Recent Posts
Film review: ‘TFW No GF’ mines quasi-empathy for bored and ignored millennial trolls
TFW No GF was released on Valentine’s Day. As a cruel joke? Or in ironic solidarity with the film’s subjects? Both, I hope. Alex Lee…
Big Muddy’s winter mixed-rep a smorgasbord of dance flavors
ST. LOUIS — The show must go on, as they say. Though this mantra has been questioned throughout the past year, as a raging pandemic,…
Big Muddy’s ‘Lemp Legends’ leans into St. Louis folklore—and pandemic dance making
ST. LOUIS—When the Big Muddy Dance Company made Lemp Legends for the Edison Theatre in 2018, I would bet, dollars to donuts, they expected to…
Rebecca Rego channels Lucia Berlin in new album, ‘Songs for Cleaning Women, Part 1’
CHICAGO—So far, Eighth Blackbird’s attempts at live-streaming a virtual concert series from their production house in Horner Park have not gone well. The series—called Chicago…
When life imitates art: George Floyd, RBG and ‘We’re Gonna Die’
CHICAGO—Ten minutes before the scheduled virtual opening of Theatre Y’s “We’re Gonna Die,” I heard that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. I didn’t want to go,…
Moving is important. What if we took the hint, and actually paused?
NORMAL, IL—My feed is filled with virtual dance classes and obituaries. As COVID-19 continues to tear through this country and redefine ways of life, indefinitely,…
Beyond ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ new film takes a deeper dive on Petipa
Icarus Films—the independent film producer that has created documentaries on Ohad Naharin, Pina Bausch and Trisha Brown—has a new dance film making its way to…
Illinois Symphony hits all the right notes—and there were a lot of them—in V-Day program
BLOOMINGTON, IL—Love was in the air at the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts Friday, which had big pink hearts projected onto the Illinois Symphony’s…
Departing from Graham, Kanopy Dance pulls from Stanley Love’s vibrant catalog in ‘Love is Love’
MADISON, WI —In a departure from their usual Martha Graham-influenced work, “Love is Love”, Kanopy Dance Company’s midwinter offering in the Overture Center’s Promenade Hall,…
‘An American in Paris’ at Drury Lane has all the movie magic of the original
OAKBROOK TERRACE, IL—The band was inconsistent. So was some of the tap dancing, and a couple actors’ French accents sounded, well, more like German. If…
