If I may, let me let you in on one of the best-kept secrets in Chicago. The best beach is Ardmore Beach. What makes it so good is that there is no parking, and there is no beach house, and it’s hard to park on the surrounding streets. And all this is on purpose. You see, it keeps the riffraff out. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A short while back, when the Park District was building new beach houses at North Avenue Beach and at Foster Avenue Beach, they asked the Edgewater community if we would like one at Ardmore....

Ever since he took office in 1989, I’ve been under the impression that Mayor Daley was the most powerful man in Chicago. Muzikowski worked out an agreement with David Livingston, then the president of the commission, and recruited some friends to clear the lot, remove the rubble, put in sod, install a pitcher’s mound and an infield, and build a dugout. They got Bill Lavicka, the well-known preservationist and artist, to build a sculpture for the field–a mitt at the end of an arm, reaching up about 15 feet to catch a fly ball....

Sufjan Stevens The album casts its generous gaze on 200 years of Illinois vitae, but though Stevens admits that his information on the state is almost entirely secondhand, dug from books and solicited from friends, he doesn’t get all high-school-civics-class on us, pulling down a map from above the blackboard, cracking the curriculum to page one, and working forward from Lincoln in his log cabin all the way to R. Kelly trapped in a closet....

Jim Provenzano’s play, based on his novel, is a coming-of-age narrative about a high school wrestler grappling with being gay. Few of the plot developments are surprising: there’s bullying, crying, parental bafflement, innocence lost, self-knowledge won. But Provenzano shows a deep fondness for his characters and a sure understanding of the wrestling milieu. He’s particularly adept at handling the crosscurrents of fear and lust produced by the conflict between the sport’s potential homoeroticism and the team members’ homophobia....

Rembrandt’s Journey: Painter, Draftsman, Etcher Like other 17th-century painters from Caravaggio to Vermeer to Georges de la Tour, Rembrandt was a poet of light. Indeed, most of the more than 200 works in the Art Institute’s masterpiece-filled show–which in-cludes 153 prints as well as paintings, drawings, oil sketches, and original copper etching plates–can be seen as delicate duets between Rembrandt’s wonderfully fleshy sense of the physical world and his use of light to suggest imma-teriality or transcendence....

In May 1993 Brian Posen, now the producer of the annual Chicago SketchFest, found himself living at home again. Having just earned his master’s, he’d signed a six-month contract with the American Players Theatre in Wisconsin, but he’d had to break it so he could care for his father, who was ill. While his father recovered, Posen worried about his job prospects. “What the hell?” he remembers thinking. “I just got this grad degree, and here I am in the room I grew up in....

The Next Battles The fair-report privilege protects journalists who cover contentious issues argued on the public record, such as in a city council meeting or in the courts. In the case at hand, Start, a Carol Stream-based trade magazine for manufacturers, reported on an antitrust suit Rockwell Automation had filed against Solaia Technology of Chicago over a patent. When Start published an article in 2003 headlined “Conspiracy of a Shakedown,” Solaia sued for defamation....

Friday 18 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » MARIANNE FAITHFULL Released in January, Before the Poison (Anti-) might be the best album of original material the husky-voiced songbird of schadenfreude has made since Strange Weather in 1987. Her collaborators include Damon Albarn, Jon Brion, Nick Cave, and P.J. Harvey, and the last two sound like they’ve been playing with Faithfull all along, or should have been....

Shakespeare’s great comedy–about a girl who poses as a boy to help the man she loves win the woman he wants, who in turn falls for the girl posing as a boy–is played by an all-male ensemble in this remarkable touring production. Created for Moscow’s 2003 Chekhov International Theatre Festival by director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod (codirectors of Britain’s Cheek by Jowl theater company), this minimalist modern-dress staging is performed in Russian with English supertitles, which distill the text rather than display it in full....

Tim Miller’s new solo show–based on his just published book of the same name–takes its title from the number of beds he estimates he’ll spend time in during his career on the road. (One of the NEA Four, who sued the government in 1990 when their National Endowment for the Arts grants were rescinded under political pressure, the Santa Monica performance artist has been in the game for more than 20 years and is shooting for another 20....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “When I was breaking in as a reporter, I ran the police beat for the Kansas City Times. The managing editor, a crusty old guy named John Chandley, explained that he wanted me to provide at least a short item about every siren heard each night in all parts of the city, so our readers would know what had happened....

