Chicago Stage Review

Let’s Give Them Something To Cluck About

Loose Chicks TONIGHT! - 5/14/2010 - 7:30pm @ Winston’s Cafe!

Jillian Erickson and Roberta Miles, the “Loose Chicks” will be presenting an hour long performance based on their experiences through life. This juicy, gutsy look at life through the eyes of two femme fatales will be presented at the Winston’s Cafe, 5001 N Clark St, Chicago, IL. The performance is Friday, May 14th, 2010 @ 7:30pm. There is a suggested donation.

Jillian Erickson is a performance artist, monologist, poet, writer, pain in the ass…She moved to Chicago to do exactly what she is doing and couldn’t be giddier. She is co-producer, co-director, and performer for the all female cabaret BEAST WOMEN 2010 and is working on her 8th series. She is also part of a film company, JAkT Films, and a series called “Myths” which is a combination of paint, sculpture, and spoken word.

Roberta Miles, best known to Chicago audiences as a jazz singer and painter, is rapidly gaining a reputation for her irreverent autobiographical monologues that make up a tell-all expose of her quirky, edgy life. These monologues are the basis for her one-woman show, which debuted summer, 2009 at the StrawDog Theatre. Roberta has recently appeared with Jason Paul Smith at the Skokie Theatre Foundation in Skokie, Illinois in a two person show called “Hot Dish: The Monologues”

Date: Friday, May 14, 2010
Time: 7:30pm - 9:00pm
Location: Winston’s Cafe
Street: 5001 N Clark St
City/Town: Chicago, IL

Check out Loose Chicks review here!:

Loose Chicks - REVIEW - Chicago Stage Review

By J. Scott Hill

Exclusive Images By Justin Bradley

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.

Juliet was wrong.  Yes, not only about faking her own death and entrusting her love life to someone who had taken vows of celibacy and chastity, but about names as well.  There is a wealth of meaning inferred from a name.  The names Archibald Leach and Norma Jeane Baker are merely answers to trivia questions, but the stage names Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe are universally famous.  Names shape perception.

When going to see Loose Chicks, one might walk in with an expectation that the show will fall somewhere between Earth Girls Are Easy and Co-Ed Prison Sluts.  Not so.  The name Loose Chicks comes from the days when the show was performed at the now-defunct Loose Leaf Tea near Lincoln Square.

Loose Chicks is an hour of original monologues, conceived and performed monthly by two powerhouses of the form, Jillian Erickson and Roberta Miles.  Jillian Erickson is a performance artist and co-producer of the Beast Women all-female cabaret.  In addition to being a monologist, Roberta Miles is an accomplished jazz singer and artist and the co-host of Café Cabaret at Café Ballou.  Performing separately together as the Loose Chicks, Erickson and Miles have used a series of intimate performance spaces to give their audiences intimate access to their minds and experiences.

This show is fairly loose in structure; Erickson and Miles interact freely with the audience before, between, and after performing. Each of the Chicks performs a selection of short monologues.  Loose Chicks creates such a friendly sense of community between and among performers and audience members that it would not feel out of place for one of the Chicks to ask someone to get up and perform their party piece.

I have sung the praises of these two performers in other reviews.  Since their material changes with each performance, any specific pieces I would refer to might not be on the bill when you see them. For more detailed descriptions of solo performances by Jillian Erickson and Roberta Miles, please follow these links:

Beast Women 2010 Spring Series – REVIEW - Chicago Stage Review

2009: My Year in the Audience - Chicago Stage Review

Beast Women 2009 Winter Series – REVUE REVIEW - Chicago Stage Review

Roberta Miles’s material tends to come from her adventures as a singer in Chicago and as a sexual free spirit.  Juxtaposing braggadocio with self-effacement, Miles seems to lay her soul bare before a room full of strangers.

Jillian Erickson does perform some material in-character, but autobiography is the focus of Loose Chicks.  Her work here tends to deal with how she is perceived and misperceived by strange men, her mother, the world.

These two women share some rather unsafe details from their lives without casting the audience as so many flies on the wall.  The audience is their friend, with whom they have become close enough to share life’s intimate stories.  Loose Chicks is a name that has less to do with moral boundaries than with the boundaries between personal and private, between performing and sharing.  DO NOT MISS the next chance to get to know the Loose Chicks.

3 ½ STARS

(“Loose Chicks” next performance is May 14th, 7:30pm, at Winston’s Café, 5001 N Clark, Chicago)

Roberta Miles

www.beastwomenproductions.com

Loose Chicks images by Justin Bradley.