CHICAGO -- If you've always wanted to celebrate the Fourth of July with a million other people, join the crowd at downtown Chicago's Grant Park on July 3, the eve of Independence Day.
The annual celebration begins at 7:30 p.m. with musical selections by the Grant Park Orchestra at Petrillo Music Shell. Around 9:30, Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" signals the beginning of a 20-minute lakefront fireworks display synchronized to such patriotic tunes as "America the Beautiful" and "Stars and Stripes Forever."
Until 9 p.m., revelers can choose from dozens of food items at Taste of Chicago, a Grant Park culinary event that runs June 24-July 4.
If you can't make the July 3 pyrotechnic extravaganza, Navy Pier, less than a mile north, stages a July 4 fireworks show that Taste of Chicago guests can view. On Wednesday and Saturdays throughout the summer, the Pier hosts fireworks set to musical soundtracks.
Besides its trademark Ferris wheel, Navy Pier offers a carousel, climbing wall, Chicago-themed miniature golf course and other amusements, not to mention bands at the Skyline Stage and Navy Pier Beer Garden. Other attractions include the Chicago Children's Museum, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Navy Pier IMAX Theatre and Lake Michigan cruises. On Family Fun Thursdays, through Sept. 1, there are two-for-one ticket specials 4-8 p.m. on Navy Pier rides, and admission is free 5-8 p.m. at the Children's Museum.
The sixth annual Chicago Outdoor Film Festival in Grant Park provides a great way to spend a Tuesday evening under the stars. Chicago's own Roger Ebert, nationally syndicated film critic and co-host of TV's "Ebert and Roeper at the Movies," has selected this year's titles, shown on a 50-by-34-foot screen with state-of-the-art sound.
Ebert and Richard Roeper, both Chicago Sun-Times columnists, will kick off the free, summer-long festival July 12 by hosting the 1942 Orson Welles classic "Citizen Kane." Other films in the series include "Annie Hall" (July 19) and "My Darling Clementine" (July 26), a black-and-white Western directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda as Marshal Wyatt Earp.
In Millennium Park, the much-talked-about public space just north of Grant Park proper, the Chicago Office of Tourism just launched the Millennium Park Greeter service, a free, volunteer-led walk.
The 45-minute tours, available Wednesday through Sunday, highlight park features like the striking Jay Pritzker Pavilion, an outdoor concert venue and Crown Fountain, with video LED displays of Chicagoans' faces on glass-block towers. Cloud Gate, the mirror-like elliptical sculpture made of stainless steel plates, has been partially unveiled while polish-and-grind work continues under cover.
The park's innovative Lurie Garden takes the spotlight July 8-10, offering a weekend packed with tours, talks by horticultural experts, and music and dance performances.
The Art Institute of Chicago, bordering both Grant and Millennium parks, presents the works of one of Paris' most popular late-19th-century painters in an exhibition titled "Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre."
The July 6-Oct. 10 show will be dominated by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec's celebrated posters, paintings and drawings of the colorful characters who filled the dance halls, bars, cabarets and brothels of Paris' Montmartre district, a nerve center of avant-garde culture. Also represented in the exhibition are Toulouse-Lautrec's predecessors, such as Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet, and contemporaries such as Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso.
"Blue Man Group," a perennial favorite that's been playing the North Side's Briar Street Theatre since 1997, offers free shuttles from downtown for Friday performances this summer. With a cast of characters covered in bright blue from head to toe, the show fuses theater, percussive music, art, science and vaudeville.
The musical comedy "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change," a fixture at the North Side's Royal George Theatre since 2002, features four actors who portray more than 60 roles in a collection of scenes and songs about male/female relationships.
Rob Beaker's "Defending the Caveman," another long-running show, also pokes fun at the ways men and women struggle to relate. Playing an open-ended engagement at the North Side's Lakeshore Theater, the solo comedy stars Chris Sullivan. ("Caveman" ran two years at New York's Helen Hayes Theater and holds the record as the longest-running solo play on Broadway.)
In west suburban Lisle, the annual Eyes to the Skies Festival, July 1-4, attracts 200,000 visitors to the Chicago area's only hot air balloon event. More than 20 balloons, including eight special shapes, take flight each morning and evening. There are balloon glows each night, and tethered rides are available. The festival also has lumberjack and exotic animal shows, nightly fireworks and 100 craft booths. The concert lineup includes The Fifth Dimension and Billy Ray Cyrus.
For a more sedate experience, horse fans can head to far north suburban Wadsworth to see Tempel Farms' white Lipizzan stallions go through their elegant paces with dance-like precision. Executing gravity-defying leaps and lifts called "airs above the ground," the horses perform each Wednesday and Sunday in a 90-minute program set to classical music.
Tempel Farms, not far from Six Flags Great America and Gurnee Mills mall, boasts the largest privately owned herd of Lipizzans anywhere and is one of the few places where the rare horses are bred, trained and perform on the same property.
Thursday, June 9, 2005
