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King Lear Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nine years ago, when the folks at Shakespeare on the Green began performing the Bard’s plays on the artfully landscaped front lawn of Barat College, there was only one other company in the Chicago area performing Shakespeare outdoors, the Festival Theater of Oak Park, now 26 years old. But today, thanks to Hollywood, Shakespeare is very much in vogue and there are no fewer than four companies doing the Bard outside....

KOKO TAYLOR, ARTIE “BLUES BOY” WHITE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Age hasn’t diminished Koko Taylor–in fact, the Queen of Chicago Blues sounds more focused and passionate at 65 than ever before. On this year’s Royal Blue (Alligator) she bursts out of the chute with a propulsive opening cut, “Save Your Breath,” then jumps straight into a roadhouse boogie, “Hittin’ on Me,” growling and spitting in vintage Taylor style as her band burns a path under her feet....

O.C. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hip-hop artists recording for independent labels or releasing their own stuff tend to stick to the basics: tough beats and strong lyrics. Skills pay their bills, not hollow gangsta braggadocio or crossover mush. New York rapper O.C. isn’t technically an underground artist–he’s worked with stars like MC Serch and Organized Konfusion, contributed to the sound track of Spike Lee’s Crooklyn, and presently records for the Polygram-distributed Payday label....

Rock ‘n’ Roll Vacancy Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Managing editor Larry Green declined to give an official explanation, but whatever it may be, it’s hard not to see the move as a face-saving opportunity for the editorial department. In her seven years writing about music for the paper, Kim’s approach has remained distressingly puerile and her reporting fraught with errors, which may be why it took the Sun-Times more than a year to decide that she was the right person to succeed Jim DeRogatis, who left in May 1995....

DePaul’s men’s basketball team began its season with seven-foot freshman Steven Hunter easily winning the opening tip over his undersized counterpart from Howard. He batted the ball forward to Quentin Richardson, who handed off to point guard Rashon Burno cutting down the left sideline. Hunter, meanwhile, used a pick set by DePaul’s other forward, Bobby Simmons, to free himself down the right sideline. He is thin as a rail, listed at a generous 215 pounds in the team’s media guide, and with his uniform flapping and fluttering around his wispy frame he went up like some true Blue Demon and jammed an easy alley-oop pass from Burno....

For one brief moment, my thoughts and Michael Jordan’s were remarkably similar, though he later expressed them much more preciously than I ever would. There were 1.1 seconds to go in game five of the NBA finals at the United Center. The Utah Jazz were leading 83-81, but after a time-out the Bulls had the ball, and everyone knew it would be going to one of two persons: Jordan, who’d had an off shooting night but had made so many game-winning shots throughout his career, or Toni Kukoc, who had kept the Bulls in the game almost single-handedly by making 11 of 13 shots from the field, 4 of 6 from three-point range, for 30 points....

CHIEFTAINS 4/25, Rosemont theatre You know they’re Irish, you know they’re good at it, and as far as I know this show, unlike their recent records, will be blissfully free of celebrity cameos. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » BABYLONIAN TILES 4/26, Metro The press kit claims “Pink Floyd meets Siouxsie and the Banshees” but the itchy insistence of front woman Bryna Golden’s tinny organ brings more to mind a gothier, girlier Fuzztones....

Year of the Independent Film Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After the huge success of “independent” films like Shine and The English Patient, both released in 1996, this was supposed to be the year of the independent film. And it was–as long as you’ve got a seven-figure budget and the backing of a major multinational corporation, you can be as independent as you like....

As a patriotic American I am quite familiar with the “new-car smell” all new cars seem to have. What causes that smell, and are there any recorded incidents of dealers or manufacturers spritzing a car with an extra touch of that smell to entice buyers? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The car companies weren’t much help. My assistant, Jane, sends the following report of her conversation with a woman at General Motors:...

Last year the Chicago Blues Festival pulled off a major coup by reuniting Ray Charles with his star-studded horn section of the 1950s, and during the first decade of the annual free event, now in its 16th year, there were many comparable once-in-a-lifetime evenings. But whether due to budget constraints or City Hall’s (probably correct) supposition that a few hundred thousand people will pack Grant Park no matter who’s playing, moments of greatness have been few and far between in recent years....

