Selling Chicago Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dubbed Theatre Week Chicago, the promotion is the brainchild of FM 100 general manager Bill Bungeroth. “We really don’t celebrate theater in Chicago the way New York does,” says Bungeroth, who mentioned this disparity several weeks ago to League of Chicago Theatres marketing director Michael Pauken. Pauken agreed with Bungeroth but noted that the league can’t afford to undertake high-visibility promotional campaigns, particularly ones that involve television advertising....

I’m always surprised at how satisfying it is to be read to, to sit back and listen to someone else’s voice while the imagination creates, from words alone, the perfect theater of the mind. Late last year when John Mahoney read aloud, in his cultivated, resonant voice, Stuart Dybek’s wistful reminiscence Pet Milk, you not only saw, heard, tasted, and smelled everything the story’s narrator described, but you couldn’t help but feel his regret and nostalgia as he recalled a long-gone girlfriend....

TinFish Productions, at Heartland Studio Theater. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Horror is engendered primarily by Things Unseen, which makes it difficult to produce in an externalized medium like the stage. It comes as no surprise, then, that the stories in TinFish Productions’ second annual Halloween show, Storytellers, concerned with the characters’ behavior–Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The New Catacomb” and Bram Stoker’s “The Squaw”–fare better than those concerned with the characters’ sensitivities: Edgar Allan Poe’s case study “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Vampyre,” adapted from Dr....

Like everyone squeezed by the post-World War II housing shortage, Milly and Bill Sexton were hot to get into a home of their own. After eight years of marriage and two babies, the Porter, Indiana, couple were making do in a cramped cottage owned by Milly’s father when they saw an ad for “the house America has been waiting for.” It was the Lustron Home, a prefabricated ranch house made entirely of steel....

By Harold Henderson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Obtaining entry into high-rise buildings or [gated] residential compounds to canvass will be difficult,” writes UIC political scientist, former alderman, and former congressional candidate Dick Simpson in his new book Winning Elections: A Handbook of Modern Participatory Politics. “Four practical methods of gaining entrance are: 1) to have a contact who lives in the building let the canvasser in, 2) to walk in at the same time as someone who lives in the building, 3) to call people listed on the precinct poll list over the speaker system until someone willing to talk about the election lets the canvasser in, and 4) to walk up to the doorman, say hello and act as if he is expected to open the door, and often he will....

Sally Timms’s new solo album, To the Land of Milk and Honey, begins with a classic bit of world-weary torch singing: “Round up the usual suspects / Somebody has broke my heart again.” The mix of languor and humor delivered by her remarkable and expressive voice sets the tone nicely for the striking collection of originals and covers that follow. The record is the first of Timms’s solo work to be released in America; her show this Saturday at the Double Door is her first solo appearance in Chicago....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most appalling was Hayford’s blatant disregard for the facts: twice in the piece he actually depletes the number of deaths in an attempt to prove his point. In the lead graph he states the bomb killed “more than 100 people.” The number of people killed in the bombing was 166–a lot closer to 200 than 100 if you feel the need (as he obviously did) to round it off to the nearest hundred....

WAYNE HANCOCK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On his second album, That’s What Daddy Wants (Ark 21), Austin singer Wayne “the Train” Hancock makes a few nods toward commercial country. There are drums on three cuts; there’s also an accordion on “87 Southbound,” brash horns on several other tunes, and an ultracatchy Beatles-esque hook on “Misery.” But the specter of Hank Williams still hovers, particularly in Hancock’s nasal twang, and in his jumpy melange of hillbilly boogie, raucous swing, and old-time country, Hancock’s MO is selective appropriation, not tacky revivalism or radio pandering....

To the Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Currently, Amtrak’s eight daily Chicago-Milwaukee trains pass about a mile west of (Mitchell) airport on the Soo Line Railroad’s double-tracked main line. If a platform were built and a shuttle bus established to meet all trains from Chicago, passengers originating their trips at Chicago Union Station could be inside the terminal at Mitchell in about an hour and 30 minutes....

All the works in “Corporalities: Films & Videos by Chicago Artists” are by former or present students of the School of the Art Institute. The five films vary in quality, but three or four are similar enough to suggest a “school style”–collagelike combinations, image modification through optical printing, enigmatic, often autobiographical content, and the use of personalizing voice-over narration–which at times becomes self-indulgent. Edward Rankus’s video Nerve Language doesn’t focus on personal emotions; its precisely composed, tableaulike images present human physiology, nature, and video technology as inextricably linked....

