the twenty-first century
(2008-04-29)
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Tip of the Week
Our Town
With a record number of productions in regional theaters across the country this season, Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" is reestablishing the claim that it is the most-produced play of the American theater canon. Written over seventy years ago, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone brought up in the U.S. public school system who hasn't at least read or studied the play, perhaps even been in a production themselves at one point. With such a long-standing culture familiarity, it’s difficult to imagine breathing new life into this old standard without pulling out some serious smoke and mirrors. That’s precisely why David Cromer's staging for The Hypocrites is such a revelation
(2008-04-29)
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Playing Around
Family Matters
"You've slipped into my life as easily as vermouth into a glass of gin... quickly and just a bit too smooth," Angela Arden, the grand dame in Charles Busch’s play "Die! Mommy, Die!" tells her gigolo suitor. It could just as easily be Joan Crawford or Lana Turner in any number of 1960s movie thrillers that serve as the inspiration for this contemporary camp classic
(2008-04-22)
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Reel Time
"Hip Hop Live + Reel" hits the MCA
"Hip Hop Live + Reel" will concentrate on four main elements of hip-hop: the music, both MCing and DJing, street art and beat-boxing. The film lineup might be the most exciting, with five seminal films focusing on these elements
(2008-04-22)
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Tip of the Week
Skriker
Caryl Churchill plays—always intensely verbal, Surrealist and heavy on choreography—can easily become trainwrecks, but GreyZelda’s production of one of her most difficult and strangest remains afloat, often inspiringly and always coherently—no small feat
(2008-04-22)
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Movement Vocabulary
Dream Dream Dream
Punk-rock ballerina Karole Armitage’s company Armitage Gone! Dance makes its Chicago debut this week at the Dance Center of Columbia College. The company will perform "Time is the Echo of an Axe within a Wood and Ligeti Essays," the first two sections of Armitage’s Dream Trilogy
(2008-04-15)
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The Great Revelations
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Chris Jackson comes home
"It came the minute I got in. I knew my life was going to change," remembers Chicago native Chris Jackson of his acceptance into the company. I caught up with him by phone in Iowa City. He is there on tour with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT). From a small dance studio in Maywood, Illinois to one of the most esteemed dance companies in the world, Jackson has come a long way
(2008-04-15)
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