This tap and hip-hop revue combines a chummy, down-home feeling with Broadway-echelon professionalism. The sense of community is earned: the show’s 16 hoofers and 3 breakdancers lived together in apartments or houses during recent rehearsals in New York City and South Bend (where producer Cari G. Shein lives). And director-choreographer Derick K. Grant–who starred in Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk–personally brought together the nationally recognized cast. He’s known Bril Barrett and Martin “Tre” Dumas III, founders of Chicago’s M....

This revue brings out everything that’s playful, melancholy, romantic, sexy, and joyful about blues music. Based on a concept by Ron Taylor with a book by Charles Bevel, Lita Gaithers, Randal Myler, Taylor, and Dan Wheetman and choreography by Donald McKayle, the Tony-winning It Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues is directed by Myler for Northlight Theatre in its Chicago premiere. Using minimal narration, the show traces the history of the blues through performances of the music that shaped it (traditional African music, spirituals, slave work songs) as well as performances in its many styles, including Delta blues and Chicago electric blues....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Attendance was minimal at the screening I attended of Aki Kaurismaki‘s Lights in the Dusk, which played at the Gene Siskel Film Center last week (July 20-26), though somehow you suspect Kaurismaki would’ve wanted it that way. Or maybe this way: one lonely viewer in an otherwise empty theater, the better to nip any general stirrings of levity in the bud....

The 14 wildly inventive stories in Melissa Fraterrigo’s new collection, The Longest Pregnancy (Livingston Press), could be episodes of The Twilight Zone. By turns sweet, sad, twisted, funny, disturbing, and downright creepy, there’s not a clunker in the bunch. Among Fraterrigo’s plotlines: an unhappy small-town housewife contemplates running away with her lover to Chicago but is enticed to stay home by an armchair that burps jewelry; a couple and the giants who live next door swap wives; the strongest woman in the world has trouble finding a boyfriend; a 40-year-old priest takes a schoolgirl he longs for to an adventure park where wild animals hunt people....

Playwright-director Shawn Prakash Reddy has fine-tuned his gloriously profane send-up of historical reenactments, premiered last fall at the Rhinoceros Theater Festival. Fortunately he’s kept the excellent six-member ensemble and general approach, putting forth speculative half-truths and fabricating outrageous lies about John Wilkes Booth’s 1865 assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Obscuring key facts about the principal figures and about the subsequent trial, Reddy proves there’s an awful lot of wiggle room when it comes to history, which can easily be distorted to serve any agenda....

A little over year ago residents along Bowmanville Avenue began asking their alderman, Pat O’Connor of the 40th Ward, to put in speed humps to slow traffic. According to Betty Redmond, who lives on the street, “he said he’d look into it.” And they don’t just slip down Bowmanville. “You’ve got cars going 40 to 50 miles an hour,” says Redmond. “People blow through stop signs, or they do the ‘California stops’–where they slow but don’t come to a full stop....

One of the most enjoyable action films I’ve seen in a while, this low-budget adventure from Thailand is being positioned as the international crossover for martial artist Tony Jaa. As a screen presence he’s negligible, but in action he’s something to see, hammering his opponents with well-aimed thigh kicks. The story that’s been assembled around him is lovably old-fashioned: He plays a teenage orphan in a rural village whose people still revere Ong-Bak, a giant Buddha statue left over from a war with the Burmese 200 years earlier....

David Cerda describes his Scarrie–the Musical as a “parodage”–a parody that also pays homage. What he respectfully ridicules in this Hell in a Handbag production (reworked from a successful late-night show) is Brian De Palma’s 1976 film adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie, about a bullied high school girl with telekinetic powers. For the homage part, Cerda reconstructs the film scene by scene, sticking to almost overly faithful re-creations of the production design and dialogue....

Last winter Bruce Tharp and Stephanie Munson, the husband-and-wife design team known as Materious, entered their latest creation, the Cubby, in Design Within Reach’s second annual Modern + Design + Function: Chicago Furniture Now competition. A combination coat hook and storage nook, the deceptively simple design–a slightly upturned hollow cylinder–beat out 183 other entries to win Best in Show. The award got the attention of design-porn blogs like Inhabitat and Stylehive, and over the spring the couple was inundated with e-mails from people as far away as Japan asking where they could buy one....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week New Times published a long article under the joint bylines of owner Jim Larkin and executive editor Michael Lacey ridiculing the subpoena, which they called a “breathtaking abuse” of the Constitution by Arpaio, county attorney Andrew Thomas, and special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik. Arpaio’s a lawman notorious nationally and frequently reelected locally for a penal philosophy that that has him blessing inmates with chain gangs, pink underwear, and green bologna....