This Lyric Opera revival of its imaginative though shopworn Jean-Pierre Ponnelle production of Don Giovanni boasts two strong new voices. Bryn Terfel, who sings Leporello, is a burly young baritone from Wales who was raised on a sheep farm and exudes natural authority onstage. He rose through the operatic ranks quickly, with his clear diction and exceptionally versatile vocal range, totally unspoiled by the prettified Oxford choral tradition. Luba Orgonasova, making her Lyric debut as Donna Anna, is likely to put an unconventional spin on the role of a woman spurned....

Yeast infections may be out of the medicine closet, but they can still make an audience squirm. And that’s just what the comedy team Nude Coffee is after. “Is it lumpy like cottage cheese?” asks an impatient Mele. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Yes,” Hill answers. The audience groans. A few guys in the front row slap one another on the shoulder; women nod....

Iris DeMent’s debut, Infamous Angel, released on Philo two years ago, combined country and western verities with a healthy agnosticism: here was an authentically “new country” star whose antique approach to the music reassured those who distrusted some of the more psychedelic aspects of the new wave. At the same time, her debut demonstrated with devastating directness one of new country’s givens: that the contemporary country one hears on the radio, for all its trumpeting of tradition, is a mess of contrivance and froth and contemptuous of the true roots of the music....

On the subject of singing, the line between cabaret performance and jazz vocalizing has always appeared a little blurry; just consider how many people think of jazz pioneer Billie Holiday as a “nightclub singer,” and how many others lump someone like Andrea Marcovicci in among the jazz chirps. But Jackie Allen does more than blur the line. She exploits the middle ground between these two forms to arrive at a quietly spectacular style–romantic yet unsentimental, musically sophisticated but instantly accessible–and in the process reveals her mastery of both jazz and cabaret idioms....

JARDIN DE PULPOS The actors in Taller del Sotano understand the importance of mastering the fundamentals. The exquisite physical control these artists display is restricted in America to the best professional sports teams. The cast spent two months, all day, every day, just developing a physical language for Jardin de pulpos (“Octopus Garden”), given its American premiere at this year’s International Theatre Festival. And all this work was done without the benefit of pay....

The Dragon and the Pearl An active and influential woman in a turbulent era, Pearl Buck is a likely candidate for a one-person show about a famous writer, which is what led producer Tony Cacciotti to commission such a play for his wife, Valerie Harper, from playwright Marty Martin. But unlike other literary heavyweights such as Gertrude Stein (played by Pat Carroll in an earlier Martin script), Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and Emily Dickinson, Buck has no familiar public persona on which an actor can capitalize....

SERVICE SECTOR Theater Oobleck’s new late-night offering, Service Sector, eloquently and hilariously illustrates this point by turning reality on its head. Instead of a world where home deliveries are a rarity, this play offers a world in which any home service you can imagine, from dog walkers to Latin teachers to coffee stewards, is available with a single phone call. And it’s service with an obsequious smile too. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Where to start with this one? Perhaps with James Newton, who has established himself as modern jazz’s preeminent flutist without sacrificing his talent for performing classical music (both new and old). Newton has incorporated the innovations of Eric Dolphy–who played the flute with an unprecedented emotional forcefulness–into a style that boasts flawless technique and improvisational daring. This is not news: for instance, when the Jazz Institute of Chicago contracted Newton for one of his earliest local appearances, back in 1983, his reputation already preceded him....

JUNIOR BROWN, 1/14, SCHUBAS, 1/15, FITZGERALD’S Inventor of the guit-steel (an electric guitar and a steel guitar fused into one instrument), Austin’s Junior Brown sings with the deep, warm drawl of Texas Troubadour Ernest Tubb, but he also plays with the urgent frenzy of lid-flipping pyrotechnician Speedy West. His richly variegated repertoire of songs is embedded in the nonsappy traditionalism of the 50s, exhibiting that period’s droll, timeless humor and wordplay (“I’m just doing what comes easy / And it’s not that hard to do”)....

By Michael Miner Stump’s dispatch tells how he made a phone call and found out that accepting the nomination to the advisory board would cost him $5,000, with other substantial expenses to follow–such as $1,000 to attend the Republican Convention Gala. “A real bargain, a sort of political one-cent sale on clout,” reports Stump, given that “Clinton’s President’s Advisory Council charges $50,000 and up.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....