The Lady From the Sea ShawChicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seldom produced, it’s perhaps the only Ibsen play that can be characterized as a comedy, complete with happy ending. But it’s comedy of the Chekhovian sort, focused on trapped and unfulfilled characters. A group of people gathered at Dr. Wangel’s remote estate discover that cupid’s arrows have pierced all the wrong targets. Wangel is concerned about his high-strung wife, Ellida, and invites an old family friend, Dr....

Michael Hollinger’s dark-comedy thriller, set in the McCarthy era, has little to say about the political issues that underlie the story. A satire without teeth, all it essentially does is speculate about what would happen if the McCarthys’ daughter fell in love with a Jewish communist spy. Still, the play can be funny, as Jessica Thebus and her able cast demonstrate in this well-crafted production. Hollinger has a flair for the sort of wisecracks that pepper film noir–or maybe the leads, Scott Jaeck and Tracy Michelle Arnold, have a flair for making wisecracks sound brilliant....

Regina Spektor’s career got off the ground a few years ago when she was invited to open for the Strokes in the U.S. and Europe during their Room on Fire tour. But Spektor’s managed to do something her former tourmates couldn’t: release a second record that’s a marked progression from her first. On 2003’s Soviet Kitsch she sounded a little awestruck and childlike, a young singer struggling to wrap her hands around the world, and her voice contrasted beautifully with the booming maturity of her baroque piano-and-strings arrangements....

Even in this era of greatly reduced vocal expectations, it’s usually not a good idea for dance producers to sing. Most of them simply don’t have much in the way of chops, and Aksel Schaufler, the German producer-DJ who records as Superpitcher, is no exception. But on Here Comes Love (Kompakt), his debut full-length, his reedy little voice, an unholy cross between David Sylvian and Chris Rea, perfectly suits the music’s forlorn longing....

To my left a woman in a halter top was wearing a beige adhesive patch on her biceps–I wasn’t sure if it was for birth control or nicotine. In the corner I spied stretch-marked areolae overflowing from a too-tiny jacket. In front of me rhinestone snakes swirled up the calves of a pair of metallic boots with silver stiletto heels and the price tags still on. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Soon after he arrived in Madagascar in 1989 Steve Goodman, a research biologist at the Field Museum, had his nose rubbed in some hard truths about the country. He accompanied some visiting herpetologists to a remote forest on the island to search for reptiles and amphibians, and they collected several skinks previously unknown to science. The herpetologists went home and wrote up their discovery for a professional journal, then found they needed photographs of the skinks’ habitat....

High on the list of reasons to read a newspaper the old-fashioned way is the opportunity to wrap highfalutin editorial comment around soggy coffee grounds and drop the mess in a can. Such is the punishment we readers, who live, of course, in the real world, mete out to pundits (who of course don’t). I recall my mother’s scorn for the op-eds favoring sanctions against South Africa that she kept spotting in her local liberal rag....

Exactly what was the deal with Operation Able Archer? I was right smack in the middle of that whole thing (as a soldier stationed in Germany), but I still don’t know what exactly happened except that a number of history books hint that we were actually closer to war in October 1983 than we were during the Cuban missile crisis. –Bill Owen, Cincinnati Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s a stretch to say we were closer....

Not even 15 minutes into the workshop on property taxes, a man in the back of the room could contain himself no longer. “We cannot continue to pay at this rate,” he proclaimed, his voice cracking as he interrupted a local alderman’s opening remarks. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » How much of a revolt may depend on the sophistication of the peasantry. Assessments on the north side are up as much as 50 percent....

Friday 24 Saturday 25 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » CURT KIRKWOOD The Meat Puppets staked out their turf a quarter century ago, playing meditative sunbaked underground rock for punks who wanted to like Neil Young & Crazy Horse but hadn’t completely gotten over their hatred of hippiedom. Snow (Little Dog), Curt Kirkwood’s first solo album, sounds like the band’s messier, slicker 90s period never happened–his languorous sense of pacing meshes with a real delicacy in the songwriting and playing on guitar and pedal steel....

