We may yearn to get out of our abodes but given the increase in Covid cases virtual has become a password. To stay safe more holiday shoppers have been looking online for Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and soon, Cyber Monday, deals (which have moved back to Friday and Saturday. But not all gift ideas are through computer and print ads. Shopping online is a chance to be creative.
One of a Kind show online
Meet artists during virtual programs. Tour their studios. Find the perfect stocking stuffers. The One of a Kind Show that usually is in theMart (formerly the Merchandise Mart) makes holiday shopping safe and fun this year.
The show is available through Dec. 6, 2020.You can also follow the artists on Instagram and Facebook and view a daily series of IGTV videos with more artist talks, demos and studio tours.
Art Institute of Chicago Shop
The world-famous art museum carries treasures you may not have considered. Just as important, its online museum shop has items for different price ranges.
Check out the Frank Lloyd Wright designs. Look for the Bisa Butler prints and Claude Monet items from the current exhibits. Gifts are categorized from Under $100 to Under $25 and from Best Sellers to Artist and Style.
Buy at Buddy
Consider supporting small Chicago businesses through Buddy, a new store founded by the Public Media Institute so that Chicago artists and small businesses can show and sell their wares. It is currently online but will be in the Chicago Cultural Center when Covid restrictions are lifted . Among items found at Buddy are toys, jewelry, wearables, music and publications. For sales, goods and other information visit Buddy/about.
Working on anything that has the word “comedy” in the job description should be fun and a laugh a minute or at least every 15 minutes.
But unless you are in the cable television business or part of the SNL group (I don’t really have to say what that stands for, right?), you learn by reading Art Bell’s memoir that working on a show or channel devoted to making people laugh is akin to falling down Alice’s rabbit hole. You don’t know what’s behind an innocent-sounding “eat me” lunch invitation sign or an executive’s Cheshire Cat grin.
Having grown up in my dad’s “Mad Men” world of advertising where clients are fickle and public trends change with each phase of the moon, I thought I knew what to expect when picking up Bell’s memoir.
The book was a surprise.
It read like one of the well-plotted mysteries I’ve been enjoying during the Covid crises that has kept me from reviewing shows in person.
A former cable television channel executive who had done everything from finance and marketing to creating and managing shows and channels, Bell takes readers behind the scenes of the tumultuous world he navigated while creating the 24-hour comedy network that became Comedy Central. (*He later joined and became President of Court TV.)
Each turn of his navigation that seemed promising in the beginning of a chapter turned so problematic that you wonder what will happen next. Will the hero find a new route?
Usually, reading a non-fiction book takes me at least a drawn-out week. And I’m a speed reader. Instead, Bell’s memoir was in my “can’t-put-this-down,” can’t-dinner-wait category.
Art Bell Memoir (Photo courtesy of Ulysses Press)
Constant Comedy: A Memoir by Art Bell. Subtitle: How I started Comedy Central and Lost My Sense of Humor. (Ulysses Press Berkeley CA, September 2020.)
Patrick Reardon, author of ‘The Loop’ (Photo courtesy of Reardon and Southern Illinois University Press)
Readers who pick up “The Loop: The ‘L’ tracks that shaped and saved Chicago” by Patrick T. Reardon, today, should picture the constant stream of office workers, lawyers, financers, shoppers and theater goers who filled Chicago’s downtown business district before the COVID-19 pandemic forced pretty much everyone to work and shop from home.
Reardon makes the case that unlike some big cities’ downtowns such as Detroit which faced difficult times until it recently started a comeback, Chicago’s business district flourished because its heart was encompassed by the approximately two miles of elevated tracks known as The Loop.
Ask many Chicagoans about The Loop and they are likely to say it is the downtown business district. The Loop’s elevated tracks follow Wabash Avenue on the east, Lake Street on the north, Wells Street on the west and Van Buren Street on the south.
