MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, Accidental Theater Ensemble, at Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ, Baird Hall. The ado in this earnest effort isn’t quite nothing, but it comes damn close. These Columbia College students and graduates give the play that old college try, but the result is not ready for prime time. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Part of the problem is the auditorium, which has no AC and poor acoustics....

MUNTU DANCE THEATRE OF CHICAGO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Muntu returns to its roots with this program, “Life Moves: A Tribute to Alyo.” The late Alyo Tolbert founded the company in 1972, and this year, as part of its participation in the Spring Festival of Dance, the company performs his Basket Dance as well as other favorites like Fangama, a war dance from Senegal in which male and female performers showcase the fine art of polyrhythmic movement....

By Ben Joravsky He has always, he says, been a man of modest means. “I was born in Nashville, I went to school at the Art Institute, and for a while I lived in Dallas, when I worked in the art department at Neiman Marcus. I came back to Chicago in the early 50s because I liked it here. I was never rich. It’s always been a struggle.” The more Creasman thought about it, the angrier he got....

Being a Russian must be a lot like being a Blackhawks fan: things are royally screwed up and have been for years, and for as long as anyone can remember there’s been a despot at the top. Yet in each case one’s natural allegiance is secure, because after all it’s the homeland (or home team), and–with the help of a little alcohol–the camaraderie of others in the same boat makes the state of affairs a lot less painful....

The Liars’ Club Nah, not really. Never happened. Just made it up. And you know what? It was fun. Easy too–especially compared to, say, actually trying to track down the actual Smith and actually getting her to sit down for an actual interview. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As Glass watched his pretty new career shatter, Cable News Network and Time celebrated their journalistic union with the stillbirth of a deformed little lump of error: their report claiming that the military used nerve gas on U....

TRAIN OF THOUGHT, American Blues Theatre. Company member Andrew Micheli’s first produced play contains many dramatic problems common to playwrights’ first attempts. His longish one-act, set on a train platform, not only lacks dramatic crescendo and climax but, more important, is overwhelmed by the playwright’s self-conscious attempts at intellectuality. When two strangers meet on a platform that overlooks a raging fire from a recent explosion, they begin a verbal joust in which each tries to throw responsibility onto the other....

The Paul Vallas magnet–attracts whites only. Near North Career Magnet High School and Jones Commercial High School are being replaced by new magnet schools–supposedly as part of a plan that requires a magnet school in each of the city’s six regions, writes George Schmidt in Substance (June). But “reporters covering the stories have missed the fact that the ‘regions’ extend from the lake all the way west to the city limits, and that in both cases the new magnet schools are being placed within jogging distance of Lake Michigan–but miles from most of the public school students who go to school in those ‘regions....

Long-time suburban U.S. representative Phil Crane is by far the biggest scofflaw in the House of Representatives when it comes to disclosing the occupations and employers of his contributors to the Federal Election Commission, according to the July 25 issue of “Money in Politics Alert,” published by the Center for Responsive Politics. Contrary to federal election law, he has disclosed the information for only 14 percent of the money he received for 1999 and early 2000....

This remarkable and beautiful 160-minute family saga by the great Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien (Goodbye South, Goodbye, Flowers of Shanghai) begins in 1945, when Japan ended its 51-year colonial rule in Taiwan, and concludes in 1949, when mainland China became communist and Chiang Kai-shek’s government retreated to Taipei. Perceiving these historical upheavals through the varied lives of a single family, Hou again proves himself a master of long takes and complex framing, with a great talent for passionate (though elliptical and distanced) storytelling....

In Timeless Voices, a documentary about the 1988 New York City concert appearance of a group of Tibetan monks, the camera lingers on a young monk named Sonam Dhargye. Dressed in ceremonial saffron and gold robes, he rocks forward on his knees at odd intervals, his eyes half closed as he leads the group in prayer. Despite the incongruous headset mike he’s wearing and the ponderous voice-over of narrator Martin Sheen, he’s a compelling presence....

