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Sybille Canthal finds the gallery world’s stuffy “white cube structure” confining not just physically but intellectually. “There are a lot of artists out there, and as we know there are only a few who get shown in galleries. At some point the question becomes not so much about money and whether the art will sell, but whether it’s ever going to be seen.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the years, the graduate student in arts administration at the School of the Art Institute became interested in unconventional exhibits....

RICHARD II, POET KING, Gilead Theatre Company, at the Chopin Theatre. Arrogant and sybaritic, Richard II nevertheless moved England from disorder to prosperity in 22 years, then lost the throne through power plays and hubris. Six hundred years after his death, Chicago theater has been giving the monarch his dramatic due: his death haunts Henry IV, recently presented by Shakespeare Repertory, while he himself appears, complete with queen and lover, in Famous Door Theatre’s Two Planks and a Passion....

Almost 30 years ago, as Richard J. Daley was preparing to host the Democratic National Convention, a large sector of the City That Works stopped working. More than half of the CTA’s bus drivers were African-American, and for weeks they had been fighting what they considered unfair union representation. At 12:01 on the night of August 25, 1968, the black drivers turned off the lights on their vehicles and headed back to the CTA bus barns, beginning a two-week strike that shut down 52 of the city’s 128 bus routes and effectively paralyzed the south and west sides....

Regular readers of this column know how loath I am to get to the Bears before the end of the baseball season. Not only do I find the idea of football in July–when training camp begins–utterly intolerable, I don’t even like the idea of football in September. If the Cubs and White Sox are still playing, the Bears can wait. In fact, the Bears can usually wait until after the World Series....

The Big Picture Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Based on discussions with my legal counsel, I am going to court,” says Ed Burgess. The local artist contributed 13 “solvent transfers” with images from gay pornography to a show in the lobby of Bailiwick Arts Center, but a week before the show was scheduled to close, his artwork was taken down. Debra Hatchett, managing director for Bailiwick Repertory, also runs an art-placement agency called Anatomically Correct, and in early August she contracted with Burgess through the agency to exhibit his work at Bailiwick through September 23....

THE LITTLE FOXES and LA BETE, Court Theatre. The two very different plays in Court’s rotating repertory this year showcase the ensemble’s versatility. The Little Foxes is a brilliantly constructed, relentlessly realistic expose of a greedy southern clan, while the farcical, quirky La Bete is exuberantly stylized. Unfortunately, the whole isn’t greater than the sum of its shows: The Little Foxes crackles with conviction, but miscasting mars La Bete. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

I recently cut open a golf ball to show my nephew Jason the rubber band wrapper and liquid-filled rubber ball in the center that I remembered from my childhood. Imagine my disappointment to discover a solid white interior made of who knows what, with no rubber bands and no secret center. There was nothing to do but reminisce. I remember as a kid it was common knowledge that the liquid in the center of the golf ball was a deadly poison and should never touch the lips....

By Ted Kleine Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Several months ago there was an auto show at McCormick Place. This was the antiauto show. The car was the Satan figure of the afternoon, and every speaker attested to its evil. Katie Alvord–who somehow lives without a car in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula–told the 100 or so people in the audience that a quarter of all U....

By Neal Pollack “Oh, it’s nice to see you guys out here,” Seifer recalls telling him. Seifer grew up in Lincoln Park trusting the police. She has an uncle and a sister on the force, and she took the initial exam to become an officer last year. In her job as a social worker for Chicago Commons she often works closely with the police, inviting them to play basketball with kids in the neighborhood....

Over the years WGN radio commentator Roy Leonard earned the appreciation of a lot of artists. His reviews and interviews brought their work to the attention of an ultramainstream audience, helping stimulate wider awareness of the local arts scene as well as big-name touring acts; the trust Roy’s listeners placed in him meant his support could make a real difference. (He earned my gratitude when he gracefully delivered the narration I wrote for The Golden Bird, a children’s music-theater piece performed by the Grant Park Symphony in 1988....

Colombia’s Best-Kept Secret Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Strangely, it was a summer trip to central Mexico in 1997 that solidified her interest in the Colombian coast. “It struck me that there were so many idiosyncrasies of the people in the various villages, and after being in Chicago for three years it was like rediscovering something,” says Navas-Courbon, who is 25 and of Spanish descent....

