An adventurous and sometimes sexy, if only fitfully successful, adaptation of Louise Kaplan’s celebrated nonfiction book by Susan Streitfeld, working with a script she wrote with Julie Hebert (1996). The focus is on the life of a successful single prosecutor (British actress Tilda Swinton, displaying an impeccable American accent) as she waits to discover whether she’s been appointed as a judge, her kleptomaniac-scholar sister (Amy Madigan), the prosecutor’s boyfriend, a lesbian psychotherapist she has a fling with, and other people in her orbit....

David Kodeski’s True Life Tales: Another Lousy Day It’s all in the name of superrealism, the wish to make the invisible visible, mark the unmarked, and force audiences out of complacency. Performance art broadcasts its creator’s compulsions. Yet ironically these compulsions often get in the way of the story itself, shadowing the invisible with the artist’s obsession with showmanship. It’s difficult to balance a sense of ethical obligation with blatant self-dramatization, and the results are sometimes entertaining and stimulating but not always as powerful as the Christian right would have us believe....

LONNIE SHIELDS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lonnie Shields’s 1992 debut, Portrait (Rooster Blues), mixed roiling funk and primal blues with enough polish to please fans of southern soul-blues and enough raw energy for the boogie-till-you-drop roadhouse crowd. But the guitarist and singer seems to have lost his sense of direction since then. Tired of Waiting (JSP), from 1996, paired his full voice with accompaniment so spare and flat it often sounded like a demo; his follow-up, Blues Is on Fire, had a little more punch to it, but still didn’t approach the blend of grease and grandeur on Portrait....

In the summer of 1975, Cassandra Fay Smith noticed something strange: virtually all the actors at the colonial museum in Williamsburg, Virginia, were white. Smith, then a PhD candidate in American history, had already found a historical document stating that in the 18th century half of the town’s population was black. “There was this accurate representation down to the buttons on the clothing,” she recalls, “but they ignored 50 percent of the population....

PAVEMENT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rumors have been flying for months that Pavement’s Terror Twilight (Matador), which hits the shelves Tuesday, is to be the band’s swan song. If that’s true, they’re going out with more of a whimper than a bang—but even Pavement’s whimpering beats a lot of other people’s banging. The new album builds on the direct pop approach of 1997’s superb Brighten the Corners....

RUBEN BLADES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Panamanian Ruben Blades has spent his entire career smashing preconceptions about salsa music; while most everyone else sang about corporeal pleasures and disappointments, he decried Latin American dictatorships and the corrosive effects of the United States’ cultural hegemony; while most everyone else held salsa traditions tight to their chests, he happily incorporated outside influences. A Harvard-trained lawyer, in the late 80s he took up acting, winning roles in the films Mo’ Better Blues and The Milagro Beanfield War, among others; in 1994 he ran for president of Panama and placed third....

dillman.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have an old and proprietary interest in WBEZ. I worked there (my first job out of college) back in the educational radio days and was very pleased when the station changed direction to public radio. I was also a member for several years until frustration with Malatia came to a head with the classless firing of Stuart Rosenberg....

Re: Re-review of That’s the Way It Is, By Golly [January 24] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It is the intention of this letter to inform the re-reviewer of Nomenil theater company’s That’s the Way It Is, By Golly that fact has not been reported. The point which we address can be found smack-dab in the middle of a set of parentheses (that we feel sure fought against playing a part in this “report of fact”): “(Conkle is playing not only his roles but helping fill in for two actors who’ve left)....

Since putting pen to paper some 400 years ago, dramatist John Webster has hardly been the critics’ darling. His two revenge tragedies, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, are about the only works critics discuss when evaluating his artistic legacy, and they’re so full of gore, skulduggery, murder, and mayhem that George Bernard Shaw dubbed him the theater’s “Tussaud laureate.” In the early part of the 20th century Rupert Brooke described Webster’s dramatic world as “full of the feverish and ghastly turmoil of a nest of maggots,” where life “seems to flow into forms and shapes with an irregular abnormal and horrible volume....

BOTTLE ROCKETS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite the unmistakable Merle Haggard twang in some of their best music, the Bottle Rockets’ name rarely came up during the overexcited predictions of an Americana boom earlier this year. But as the band’s brilliant third album, 24 Hours a Day (Atlantic), confirms, they’re the most vital practitioners of country-inflected rock working today. The band’s tough, lean mix of boogie rock, hard country, and Neil Young stompin’ sounds far more impressive live than it does on paper: singer-guitarist Brian Henneman brandishes his simple hooks like truncheons....

