Theater-Food-Music in Chicago

Mitchell Oldham

The First Homosexuals & Celestial Stage Energize Chicago’s Arts Landscape

Consider the two new exhibitions featured in Lincoln Park’s Wrightwood 659 like a fine dining experience.  Something that’s best appreciated unrushed and with a receptive mind.  That approach will leave you with a new appreciation for art’s ability to transcend language. Impressively ambitious, The First Homosexuals looks at the elusive essence of sexuality from the …

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Tiger Style! Unfurls the Joy of Telling Your Own Story

You need a minute to unpack all the messages in Tiger Style!  Essentially a story about self-discovery, it’s rare this kind of journey to self-knowledge includes two people undergoing it together.  But Tiger Style!  seems to thrive on the unexpected as it busily sheds much needed light on a group of overlooked fellow Americans. Missing …

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Festival Reveals the Possibilities of Dance

Sometimes it’s just good to tap into origins.  To connect to how something began before it explodes and flowers into something grand.  Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival (HCCDF) held a lot of that kind of wonder.  An annual dance festival featuring companies from across the country, with a concentration of those from Illinois, it offers …

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My Brother Langston: A Musical Nod to Greatness

Langston Hughes loved music.  And he especially loved the blues.  Learning that Chicago’s esteemed Black Ensemble Theater (BE) would be presenting a play profiling Hughes’s life naturally generated lofty expectations.  At last a contemporary Black performance venue specializing in musical theater would be taking on this neglected literary giant.  My Brother Langston now playing at …

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The Dance World’s Impressive Blueprint for Self Help – Dance for Life

By 1991, HIV/AIDS had been plundering the world for a decade.  And even though the first antiviral drug that showed any promise of stanching it had been on the scene for six years; tens of thousands of once vital and vibrant young people were still dying every year.   Dance for Life, the extravaganza of dance …

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