La Turista A Mysterious Overture at Breadline Theatre Shepard does the opposite: he takes important themes–about the search for identity, the yearning for meaning, the contradictions in the American psyche–and buries them in plays with superficially silly or comical premises. Or at least he used to. The 1966 La Turista concerns an American couple visiting Mexico who are trapped in their motel room by bad cases of Montezuma’s revenge. Suicide in B Flat: A Mysterious Overture, written ten years later, begins as a parody of detective dramas: two incompetent flatfoots investigate the mysterious death of a prominent jazz musician....

German printmaker KŠthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) is often, if unfairly, regarded as a propagandist. Though she lived a middle-class life–a servant helped run her household, freeing her to work–she lived in the poorest district of Berlin, where her physician husband saw his patients. Even as a child she was fascinated by the “native rugged simplicity” of workers’ faces; later she said that middle-class people didn’t interest her, and that an “upper-class educated person” is “not natural or true…not a human being in every sense of the word....

The Governess Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like Jane Campion’s The Piano, this first feature by writer-director Sandra Goldbacher is less a story about the 19th century than a fantasy about the 19th century, and as such even more erotic. The singular Minnie Driver (Circle of Friends, Good Will Hunting) plays a stagestruck Sephardic Jew in London in the 1840s. After her father is murdered she has to support her surviving family and, concealing her Jewish identity, secures a job as a governess on a remote Scottish island....

Six months after its original run at Live Bait, Rick Almada’s one-man show is tighter, cleaner, sharper–and as baffling as ever. Among his blunt, charmless, self-important characters are a sauced would-be pugilist trying out his pickup lines in a singles bar, an infomercial host peddling do-it-yourself everything, and a failed local business leader telling a graduating class just how bleak its prospects are. Yet Almada’s exquisitely subtle performance brings out the aching hearts in all his creations, while his unconventional imagery gives the brain ample food for thought....

In the media buildup to this year’s Super Bowl I saw a mention of the old story that there is a 40 percent increase in violence against women on Super Bowl Sunday due to testosterone-jacked men taking it out on the women in their lives. I seem to recall that this story has been debunked but couldn’t find anything definite and look to you to sunder the mists of ignorance....

By Michael Miner Green wanted his staff to stay on their toes. When retailers were being quoted and photographed for roundup articles the paper should favor its advertisers. A Crate & Barrel didn’t deserve the attention paid to a Marshall Field’s. Everyone had a point. In journalism, events normally drive coverage. But survey articles such as Podmolik’s do present choices, and it’s hard to blame the bosses of a paper at a competitive disadvantage for wanting to choose stores that have chosen the Sun-Times....

Silkk the Shocker Ghetto Fabulous Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nothing succeeds like excess, and with all quality control eliminated and production sped up to wartime rates, Master P’s No Limit label released a slew of stunningly successful albums, beginning with P’s own late-’97 smash, Ghetto D. In just over a year its bankroll and roster have ballooned to incorporate enough interchangeable No Limit “soldiers” to guard Fort Knox....

ANONYMOUS 4 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Attending an Anonymous 4 concert is like entering a cloister where disagreeable thoughts are banished and the spirit is cleansed by soothing, unearthly voices. Perhaps that accounts for the a cappella quartet’s rising popularity in these incivil times; perhaps it also explains why the group is warmly embraced by New Agers. But Anonymous 4 is what it has been since its four gifted singers banded together in 1986–a vocal ensemble dedicated to reviving the medieval musical forms of chant and polyphony....

perazzo.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jonathan Rosenbaum’s “In Defense of Non-Masterpieces” [April 17] fails to mention an important factor relevant to the lack of foreign influence in film and society’s trend of preevaluation: the absolute glut of studio films in recent years. Each year, more and more films come out of Hollywood backed by the dollars to buy mass-media coverage. With five or six opening every weekend, distributors and theaters can’t afford to gamble on doubling that number with imports....

CHICAGO YOUTH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Among the junior-league orchestras in the Chicago area, the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra lately has been running a close second to the Civic, which is backed by the resources of its parent organization, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Some of the credit for the success of the independent CYSO, which has been winning awards and seeing attendance rise, goes to the musicians, most of whom are teenagers and on average are younger than the Civic’s members....

