Orestes: An Alternative Rock Musical It’s a tale so lurid it makes Erik and Lyle Menendez look like the Hardy Boys: A brother and sister, heirs of the most powerful family in town, slaughter their mother because she killed her husband, their father. On trial for the crime, the matricides insist it was righteous, even divinely ordained; besides, they argue in a bid for sympathy, with a family history like theirs, how could they help it?...

Beau O’Reilly’s newest play, The Third Degrees of J.0. Breeze, doesn’t contain a single stage direction. “It’s the kind of play that forces an actor to make bold choices to support the dialogue,” explains cast member Paul Tamney, who plays the barracudalike title character. “Otherwise, things don’t click.” Tamney’s work has always been characterized by boldness-and clicking-and he’s never been stronger than he is in O’Reilly’s absurdist sci-fi drama. J.0. and his repugnant assistant the Captain, who work for an unidentified “crackpot,” are interviewing candidates for a position that somehow holds the key to mankind’s salvation....

The top brass at the Chicago Park District thought they’d figured out what to do with the great Viking ship near the duck pond in the Lincoln Park Zoo. In December they sold the replica of a 1,000-year-old wooden vessel, which has been stored in the park for most of this century, to the American Scandinavian Council, a group of Scandinavian American civic and business leaders. On the other side is the American Scandinavian Council, a stodgy bunch of businessmen, most of whom live in the suburbs....

NOVEMBER Gay male performers from the local theater, poetry, video, publishing, and performance-art scenes are coming together for the second Pansy Kings’ Cotillion. This year’s Cotillion is emceed by poetry-slam champ David Kodeski and his partner Edward Thomas-Herrera and will feature performances by its creator and producer, Dave Awl, and a host of other new and returning Pansy Kings. It’s happening at the Neo-Futurarium, 5153 N. Ashland, tonight and Saturday at 8....

By Tom Frank Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Technically, Foodlife is a glorified version of the familiar shopping-mall food court, scaled up in price and pretense to match the affluent surroundings of Watertower Place. It offers all the usual food court fare, at predictably inflated prices that no doubt put it safely outside the budgets of the mall’s various employees: hamburgers, pizza, burritos, stirfry, pasta....

After heading the University of Chicago-based Contemporary Chamber Players for more than three decades, founder Ralph Shapey has finally passed the baton to the next generation. His successor, Yale-trained California Institute of the Arts professor Stephen Mosko, is part of a funky west coast contingent that’s enamored of multimedia, cyberspace, and music from the Pacific Rim, and while still advocating pluralism–a CCP hallmark–Mosko’s debut program as music director tilts slightly westward....

I can’t go to Africa, at least not this week. But I can go to the Medinah Temple, where this weekend four African American dance troupes and one pickup group of female percussionists will perform, and a bazaar of African crafts and cooking will take over the burrowlike hallways of this fine old place. As much as it can be, the Temple is transformed into an African village, its huge, open stage flooded with dozens of dancers and musicians at a time....

DIANE DELIN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You don’t have to look very hard to find admirable attributes in Diane Delin’s violin work. On an instrument notorious for its problematic intonation, she maintains a strong, pure tone, even when improvising. In other words, even when making an instantaneous decision about which note will come next, she will still play it in tune. She swings lightly but surely at quick tempos and, more impressive, on ballads....

THE MAKING OF FREUD Theater Oobleck at Chicago Filmmakers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As David Futrelle pointed out in these pages a couple of weeks ago, Freud is under intense attack these days, particularly for his insensitivity to women. But you don’t have to unquestioningly admire someone of Freud’s significance to appreciate him–nor do you have to reject everything he represents if you criticize his shortcomings....

A couple of months after the Coca-Cola Company changed the recipe for its product in 1985, a consumer in Marietta, Georgia, spotted a Coke delivery man stocking a supermarket with New Coke, as it was called back then. “You bastard!” she yelled, smiting him with her umbrella again and again. “You ruined it, it tastes like shit!” Pepsi, which is never far behind Coke these days, was represented on the scene by a uniformed driver of its own; when he started to laugh at the commotion the woman turned on him in her fury and screamed, “You stay out of it!...