Chicago So I wasn’t surprised a few years later when Fosse’s musical Chicago turned his hometown into a symbol of sleaze and sin–an all-American version of the decadent Berlin he’d depicted in his film Cabaret. The notion hadn’t originated with him, to be sure; produced on Broadway in 1975, Fosse’s Chicago was based on a 1926 play of the same name written by former Chicago Tribune reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins and inspired by real-life murder cases she’d covered....

Friday 5/8 – Thursday 5/14 How many Sherpas does it take to schlepp a 35-pound Imax camera to the top of Mount Everest? About six, if you also count the five-pound packs of film–each of which lasted all of 90 seconds–that were needed to make the new Omnimax feature film Everest. The big-big-screen film was shot in 1996, the year that eight climbers died in a disastrous storm (the Imax team helped rescue the survivors)....

Gloria With Sharon Stone, Jean-Luke Figueroa, Jeremy Northam, Cathy Moriarty, Mike Starr, Bonnie Bedelia, and George C. Scott. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Enjoyable hokum at best, Cassavetes’s movie draws a lot of confidence from old-fashioned Hollywood tropes. In contrast to his independent and more personal efforts, which initially appear to be all over the place, this tight scaling down of incident and character–a battered, middle-aged moll (Rowlands) and a precocious seven-year-old Puerto Rican kid fleeing a malevolent Mafia in bombed-out sections of the Bronx, Manhattan, and Jersey–clicks along like a well-oiled suspense machine, improbably delivering the shopworn goods....

Toots and the Maytals Recoup (Alla Son) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Along with collaborators Jerry Matthias and Raleigh Gordon–the Maytals–Hibbert has long been one of reggae’s most influential acts. Since the early 60s he’s been a constant in Jamaican music, from the early days of ska through the rock steady period of the mid-60s to the development and refinement of reggae and beyond....

GORKY’S ZYGOTIC MYNCI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At South by Southwest last week the Welsh combo Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci overcame numerous technical problems (from keyboards cutting out to ungodly blasts of unintentional noise) and a venue that seemed better suited to line dancing than their quirky, trippy, ferociously catchy pop to turn in the best performance I saw at the entire conference. The band’s plucky endurance no doubt came from experience–they’ve been at it since the mid-90s–but what really saved them was their astounding oeuvre of hooky tunes....

Sleepy Hollow With Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Miranda Richardson, Michael Gambon, Casper Van Dien, Jeffrey Jones, and Christopher Walken. Admittedly, there’s an Ichabod Crane in Burton’s movie–though here he’s a New York detective (Johnny Depp), not a local schoolteacher and choirmaster–and a farmer’s daughter named Katrina Van Tassel (Christina Ricci) who takes a shine to him, and a burly horseman who competes for her favor called Brom Van Brunt (Casper Van Dien)....

LATITUDE, Phoenix Theater of Indianapolis and Bailiwick Repertory. By the end of Tony McDonald’s New Age love epic, part of Bailiwick’s “Pride Series ’98,” two time-traveling gay lovers have finally recognized the influence of their previous lives on the present. Heading “back to the future,” they fall in love all over again. But in Bryan Fonseca’s throbbing staging the hokey finale is far less persuasive than the lovers’ three earlier encounters....

By Sridhar Pappu “What time you got to leave?” Thirty minutes later Squirt arrives, his gym bag flung over his shoulder. Five-six and 155 pounds, he has a thin goatee, an almost triangular smile, and sharp features. He’s wearing a look that says, “I know I’m only five six, but I’m gonna outrun you to the basket, break up your passes, and let you know about it later.” Two years ago he was a star, averaging 14....

By Mark Swartz “It’s real art,” Boggs replies. The bill is cheerfully rejected, so he takes out some of the green stuff. He doesn’t mind. He’s already had some successes today. Flow, the Chicago Avenue diner owned by painter Rodney Carswell, took Boggs’s Bills enthusiastically–he even got $40 back in change. Earlier at Navy Pier, during Art 1999 Chicago, the New Art Examiner accepted Boggs’s Bills as payment for a subscription....