Dracula If I weren’t a gay man living in the age of AIDS, I might have gotten sucked into the century-old vampire mystique exemplified by Bram Stoker’s 1897 horror story, Dracula. The lure is obvious: libidos run wild, unleashing “darker” instincts and lustful evil. In the figure of the Transylvanian count (inspired by a nightmare brought on by “a too generous helping of dressed crab at supper one night”) Stoker forever linked blood, sexual deviance, and death....

maldon.qxd The history of Humboldt Park is about a community that has been in an embattled position for virtually the whole of its time in this city. I grew up here with my family in the 1950s and ’60s, and I watched my community expand as many new immigrant families from Puerto Rico chose to settle in the area. Thereafter followed the anger and racial hatred against a people and race who simply wanted an opportunity to work....

Gram Parsons & the Fallen Angels Byrds In a 1972 interview with an A&M Records publicist, Gram Parsons was asked what he’d been doing with himself since leaving the Flying Burrito Brothers two years before. The godfather of country rock replied, “I played a lot of sessions, but I played mostly with friends. It’s a hard thing to do, making a living.” This answer was more than a little disingenuous: for the most part, he’d been jamming, drinking, shooting heroin, hanging out with the Rolling Stones at Keith Richards’s villa in the south of France, and drawing on a family trust fund that paid him as much as $100,000 a year....

Illinois lawmakers and the media have spent a lot of time this year considering how taxpayers can help wealthy spectators watch even wealthier football players botch games at Soldier Field eight Sundays a year. Meanwhile the Chicago Housing Authority is proceeding with a much less scrutinized “transformation plan,” under which it will spend more than $1 billion to turn 38,000 public-housing apartments into 25,000. To do this, the agency will move residents into rent-subsidized apartments in the private market and then back into renovated CHA properties in mixed-income neighborhoods....

Something’s Cooking at In These Times As a journal of the Left, In These Times has never placed vegetarianism high among the virtues. James Weinstein, the founder-publisher-editor, could think of one vegetarian on the staff; he could also think of one Republican. When Weinstein called last week to say that Paul Obis, founder of Vegetarian Times, had agreed to succeed him as publisher, he made it clear that Obis’s diet had no bearing on the decision....

By Linda Lutton “When I just hear ‘network cabling’ and ‘fiber optics’ I think ‘good career,’ something I’m proud to say I do,” says Antoinette Merridith, an Ickes resident who had interviews lined up just days after she received her certificate for completing the course and is currently waiting to hear about a job at Ameritech. “Every time I speak to somebody and tell them about it, they’re like, ‘Fiber optics?...

The Possessed, Prop Theatre and National Pastime Theater. Featuring a high-voltage cast, a mesmerizing score by Milkbaby, and Joey Wade’s stunning scenic design, this ambitious, flawed adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s grimly satirical novel promises an intelligence and intensity it never quite delivers. Michael Hannen’s hip, contemporary script blends the book’s heightened language with awkward Tarantino-esque dialogue (“This faggot is gonna shit over your life, and you’re just gonna eat it.”). And he gives his cadre of duplicitous, bloodthirsty revolutionaries an impressive litany of 20th-century characteristics (heroin addiction, cross-dressing) and slogans (“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”)....

Like garage bands, improv troupes have a short life expectancy. Often thrown together, they perform for a while, then fall apart. So even though there are a lot of improv troupes in Chicago, there aren’t many that perform with the intensity or level of trust of the Screw Puppies, made up of members of the unofficial Annoyance ensemble. Some of them have been playing together for a dozen years or more–these performers know one another so well it seems they can read each other’s minds....

The first and second floors of this huge store are showcases for the usual selection of decent furniture, collectible tchotchkes, and shimmering prom dresses. But the basement, which smells like dirty auto parts, harbors a treasure trove of bizarre goods, most of which teeter on the useful-useless axis. Hospital beds. Dented, half-empty paint cans. Car seats. Gynecological exam tables. Boxes of envelopes from an accounting firm. I’m captivated by the ziggurats of putty-colored PC components shrink-wrapped together for $100....

My question to you is whether individuals have any rights to the airspace above the land they own. Can I, for example, declare the space above my house a no-flight zone (I know that it would be virtually impossible to enforce this), or can this only be done on a national level? –Dawood Salam, Toronto, Ontario Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I understand your feelings....