Indeed, The Loop is usually considered so important as a Chicago neighborhood that business, restaurants and residences that have developed south and west of it are now known as in the West Loop and South Loop neighborhoods.
However, the author doesn’t start with the building of what is actually a rectangle of tracks.
Readers interested in that beginning should start on page 97 in the chapter called “The Birth of the Union Loop” which chronicles some of the shenanigans by city and real estate movers and shakers that entrepreneur Charles T. Yerkes wallowed through to make the Union Elevated Railroad Company (Union Loop Company) a downtown elevated track reality beginning in 1895 and completed in 1897.
Starting with the later chapter and then going back is a good idea because Reardon often refers to The Loop early on as the Union Loop but the word Union doesn’t mean much until the birth of his company.
The Loop (Southern Illinois University Press photo)
What Reardon, a long time Chicago Tribune writer, columnist, editor and Pulitzer Prize winner, does do early in the book is convincingly dispute claims that The Loop really was an evolutionary name that grew from the many small loops made by cable cars.
And even though Chicagoans have lovingly adopted The Loop name for downtown Chicago, the book also describes efforts to tear down the elevated tracks because they pass second-story business windows, shadow the businesses on their streets below and make a racket.
The book contends that the “L” tracks still exist today partially as a result of their landmark status, their universal identity with Chicago similar to San Francisco’s cable cars and New York’s Brooklyn Bridge and the efforts to save them by a former mayor, the late Jane Byrne, after Mayor Richard J. Daley wanted them gone.
As evident by the bibliography, notes and 230 pages of historic references, Reardon has definitely done his research. Translated, that means there is extraneous information including bits about skyscrapers and Potawatomi Indians, but readers will come away with a better understanding of Chicago and its core.
The Loop: The “L” Tracks that Shaped and Saved Chicago (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 2020)
I can’t promise that your eyes won’t tear as you watch Stehanie Jeong, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Associate Concertmaster, stand elegantly but alone in an empty Orchestra Hall.
However, I can promise an entertaining evening that includes, among others Maestro Muti talking about how he misses his CSO family and Yo-Yo Ma, explaining what the orchestra means to him while he accompanies two rising cellists in separate videos.
Other voices and performers included Cynthia Yeh (principal percussion) playing Elden “Buster” Bailey’s “Two sticks in search of a waltz” and Concertmaster Robert Chen playing a Ravel sonata for violin and cello with principal cellist John Sharp plus appearances by Herbie Hancock, Mitsuko Uchida, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Hilary Hahn and Anita Rachvelishvili.
To see the event click CSO.org/tv then scroll way down to “Sounds of Celebration” and click “watch now.”
The CSO tv site is a good one to bookmark because it has links to concerts in the Sessions series that ranges from a virtual recital of the Lincoln String Quartet performing Dvořák’s String Quartet No. 12 and a program of CSO members playing Mozart and Tchaikovsky.
Each session is on for a limited, date specific time. They cost $15 a ticket but can be obtained at a discount with the series. And viewers’ seats are unobstructed. And they support the CSO.
Photo courtesy of Theatre in the Dark War of the Worlds production.
3 Stars
Is it an audiobook? Is it a podcast? Is it a radio show? Maybe yes but then again maybe no. Actually it is Theatre in the Dark’s virtual audio drama. Perhaps it is partially inspired by Orson Welles’ memorable 1938 radio broadcast of “A War of the Worlds” based on H.G. Wells’ iconic novel about a Martian invasion of the Earth.
Congratulations to this innovative production company whose mission is to create theater performance based on sound and utilization of Internet technology to reach out and engage audiences during these trying times.
This updated 21st century version of “A War of the Worlds” adapted by director Corey Bradberry and Mack Gordon, is set primarily in and around the Chicago area. (Ironically Bradberry and Gordon met at an improv class at Second City which is now up for sale).
