Broadway actor Martin Moran won a 2004 Obie for this autobiographical monologue, recounting the sexual abuse he endured for three years as an adolescent from a thirtysomething camp counselor. Moran’s presence may have lent power to the script’s wearying literary excess, heavy-handed metaphors, and structural imbalance–every moment of his first sexual encounter is voyeuristically chronicled, yet there’s hardly a word to explain why he kept coming back for more, including a three-way with the counselor’s wife....

In September Kris Paulson attended the “worldwide launch” of an animatronic creature named iZ at the Toys “R” Us in Times Square. Nine inches tall and shaped like a squat bowling pin, iZ has big wide eyes, trumpetlike ears, three legs with disk-shaped feet (it can balance on any one of them, appearing to be in mid-sproing), and–maybe most significantly–a line-in jack for an iPod or other music player. A store employee showed Paulson how you could play music through iZ, how the toy contributes its own sound effects and commentary, how its built-in beats and lead and rhythm tracks could be used to make music, how it giggles wildly when its belly is “tickled” or tapped rapidly....

Except for a few jabs at foot-in-mouth politicians, this Second City National Touring Company production forgoes the biting satire its title suggests. Instead it focuses on keenly observed but lighter-weight issues, offering insights on American families, dating, body image, and Pollyanna propensities in the face of real problems like war and homelessness. The six-member ensemble misses nary a beat; Shelly Gossman, Hans Holsen, and Brendan Jennings display exceptional range. The singing is just OK, but the performers sell their songs–Holsen even offers a touching, comical homage to off-key crooning....

Two cheery, even hilarious works that are informed by a surrealist spirit are showing this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Each says plenty about what’s wrong with the world, yet neither has a villain. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, showing in a sparkling new archival CinemaScope print, is a wild avant-garde satire of Western culture circa 1957 by writer-director Frank Tashlin....

Seven Guitars Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seven Guitars was in fact famously attacked for its slow-moving style by critic and director Robert Brustein in 1996. Earlier that year Wilson decried the lack of support for African-American companies in a speech delivered at the conference of a national theater-services organization, Theatre Communications Group, and published in American Theatre. Among other things, he charged New Republic writer Brustein with “a presumption of inferiority of the work of minority artists....

Far Away The story takes place in an unnamed setting at an unknown time. In the first act, ten-year-old Joan tells her aunt, Harper, about a strange shrieking noise she heard outside her aunt and uncle’s home. Harper tries to put a soothing spin on the story–first she says it must have been an owl, then a party thrown by the girl’s uncle. But once it becomes clear that Joan has seen him herding people from a truck into a bloody shed, where he strikes them with an iron rod, Harper swears her to secrecy....

For years Daniel Barenboim has been programming Beethoven with contemporary works to great effect–not just using familiar favorites to get audiences to sit through stuff they might otherwise never hear, but using the new to highlight the freshness of the old. The edge-of-your-seat performance a couple weeks ago of two Schnittke concerti grossi and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is a case in point. This weekend Barenboim will lead the CSO in Beethoven’s sublimely lyrical violin concerto, which combines majestic symphonic and intimate violin writing....

FEBRUARY “We focus primarily on indie rock, but we all have an intense love/hate relationship with classic rock, as well as lots of other types of music,” says Jake Brown, one of the founders of the three-year-old Web zine Glorious Noise. The site’s content runs the gamut from ruminations on Janet Jackson’s boob to an interview with the tour manager for an unknown, struggling band; there are also book and record reviews, discussion boards, and free, legal MP3s....

Gary Shteyngart’s satirical 2002 best seller, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, charted the travails of a transparently autobiographical hero named Vladimir Girshkin: he emigrates to the U.S. from Leningrad in 1978, just like Shteyngart did, and spends the balance of his life failing to assimilate. Shteyngart ups the ante in his new novel, Absurdistan (Random House). Girshkin returns in a cameo, but his alter ego status is challenged by two characters. The antihero, Misha Vainberg, fancies himself a bit of a holy fool....

Last October, Russel O’Brien received a letter from a New York writer he’d exchanged a few e-mails with but had never met. “Dear Russel,” it began. “Your word, should you choose to accept it, is: fuse.” So O’Brien went out and got fuse tattooed on his back, just below his neck. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I like ideas I’m pissed off I didn’t think of,” says O’Brien, the visual arts curator at the Old Town School of Folk Music....

