One of the 80s’ finest bands, the Pogues created whiskey-splashed Celtic folk rock that was an exhilarating blend of musical virtuosity and gob-in-the-face fury. The group’s 1988 LP If I Should Fall From Grace With God was one of that decade’s certifiable gems. Back then it seemed that while veteran players like Terry Woods gave the Pogues their chops, the inspired Shane MacGowan was the group’s heart and soul–a view that was verified after MacGowan and the Pogues parted ways (reportedly because MacGowan had become a booze-sodden, drug-drained wreck) and the Pogues released a pleasant but punchless record that only highlighted MacGowan’s absence....

“A day in the life of Festus, Missouri,” is the way the Bottle Rockets’ Brian Henneman laughingly describes his band’s second album, The Brooklyn Side. This quotidian panorama is of ceaseless interest to Henneman. “Festus is getting bigger than it used to be,” he reflects. “It’s got to be 10,000 people. It’s practically a suburb. It’s getting there, and they won’t rest until it does.” The Brooklyn Side, he laughs, is about “the way it works every single day down here....

LENNY KRAVITZ 2/2, Aragon On his fourth album, Circus (Virgin), Lenny Kravitz continues skimming the past in search of familiar settings for his well-worn religious platitudes. Kravitz plays almost everything on the record himself, borrowing mostly from Jimi Hendrix while evoking a John Bonham-esque wallop and a Sly Stone-ish funk. Just like the title of the album’s opening track, “Rock and Roll Is Dead,” Kravitz seems to feel it’s better to exist as a zombie than to come alive with something new....

No No, I Was Sleeping You Know In its debut performance Lucky Pierre has hit the ground running, proceeding with sure steps through a slippery evening, taking its place at the right hand of one of Chicago’s most influential and benevolent performance goddesses, Lin Hixson of Goat Island. At her left hand sits the Cook County Theater Department, and scrunched in there somewhere is Doorika. All four groups share a love of textual non sequiturs and physical absurdity....

THE HEART OF A DOG Lookingglass Theatre Greedily occupying a suite of seven rooms, the apartment building’s celebrity tenant is a professor who cosmetically alters the elite of a “classless” society, rejuvenating divas with monkey ovaries and offering codgers a second stab at love–at the risk of turning their hair green. His latest experiment–to turn Sharik, a mangy, streetwise Moscow mutt, into a human through a pituitary implant–misfires when the dog develops the flaws of the brawling thug who gave him his gland....

The real political atrocity this year was the choice of Clinton or Dole. Joan Rivers got it right when she noted that picking between them was like choosing your favorite Menendez brother. But Chicago’s puttering pols stalwartly held their own, patting themselves on their collective back because the 1996 Democratic Convention didn’t result in a repeat of the 1968 police riots. And guess what–the Haymarket riot, 1919 race riot, Chicago Fire, and Fort Dearborn massacre also did not recur....

Hailing from Sicily–a region not exactly known for its noisy rock bands–Uzeda possess a distinctly European take on aggressive American postpunk. On 1993’s impressive Steve Albini-recorded Waters (A.V. Arts) the stop-on-a-dime precision and broad dynamic range of drummer Davide Oliveri and bassist Raffaele Gulisano combine with the skewed twin-guitar attack of Agostino Tilotta and Gianni Nicosia to produce bracingly off-kilter, subversively substantive structures that eschew blammo excess. Emerging from this tightly constructed sonic architecture, the distinctive vocals of Giovanna Cacciola–which recall a haggard, unsweetened Kim Deal–create a luxuriant tension; amid the din, sometimes in direct opposition to it, she traces faint melodic contours that sound nothing like typical American pop....

DANCE AFRICA/CHICAGO 1993 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But dance on a concert stage has to be structured to make theatrical sense, a concern separate from but sometimes related to such magic. And for some reason at DanceAfrica/Chicago 1993, sponsored again by the Dance Center of Columbia College, I kept thinking about whether things made sense theatrically or not. For one thing, novelty is a theatrical virtue, and the lineup here was completely new: none of the four companies had appeared in the two previous DanceAfricas....

What’s Wrong With Chicago Opera Theater? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » COT’s demise really began as long ago as the fall of 1990, when it bid farewell to Marc Scorca, who left his post as general manager after six years with the company. After encouraging a bold expansion in programming that included lavish productions of Carousel at the Shubert Theatre and Where the Wild Things Are at the Chicago Theatre, Scorca walked away to become executive director of OPERA America....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was pleased with Patrick Griffin’s reflections on Christmas (“The True Meaning of Xmas,” December 17, 1993). I am a Christian who has despised the holiday for years, though in recent times I have made peace with Yuletide by ignoring it, and allowing my wife to take care of the shopping and decorating. She and the boys like it, and I wouldn’t want to deprive them....

