city Winnetka: Last News

Since it’s the holiday season, there springs an eternal question. No, not if Santa Claus is real (we all know that’s so, Virginia). It’s how rich was the McAllister family, who in the iconic Home Alone film owned a sprawling mansion in a tree-lined neighborhood and were too preoccupied with getting themselves to Paris to remember poor, eight-year-old Kevin.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic During his lifetime, Rock Hudson was a model for American masculinity. That changed after his death, when the strapping, straight-acting (but occasionally sensitive) hunk from Winnetka became the poster boy for Hollywood homophobia: a closeted star who’d been forced to play a role his entire career that wasn’t true to himself, on screen and off. “Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed” treats that compromise as a tragedy, leaning on the fact Hudson died of AIDS to underscore the injustice, but Stephen Kijak’s documentary does him a disservice, reducing Hudson’s career — in exactly the way he went so far out of his way to avoid — to the dimension of his sexuality. Built around interviews with a handful of former lovers and friends, Kijak spills private details from Hudson’s personal life, ranging from whom he shagged to how he arranged such trysts in the first place. A secretly recorded phone call reveals Hudson to be a “size queen,” audibly excited by the prospect of meeting a tall, well-endowed stranger. The whopper — which underscores the kind of salacious gossip Kijak gravitates toward in the film — comes from Joe Carberry, who recalls, “Rock had a sizable dick, but he tried to put that thing up my ass, and I couldn’t do it.”

Marilyn Stasio Theater Critic It’s hard to believe, but Bob Fosse’s definitive signature musical “Dancin’” has never been revived on Broadway since its Tony Award-winning debut in 1978. Huge kudos, then, to director-choreographer Wayne Cilento, for creating a new Broadway revival that both honors its source and shares his own inspirational ardor. Although it famously has no plot, Fosse’s groundbreaking show does, indeed, have a story. It’s the love story of a dancer and his dance. This production even has a backstory, because Cilento also performed in the original production. This is Cilento’s rapturous – and extremely personal – homage to a great showpiece by a great choreographer.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans EditorDavid M. Jones, best known for his contributions as a visual effects supervisor on “Star Wars,” died from complications related to cancer at his home in Winnetka, Calif. on April 8.