From the Ledge

There’s probably no other city in North America, other than New York City, that is like Chicago in terms of the staggering number of arts and culture events that you can go to at any given day. There’s music, theater, dance, film, visual arts, even glassmaking, pottery-making, tattoo art demonstrations- you name it you can find it here, in rickety schoolrooms converted into theaters, in cavernous loft warehouse spaces, in parks and botanical gardens, in gleaming, acoustically-perfect music pavilions, in art galleries and antique shops. There’s high-art and low-art, spectacular extravaganzas and intimate chamber performances, world-class productions and artists and brazen “hey-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show-in-the-barn” performances. And you have a pick of them at any given day of the week. Last Saturday was one of those days when I felt truly lucky to be living in the arts vortex that is Chicago. I started the evening off with a marvelous, perfectly put-together Gershwin tribute concert (for free!) with acclaimed Broadway stars, and a brilliant up-and-coming Russian pianist, framed by a skyline glowing in the sunset at Millennium Park’s stunning Pritzker Pavilion, and ended it after midnight at a dark, dank, perspiration-inducing storefront in Uptown where the bathrooms were scarier than the Blair Witch Project, but where the whole air was tingling with artistic ambition treading on a high-wire without a safety net. Man, this is why I love living in this city!

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Tags: Grant Park Music Festival, National Pastime Theater, The Living Canvas

For me, as a regular Chicago theatergoer, the one thing that makes the recent Chicago Shakespeare Theater Tony Award for Best Regional Theater so well-deserved, and so important for the city, is that they’re the one Chicago theater company, bar none, which has consistently and visibly brought to Chicago audiences the great work being created in other artistically vibrant countries.  Over the years, their World’s Stage series has brought in Peter Brook multiple times, France’s James Thieree and La Comedie Francaise, the UK’s Complicite and Cheek by Jowl, South Africa’s Foundry Theater, and Ireland’s Abbey Theatre; this year the program includes the British director Tim Supple’s acclaimed Midsummer Nights Dream, spoken in eight languages, and set in the Indian subcontinent.   I am passionate in my belief that we are a great theater town, in terms of the variety of work on view, the brilliant creativity of our homegrown talents, and the sophistication of our audiences, but if there is one thing we lack, in my view, which our sister North American theater capital New York City has, it is access to theater coming from different countries.  In addition to Midsummer and the other World Stage production, Sweet William, this coming theatrical season will also see Ivo von Hove (whose astounding New York work I’ve been privileged to attend) and his Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s version of Mourning Becomes Electra, and Brazil’s Compania Triphal as part of the Goodman’s Eugene O’Neill festival, as well as Japanese performer-director-writer Toshiki Okada’s chelfitsch at the MCA’s performance series.  As far as I know, that’s it. 

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Tags: Chicago Shakespeare Theatre

For me, the highlight of Collaboraction’s 2008 Sketchbook Festival was an eccentric, conceptually brazen, and very funny piece called “Cowboy Birthday Party” by Chicago playwright Emily Schwartz.  It was so creative and so astounding, so in-tune with the exciting new work that Sketchbook has showcased in the past (unlike the disappointment of this year’s edition, but you could read about that in my previous blog post), that I was eagerly awaiting Schwartz’s next full-length play.  I know she wrote Mr. Spacky…the Man Who Was Continuously Followed by Wolves which was much buzzed about last summer, and which actually won an Orgie award for best theatrical ambience or something like that (yeah, you read it right, the Orgies are theater awards supposedly given by anonymous critics/judges/audience members to the freshest, most creative, and tragically overlooked gems of the Chicago storefront scene, sort of like the antidote to the more conventional, fuddy-duddyish taste of the Jeff Awards).  So I was looking forward to seeing her latest opus, The Mysterious Elephant and the Terrible Tragedy of the Unlikely Addington Twins…who kill him, currently being staged by her theater company Strange Tree Group in the basement of the Chopin Theater (which, notably, has hosted a bounty of theatrical delights this year such as the Hypocrites’ Our Town and TUTA’s Uncle Vanya).  After several false starts given my wacky schedule nowadays, I finally made it to see the play last Sunday.  Although Mysterious Elephant is not quite the must-see theatrical event of the season that some people have anointed it to be, I personally think it is unique, impressive, engaging, balls-out creative, and definitely deserves a wide audience.  And I think it’s safe to say that Emily Schwartz and the Strange Tree Group are inarguably major talents on the rise, the ones to watch, the ones whom we can safely entrust the future of Chicago theater to.

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Tags: Emily Schwartz, Strange Tree Group

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago has been on a roll lately, with its fantastic Escultura Social exhibit of new Mexican art last summer, and Sympathy for the Devil, the much-talked about showcase of the intersection of rock and roll and art last fall, proving once and for all that it is one of the top platforms in the country for brave, unique, innovative contemporary arts programming. So I was really looking forward to its Jeff Koons exhibit, simply titled “Jeff Koons”, which opened May 31.  For one, this exhibit was the first comprehensive survey of the work of this major contemporary artist, including not only his most well-known pieces but also a parallel exhibition of the works of the Chicago artists, such as Ed Paschke, who influenced him.  For another, Koons himself had been very much involved in putting the show together, and had made available some pieces from his personal collection.  Finally, it wasn’t a traveling show- it was an art show conceived in Chicago, which would only be seen in Chicago.  Well, great expectations beget even greater disappointments, and the show, as well as the artist, Jeff Koons, has fallen with a thunderous thud, in my eyes.