“The image of ‘gangs,’ perhaps the ultimate devil figure in late twentieth-century urban America, is one of the most powerfully distorting filters through which law-abiding middle-class citizens distance themselves from residents of the inner city,” Dwight Conquergood told a recent Northwestern University conference on race and media. “Labeling someone a gang member licenses the most rabid racism and class bias….A Chicago Police manual describes gang graffiti as ‘dog and fire hydrant’ marking of turf or ‘like a wild animal marking his boundaries....

THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE at Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ, Baird Hall Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The enterprising princess Leonide combines a search for love with revenge, obtaining both with some deft role-playing. Accompanied by her maid Corine, Leonide disguises herself as a man named Phocion in order to meet Agis, the young prince her family overthrew and whose throne she regretfully inherited....

When the National Academy of Sciences reported in the last year that children’s health may suffer more than adults’ from the pesticides they routinely swallow with their fruits and vegetables, Bob Scaman’s business got a healthy shot in the arm. Scaman is the 26-year-old president and founder of Goodness Greenness, Chicago’s major organic produce broker. “The health food customer has always wanted organic produce,” he says. “But when reports like that one come out, you get a new group of mainstream families shopping for this stuff....

Anticensorship Mom “Tom says I’m famous in England,” Mary Morello is saying. “But I don’t know because I never see the papers. I have a lot of Japanese members, too. There’ve been articles about me there, too. I have them here but it’s useless ’cause I don’t read Japanese.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A conversation with Morello, the Libertyville woman who runs the anti-anti-rock outfit Parents for Rock and Rap, is a dizzying whirl around the world, with conversational stop-offs in Europe and Asia, in Kenya and New York, in the studio with Ice-T and on the road with Lollapalooza; she makes passing references to everything from Carol Moseley-Braun to that Fishbone concert last week at the Vic....

Charles Wiesen through August 10 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Poking fun at the way the typical gallery or museum setting confers preciousness on objects is hardly a new theme in modern art, but Wiesen handles it with an unsettling, quirky creativity. There’s always one more detail than is needed for a simple statement of his idea in these seemingly minimal works–a detail that somehow comes at the theme from an unexpected direction....

To celebrate the anniversary of cinema’s invention in 1895, Ines Sommer has organized a program of films “made in and about Chicago,” beginning with the 1897 Stockyards. Most offer an unglamorous view of the city’s grittier sides. I especially like Conrad O. Nelson’s Halsted Street (1931) and James Davis’s Pertaining to Chicago (1957), both of which are in the tradition of topographic paintings and photographs. Davis’s film is a lyrical paean to a city in motion: he intercuts shots from moving trains to create a clear rhythm and pans tall buildings along their architectural lines, making them seem to soar upward....

Coyote Chases Artistic Director Away Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Benkoczy realized he didn’t have the full support of the ATC board at a board meeting last week. “Apparently, the artistic direction of this year’s event was inconsistent with whatever the goals of the current board were,” he says. Several sources present at the meeting, where a newly reconstituted 12-person ATC board discussed the organization’s bylaws and the structure of the 1995 festival, say the group was moving to limit Benkoczy’s artistic control to the weekend festival, while trying to retain control of the year-round organization it hopes will grow out of the event....

Its poorly translated title makes it sound like a sensational B- movie, but Seijun Suzuki’s Go to Hell, Hoodlums! (1960)–his first color feature–is really a Sirkian family melodrama enlivened by an audacious, irony-filled mise-en-scene. Intended as an action vehicle for teen idol Koji Wada, whose boy-next-door charms earned him comparisons to Troy Donahue, the film has a rather predictable and mindless script. Wada plays a Tokyo painter’s assistant who discovers that he’s the sole heir of a noble family that lives on a picturesque remote island....

Johnny Adams, the legendary “Tan Canary” of New Orleans R & B, first scored locally in 1959 with the heartrending “I Won’t Cry,” and in 1962 another ballad, “Losing Battle,” catapulted him onto the national charts. Adams’s voice can only be described as thrilling: gospel-drenched, with a seemingly limitless emotional depth and a sense of control that only heightens the emotional tension, it can easily invoke transcendence and desolation at the same time....

KURT ELLING Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What a difference a year makes. When Kurt Elling celebrated the release of his debut CD last spring at the Green Mill, few people outside Chicago knew anything about him. This weekend’s appearance follows a Grammy nomination in the jazz vocalist category–almost unheard of for a new artist–a slew of articles in newspapers across the country, and a barnstorming tour of European jazz festivals last summer....