Karani Marcia Leslie’s 1994 play explores distorted images of African-American women in the popular media. Her arguments, illustrated by vintage film clips, are presented as part of a fanciful construct: a young executive brings a lawsuit against the stereotypes that she alleges have impeded her professional progress. Leslie’s satirical portrait of Hollywood greedheads is as timely now as it was a dozen years ago. And the cast’s performances are no more exaggerated than the didactic text requires: the testimony of every character–even a smug slave owner–gradually builds Leslie’s case for education and enlightenment....

Any play suggesting that a woman needs a workshop to help her find her clitoris strikes me as insulting, but Eve Ensler’s collection of humorous and, um . . . touching vignettes, The Vagina Monologues, has become a showbiz phenomenon. Now Metropolis Performing Arts Centre, in its first opening since Arlington Heights decided last month to throw it a lifeline and buy its venue, is presenting its own production of the wildly popular show....

Select, Lumpen, and Public Media Institute produce this annual festival, now in its fourth year, focusing on art, media, technology, and politics, with an emphasis on work generated by underground and activist communities. This year’s festival runs from Friday, April 22, through Sunday, May 1, and includes neighborhood walks, workshops on urban gardening and exterior decoration, and numerous public art installations, film/video screenings, music, lectures, and performances. The events are mostly scattered throughout the Wicker Park and Bridgeport neighborhoods....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Still, with 2007’s example to spur him on, the A.V. Club’s Noel Murray has decided it’s once again time to reflect on what the greatest year in movie history might be. “To qualify as ‘the best ever,’” he argues in what’s mostly a semantic circle, “a movie year needs to be both bounteous and pivotal,” which in his own considered view means 1974—the year of Godfather II and Chinatown and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (not to mention Celine and Julie Go Boating, which Murray confesses he hasn’t seen yet)....

New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, in town last week to lecture at the Museum of Contemporary Art, didn’t waste any time putting us rubes in our place. “Chicago’s a great place to be from,” he said. “It’s a place that has always sent talented artists and creative types out—a net exporter of talent.” Schjeldahl, who considers himself a New Yorker but admits to being a refugee from small-town Minnesota (rube central, for what it’s worth), describes our little burg as a kind of bin by the lake....

This show is such a breath of fresh air I hardly know where to begin. Playwright Jane Martin (the pseudonymous author of Talking With . . . ) has somehow packed a dissertation’s worth of observations on the absurdity of contemporary theater into the script, which follows an ill-starred San Antonio production of Three Sisters. But thanks to her featherlight, razor-sharp touch, the satire unfolds effortlessly, avoiding every overreach yet leaving damn near nothing unsaid....

Last year Azita Youseffi surprised me by saying she’d always thought of her music as something people could sing along with. True, there was a singsongy quality threading through the agitated screech of her first group, the Scissor Girls, and a semioperatic grandeur to her second band, the abrasive, shape-shifting Bride of No No. But it wasn’t until her piano-driven 2003 solo album, Enantiodromia, that Youseffi began sculpting melodies that could take root in your brain....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michael Van Winkle at the Heartland Institute keeps the libertarian case short, cool, and simple. Most commentators talk as if the big boxes will either walk or stay. But the real effects will be subtle, at the margins, and based on profitability, whether they involve building slightly smaller stores, stores just outside the city limits, automating more entry-level jobs, or opening stores that later close....

Rebound relationships are notoriously desperate, ill-conceived things. Jimmy Binns is on the rebound from the Noble Fool, the Loop comedy theater that failed abruptly and expensively last spring. You can imagine how brokenhearted he must have been as its artistic director. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. This new comedy revue, which Binns conceived and directed, opens with a speech about his bad experience. I applaud the guy for picking himself up, dusting himself off, etc–but it’s clearly far too soon for him to be dating a new troupe....

“I was born four times,” says Rachel, the protagonist of this work created by the talented young Albany Park Theater Project. Twice she was born into life in an unheated basement with a swarm of siblings, all of them under the draconian rule of a religion-obsessed father, and twice into the sanctuary of an affectionate aunt and uncle’s home. Directed by David Feiner and Laura Wiley, this play based on a true story is recounted in a multidisciplinary montage blending spoken text, interpretive dance, and original music composed by Colby Bessera and Micah Bezold....