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Tags: Jeff Koons, MCA Chicago

Chicago is food festival central every summer.  Of course, the motherlode of culinary shamelessness, the Taste of Chicago, just wrapped over the weekend (with the hue and cry over violence at the Taste overshadowing any discussions of the quality of the delicacies on view, or more apropros, in mouth).  There’s something for every self-styled Chicago foodie over the next several weeks; from street festivals such as the Taste of Lincoln Avenue (where Chad and Trixie-watching will trump any attempt at true gastronomy) to high-end food celebrations/benefit events such as the very noteworthy Share our Strength/Taste of the Nation at the Trump International Hotel and Tower to idiosyncratic discoveries such as the Sugar Grove Corn Boil in, uhmmm, Sugar Grove, Illinois.  Since corn isn’t my vegetable of choice and Sugar Grove isn’t this white-linen-pants-wearing boy’s kind of town, I’ll be attending, instead, two of the most interesting, culinary-wise, and most significant food events of the season.  Next week, on July 17, I’ll be at the Green City Market’s Chef’s Summer Barbecue Festival.  Of course, the Green City Market, with its wonderful selection of fresh, sustainably-farmed meat and vegetables from small farmers and agricultural producers, is legendary among Chicago food lovers, and this annual benefit event helps the Market continue to enrich Chicagoans’ culinary lives. The restaurants and chefs participating in the festival are some of the boldface names of the Chicago food scene:  Rick Bayless, Blackbird’s Paul Kahan, North Pond’s Bruce Sherman, James Beard winner Carrie Nahabedian of Naha, Food and Wine Best New Chefs of the Year Koren Grieverson (Avec) and Guiseppe Tentori (Boka), Green Zebra’s Shawn McLain, and Top Chef Chicago winner Stephanie Izard.  Wow, with this lineup, you know foodies are going to be buzzing like fruitflies to honey at the corner of Clark and Stockton.  Tickets are available online at the Spice House website or at the Green City Market every Wednesday and Saturday.  Check out the mouth-watering reportage, with yumm-o pics (yep, this whole post is unleashing not just my hunger but my inner Rachael Ray!), on last year’s event that was posted at foodie blog www.lthforum.com.

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Tags: Angelic Organics, Green City Market

The long Fourth of July weekend has a way of sneaking up on you and making the week before seem hazy and lethargic.  So I’m just catching up on the arts news from last week, which had quite a number of sizzlers!  Hottest theater news - Chicago version:  The Hypocrites, one of the Chicago arts groups that really matter, announced their 2008-2009 season last week.  Someone douse me with a firehose, quick, since, from the email release, this Hypocrites season looks to be one of the hottest, and promises to be one of the most-talked about, seasons of any Chicago theater in the coming year.  The season-opener is Brecht and Weill’s masterpiece, The Threepenny Opera, to be directed by Sean Graney, one of Chicago’s most risk-taking and wildly inventive directors, at the Steppenwolf Garage.  Graney doing Brecht and a musical?  Stick me with a defillibrator right now (or better yet, have Christian Bale give me 10 minutes of CPR), my heart is uncontrallably pounding with excitement!  The season also includes a production of The Hairy Ape which will be part of the Goodman’s O’Neill festival (with the Wooster Group and the Netherland’s theatrical enfant terrible Ivo von Hove also participating, this festival will definitely not be O’Neill as read in college sophomore English classes); Graney’s three-person Oedipus Rex to be staged promenade style; and the remount of the magnificent David Cromer-helmed Our Town which I raved about here.  Hottest theater news - New York version: Broadway will be seeing this fall the acclaimed Royal Court production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, with most of its London cast intact, including the fabulously incandescent Kristin Scott-Thomas of The English Patient fame, who won an Olivier Award for her performance as Arkadina.  The one big casting change from the London production, though, which has sent various Francis biological and genetic processes into nuclear overdrive is Peter Sarsgaard, brilliant actor/thinking (gay) man’s sex symbol/the-one-guy-I-would-shapeshift-into-Maggie-Gyllenhaal-for, playing Trigorin in lieu of Chiwetel Ejiofor.  Just thinking how marvelous (and how hot and sexy) Sarsgaard would be performing Chekhov is enough for a flame-retardant blanket to be thrown over me!  I can’t wait to see this production, and I’m booking my flight and buying my ticket soon!  Hottest art and culture-related news of the week:  Fritz Lang’s hypnotic Metropolis, one of the most influential films of all time, and one of the two German expressionism films that I really admire (the other one being Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) is also famously one of the most incomplete masterpieces of all time.  Paramount Pictures, its US distributor, cut out key scenes and characters in order to make it more palatable for the American mass market.  A complete version of the film had been thought lost for the past eighty years, until a small Argentinian film museum discovered a copy in its archives.  Movie fans have been rejoicing and drinking themselves silly over this news- finally, there will be an opportunity very soon for everyone to see the movie as Lang envisioned it to be.  And if the mutilated film version is a classic, everyone’s holding their breath on how masterful the complete version will turn out to be. I first read about the Metropolis discovery on Rob Kozlowski’s blog last week, which had a, ahem, pretty vivid description of its impact on film preservationists.

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Tags: Fritz Lang, Hypocrites Theatre, Metropolis, Peter Sarsgaard, The Seagull