Really. According to a recent press release, the Chicago Skyloop film–an eight-minute aerial tour of the Loop and lakefront now being shown at Navy Pier–“is shown in two 15-seat theater capsule flight simulators that give the illusion of virtual reality.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Everybody does it, then they grow up. “The best research evidence available suggests several broad ‘truths’ about the universality of youthful delinquent behavior,” write David Reed and Doug Thomson in One City (Fall), a publication of the Chicago Council on Urban Affairs....

FRANK GRATKOWSKI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » German reedist Frank Gratkowski has acknowledged Evan Parker as a key influence–but even if he hadn’t, you’d figure it out pretty fast after hearing his terrific new trio album, Quicksand (Meniscus), where his jagged runs of tightly coiled notes unspool like fishing line in the mouth of a mad shark. The pianist on the record is Gratkowski’s frequent cohort Georg Gräwe, but the contributions of percussionist Paul Lovens–a longtime collaborator of Parker’s–really drive the similarities home....

Freak Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » John Leguizamo’s new solo show is a work in progress–which, Leguizamo told his fans at the show I saw last weekend, means “you’re very privileged to see me suck.” Certainly this ever-changing “semi-demi-quasi-pseudo-autobiography” has its spotty patches–but it has wonderful ones too, and even when he falters Leguizamo is a high-voltage performer with a remarkable gift for mimicry....

By Nadia Oehlsen “Free Trips and Buffet to Casino” promises the sign outside the office of Chicago Entertainment Tour. A fleet of white buses and vans, with the company name and phone numbers painted on their sides, beckons enough passengers to support four to six trips each day from Uptown. The earliest departure is Saturday at 8:30 AM. The latest, by reservation, departs any night at 8:30. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

JONATHAN BISS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These days precocious technicians are a dime a dozen in classical music, but it’s still rare to find a practiced young player with instincts as sharp as his skills. Pianist Jonathan Biss is just such a rarity: though only 18 and still a student at the Curtis Institute, he’s already a fixture on the recital circuit, and his talent and intelligence portend a long, distinguished career....

“Adding pictures to words is like having flowers on the rosebush,” says Elmer Krueger. He added more than 400 of them to his autobiography, Endless Echoes. Would you like to see his first car–a used 1923 Model T? Or his latest–an ’82 Buick Riviera? There’s a picture of every car he’s ever owned, and also a verse: By all these cars that I have bought!! Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Local Record Roundup INFAMOUS SYNDICATE Changing the Game (Relativity). Lateefa Harland and Rashawnna Guy don’t go in for the played-out gangsta posturing of Twista and Do or Die, but their rapid-fire, syllable-collapsing, occasionally off-the-beat rapping fits squarely into the current Chicago style. It works well with lean rhythm tracks like the ones crafted by Common collaborator No I.D. on “Here I Go” and “Hold It Down,” but other producers give the girls flaccid stuff like the slow-jammy “What You Do to Me” and the static “Jenny Jonez....

MAL WALDRON & STEVE LACY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For much of his career, visionary soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy has focused on the music of Thelonious Monk; their names have naturally become linked in the minds of many jazz fans. Yet his duo partner here, marvelously melancholic pianist Mal Waldron, may actually have closer ties to that idiosyncratic genius. He began exploring Monk’s music in the mid-50s, about when Lacy did–at the time, Monk had attracted little attention for his quirky compositions, and plenty of folks still looked sideways at his heavy touch and artful stumbling at the piano....

If you saw only one show during the Cook County Theatre Department’s five-year stint in the South Loop, you wouldn’t have forgotten Vicki Walden, the driest, most sophisticated member of that dry, sophisticated troupe. She could hold an audience captive by staring deadpan for an hour or prattling on about nothing in particular–two things Cook County members did with some regularity. When that company closed its doors a couple years ago, it seemed that Walden might simply drift, her mega-minimal style sadly irrelevant in a city of over-the-top acting....

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, First Folio Shakespeare Festival, at the Peabody Estate at Mayslake. This play is hard. If Beatrice and Benedick take over, the plot gets lost. If they don’t, its grim goings-on make the work a comedy only by definition: it ends in marriage. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First Folio Shakespeare Festival gets the balance right by combining a good concept with superior acting....