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The Hairy Ape Director Kirsten Kelly has other ideas in her production of O’Neill’s play for Mary-Arrchie Theatre. In fact, she has so many ideas–too often lacking in similar big, burly productions–that the 11 men she shepherds through O’Neill’s masterful semisocialist parable of malignant modernism rarely need to thump their chests or cup their genitalia. Understanding that the early O’Neill was more expressionist than realist, she has her actors shovel coal with a kind of unstudied grace....

By Grant Pick Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cole has taught many of these men, most of whom are in their 20s and 30s, the shoe-shining trade, hiring them despite their sometimes checkered pasts. “A guy’ll get locked up at 20, and when he gets out of the joint at 35 he’s in need of rehabilitation,” says Cole, whose father went to prison for accidentally shooting someone....

Raw Dealers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the very least Kimler knows how to change galleries: since arriving in Chicago in 1982 he’s had formal business arrangements with Peter Miller, Bill Struve, Thomas McCormick, and Ingrid Fassbender. “There aren’t a lot of good options in Chicago when it comes to dealers,” he says. “Galleries work under the assumption they have an entitlement to your work, when it’s really a consignment situation....

Hey, Faggot: Laugh? You have all my sympathy, Mariah. I take your problem very seriously, and my first thought upon reading your letter was that the root of your problem must be your diet: What you put in your mouth largely determines the odor of what comes out your pooter, pores, and pits. Actually, that was my second thought. My first was relief that your letter was postmarked from a distant state, making it unlikely that I will ever find myself trapped behind you in line at the supermarket....

GREAT PLAINS GYPSIES 4/4, BIG HORSE A stripped-down lineup of rhythm guitar, bass, and drums gives leader Dan Whitaker’s songs lots of room to breathe on this local folk-blues-rock band’s debut LP, Meeting at the Building (Sunny Smedley). Though Whitaker’s muted vocals sometimes threaten to send you drifting off to sleep, he’s gifted enough as a melodist to unlock the beauty of Jimmie Davis’s “You Are My Sunshine” and let it waft into “The Fool,” a country ballad that tickles like a gentle breeze....

By Michael Miner The Reader’s Ted Kleine tells a funny little Lee Anglin tale. Early last year Kleine wrote us a cover story on the Tenth Ward aldermanic race down on the southeast side, Anglin’s home base, and it seems Anglin asked to reprint it in his Calumet Journal for $100. What was that all about? I asked both of them the other day. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

TOM VARNER-RYAN SHULTZ QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Tom Varner last came to town, in 1996, he had agreed to spend almost a week working with four local strangers to present his own stark and sometimes challenging compositions. That alone would have qualified him as somewhat intrepid–but he’d already earned that description by deciding to play jazz on the French horn. Among the few predecessors and contemporaries he has, Varner stands out for the facility of his technique and the fecundity of his imagination....

The Collector’s Guide to Heavy Metal By Martin Popoff (Collector’s Guide Publishing) As you contemplate a vigorous dissent, another coworker ambles by. Heavy metal was born around 1970 with a supernova of loud, pummeling releases, the most influential of which was Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. The press responded to their savagely rudimentary riffing, minimal ornamentation, and overarching aura of doom with little enthusiasm. Britain’s Disc magazine commemorated the chart success of the single “Paranoid” by putting Sabbath on its November 1970 cover under the headline “Fans We Don’t Want....

The Loyal 47 Ronin Most film aficionados outgrow discussions of the “greatest films of all time.” Not me. For more than a decade I’ve had three favorites. Stan Brakhage’s Arabics, a series of abstract silent films of perpetually shifting colors and shapes and spaces, is one; another is Roberto Rossellini’s mystical, expansive personal documentary India. And the third is Kenji Mizoguchi’s two-part, four-hour Genroku Chushingura (usually translated as “The Loyal 47 Ronin of the Genroku Era”), being shown in Chicago for the first time in several years this weekend at the Film Center....