The original book was centered in London at the end of the 19th century. Then, the 1938 Mercury Theatre on the Air production was based in mid-twentieth century New Jersey. So with so much global turmoil in 2020, why not project a Midwest interstellar invasion into the mix.
The story itself is not complicated. Basically, it deals with peoples’ mostly nonchalant, then chaotic reaction to the presence of an extraterrestrial artifact. First thought to be an asteroid, it turns out to be the beginning of an invasion fleet from Mars.
Theatre in the Dark’s production is not about the story, but rather more about the dramatic performance in the telling of the tale which this company does very well.
It’s a study in contrast that depicts the laid back lives of many city dwellers who are going about their daily business while the first reports of odd occurrences in the seemingly remote village of Bourbonnais, 55 miles south of Chicago, begin to reach the downtown area.
Tension mounts as complacency leads to panic and then to mayhem.
It is probably safe to say that the majority of today’s theater goers have had little or no experience with traditional radio drama. The genre reached its commercial peak sometime in the early 1940’s then limped along into the beginning of the 1950’s.
Indeed, most of us are children of the television age for whom this style of entertainment is an oddity or curiosity. That makes this presentation much more interesting as it encourages performers and audiences alike to explore a nearly forgotten, or at least, underrepresented art form.
Because the audience, listening at home via Zoom, is using sound only with no visual cues such as facial expressions, gestures, or body language, the actors must be extra creative in the verbal projection of their characters.
This is a chance for them to exercise their emotional muscles audibly in a slightly over-the-top way, even flirting with full-on melodrama. Conversely, the audience is challenged to listen closely for the information needed to paint mental images of the situations and the shifting environment.
The construction of one’s mental picture is aided greatly by the sound design offered by Ross Burlingame and Corey Bradberry. They provide continuous, thoughtful, sound effects meshed with an effective, original music score by Ben Zucker.
A major question is why do this live over multiple performances? Tickets are needed for each performance. Why not simply record it?
I imagine part of the answer has to do with the fact that this is a live theater company and that is what they do.
However, one of the unique aspects of this particular production that makes it different from a traditional radio drama is that the actors themselves are not in the same room. They are not necessarily even on the same continent.
Each performer logged in remotely from various locations around the world using their own often makeshift home studios. In this way they are literally pushing the boundaries of what we think of as theater.
What is missing, of course, is the interplay between the audience and the actors. The feedback loop that brings energy to live performance is an element that is difficult to duplicate at a distance.
The freshness of multiple performances will rely on the extent to which the actors innovate and improvise as they discover new opportunities of expression.
But not having been in a theater for over six months, it was exciting to prepare for the eight o’clock “curtain.” This was accomplished by setting the lighting and adjusting my laptop and speakers in the living room, ready to provide an optimal listening experience.
Then, it was settling down with a glass of wine in eager anticipation of this unique event.
As a way to celebrate this Halloween season I encourage you to gather your “pod mates” and a few socially distanced friends (wherever they may be) to enjoy this performance online then consider a Zoom call together to discuss the play or perhaps devise a disaster plan of your own.
Details: Theatre in the Dark players Mack Gordon, Elizabeth McCoy, Alex Morales, Ming Hudson, Robinson J. Cyprian, and Lauren Ezzo will be performing “A War of the Worlds” through November 21, 2020 via Zoom. Running time is 90 minutes with a 10 minute intermission. For tickets and information visit Theatreinthedark/tickets.
Yes, shows, conferences, etc. that go virtual have become a way of life that sometimes reaches maximum level of “go-away,” “don’t- bother-me” reactions. However, Neo Futurists, a small theater on Ashland Avenue that doesn’t go in for the usual stuff, is doing a show that theater goers will find a break from the political craziness clogging the airways.
The show, “45 Plays, 50 First Ladies,” a 100-minute take on who was in the White House besides the husbands, opens, Oct. 13, 2020 online.
Directed by Denise Yvette Serna and written by Chloe Johnston, Sharon Greene, Genevra Gallo-Bayiates, Bilal Dardai, and Andy Bayiates, it continues through Nov. 2, 2020.