MNG by Mango Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’re accustomed to the constant frenzy across the street at H&M, the small size and laid-back atmosphere of MNG by Mango is almost underwhelming. Both chains are aiming for fashionable but budget-conscious customers, but the Spanish import’s carefully edited selection of seasonal looks, influenced more by classic style than momentary trends, may have more appeal for women in search of affordable clothes that go easily from work to play–not to mention those who prefer to shop without being jostled around to a pounding Top 40 sound track....

Friday 4/30 – Thursday 5/6 MAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 1 SATURDAY From the 1850s to the 1920s, wealthy European families impressed their friends with collections of automata, intricate mechanical dolls and figures that performed complex repetitive actions. This weekend the touring exhibit Magic and Motion: The Art of Automatons stops at the Hotel Sofitel, 20 E. Chestnut. It features more than 40 pieces belonging to Christian Bailly, who’s auctioning off all 150 of his toys–the largest collection to ever hit the market–on May 15 in Vegas....

Just three years ago independents, radicals, and libertarians up in Logan Square were howling with triumph. It wasn’t so much that their candidate, former Park District supervisor and YMCA head Rey Colon, had been elected alderman of the 35th Ward. It was that his opponent, Vilma Colom, the scourge of many local activists, had been bounced by a margin so commanding that her enemies figured she’d crawl away in shame....

Unless you count guitarist Nicke Andersson taking a turn in the Fred “Sonic” Smith spot during MC5-DKT’s 2004 tour, Sweden’s HELLACOPTERS haven’t played Chicago in four years. The album they come bearing this time is last year’s Rock & Roll Is Dead (Universal/Liquor and Poker)–and yeah, an awful lot of the great stuff is. The great dead rock ‘n’ roll in this case isn’t so much the MC5 or Johnny Thunders or even Bon Scott; the ghosts the Hellacopters seem to be channeling are Duane Allman and Ronnie Van Zant....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The New York Times reported in April on a Japanese electronics company looking to sell its art collection–which included a Cezanne, a Picasso, and a van Gogh–that asked the auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s to play rock-paper-scissors to determine which would conduct the sale. (The writer said that making such decisions via games of chance is not unusual in Japan....

The Best Man | Remy Bumppo Theatre Company PRICE $35-$40 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s been nearly 50 years since The Best Man debuted, and in some ways Gore Vidal’s biting drama about two presidential aspirants is showing its age. Set during a political convention in Philadelphia, it’s peppered with references to hot-button issues of the time: whether a Catholic could win, whether the United States should recognize “Red China,” the political dangers of supporting birth control, and the importance of politicians’ wives (and their hairdos) to the “women’s vote....

An evil twin to The War Room (1993), which documented Bill Clinton’s first White House run, this trenchant video by Rachel Boynton eavesdrops on political strategists from the Democratic consulting firm Greenberg Carville Shrum as they devise a winning presidential campaign for Bolivian free trader Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada in 2002, only to see him driven from office a year later by antiglobalization riots that left more than 100 people dead....

This poor man’s Odyssey is afflicted with a preposterous plot full of implausible separations and reunions, but because Shakespeare wrote some of it, we watch all of it. Presented on a set inspired by a Shaker meeting house, the three-hour show is oddly lavish, reflecting the script’s mishmash of styles and moods with a variety of costumes, solemn processions, and anachronistic props. In a role that’s all reactions, Ryan Artzberger never truly conveys Pericles’s suffering, but at least he doesn’t succumb to manic mugging, as some others here do....

Loving Repeating: A Musical of Gertrude Stein Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Both the quirky charm and the utopian radicalism of this legendary figure are central to Loving Repeating: A Musical of Gertrude Stein. The Gertrude that director-adapter Frank Galati and composer Stephen Flaherty portray onstage is formidable and jolly, refined and ribald. Galati’s libretto, ingeniously stitched together from Stein’s writings, celebrates her as artistic innovator and queer pioneer....