Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
September 11, 2009
Maggie Brown
In partnership with the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, jazz musician Maggie Brown will perform on Court Theatre’s stage on Saturday, September 26 at 3:00 PM. FOR FREE! The opportunity to host Maggie seriously just materialized for us today, and I think it’s a fitting way to christen the set of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom with some honest-to-god live music. Come along, and then get your tickets to Ma Rainey! Did I mention it’s FREE?
Maggie Brown
September 9, 2009
Columbian World Fair Yesterday and Today
“The City White hath fled the earth,
But where the azure waters lie,
A nobler city hath its birth,
The City Gray that ne’er shall die.”
These words are part of the University 0f Chicago’s alma mater, and refer to the ending of the 1893 Columbia World Exposition that took place in Jackson Park and on the Midway. A few days ago I biked south to the Japanese Gardens, a small and relatively unknown spot behind the Museum of Science and Industry. The Japanese government turned the area from a swamp into a landscaped area of trees, paths, a pagoda, waterfall, and small footbridge. Biking a bit farther south towards the 63rd St. beach, I came across Republic, a golden sculpture of a woman who symbolizes national unity. She’s 24 ft. high now, a reproduction of the original sixty five foot sculpture that was destroyed along with much of the rest of the exposition in an 1894 fire.
The buildings for the exposition took over two years to build, and about 27 million visitors came to the fair between May and October of 1893. I imagine their spirits still wandering around the now deserted Midway and Jackson Park area, gawking at the displays of “native villages,” the ferris wheel, the new inventions in electricity. The fair was a celebration of consumerism, and many believed at that time (and still do) that Chicago was the capitalist center of the most capitalist nation on earth. Those that set up and profited from the fair were politicians and businessmen, sending out the message that the success of America’s future was bound up with an alliance between business, culture, and the state.
The bus stop outside my window has been sporting a Chicago 2016 olympics sign for the past few weeks, and I cringe a little every time I go out on my balcony. It’s intriguing to think about the remnants of the World Fair and how a similar commercial enterprise more than 100 years later would affect the city. I believe that politicians tout improvements in the city’s architecture and transportation but the most pressing and immediate transformations would involve displacement of low-income people and suspension of civil rights during the games.
The history of the exposition and its connection with the founding of the university is certainly fascinating, though its important to remember the racism and exploitation that were also a large part of the fair. It also is representative of a series of discontents and disconnects between the ideology of much of the humanities and social sciences faculty and the way the administration runs the school. Multiculturalism, anti free-market solutions, peace, and tolerance are all ideals that are taught in most of my classes (for instance, all undergrads are made to read Marx in SOSC), but the University is building the Milton Friedman Institute. And let’s not forget that this was the birthplace of atomic energy. We even have a nice Henry Moore sculpture to commemorate it.
September 2, 2009
Three Little Bops
Yesterday I ran into Debbie Gillaspie, the curator of the Chicago Jazz Archive, who is helping us compile some material for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. She said she had just come from a meeting with some Chicago Jazz Festival people, but she was carrying a DVD of Looney Tunes cartoons. I asked her why she had it, and she said, “The Three Little Bops. I didn’t even get to show it.”
Three Little Bops is a 1957 cartoon telling the story of the Three Little Pigs with be-bop jazz. Apparently it’s well-known among jazz enthusiasts for the mystery behind which musicians actually provided the instrumentation for this cartoon. And here it is:
I’m agnostic about any racial undertones of the piece (I could go either way with “No Wolves Allowed”). But there’s a lot of August Wilson’s character of Levee you can see in the trumpet-playing wolf. And the blues lick Slow Drag sings at the end of Act One: “If I had my way, I would tear this old building down”—the common lament of both Levee and the wolf. What do you think? Stretching it? Wait and see the play—you’ll see.
