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Stages ’99: A Festival of New Musicals in Progress Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This weekend’s musical-theater marathon–hosted by Chicago’s New Tuners Theatre with the participation of LA’s Lehman Engel Workshop and London’s Mercury Workshop–showcases 11 new works in various stages of development, ranging from “pitches” (short excerpts from recently produced shows seeking a future) to staged readings, as shown in the schedule below....

The Waltz Invention “Well, I don’t,” Nabokov responds soberly. “And this too is the tragedy of tragedy.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alas, few theaters have the nerve to take Nabokov’s words to heart, to take risks–box office be damned–and embrace innovation. Practically every company in town, from the esteemed Steppenwolf to the fledgling troupes renting space for $50 in the basement of O Bar, seems to prize commercial over artistic success; the result is a stream of productions loaded with talent but devoid of originality, ambition, and imagination....

feit.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If prisons were serious about controlling the flow of drugs and weapons into prisons, they would strip-search prison employees. Strip-searching prisoners has little to nothing to do with security concerns. Strip-searching has to do with dehumanizing the incarcerated. Barbara Deming, author and civil rights activist, after being strip-searched wrote, “They wouldn’t be able to admit it to themselves, but their search, of course, is for something else, and is efficient: their search is for our pride” (Prison Notes)....

By Harold Henderson If it were a child, the Indiana Dunes Environmental Learning Center wouldn’t be out of diapers yet. But since it opened on October 5, 1998, more than 3,000 students from 32 schools–roughly 300 of them from Chicago–have participated in its programs. The vast majority have been fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders who spend two and and a half days there. The center has a big dining room and ten heated and air-conditioned cabins with eight beds each, so full capacity is two sessions a week of 70 kids and 10 adults....

Attack of the Killer DJs Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What’s bringing the superstars of the dance underground to Chicago en masse? Cold hard capitalism, the music lovers who booked them will be the first to tell you–and they’re happy to take advantage of it. “The high-profile names are more about branding than making money,” says John Curley, talent buyer and resident DJ at Karma....

Are you ready for some. . . recidivism? Notre Dame is number one in the Tarnished Twenty, a list compiled by FindLaw Sports (www.sports. findlaw.com/tarnished). The football rankings are “based on the number and severity of ongoing or recently concluded criminal, civil, NCAA and other administrative proceedings and investigations involving players, coaches, boosters or other persons or entities associated with a program. . . . The Tarnished Twenty takes into account everything from murder to the smallest of recruiting and on-campus violations....

Ever increasing carbon dioxide emissions do not equal prosperity, contrary to what conservative critics of global-warming controls often claim, judging from the latest figures from the Energy Information Administration. U.S. carbon emissions from fossil fuels rose 0.4 percent in 1998, while the economy grew by 3.9 percent. Since 1990 carbon emissions have risen by 10 percent while the economy grew by 23 percent (www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/sld002.html). Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The solution to future police scandals may hinge on the willingness of the mayor to scrub the bureaucracy clean, oust a few political cops, and bring in a Mr. Clean. But in a department like ours–defined by racial divisions, political expediency, and a brutal and corrupt history–logic dictates that the superintendent will always be someone who’s skillfully maneuvered through the thicket of middle and upper management at 11th and State. Our police chiefs will never be recruited from national talent pools because Chicago has never worked that way....

Men on the Verge of a His-Panic Breakdown Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pain is funny. That’s why slapstick gets laughs–and why subtler studies like the Borderlands Theater’s one-man show Men on the Verge of a His-Panic Breakdown are hilarious. In this series of finely crafted comic monologues we’re introduced to a full range of flawed, self-torturing Latino males: a naive young gay immigrant, a bitter kept man who’s been jilted, a closeted middle-aged guy, an angry, self-loathing ESL teacher....

Epiphanies, by their nature, tend to just arrive–you can’t usually schedule them. An exception takes place this weekend, when the Unity Temple in Oak Park hosts a concert by the invigorating jazz pianist Myra Melford, who credits the temple’s designer, Frank Lloyd Wright, as a major influence on her work. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yes, yes–Wright drew buildings, Melford makes music. But Melford, who left Chicago in the 1980s for New York, punched through that barrier long ago, using not only Wright’s architecture but also his writings as inspiration....

