Romeo and Juliet, Tripaway Theatre, in Lincoln Park. Performing Shakespeare under the stars is a popular approach in summer, but what’s a small-budget company to do when their performance space is a grassy grove far from electric lighting, artificial amplification, and man-made scenery? Well, Tripaway Theatre in its production of Romeo and Juliet illuminates the stage with patio lanterns, stadium torches, and 17th-century-style candle-and-mirror footlights. The actors are uniformly costumed in white shirts and black trousers–a practical way to deal with multiple casting and with this production’s arboreal balcony scene, which has Juliet straddling the fork of a wind-splintered tree....

Frank Black & the Catholics The question isn’t how Charles Thompson IV will be remembered–it’s what name he’ll be remembered by. It could be Black Francis, the name he used as front man for the Pixies. It could be Frank Black, the name he adopted when he went solo. For the indecisive, it could be Frank Black Francis. But how he will be remembered is already obvious: as one of the premier architects of a generation of rock that altered the course of the music industry....

What a perfect time for the end of the millennium or, if not that, the end of the century or, if not even that, then certainly the end of the 1900s and, ergo, the 90s. If there has ever been a time when Chicago sports fans wanted to reject the present and lose themselves in reverie over things past, it’s now, with every major professional team suffering through a losing year....

The hepatitis C virus (HCV) has become the new, ugly epidemic in this country, but it’s not showing up in the headlines. What’s up with that? There are 3.5 million Americans chronically infected with HCV. At least 80 percent of the cases are blood borne. The experts seem uncertain about the origin of the other 20 percent. The blood supply wasn’t screened for HCV until 1990. Liver failure due to chronic HCV infection is the leading cause of liver transplants in this country....

Traveling Second Class The lower court agreed, ruling that bicyclists were permitted to use the roads but weren’t the intended users. Boub appealed and lost again, then appealed to the Illinois supreme court. Four weeks ago, the supreme court ruled four to three against Boub. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hickey answered that the township’s highway commissioner had acknowledged in a deposition that officials were aware that bicyclists frequently used the road and bridge, and he pointed out that a road map approved by the Du Page County Board shows that stretch of the road as “generally suitable for bicycling....

Elvis Costello & Burt Bacharach In fact, anyone who has even casually followed Costello’s career should have seen this coming, not least those fans who tuned out in the mid-80s, when he began to show signs of overt sentimentality on albums like Imperial Bedroom, Punch the Clock, and Goodbye Cruel World. These “purists” thought he was better suited to carry the cynical banner of “I’m Not Angry” than the torch of “The Only Flame in Town,” but they were wearing blinders....

About six months after he left Sears, Chuck Hanna called me up and asked me if I’d come work with him at Spiegel’s. He said, “Look, you get $37.50 a week to start.” I was making $23. He said, “It won’t be long before you’re making more than that.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So I went over there to talk to Mr. McDonald....

“The Bridegroom, the Comedienne and the Pimp” and other short films Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This may be the most exciting and revealing program in the Film Center’s entire Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective. It includes Fassbinder’s two earliest surviving shorts, City Tramp (1966) and Little Chaos (1967), to be shown without subtitles, and a subtitled 1977 interview with the filmmaker–none of which I’ve seen....

You can expect the unexpected with the 58 Group–and that unpredictability goes well beyond its unusual character as a combined troupe of dancers and jazz musicians. In the piece Autobody, premiered last September, the musicians played power tools, strolling among the dancers like so many nonchalant serial killers. And the upcoming 90-minute site-specific work at HotHouse (as yet untitled) subverts any expectations we might have that the piece will be about dancing in a nightclub....

AUDREY MORRIS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A singer doesn’t have to nurse idiosyncrasies to have style–just listen to Audrey Morris. Morris doesn’t deflate her material with affected nonchalance or smother it with histrionics; instead she delivers classic songs, some quite old and many nearly forgotten, with great musical intelligence and a literate, naturalistic approach to the lyrics. Morris has sung this way since her first recording in the 50s, but on the quiet and lovely Round About (newly released on Southport), she sounds equal parts ingenue and doyenne: there’s a buoyant lilt to her upper register, warming the occasional held note with a controlled vibrato, and her lower register and darker sentiments carry the force of wisdom, not condescension....

