It’s not as crazy as it seems that Amsterdam’s largest ballet troupe is making its Chicago debut at a neighborhood theater: local choreographer Altin Naska, who’s created work for the 45-year-old, 80-member company, is also the director of foreign exchange for Dance Chicago, based at the Athenaeum. Only seven Dutch National Ballet dancers are coming, but they make up in quality for what they lack in quantity, and their ranks will be augmented by performers from the Joffrey Ballet and River North Chicago Dance Company....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is the last weekend that Gunther Murphy’s, 1638 W. Belmont, will be a live-music venue. Co-owner Pat Mooney (who also owns the Abbey Pub) says that he and his partners simply needed to make a business decision. “We were struggling,” he says. “We need to get a kitchen back in there, and there’s no room to do it now....

Brainy, well executed, and cleverly conceived, Iraqtile Dysfunction is topical with a vengeance, spoofing everything from trash-talking steroid jocks to Condoleezza Rice to Katrina victims–an evacuee named Snake Lady (the wonderfully rubber-faced Claudia Michelle Wallace) magically transforms a dysfunctional clan in Wilmette. Director Ron West and his sextet have spared no absurdity in this unashamedly political revue. It’s generously long at two hours but tighter than any previous Second City show, with plenty of brilliant improv–an achingly funny evening....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cardozo’s. Saveur‘s Terry Sullivan writes, “Cardozo’s is a rarity: a neighborhood tavern right in the Loop, Chicago’s downtown core. The nearly 90-year-old basement pub offers a full menu of hearty fare that includes everything from burgers to shrimp de jonghe. The place is open only on weekdays and, in true Chicago saloon tradition, serves free appetizers (buffalo wings and sausage and peppers, among others) during happy hour....

Swedish alt-pop band the Sounds are fronted by a hot blond singer and mix their keyboards front and center, which is why nearly every story about them mentions Blondie. But the comparisons are weak: the Sounds’ choruses are too big, their guitar sound too anthemic, and if you caught the band sweating through any of the hundreds of TV appearances they made while promoting their first record, Living in America, you know they don’t share Blondie’s cool-ass detachment....

Many years ago I was told there were Nike missile sites along the Chicago lakefront. Supposedly they were scattered from Grant Park to somewhere north of Lincoln Park, and consisted of underground bunkers that would open to let the launching platform rise up and fire the missile. Was that a cold war urban legend? –Larry Cywin, Gainesville, Florida Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nope, that was cold war reality....

Attorney Frank Avila has been battling the Hispanic arm of the Daley machine since 1997, filing lawsuits, holding press conferences, and giving tips to reporters. Last week City Hall officials exacted a bit of revenge, kicking him out of a client’s disciplinary hearing. “We were following procedure–it’s nothing personal,” explains a City Hall press officer, then laughs. “Well, maybe a little.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The practice of using jobs to reward friends and punish enemies has long been a sore point with Avila, and much of his ire is directed at the Hispanic Democratic Organization, Daley’s main political operation in the Hispanic wards....

Anton Chekhov invented the modern short story, which reveals characters’ lives through discrete but telling episodes. In the masterful 1892 “Ward 6,” he turned his gaze on the well-meaning but criminally negligent director of a mental hospital, Dr. Ragin. Convinced that truth lies only in the mind and that physical suffering is illusory, the doctor devotes himself to a brainy paranoid, Gromov, thereby putting his career in jeopardy. Adapter-director Joe Feliciano’s somber, methodical staging for Mom and Dad Productions is aptly formal and restrained, and a poignant Chekhovian humanity emerges whenever Feliciano holds court as Gromov....

Conservatives have long argued that Democratic trial lawyers are to blame for out-of-control litigation. In his new book, See You in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation, Chicago lawyer Thomas Geoghegan volleys back that, on the contrary, it’s Republican deregulation that has led to the spike in lawsuits. For instance, in the past much employment was covered by union contracts. If you were fired and felt wronged, you could go to a neutral professional arbitrator who’d decide—cheaply, quickly, and with relatively little fuss—if the termination was fair....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Braggtown, the new album by the Branford Marsalis Quartet, opens with a full-on blitz called “Jack Baker,” and even though Marsalis has his own distinctive sound, the remarkable performance evokes the classic John Coltrane Quartet as well as humanly possible. A couple of years ago the band — drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts, bassist Eric Revis, and pianist Joey Calderazzo, who’ve been a steady unit since 1997 — released an explosive reading of Trane’s A Love Supreme....

Friday 8/6 – Thursday 8/12 African-American women are the target audience for the multimedia show All Hail the Coochie II: The One Coloredgirl Coochie Self-Determination Circus, but health educator and performance poet Sharon L. Powell hopes it’ll speak to people of all colors and genders. It focuses on the history of black women’s bodies and sexuality, including dark chapters such as the story of Sarah Baartman, “the Hottentot Venus,” a South African woman who was put on display in 19th-century Europe as a freak because of her large buttocks and genitalia....

