The Hypocrites’ production of Millennium Approaches, the first play in Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” diptych, was largely screechy and overacted, but certain key scenes, particularly those between Kurt Ehrmann’s savage Roy Cohn and J.B. Waterman’s tortured, closeted Mormon Joe Pitt, showed how much potential for dramatic truth lay beneath the overplayed exterior. In this production of the second half of the epic, Perestroika, director Sean Graney has unleashed that potential, offering three and a half hours of engrossing, thought-provoking, heartbreaking theater....

Christopher Gutierrez is sitting alone on a bed in a room that reeks of dirty cat litter, a lapel mike hooked to the zipper seam of his hoodie, a computer resting on his lap. He reads aloud from a script displayed on the monitor: “So bring on the heartbr–shit!” He starts the line again. “So bring on–shit!” He makes another half-dozen attempts, each ending with a string of obscenities, before a muffled voice comes through the door leading to the living room: “Don’t just read it, Chris....

Chicago’s first-ever festival focusing on work created by and about artists with disabilities includes performances, visual art, film and video, lectures, and workshops presented throughout the city and in some suburban locations Thursday, April 20, through Sunday, April 30, with several visual art exhibits running beyond those dates. More than 50 cultural institutions and community groups are participating; all venues are wheelchair-accessible and have accessible restrooms. Many performances include audio description, word-for-word captioning, or sign-language interpretation....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A new front broke out in the war over Barry Bonds this week as he surpassed Hank Aaron’s career 755 homers — and it broke out not in the MSM but on the Web. First Michael Witte, an illustrator who is also “a paid consultant to a major-league team on mechanics,” announced on the unlikely editorandpublisher.com, the Web site of a media-industry publication, that in his opinion Bonds’s protective elbow brace is a simple machine that helps Bonds hit the ball....

When I first heard Josephine Foster sing, with local duo the Children’s Hour a year and a half ago, I couldn’t believe she hadn’t already been adopted by the burgeoning “new weird America” scene: plenty of so-called acid-folk singers sound like rock vocalists trying to backtrack into a purer, more idiosyncratic style, but Foster has been idiosyncratic from the start. Unsurprisingly, the scene’s since caught up with her: she’s got a track on a new compilation curated by Devendra Banhart, and Born Heller, her new duo with bassist Jason Ajemian, has been turning up on bills with the likes of Six Organs of Admittance and Espers....

Baile funk, the current sound of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, got a foothold in America this year via “Bucky Done Gun,” a track by British MC M.I.A. But in Rio the music–a variation on electro and Miami bass, with Portuguese lyrics and samples of native samba and forro rhythms–pounds from huge sound systems at up to 500 bailes, or parties, every weekend, and the scene’s eminence grise is DJ MARLBORO (aka Fernando Luis Mattos da Matta), who released a definitive compilation of the music, Funk Brasil, in 1989....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A couple of days ago a reader disputed my claim that Tetine was behind the curve, gently calling me a “clueless American crit.” Because the duo hosts a radio show on England’s Resonance station called Slum Dunk and has curated a decent collection of funk carioca, they’ve gotten lots of exposure, which has allowed them to become flavor of the moment....

Like the chandelier in Phantom of the Opera, a revolving door is the all-purpose metaphor here. Luther Davis, who wrote the book for this 1989 musical version of the 1929 novel and 1932 film, has a mere 110 minutes to spin the show’s many intersecting stories, set in the world’s most luxurious hotel, so the door whirls fast. Michael Weber’s staging makes sense of and gives solidity to these glimpses of desperate souls on the eve of a depression and the Third Reich....

Teddy Riley is on the comeback tip, and not a moment too soon–what 2006 really, truly needs is more new jack swing, and nobody knows new jack swing like Teddy Riley. The man who put together Guy and Blackstreet is best known for changing R & B forever by producing and/or cowriting all the new jack songs you know by heart (Blackstreet’s “No Diggity” and Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative” for starters), plus a few you kinda remember from the club or sound track cassettes circa 1988-1991 (the lesser works of Al B....