Because theaters have been shuttered during the COVID-19 crisis for the safety of artists and audiences they have been putting some of their productions online. One such production was a Neo-Futurists “Wrench” production mentioned here in CTAA a few weeks ago.
Also, Citadel in Lake Forest just successfully held a live production that was a round-up of past musicals. It was held sitting in cars in the parking lot of the local community center.
However, sometimes it is worthwhile to go back to productions that have become extraordinarily relevant today during our (hopefully) history-changing 2020.
One such production is “The Talk” done in Durham and Chapel Hill, NC in 2019. Presented by StreetSigns and Bulldog Ensemble Theater in cooperation with the Department of Communication at UNC Chapel Hill, it has been brought back on video for a short time only by Bulldog and PlayMakers Repertory Company with permission from the artists and unions.
Written and performed by Sonny Kelly and directed by Joseph Megel, “The Talk” is a one-person show where a young black father talks to his son about his own experiences and what the son may experience growing up in the United States of America.
The script and acting is intelligent, poignant and heartbreakingly informative. Kelly wrote it while working on his Ph.D at UNC Chapel Hill’s Department of Communication a few years ago. He has since attained his doctorate.
The show takes a little over an hour to watch but its messages are deep and lasting. Be mindful that the video introduction says not to copy the video or use it for commercial purposes.
The production companies involved hope more people will be able to see a show that sold out in 2019 and speaks to what is still confronting Americans today.
Edward Hopper Gas 1940 The Museum of Modern Art NY
Enjoy the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. Go into the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Cross back over the pond to New York to visit the Museum of Modern Art. While in NYC explore the huge Metropolitan Museum of Art without wearing out the shoes.
The first two places are excellent stills and 180 degree shots you can maneuver to see galleries and works up close. The next two places you visit are really good YouTube videos that are part of the Great Museums film series.
Google Arts & Culture takes you to Paris’ famed Musée d”Orsay to see works by Renoir, Monet, Manet and Degas among others. Its giant clock is a reminder that the museum is housed in the former Gare d’Orsay railway station and hotel on the Seine’s Left bank across from the Tuileries Gardens.
Instead of watching a video, with this visit you go to the floor you want, the work you want and the views of the galleries.
On this site you can scroll down past highlighted works by Vincent van Gogh to four circles, each a different floor for you to visit at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
What is modern? What is art? The video on New York’s Museum of Modern Art starts with those often asked questions, then takes you on a tour so you can find your own answers.
As expected with a building that stretches 1,000 feet along New York’s Fifth Avenue at Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is filled with more than paintings. It’s two million square feet covers multi cultures and multi centuries. Stay with the video after its introduction to get to the film itself to answer its question “What makes a masterpiece.”
‘Legends the Musical: A Civil Rights Movement Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow’
3 stars
Jackie Taylor, the amiable creative heart and soul of Chicago’s beloved Black Ensemble Theater, has declared 2020 as the company’s Season of Change. She opens with this original, ambitious, musical battle cry, a movement against the injustice and bigotry that’s overtaking our country today thanks to an administration that has set our country back 200 years.
And this is just the beginning of Taylor’s aggressive theatrical approach to helping combat the racism that’s reared its ugly head in America.
Left to right, Alexa Castelvecchi and Nancy Hays star in Judy & Liza. (Photo by Tyler Core)
4 stars
Imagine what it was like in 1964 when Judy Garland and her daughter, 18-year-old Liza Minnelli, performed together for the first time at The Palladium Theatre in London. This was the only time these two superstars performed in a live concert together and it was electrifying.
Now, Chicago theatre-goers can experience the thrill of “Judy & Liza — Once in a Lifetime: The London Palladium Concert – A Tribute” at the Greenhouse Theater Center. The show is co-produced by Greenhouse and Nancy Hays Entertainment, Inc.
