Month: June 2024

New Theater Company Opens with a Delectable World Premier

Overdue for one of those sudden unexpected bursts of laughter?  Interested in meeting singularly engaging and original people?  Open to a little amusing titillation? Be grateful that there’s a brand-new theater company in town who’s delivering all of those delights and more in their very first public performance. Creating change and expanding visibility don’t come …

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The Salon Champions Culture from the Vantage Point of the Beauty Parlor

You’d be hard pressed to overstate the importance of legacy.  Often it represents a lifetime devoted to a dream, a purpose or an ideal.  And just as often, especially in minority communities, legacy symbolizes achievement. In Black Ensemble Theater’s (BE) The Salon, writer and director Michelle Reneé Bester pays tribute to a mainstay and important …

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Subtext’s New Play Exposes and Celebrates the Malleability of Love

For many, the world Qualia envisions was first glimpsed in Cormac McCarthy’s seminal novel, The Road, a haunting tale of a man and his son desperately trying to survive in the midst of devastation after a nuclear Armageddon.   In the 2006 masterpiece, hope has been abandoned, wretchedness is constant and much of what’s left of …

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Wrightwood 659’s Chryssa & New York Revives Neglected Greatness

For full impact, viewing art will always be a “live, up-close and personal” kind of activity.  Pictures just don’t offer the benefit of scale and dimension to permit wholesale appreciation of the images and objects artists create.  Not to mention their limitations in translating attributes that take in the tactile like texture and finish.  Without …

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Court Theatre Powerfully Recalls a Hero and His Movement

The acquisition of fame and notoriety may indeed be gifts from the stars; a matter of destiny where personal exceptionalism inevitably leads to broad recognition.  In the world premiere of Stokely: The Unfinished Revolution, we get a strong sense of how it manifests over time.  Time also has a tendency of turning the past gray, …

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Driehaus Museum’s New Exhibit Awash in Rare and Precious Jewelry with a Chicago Pedigree

The desire to embellish or accentuate the body with jewelry extends deep into our ancestral past.  According to a 2021 article by Sarah Cascone in ArtNet, archeologists discovered the world’s oldest jewelry in Morocco dating from 142,000 to 150,000 years ago.  The set of 33 sea shell beads were found at the mouth of a …

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