In Israel Horovitz’s 1967 play, five people battle almost to the death for first place in a line, though they have no idea where it leads. Horovitz’s view of human dynamics has been interpreted in various ways: as an indictment of American complacency, as a call for individual fulfillment, as a caveat against self-serving anarchy. Wisely, director Aaron Shapiro chooses to stage this enigmatic allegory unrealistically: the stage is dominated by a giddily revolving platform, and even the venue’s restrooms and closets figure in the action....

Have you heard that the newspaper business is going to hell? It’s in all the papers, but nobody reads the papers anymore so you might have missed the news. Assuming you still care about news, which you don’t, according to the papers. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Craig is not the only culprit. There’s also eBay, which has siphoned off who knows how many more millions of dollars by making camera-for-sale ads obsolete....

The 18th Polish Film Festival in America runs Saturday, November 4, through Sunday, November 19, at the Beverly Arts Center, the Copernicus Center, the Portage, and the Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee. Tickets are $8.50-$10; a festival pass, good for five screenings, is $45. Following are selected features screening Saturday through Thursday, November 4 through 9; for a full festival schedule visit www.pffamerica.com. Unless otherwise noted, all films are in Polish with subtitles....

Mecca Normal The pop canon is full of songs about romantic longings and failures, so that we’ve been conditioned to expect certain story arcs, delivered in each genre’s codified language–blues and its back-door men, hip-hop and its baby mamas, rock and its lonely motel rooms. There’s pleasure in having our sufferings and hopes reaffirmed, however approximately, by such archetypes. But Mecca Normal, the Vancouver duo of Smith and guitarist David Lester, have spent two decades hammering away at the musical and social conventions that mainstream culture goads us toward as listeners and as people....

More than a million teenagers play high school football across the United States, and one of those kids, the star running back for the Libertyville High School Wildcats, just took the handoff on a double dive. So hungry to reach the NFL that he’s already being counseled by a personal trainer, a “speed specialist,” and a California-based dietician, the kid gets to the corner and explodes–one furious stride splitting two defenders....

Chicagoan and former FCC chair Newton Minow famously characterized television as a “vast wasteland,” but there’s plenty of life on the prairie. Shows have been made here since TV’s beginnings, from the first soap opera (These Are My Children, in 1949) to Kukla, Fran and Ollie to Unsolved Mysteries to Prison Break. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There is, however, a lot of made-in-Chicago TV filling the national airwaves....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Heisman Trophy Web site goes into the history of the venerable football honor, established in 1935 by the Downtown Athletic Club of Manhattan. The site explains that “while the task of designating the most outstanding college football player was daunting, a crucial decision was the group of individuals chosen to select him. It was determined that a logical choice was sports journalists from all across the country who, as informed, competent and impartial, would comprise the group of electors....

A young French economist got a lesson in risk assessment when she arrived in Chicago last week for the 13th International Conference on Cultural Economics. She turned her back on her suitcase in a hotel lobby and it vanished. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Abbing was at the meeting, with an answer right out of Econ. 101: supply and demand. “Artists are poor because there are so many of them,” he says....

When in 1997 Don Turner began pushing to get the city to create a permanent memorial to the Haymarket tragedy, he knew that history wasn’t on his side. For years city officials had avoided commemorating the site, near the intersection of Randolph and Desplaines, because of the stigma of anarchism and the violence associated with the event. The police didn’t want to see cop killers glorified. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fascinating reading in the Wednesday morning Tribune. The quest for the Higgs boson at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago has reached its end game. With just a few more months to bag the elusive boson, the Fermi lab is in what the Tribune called a “flat-out sprint.” because next year the Large Hadron Collider comes on line outside Geneva, Switzerland....

A gag Christmas gift came to my house, a “countdown clock” key chain labeled “Backwards Bush.” As I write there are 1,114 days, 8 hours, 27 minutes, and–let’s see–20.9 seconds left in his second term. That’s an eternity if you don’t like Bush. I’m guessing most Bush bashers who read the Tribune editorials, which concluded on December 28, judged them a shameless apologia for the president. Given the language that launched them, I found them surprisingly balanced....