In Mali, when a family loses a child, by custom they give the next baby an unusual nickname. Ali Toure’s mother had borne nine boys who died in infancy, so when she had her tenth she called him “Farka,” which means “donkey.” And the young Ali did turn out to be stubborn, bucking his country’s caste system to take up music: In the southerly Wassoulou region of Mali, home to Oumou Sangare and Sali Sidibe, anyone could play, but elsewhere only the griot caste of the dominant Mande culture could be professional musicians....

An Itch to Scratch Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » De la Pena attended his first DMC event in 1989, when the U.S. finals were held here at the Riviera and DJ Aladdin took home the title. The experience inspired de la Peña to take his craft more seriously. Although he’d been spinning since 1985, he mostly worked at underground parties. The acrobatic, technically rigorous performances he saw at the DMC competition enlarged his sense of the possibilities inherent in a pair of turntables....

CHICAGO CHAMBER MUSICIANS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Throughout his long and prolific career, William Russo has displayed a predilection for mixing jazz and modern classical music in the sort of fusion composer Gunther Schuller called the “third stream.” In 1950, Russo joined Stan Kenton’s orchestra as a trombonist and arranger; in the classical realm he’s written oratorios, song cycles, and a grand opera he still considers his greatest achievement....

DANILO PEREZ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Barely into his 30s, Danilo Perez has already built a reputation in Chicago that musicians twice his age would kill for. The Panamanian-born pianist is an exacting player with an unsurpassed gift for combining the rhythms of jazz with those of Caribbean and South American music, and in a live setting he improvises on this hybrid with power and joy, sending audiences glowing into the night....

Ella worked at teh Belair for ten years, and on the third floor exclusively for the last five. The news of her sudden death–she was only in her 40s–sent show waves through the building…. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Five years ago, Ella replaced Bea, the wild one. Beah had a little “bad” in her, and that’s what we liked. She was an entertainer as much as a maid....

Flight Courier Service Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the past five years the members of the Cook County Theatre Department have been puttering around in their near-south-side loft, largely ignored by mainstream press and audiences alike. Yet they’ve mounted ten peculiar, beguiling shows with a total budget of less than $10,000. From the hesitant fumblings of their debut, Swing Your Lady (a self-described deconstruction of Oklahoma!...

ILLINOIS JACQUET BIG BAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the last 15 years or so, saxist Illinois Jacquet has led a jazz big band with undisguised zeal and undiminished fervor. And why not? Everything about the jazz orchestra–from the power of the horns to the familiarity of the arrangements that support and prod his solos–must feel right to Jacquet. His own path threads inextricably through big bands, most notably the juggernaut led by Lionel Hampton in the 40s....

RAISED IN CAPTIVITY, Cobalt Ensemble Theatre, at Chicago Dramatists. Nicky Silver is the king of quirky playwrights–a dubious distinction when so much contemporary theater has quirked itself into irrelevance. His 1995 Raised in Captivity, the work that made all the New York critics wrongly conclude he had something important to say, begins promisingly enough as a black farce about neurotic estranged siblings Sebastian and Bernadette, reunited by their mother’s death from a projectile showerhead (I told you it was quirky)....

The Ice Cream Truck Cometh Zimmerman, who’s 30, graduated with a graphic arts degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1992. After college, he joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and for the next three years was a social worker dealing with street kids in Tacna, Peru, a shantytown. Back in the U.S. and wanting to be an artist, he moved to Chicago, took painting classes at Columbia College, and taught continuing education courses at the School of the Art Institute....

Bulgarian actor Yasen Peyankov says he didn’t presume much when he moved to America nearly seven years ago. Back in Sofia he’d been a salaried player in a theater troupe sponsored by the communist government. Within his first five months here, he was cast in a play. Then he learned he’d be working for free. “It seemed like a microcosm of racial problems in America,” Goulding says. “All the guys outside freezing their butts off were African-American or Hispanic....

DONALD HARRISON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Physically, alto saxist Donald Harrison has chops like Louis Armstrong, his fellow New Orleans native–a broad mouth and full, fleshy lips–so some people think he should play “bigger” than he does. (A local saxophonist once complained to me, “If I had those lips, I’d have a sound like Cannonball”–meaning Cannonball Adderley, whose tone could stuff a room....