The shoulders carry pain; they hunch to ward off harm. And the shoulder girdle–that vulnerable, sinewy, crucial part of the body from which the more consciously expressive arms and hands hang–is the focal point of Rimasto Orfano (“Abandoned Orphan”). In this 75-minute piece for six performers by Italian choreographer Emio Greco and Dutch director Pieter C. Scholten (PC), the shoulders twist, grind alarmingly askew, pull back harshly, grow spastic and windmill the arms wildly....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Hailed as an environmental pioneer, FedEx says on its Web site that it is ‘committed to the use of innovations and technologies to minimize greenhouse gases.’ [I didn’t find these exact words there, but plenty like them.] With 70,000 ground vehicles and 670 planes burning fuel, the world’s largest shipper is a huge producer of heat-trapping gases. Back in 2003, FedEx announced that it would soon begin deploying clean-burning hybrid trucks at a rate of 3,000 a year, eventually sparing the atmosphere 250,000 tons of greenhouse gases annually from diesel-engine vehicles....

Greg Trooper’s songs have been recorded by the likes of Steve Earle, Billy Bragg, and Vince Gill, but I’d say they sound best sung in his own rough-hewn voice. On his latest release, Floating (Sugarhill), Trooper treads a fine line between cynicism and idealism, experience and hope. He tends to write about people who’ve been burned by life but still continue to search for love, peace, or grace. Though undeniably earnest, he keeps clear of the pathos that makes people flinch at the term “singer-songwriter” through gentle, self-deflating humor (evident in “Lucky That Way,” a song about not getting lucky) and an oddball capacity to find oblique inspiration in unexpected quarters (clearly manifest in “Muhammad Ali,” which turns a TV appearance by the aging boxer into a lesson in the true meaning of Christmas)....

Too much of current “relational” art talks about play, then presents an orgy of alternative-art-star idolatry. But textile and technology artist Huong Ngo is returning warmth to participatory minispectacles. In her scrappy, subtle immersive experience–“Savage Parallelograms,” opening Saturday at Duchess–the aim is to create geometric-camouflage tableaux as viewers are offered backdrops, props, conjoined costumes, and sculptural helmets and prompted to become what she calls “landscapes from the shoulders up.” She provides a conceptual context for the show in the form of drawings, prints, animations, and stories about feral children and twin relationships....

Square, understated, and workmanlike, 2004’s The Grind Date (Sanctuary) is yet another reminder that DE LA SOUL didn’t become the most consistent recording act in hip-hop history by taking chances. Nope, they established a streak of creative longevity unprecedented in the rap game–seven studio albums since 1989 without a misstep–by laying claim to an idiosyncratic groove and riding it out just like old-time R & B pros. Titling their 1991 album De La Soul Is Dead now seems like a brilliant career move: by preemptively declaring that they’d fallen off, they freed themselves from a lifetime of unsuccessful attempts to out-weird the visionary Day-Glo poetics of their debut, 3 Feet High and Rising....

Three guys get together one night and smoke dope, talk about their favorite bands, and play practical jokes on one another. They also bake cookies, sing Indigo Girls songs, and whine about their periods. When a delivery boy arrives with pizza, one of the three identifies him as a rapist and attacks him. After things calm down, the chums snuggle together on the floor to sleep. Are they gay? Hets with gender conflicts?...

Guinea Pig Solo Bailiwick Repertory Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Leonard’s play is the more visceral and far-reaching, perhaps because of its historical immediacy–after all, there’s no end in sight for our current conflict while the first gulf war was over relatively quickly. But Leonard’s world is also much darker and grittier than the magic-realist universe Rivera creates. In our first glimpse of Leonard’s soldier–the isolated, enraged Jose Solo, who’s returned to Spanish Harlem–he’s a shadow behind a scrim, running as fast as he can on a treadmill and intoning “love and be loved....

Urinetown the Musical Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Urinetown’s most obvious target is the sort of Depression-era social commentary epitomized by Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 “proletarian opera” The Cradle Will Rock, which is full of prounion song-and-dance numbers that drive home its self-righteous lefty message. Contemporary director and critic Harold Clurman dismissed that show as “boyishly sentimental and comically theatrical,” and those are the shortcomings Kotis and Hollmann mine in this parody, the story of a populist uprising against capitalist greed....

“Knowledge is love and light and vision,” Helen Keller wrote in her autobiography, a lofty enough statement to merit a prominent spot on a wall in the computer center at the city’s main library. In the “computer commons” on the third floor at the Harold Washington Library Center on a recent Monday afternoon, nearly all the terminals were occupied, their monitors covered with dimmer screens that provide almost complete privacy. You can’t see what’s on them unless you stand directly behind the user....