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LIGHT SHINING IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, Blue Star Performance Company, at the Church of the Atonement. This debut production delivers some of the best ensemble acting I’ve ever seen off-Loop. Caryl Churchill’s didactic 1976 study of England’s 17th-century civil wars ranges from touching to tedious, but the cast gathered by director Amy Ludwig for this Chicago premiere perform with unfailing emotional accuracy and intense but never overstated connection to one another and the text....

MACADAM TRIBE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This 1996 debut by African director Jose Laplaine provides an insightful view of urban dislocation and the new communities that form in a changing Africa. Set in an unnamed city, the film follows two brothers, an auto mechanic and a boxer, as they talk and gamble at a local bar; the episodic story abjures narrative tension in favor of vignettes that reveal character and community....

Romeo and Juliet By Justin Hayford Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So it might seem unlikely that actors in these plays would turn every incidental innuendo into an opportunity to grab their crotches, thrust their pelvises, or position any handy cylindrical object in front of the nearest man’s zipper. But in Alison C. Vesely’s Romeo and Juliet and Dale Calandra’s cloyingly retitled 12th Nite, the crotch grabbers, pelvis thrusters, and cylinder manipulators are out in full force....

Hey, Faggot: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Me, I know why I’m still a virgin: a 257-pound man is not exactly that attractive to the opposite sex! But I know why I’m unattractive, and I’m doing something about it: getting my load lightened and my head screwed on tighter. Don’t be passive, waiting for the girl to come to you. Ask women out even if you’re dead sure they’ll turn you down, get involved in hobbies and activities, or even take out a personal ad, for Pete’s sake!...

It may be the year of the home run in the major leagues, but in the Midwest League it’s the year of the pitcher–and in Kane County of Josh Beckett in particular. Beckett was the first pitcher chosen in last year’s draft–he earned the honor as a hard-throwing Texan in the long and glorious tradition of Nolan Ryan, Roger Clemens, and Kerry Wood–and he was assigned by the Florida Marlins to the Cougars in the Class A Midwest League for his rookie season of professional baseball....

The American Girls Revue It’s even easier to feel cynical while shopping the glittering urban mall of Michigan Avenue, the most expensive mile in town. There’s no haven from the relentlessly alluring portable luxury displayed in every shop window. Pre-Christmas crowds this year included the usual mix of customers, gawkers, and beggars. But among them were a few new faces: well-scrubbed little girls in velveteen dresses and shiny patent leather shoes on their way to American Girl Place on Chicago Avenue to see a play, have a pricey tea party, and ogle American Girl dolls, accessories, and books....

TED SIROTA’S REBEL SOULS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago’s jazz scene is awash in celebrity: we have a new MacArthur fellow (Ken Vandermark), a perpetual Grammy nominee (Kurt Elling), a breakthrough songwriter and performer (Patricia Barber), and a national radio host (Ramsey Lewis). But so far this year none of these stars has come up with a better album than Propaganda (Naim), by drummer Ted Sirota’s Rebel Souls, whose combination of adventurous improvising and driving lyricism stuck in my head for days after I first heard it....

It’s hard to imagine a more uncharacteristic David Mamet project: an adaptation of a genteel Terence Rattigan play from the mid-1940s about family affection and loyalty (previously adapted for a 1948 film directed by Anthony Asquith), based on the real trial of English naval cadet George Archer-Shee in 1910. But this may well be the most accomplished Mamet movie since House of Games, not only because he works so fruitfully with his excellent cast (Nigel Hawthorne, Jeremy Northam, Rebecca Pidgeon, Gemma Jones, Guy Edwards, and Matthew Pidgeon) but also because he offers a sturdy object lesson in how to attack period material of this kind without self-serving irony or condescension....

I avoided seeing Boys Don’t Cry for months, got the feeling it was “Movie of the Week” propaganda or something like that. I remember reading about the story in the press when it actually happened and thought a movie about the subject silly. When I actually saw the film I was taken aback by the liberties it took with the facts of the story. I searched and searched for reviews of the film that acknowledged this twisting, no, “tweaking” of fact....

Bollywood on Clark Moviegoing is a national pastime in India, and it has often been noted that its studios produce more films than those of any other nation–about 700 per year in a variety of regional languages. While some 200 of these are filmed in Hindi, many of the remaining movies are dubbed into that language to take advantage of the country’s largest market. The most influential of the regional cinemas comes out of Bombay, commonly referred to as Bollywood; the majority of its offerings are musicals....