The Wanton Seed Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To their credit, Shanahan and O’Donnell have the courage of gamblers–they’ve cannibalized Burgess’s text to fit their intuitive understanding of the story’s emotional development and resolution, successfully condensing and transforming the novel into two 30-minute segments separated by an intermission. For minutes at a time the result is nothing short of spellbinding, but they’ve also underestimated the difficulty of deciphering the show’s thematic nuances if the viewer hasn’t read and meditated on Burgess’s novel the way they obviously have....

Last Friday night, a hundred or so of Sergio Mayora’s closest friends gathered at Pop’s on Chicago, a spacious and ungentrified honky-tonk just west of Damen. The party was organized by Scott Levy, who reads poetry under the name “Squat” on Monday nights at Mayora’s family’s bar, Weeds. When Levy told Mayora the party would be at Pop’s, Mayora was excited. He’d met Tom Burton, the manager of Pop’s, on an all-night drinking binge last year....

12th ANNUAL JAZZ CLUB TOUR CHICAGO CULTURAL CENTER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Cultural Center (78 E. Washington; 312-744-6630) now has some of the most inventive programming anywhere in the midwest; piggybacking on the festival lineup, it will present three major artists in groupings considerably more intimate than you’ll find in Grant Park. Thursday, September 2, at 4 PM in Preston Bradley Hall, pianist Danilo Perez, who belongs on any shortlist of the decade’s jazz innovators, performs in duet with legendary soprano saxist Steve Lacy....

Every year the networks roll out their bland knockoffs of last year’s hits, ignoring much of our rich cultural landscape. I suppose that leaves more of the American pie for theater, but most companies take the safe route and neglect this opportunity. Which is why we need more people like Rick Najera, who knows there’s more to the world than the bleached, pasteurized version of it in Dawson’s Creek and Felicity....

Baltimore, Basketball and Beyond at Tough, March 6 and 7 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the years, many prime performance venues have closed: Lower Links, MoMing Dance & Arts Center, and last month Randolph Street Gallery, the onetime mecca of Chicago performance. With the earlier closings, a new timidity began to seep into much of the city’s performance. Artists seemed more and more reluctant to mystify audiences, less willing to offer up tantalizing images defying explanation....

Hey, Faggot: Whenever I need the vibration record set straight, I access one of my many lady friends in the retail sex-toy industry. Carol Queen works at San Francisco’s Good Vibrations (1210 Valencia in San Francisco, 2504 San Pablo in Berkeley, 800-BUY-VIBE, www.goodvibes.com). Good Vibrations is the 20-year-old grandmammy of the woman-owned, anticreepy, sex-positive sex-toy-store movement. Queen has been pushing vibrators at Good Vibrations for the last seven years, and “I’ve been using them for longer than that,” she says....

It started in slow, then it started to grow. In the closing minutes of the Bulls’ victory two weeks ago over the Milwaukee Bucks–a triumphant 84-62 return home after a grueling road trip–the fans in the stands started to chant, “Scot-tie, Scot-tie.” The intent was obvious. Scottie Pippen, sitting on the bench–looking quite abashed as the chant persisted, fading out in one area of the United Center only to be taken up in another section across the way–had recently made a public demand to be traded, saying he would never play another game for the Bulls....

Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop With a shrug, a shuffle, and a twitch of his hips, Danny Hoch takes his place in the hip-hop diaspora, a culture that originated in American cities but has become a lucrative international business selling toughness and ghetto culture as earnestly as Disney sells family values. Hoch–who teaches performance in jails, universities, and high schools–aims his art at the young people who buy the hip-hop style. But if last Saturday’s audience was any indication, his leftist sincerity and boyish energy attract adults as well....

Telling Lies in America Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Small, quiet virtues are rare enough in American movies these days, but to find them in a bittersweet autobiographical script by none other than Joe Eszterhas–about growing up as a green Hungarian immigrant in early 60s Cleveland–is a genuine shock. Yet I have to admit that earlier Eszterhas-scripted movies such as Basic Instinct and Showgirls, for all their grotesqueries, have gradually become guilty pleasures of mine; there’s something touching about his honest primitivism....

In 1968, one of the most awful years in the history of America, Dick Richards donned a red nose and red hair. He became Bozo. In Michigan. Well, in Grand Rapids. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The other day” was the day that Richards’s show, Bozo’s Big Top, was taped (in the local baseball stadium) for the last time. Last Saturday WZZM in Grand Rapids aired the final show, and WGN’s Bozo Super Sunday Show became the one and only surviving vestige of the most prolific children’s franchising effort of our time....