“I do not allow my feelings to flow into the theatrical embodiment,” Bertolt Brecht told an interviewer in 1926, around the time the rising German sensation had begun work on the play Fatzer: Demise of the Egotist. “This would falsify the world. I do not write for the scum who value having their heartstrings plucked.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brecht, of course, was passionate about ideas....

The fire at Augusta and Ashland on May 27, 1992, was the third of the day for Michael McGuire, a fire fighter with Engine Company 30. The fire was blazing in the back of a coach house and spread quickly to the neighboring houses across the oil and trash that someone had put down to accelerate the fire. McGuire’s truck was one of two called to the scene. “A fireman comes up to me and says he’s hurt,” Dennis McGuire says....

HUBBARD STREET DANCE CHICAGO But what is Hubbard Street? With the retirement of Claire Bataille, in 1992, none of the original dancers remain. The troupe doesn’t have a high turnover, but it does have some (the dance world, with its low pay, short careers, and intense working conditions, is notoriously fluid). Since the dancers move on and the company’s choreography is eclectic, the answer has to be that Hubbard Street is the people who run it....

DANCES OF INNOCENCE AND DESIRE Bartoszek’s work demands a certain open-mindedness from the observer, a willingness to let go of preconceived notions and simply let the images unfold as they will. It’s not emotionally powerful stuff like Robin Lakes’s. It’s not technically dazzling like Hubbard Street’s. In Sweet Baby, Baby Suite, which premiered at the Dance Center of Columbia College, Bartoszek conjures up the gentle, delightful, and sometimes fearful feelings that come with early motherhood....

I want to thank Jeff Dorchen, the Voice of the People, for revealing the perfidious and evil nature of Jack Helbig (Letters, October 11). Having grown up in the Soviet Union, I know the importance of unmasking and destroying antisocial elements. Mr. Dorchen’s denunciation rivals the best such articles from Pravda, both in structure and style. I was particularly pleased that he wasted so little time on Mr. Helbig’s article or abilities as a critic, and instead concentrated enthusiastically on the shocking personal revelations: such as the fact that Mr....

NIGHT AND DAY With Guilaine Londez, Thomas Langmann, Francois Negret, Nicole Colchat, Pierre Laroche, and Christian Crahay. And finally, after they make love, this closing exchange: “You must sleep, Jack. You’ll have an accident.” “Next year.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The musical-comedy-like rhythms of their dialogue are far from accidental. Roughly speaking, Night and Day is Akerman’s third and most successful attempt at capturing the feel of a musical–after Les annees 80 (1983), an inspired feature-length trailer for one, and Golden Eighties (aka Window Shopping, 1986), a charming if somewhat disappointing fulfillment of the earlier prospectus....

In the middle of winter the old squaw is not an uncommon bird at the southern end of Lake Michigan. When the lake is well filled with ice these northern ducks search for the stretches of open water, and there they seek rest and food. A gunner who took station at the end of the government pier in Chicago one winter’s day, killed a hundred old squaws in a few hours’ time....

A cow never changes facial expression. This 1,500 pound black and white Holstein here in one of the barns of the University of Illinois animal sciences department dairy research farm has flies crawling around the white expanse between her translucent black eyes. She looks up from her trough of dirty yellow hay and stares at me with impassiveness, a touch of guilt, submission. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Expect stands nonchalantly swishing her tail as farm manager Gene McCoy removes the plug from her porthole....

In recent years I’ve wondered what makes Jan Erkert’s choreography so moving. The movements are rarely literal–it isn’t as if we’re drawn in by a facile, familiar gesture that suggests emotion. And though she often chooses cut-to-the-bone subjects–losing one’s children, experiencing a deathly illness–she doesn’t hit us over the head with them. Her dances are at some elegant remove from life yet all the more powerful for that. Watching a rehearsal of her new piece Gaps made me think I’d found her secret: she establishes an energy, then transforms it continually....

The Little Tommy Parker Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show We tend to think of 19th-century minstrel shows as white actors wearing blackface and acting out reconstruction-era stereotypes of “darky life on the Old Plantation,” in the words of one old playbill. But by the 1870s, as Allen Woll notes in his book Black Musical Theatre, troupes of self-proclaimed “real and original” African American entertainers were competing with white companies. The 1890 census listed 1,490 black professional actors, and most of them were employed by minstrel shows....