Friday 1/29 – Thursday 2/4 Physicist Stephen Hawking has done some amazing things: he discovered that black holes emit radiation, wrote a best-seller (A Brief History of Time), and got to appear on Star Trek. Hawking will explain it all (the universe stuff, that is) tonight at 9 at “The Universe in a Nutshell,” the first installment of the Adler Planetarium’s new lecture series, “Our Expanding Universe.” It’s at the Arie Crown Theatre at McCormick Place, 2300 S....

Captured at www.nasinet.org/faq95b.html Sighting Reports Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stories about sightings of bigfoot-like creatures persist amongst Native Americans and Eurocentric immigrants and their descendants, providing evidence that the bigfoot phenomenon is not culture specific, lending even more evidence to the idea that it is not caused by a mass hallucination, since mass hallucinations don’t jump cultures very well. The stories also show that the phenomenon is a continuous one which has occurred in the Pacific Northwest for more than 150 years....

CHICAGO CHAMBER MUSICIANS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pierre Boulez is just the man to lead this Chicago Chamber Musicians concert, billed as a farewell to the 20th century. In the twilight of his career, the French composer has emerged as an avatar of new music, admired both for his own slim oeuvre and for the clarity and elegance of his interpretations. He helped enshrine atonality–formalized by Schoenberg just after the turn of the last century–as an academic orthodoxy, and now that he’s mellowed from an angry Young Turk into an avuncular sage, he’s won acceptance as a conductor with major orchestras....

Chicago’s Next Dance Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Henry James once remarked that the house of fiction has many windows, and the same might be said of modern dance: with every new choreographer, its physical vocabulary and point of view shift. So the fact that the fifth annual Next Dance Festival is made up almost entirely of modern dance does not imply any limitation or monotony–far from it....

Chicago’s Next Dance Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Harrison McEldowney knows he’s in a bit of a rut. But what can he do? He’s good at choreographing funny dances–he just can’t help it. Fans of River North Dance Company, where he’s a dancer, are probably familiar with his work from the trio Perfidia, in which a woman switches partners with remarkable sangfroid. That piece is restrained, however, compared to his premiere for the fourth annual Next Dance Festival....

I was so enraged by John Conroy’s “killer symp” article (“The Shocking Truth,” January 10) that I had to take a dozen Valium tablets. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What we really had was two evolutionary errors in the form of Andrew Wilson and his brother who were unproductive outlaws and a menace to society and considering the overwhelming evidence and the full bestiality of their crime should have been executed shortly thereafter and the officers who engaged in the physical abuse should have been tried for assault and battery and fired....

Apple Tree Theatre is reprising its 1999 hit production of Old Wicked Songs for its second offering at Metropolis Performing Arts Center, with Daniel J. Travanti and Tom Daugherty returning for the show. Here’s what Reader critic Adam Langer had to say about it when it ran in Highland Park: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “One of the most reliable star-vehicle formulas pits a cantankerous elder (the star) against a young innocent (played by an up-and-comer) who ultimately thaws their relationship....

HEART OF A DOG, Breadline Theatre Group. Anyone expecting the wit, energy, and style of Frank Galati’s adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1925 satire for New Crime Productions five years ago (or Wisdom Bridge’s more than a dozen years ago) will be cruelly disappointed by this plodding version. Supposedly inspired by Bulgakov’s wicked spoof of socialist science and scarcity, Paul Kampf’s dogged adaptation displays none of the novel’s playfulness or purpose. The novelist’s joke–that humans can no more be improved by communist eugenics or a new social order than a dog can lose its dogginess–is labored to death....

vargas.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your mention of the Hispanic Democratic Organization made it appear that the people involved were merely motivated by “expensive City Hall jobs.” I know Al Sanchez, Ray Gamboa, and George Esquivel, and they also don’t need to justify or make apologies for being employed by the city. These are honorable men who certainly merit the support of the Hispanic community....

Shirley Mordine choreographs with a physical poetry that harks back to an earlier age of modern dance. Her work is modern in the sense of the great modern movement of the 20th century in art, and contemporary in that it still speaks and still educates and is performed by strong, young dancers. Capturing the primitivism within the modern movement in bold strokes, she produces movement with an intentional rough edge, performed by dancers who are not quite characters yet make up a miniature society....