Jim Snyder stood before nearly 200 people at a political rally on the evening of August 25 and told them he’d recently had the “strangest, most disturbing dream.” He’d been walking down Halsted Street, he said, when he realized he was being chased by two men, one of whom was carrying a baseball bat. When Snyder turned around, he saw that the men were Peter Fitzgerald, the Republican candidate for the U....

Chicago theater is as racially and culturally varied as the city itself, yet to actor-director Stephan Turner–and many others–it often seems that off-Loop theater is still fragmented in terms of the work companies present and the audiences they target. “We live together, we work together, and then when we get ready to do theater we all go into our separate microcosms,” says Turner, artistic director of the Lakeview-based Stage Actors Ensemble of Chicago....

LEE “SCRATCH” PERRY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The work that has made Lee “Scratch” Perry an underground hero–pioneering dub reggae while producing classic records by everyone under the Jamaican sun–doesn’t necessarily translate into the stuff of golden concert performances. In their book Reggae International, writers Stephen Davis and Peter Simon report that Perry’s 1981 American tour with backing group the Terrorists was “the worst in reggae history....

Letting the Defender Go In retrospect, Milliner shrugs off the dismissal. He’d taken a sabbatical from his company, so he had that to go back to. But the experience gave him more to chew over whenever he tried to figure Sengstacke out. “We were very close but very fiery toward each other,” he says. “He was the kind of person who wouldn’t back down from anything, and if you backed down from him he thought you were sucking up to him…....

Lead Stories Another distinguishing characteristic: According to an October Reuters news report, a man who was fined about $357 for mooning German chancellor Helmut Kohl in a political protest two years ago near Vienna, Austria, has decided to appeal. The man has asked a court to require Kohl to come back to Vienna, take a look at the protester’s bare bottom, and certify that he was not among the mooners....

True Dreams of Annie Arbor What emerged from my early, frustrating discussions with Allen was an idea of what neofuturism wasn’t rather than what it was. The Neo-Futurists opposed the usual tricks of theater: they never pretended to be anywhere but on a stage talking with–or performing for–an audience. In the years when they performed late night on other people’s stages, it didn’t matter what set was behind them, a fake kitchen one week, a courtroom the next....

At the beginning of the final round of the PGA Championship, played in the western suburbs at the Medinah Country Club two weeks ago, Tiger Woods strode purposefully down the fairways. He’s put on considerable weight in his shoulders and upper body–he’s bigger and better than the lithe lad who won the Western Open two years ago at Cog Hill Country Club in Lemont, after his runaway victory at the Masters–and he looked like an athlete in his prime....

TALES FROM MOM’S CRYPT III–DON’T LOOK IN TIFF’S MIRROR!, Corn Productions, at the Cornservatory. Robert Bouwman and Todd Schaner’s drag creations return once again to host an evening of “hot and nasty” stories in the latest installment of the ongoing adventures of the suburban mother-daughter duo Tiff and Mom. Tales From Mom’s Crypt III opens promisingly enough with Bouwman and Schaner sniping at each other throughout the introduction. But aside from a goofy riff on ‘N Sync and Britney Spears (which imagines the prefab teen pop sensations as slave laborers in a Sweeney Todd-esque meat-pie factory), the first act’s spooky tales are marred by clunky stagings and poor executions....

Trib Cracks Its Last Nut Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But some people think the Tribune’s passive marketing plan doomed the show. “The Nutcracker died of criminal neglect,” says Larry Long, the Ruth Page Foundation School of Dance choreographer who staged the show for Tribune Charities. According to Long, the Tribune Company seemed content to run display ads in its newspaper, seldom promoting guest dancers or devising new marketing tactics for the heightened competition....

WILLIE PICKENS TRIO WITH RANDY BRECKER & JOANIE PALLATTO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Christmas never comes too early for Chicago pianist Willie Pickens: for five years running he’s produced a yuletide concert, and in 1998 he issued A Jazz Christmas (Southport), one of the least sentimental and most engaging holiday jazz albums ever. If you think of Christmastime tunes as either lacy raptures or happy-go-lucky toboggan rides, listen to what Pickens does to the likes of “Caroling, Caroling” and “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen”: his monolithic chords and trampolining right-hand lines exploit the songs’ modal possibilities with force and urgency as well as glee....