Can Rubberoom Bounce Back? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Things had almost seemed too good to be true, so it was definitely a blast of reality,” says Jon Bostic, better known as Lumba, one of the group’s two MCs. “After it happened it was, like, safe to breathe–you knew where you stood. It was like, we’re at it again, what’s the next move?” The group, which also includes MC Meta-Mo (Brian Hines) and producers Isle of Weight (Aaron Smith) and Fanum (Kevin Johnson), is currently in search of a label to reissue the album, which was officially on the market for all of three weeks....

The average Chicagoan lives 71.5 years–but where are the average Chicagoans? According to Natalie Pardo in the Chicago Reporter (April), “The mostly white, middle-class residents on the city’s Northwest Side can expect to live 75 to 80 years. For the mostly poor African Americans on the South Side, the life expectancy is around 60 years.” Moreover, white death rates have plummeted from 681 per 100,000 in 1980 to 468 today, while African-American death rates have gone down only slightly, from 884 to 858....

Don’t Get Around Much Anymore Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When their third album, Are You Driving Me Crazy?, was issued in June 1995 by Touch and Go (which has released all but their first album), Seam was in the midst of a grueling four-month U.S. tour, which was followed by a whirlwind trip around Europe. The band took off most of 1996 to recuperate, but by that fall they were eager to begin work on a new album....

In a city where producers and engineers like Steve Albini, Brad Wood, and John McEntire are as celebrated as the bands they record, the late Phil Bonnet kept a profile so low as to be invisible. Bonnet, an engineer and musician who died last week at age 38 (a brain aneurysm is suspected), “didn’t know how to blow his own horn,” explains Thymme Jones, who played with him in the prog-rock band Cheer-Accident for eight years....

By Jonathan Rosenbaum The only full-scale junket I ever participated in–which I’m not proud of either–was in late 1981, when an old college friend who was an editor at Omni arranged to have me visit British Columbia, where John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing was being shot. The offer came almost immediately after I was fired from the Soho News, a Manhattan weekly where I’d been working for over a year as a film and book reviewer–my main source of income at the time–so it was hard to turn down this opportunity....

Of course the Trocks’ big shtick is men dancing women’s roles in famous ballets, something they’ve been doing since 1974. But that’s only one of the many transformations they achieve in their affectionate parodies of what is often a very silly art form. Sometimes the transformations are contemporary and cultural: in the blink of an eye a graceful swan will suddenly turn into a scolding black mama, or a shy young girl will show us the Jewish mother lurking behind her coy facade....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tough guys: In Paris in December, just before being convicted of the murders of two counterespionage agents, international terrorist Carlos the Jackal was sentenced to ten days’ solitary confinement for calling a prison guard a “gnu.” Two weeks later, Montreal Canadiens defenseman Dave Manson underwent surgery to remove a Christmas tree needle that had gotten stuck in his ear....

I am writing to request clarification of facts regarding an article written by Ben Joravsky on June 6, 1997. In Mr. Joravsky’s article entitled “Social Insecurity” he states that the Mary Crane Center did not conduct an official presentation to the residents of the Lathrop Elderly building, which is untrue. A presentation and meeting was conducted on May 15. This presentation consisted of introduction of some of the Mary Crane Head Start staff, history of the Center within Lathrop Homes which encompassed the various programs we offer, and an actual video of the Head Start program depicting several segments of the program....

Dear Carlos Pecciotto [Letters, September 10], Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a fellow bicycle commuter, I fully appreciate the car-culture-versus-cyclist problem. My husband was a Chicago bike messenger for three years and nearly got killed doing it. However, I was totally put off by your cynical tone and personal attack on the author of “Joy Riders” [August 20]. After reading Kristin Ostberg’s article, my opinion of Critical Mass was that it is a pretty interesting response to the car-culture phenomenon, and I was fully considering joining the next ride....

The Perpetual Patient Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A challenge faces anyone who updates Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid–including prolific playwright Keith Reddin and director Michael Maggio, the creators of this new version, being introduced in a student production at DePaul University (where Maggio teaches). Compared to today’s doctors, 17th-century medical men were charlatans; as a result, Moliere’s antimedical diatribe carries less conviction than it used to....