Bobby Leonhard recalls the time, around Thanksgiving 2003, when he was told his West Virginia National Guard unit was being sent to Iraq. “Starting out it was kind of exciting, just knowing we were going off to this foreign land and we were going to be on the front line. At the same time I was like, wow, I might die out there.” A drama student at West Virginia University whose dad was a career army officer, Leonhard had joined the guard in 1999, when being a weekend warrior seemed a good way to help with college costs....

Back in the 80s, Angel Dean, Sue Garner, and Amy Rigby lent their gorgeous vocal harmonies to a New York group called the Last Roundup. They put out a single album of homespun country, Twister (Rounder, 1986), and then disbanded. Garner went on to play in relatively experimental rock outfits like Fish & Roses and Run On, though she and Rigby also crafted delicate, clever pop in the Shams; Dean worked sporadically with country-rock bands like the Zephyrs and Shackwacky before moving to Providence, Rhode Island, with her husband, horror writer Jonathan Thomas....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s the beginning of Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables: Seasonal Recipes and Stories from a Community Supported Farm, by Boone County’s walking collection of ironies, biodynamic farmer John Peterson. Its generous format encompasses more than 200 recipes (organized by vegetable and season) in more than 300 pages, and it’s one of the few cookbooks you can enjoy reading when you’re not hungry....

Rest assured, some band or album you love is savaged in The Overrated Book (Last Gasp). Chunklet editor and publisher Henry Owings (“chafing America’s ass since 1992”) has culled a collection of writings from past issues of the zine to haze indie filmmakers (Guy Maddin is a “pompous, self-important jerk-off”), actors, records (London Calling? Ouch!), and musicians (Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen: “So he had one arm, big fuckin’ deal”). The vitriol can be extremely sophomoric (I mean in a good way), and there are some nice essays on topics such as why it sucks to be in a band and what a skank Winona Ryder is....

My name is Anjelica Kieltyka. I am at the very center of the “[J. Michael] Bailey controversy” at Northwestern [“Sex and Transsexuals,” December 12; Letters, December 19, January 2]. May I finally speak for myself? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Allow me to set the record straight on Rodkin’s not-so-straight reporting. Basically he “queered” the facts throughout his article. As to my most important role as Transexual Advocate (something the whole Chicago transexual community and the Chicago TransHealth service community knew about), Dennis Rodkin never mentions it, ignoring this key aspect of my work with Bailey and the transexual women he exploited, just as Bailey did throughout his book....

At the September 1 annual city budget hearing, held at Falconer Elementary on the northwest side, Mayor Daley was doing what he does best: telling people what they want to hear while promising nothing. To the activist who asked for more money to alleviate overcrowding at a local school, Daley said, “You got my ear.” To the woman who complained about a rude city employee, he said, frowning, “Is he in this room?...

Over the course of four decades, protofusion guitarist Larry Coryell has made some extraordinarily dynamic music, some extraordinarily unfocused music, and some music that managed to be both at once. But he’s aged gracefully: playing songs from the Great American Songbook, folk-blues standards, and his jazz-rock originals, he brings a unique phrasing–brittle on the surface but substantive underneath–to the postbop guitar language he helped create. These days Coryell never sounds better than when he’s accompanied by the local boys that make up his Chicago trio....

The weight room at Union Park wasn’t much of a facility–just a dingy little room in the field house under the el stop at Lake and Ashland, but it meant a lot to the people who used it. On July 16 the Park District closed it. As one lifter put it, “something’s pretty out of whack” in a city that can afford to spend $475 million on Millennium Park but can’t afford a few hundred dollars to buy some weights for the people who use a small park on the near west side....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seeking to curb insider trading, the agency that oversees Spain’s stock exchange announced in May that it would soon implement a rule requiring directors of listed companies to provide not just the names of their family members but the names of anyone else with whom they have an “affectionate relationship.” Also in May, the city of Nanjing, China, stepped up its fight against corruption by ordering municipal officials to disclose any extramarital affairs they might be having....

Shakespeare’s Sister isn’t buying amateur anthropologist Robert Putnam’s latest alleged finding — that diverse communities are less trusting than homogeneous ones. Her experience in Chicago’s northeasternmost neighborhood was quite different: “I lived in Chicago’s most ethnically diverse neighborhood, Rogers Park, for a decade, the last two years of which were spent as part of a condo association that looked like a mini-U.N. — whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Arabs, Jews, mixed-race individuals and couples, straight people, gay people....