In late 1998 Norah Utley printed up 1,000 promotional buttons that said “I (heart) Norah (TM).” For the next three years she handed them out at shows and bars around town. “You know how there’s bands that you’ve never heard but are really well-known because people always wear their buttons?” she says. “That was my attempt to try and do the same thing, but with myself.” Utley’s buttons have since turned up as far west as California–a friend of hers spotted somebody wearing one in a club in LA....

Sir Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella, first performed in 1948, is remarkable for its mildness and subtle shadings. Only the stepsisters even approach the raucous: played by men in drag (Ashton himself danced one of them), they’re utterly ridiculous–ungainly giants who tower over Cinderella yet are clearly nowhere near as strong, confident, or proud. Clomping around adjusting their boobs and giving themselves airs, they’re no genuine threat–they’re too funny. And because there’s no wicked stepmother here, the only thing oppressing Cinderella is the death of her mother....

Back in November, when he was looking to build support for his budget, Mayor Daley promised voters he’d be on their side come spring, fighting in Springfield to extend the so-called cap on rising property taxes. But when the vote came on May 3, Daley was in the Middle East, far from the legislative fray and of no help in defending the bill, which was soundly defeated. Meanwhile, house speaker Michael Madigan voted for the measure while playing a passive role in its defeat....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Doss is president and CEO of the International Bottled Water Association, which represents 450 companies. He said the association has already begun to address concerns about the petroleum used in making plastic water bottles and landfill space used up when people don’t recycle them. The bottles are now lighter than they once were and use much less plastic than other beverage bottles, he said, adding that the association is a leader in recycling....

I’m a 21-year-old straight guy with a boring, straight sex life. Until a few months ago, when something terrifying happened. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So I agree–awful decision–to meet up. When I get to the bar where we agreed to meet, she calls me and tells me to come to her friend’s apartment instead. When I get there it’s totally dark. She calls again and tells me not to turn any lights on when I come in, just to get naked in the bed and wait for her....

South of Cicero, West of the Planes Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But that’s not the kind of detail likely to bog down a company that plops an ellipsis in the middle of its name. Thusing, who’s worked around town for about six years as a director and stage manager–and was one of the people laid off when Noble Fool shut its Loop theater at the end of April–says she and most of the ten other people in the company had been kicking around the idea of opening a theater on the city’s southwest side for several years....

“Hideous Transformations,” a show organized by Synapse Arts Collective, isn’t nearly as dire as it sounds. Subtitled “Strange Tales of the Ordinary,” it highlights the oddity of often-overlooked activities and experiences. Synapse artistic director Rachel Damon presents a reworked piece from 2003, Language Body, set to her complex, layered score of involuntary sounds: sighing, snoring, sneezing, yawning, retching, laughing. More often humorous than horrifying, this study of human habits creates a bizarre universe out of everyday actions....

Nearly 18 years ago, when she was 13, JoAnn “Holly” McGuire Campbell was at a party where three people were shot and killed and a fourth was wounded. She identified 15-year-old Jason Gray as the shooter, and her testimony was key to his conviction. In March the judge granted Gray a new trial, and if the prosecutors’ appeal fails, Holly might well be back on the stand. If so, it’s likely the case will again turn on whether the jury believes she saw what she says she saw....

At five o’clock on a Friday afternoon the sidewalk along Madison in front of the main entrance to the Metra station is bustling. Commuters pour out of the doors and start looking for taxis. Waiting is a long line of them, dropping off fares and eagerly picking up new ones. “If you picked someone up they wrote you a ticket. I asked one aide, ‘Why can’t we pick up fares here?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not that I’m put off by this, since for the most part I eagerly look forward to trailers—the more of ’em the better. At the old, depressing Plaza Theatre (part of the former Plitt chain before reincarnating itself—twice—as a discount outlet store, now mercifully demolished) at Devon and McCormick just west of the North Shore Channel, there’d typically be half a dozen or more per show—a lot of ’em more technically accomplished than the B-movie flotsam and Canadian tax-shelter dregs that made up the weekly playbill....