Now Then Again Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After a successful run at Bailiwick Repertory, Chicago playwright Penny Penniston’s comedy about the science of love and destiny has been transferred to the Ivanhoe. Set at Fermilab in Batavia, the play revolves around a hypothesis derived from quantum mechanics, that the future and the past happen simultaneously and can both be altered. Its truth is tested in the relationship between Henry (Joseph Wycoff)–a gifted, socially challenged scientist–and Ginny (Katie McLean), a perky prodigy torn between a brilliant career and a simple life with her childhood sweetheart....

RED HOLLOWAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gritty, sweat-streaked, bluesy tenor saxophone is an essential ingredient in what’s come to be known as soul jazz–and tenor man James “Red” Holloway was seducing crowds with that sound well before “soul” was a term people applied to popular music. He was a mainstay in Chicago by the end of the 1940s, playing with Gene Wright’s big band, blues guitarist Muddy Waters, and pianist Roosevelt Sykes, but he really broke out when soul-jazz organ grinder Jack McDuff spotlighted him alongside young guitarist George Benson on his 1963 outing Live!...

Sex, Drugs, and Venture Capital Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thomas’s film production company, Future/Now Films, has been making a documentary about the Detroit rock legends for nearly three years now. Despite several grants, including one from the Illinois Arts Council, Future/Now has only been able to raise a third of the film’s budget of more than $300,000. Thomas cited the MC5’s revolutionary stance–not just all the “fucking,” he insisted, but the band’s advocacy of thinking and doing for oneself–as a red flag for potential backers of MC5: A True Testimonial....

SIMON JOYNER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Simon Joyner writes ’em like Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen used to, unapologetically reaching for–and occasionally grasping–profundity. His lyrics conjure a world where love is an uncertain refuge from a tragic past of biblical proportions and a future that promises more of the same. The Omaha native’s fifth and latest album, Yesterday Tomorrow and In Between (Sing, Eunuchs!...

Joe Baldwin Retrospective Repeating geometrical patterns have a long history in modernist paintings, with very different meanings in works by Mondrian and Frank Stella, for example. But both artists comment on the geometrical form of the canvas itself, and by extension on the rectilinear room in which it’s displayed and the geometry underlying Renaissance perspective. Such works produce the feeling that emptiness itself is regular, predictable, rational–one reason why Baldwin’s untitled painting formed of a “grid of lozenges” is disturbing....

Like any playwright, Will Shakespeare appreciated the vital importance of two elements in helping him get his words across to the public: fine actors and generous patrons. This informal performance showcases several of the former and celebrates one of the latter, Hope Abelson. Tony-winning British actor Brian Bedford–a stalwart of the Stratford Festival in Ontario as well as a Broadway and TV star–will share the Goodman Theatre stage with such local luminaries as Harry J....

Transformations Some of these plays are about race, some are not, but the mostly African-American cast of six intensifies our awareness of racial issues. Henry Godinez and Cheryl Lynn Bruce, two of the five directors who pieced together this theatrical collage, also perform in the ensemble, which gleefully, kaleidoscopically reshapes itself as it moves from play to play. The glee itself gives an effortless, childlike grace to the performances, both illuminating the plays’ mystery, horror, and verbal acrobatics and easing us into the strangeness of each new story....

DONALD NEALE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The most significant composer to emerge from Cuba, Ernesto Lecuona left behind an astonishing legacy when he died in 1963. But of his 400 songs, 170 solos for piano, 80 theatrical works, and 30 orchestral pieces, by a conservative count, only a handful are still regularly performed outside his country. Conservatory trained, he learned to improvise during early stints in honky-tonks and movie palaces, developing the quicksilver mood swings that would be so crucial to his style, and for the rest of his career he’d be a nightclub pianist first and a concert-hall pianist second....

I’ve seen about a dozen of the 57 features directed by the fascinating and criminally neglected Yasuzo Masumura (1924-1986), and while no two are alike in style, many are socially subversive and most skirt the edges of exploitation filmmaking. This 1965 black-and-white ‘Scope comedy is also known as Yakuza Soldier; Shintaro Katsu, star of the popular Zatoichi films, plays an amiable, earthy yakuza thug drafted into Japan’s war with Manchuria prior to World War II, during which his main companion, the story’s narrator, is an intellectual with a similarly jaundiced view of military discipline....

The long-suffering Cubs fan is a cliche; in fact, there’s a certain perverse glory in being one. But what glory does Richard Lindberg garner for his lifelong love affair with the White Sox? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One person who didn’t conform was Lindberg; for a thousand reasons apparent only to his peers at Onahan Elementary School, he became their whipping boy. “I had a really rough time growing up in that school,” he says....