CHICAGO CARLESS

(Photo: I said “Bharata”, not “Bollywood”! Credit: Natya Dance Theater.)

Spending last Friday afternoon at the Art Institute of Chicago, I had the unexpected pleasure of witnessing an artist-in-residence performance by a member of the Natya Dance Theater (NDT). The Natya troupe performs Bharata Natyam, an ancient, highly expressive dance tradition from Southern India with a wonderfully varied (and surprisingly a

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(Photo: Share a car, save the planet. Credit: Zipcar.)

Last night, February 26, the folks over at Zipcar, Chicago’s for-profit but far better and very downtown-friendly car-sharing company (sorry, I-Go), hosted a movie benefit at the opulent, old Music Box Theatre movie palace on Southport Avenue.

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(Original Photo Credit: Museum of Broadcast Communications.)

Last week, the Chicago Tribune’s Eric Zorn blogged about the continuing trials and tribulations of building the new River North home of Chicago’s Museum of Broadcast Communications (MBC). The museum, founded in 1987 and one of only three broadcast museums in the country, left its longtime home at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2003 in preparation for moving into swanky new digs next to Marina City at the corner of State and Kinzie streets. Unfortunately, as E-Z Writer tells it, the museum building just can’t seem to finish getting built.

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(Photo: You live here, you should know better. Credit: Vince-Vaugn.com.)

Just how far is the City of Chicago willing to sell itself out to movie filming? A closed street here and there to accommodate a movie shoot is one thing. Allowing a studio to close almost every single bridge between the Loop and the Near North Side on a Friday evening is something else entirely.

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(Credit: Rock Paper Scissors.)

A last-minute substitution brings Mariza, Portugal’s most celebrated contemporary fadista, or fado singer, to Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion tomorrow evening to sing with the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra. Enormous Lusophile that I am, as I write this, I’m still attempting to lift my jaw off the soalho.

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If the Gay Games organizers hadn’t refrained from taking a pig-blood stained bow after Saturday night’s disastrous Gay Games VII opening ceremony, I would have sworn I was back sitting in the last row of the only Saturday matinee that the ill-fated Carrie: The Musical, Broadway’s most infamous flop, ever played. Bad choreography, poor staging, laughably cheap costumes, and a hell-bent urge to take things far, far too seriously plagued both alleged entertainments. But at least with Carrie, I got to leave the theater before my butt fell asleep, in something less than the four ponderous hours it took for the slow-motion car wreck that was the Gaymes’ opening ceremony to finish crashing.

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(Photo: Siskel Center main auditorium. Credit: Nausea.)

I suppose it makes me an award-winning writer. Last week I submitted a review (more of a love paean, really) of the Art Institute’s Gene Siskel Film Center to the sage scribes of CenterStage Chicago. Today, the CenterStage eds told me I was chosen Review of the Week, allegedly for being last week’s most “insider-tip-filled” review.

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