Hailed as a cutting-edge combination of art and technology in its birthplace, this evocative if bleak South African production synthesizes puppet theater and film animation to tell the story of “a good murder, a genuine murder, a beautiful murder.” A coproduction of the Johannesburg-based Handspring Puppet Company and Market Theatre Company, it’s directed and designed by William Kentridge, whose script is adapted from Georg Buchner’s unfinished 1837 tragedy Woyzeck. Buchner’s play, based on a true crime, concerns a poor soldier who murders his common-law wife after discovering she’s having an affair with a drum major, though Buchner eschewed the story’s inherent sensationalism and focused on the social pressures contributing to his everyman protagonist’s descent into madness....

Kiss of the Spider Woman–The Musical Brooks wasn’t seriously disparaging Cabaret, of course; but there are those who do, arguing that subjects like fascism, anti-Semitism, and abortion “just don’t work” in musicals. Not that these folks don’t like musicals–Guys and Dolls and La Cage aux Folles are great shows. They just think it should remain an escapist genre. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The men who defied conventional wisdom in Cabaret turned their talents in the early 90s to a more recent example of fascist evil: 1970s Argentina, whose leaders waged a “dirty war” that claimed the lives of between 14,000 and 30,000 civilians (depending on whose tallies you believe, the government’s or those of international human-rights groups)....

The festival continues from Friday, October 22, through Sunday, October 24, with screenings at the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport. Tickets can be purchased at the box office an hour before show time; they’re also available by phone (for a service charge) at 559-1212 and 644-3456. General admission is $7; $6 for students and seniors; $5 for Cinema/Chicago members. Shows before 6 PM are $5, $4 for students, seniors, and Cinema/Chicago members....

“You shouldn’t be here,” a red-haired woman in shorts says to her friend in a suit. “You work for Arthur Andersen.” There are graying couples, determinedly alternative teens, activists selling newspapers and passing out flyers, and die-hard fans of Michael Moore, the host of the leftish newsmagazine. The rain streaks the letters of one guy’s homemade sandwich board, which reads “Corporate Crime Fighting Chicken–Jr.” Some women wave sticks attached to paper plates on which they’ve scrawled “Crackers #1” in fluorescents....

December 1999 or bust! “To [Chicago School Reform Board president Gery] Chico’s mind, the test of the new board’s success will be if reading scores of the 109 schools in probation climb 5 percent to 10 percent within three years,” writes Grant Pick in Catalyst (December). “You can hold me accountable if we’re not making progress,” Chico says. “If we lose, the [decentralization-minded] reform people can come back in, and we’ll hold them accountable....

Imagine a new Chicago airport. It could have a shopping arcade with a big used-book store and a little museum, maybe describing the history of aviation. How about a full-service bank and work spaces for executives on the go. Maybe a barbershop and shoe-shine parlor. Of course, that would place this new airport considerably farther from downtown than O’Hare or Midway is. It might take two hours to drive from the Loop, an hour and a half from the north side, or an hour from Lake Forest....

Perhaps it really is Cleveland’s year: the Indians have reached the series, and Ernie Krivda has a record deal with an international company. To extend the analogy, Krivda fits into the small Cleveland jazz scene in much the way Albert Belle serves the city’s baseball team: he’s not only its most valuable player but also a strong motivating influence on his confreres, both on and off the stage. By extension you can probably include Krivda–even more than his Cleveland-born contemporary Joe Lovano–in a midwestern school of idiosyncratic tenor saxophonists, exemplified by Von Freeman....

As Russia struggles toward a stable democracy against a reactionary communist backlash, here’s a potent reminder of the bad old days. Inspired by the cases of dissidents Victor Fainberg and Vladimir Bukovsky, Tom Stoppard’s intense, dazzlingly witty one-act concerns two prisoners–sorry, make that patients–in a Russian insane asylum. One is an outspoken foe of Soviet dictatorship; the other is a lunatic who hears music in his head. Taking his title from the music student’s mnemonic phrase for the notes of the treble clef, Stoppard explores the political, psychological, and aesthetic implications of nonconformism in a totalitarian system, represented by a partly cynical, partly compassionate doctor whose job is to brainwash malcontents into “good boys” of the state....

The April 29 Hot Type creates the false impression that La Raza’s Jorge Oclander supplied the Tribune with documents that were used in our reports on the Board of Education building at 5151 W. Madison St. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That simply isn’t true, and Michael Miner knew it. Mr. Oclander may be the rock-steady, dogged investigator that Miner says he is, but his records weren’t a source for the Tribune’s articles....

A group of 12-year-old boys kept interrupting Jeni Bonjean and Nicole Rittenmeyer when they were shooting a documentary about the problems of adolescent girls. They wanted to know why the pair were concerned with girls and not with them. So the two cut a deal with the boys: Answer one question and you can be in the video. The boys agreed. “If you woke up tomorrow and found out you were a girl, what would you do?...

In the villages of Java life is monotonously regular. On the equator the sun rises and sets at nearly the same times every day of the year, and dawn and dusk last only a few minutes. By early evening the sky is pitch black. Few of the homes are electrified, and most light is the kind that moves. Swinging gas lamps and darting beams from passing motor scooters send shadows wandering across palms, through gangways, and over rice fields....

JEFF ABELL & BARBARA STEG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From a certain perspective, “studio improvisation” is an oxymoron on par with “jumbo shrimp”–since improvising is about registering an instantaneous and irrevocable response to the unforeseen and the studio allows sonic explorers to return to material, reconsider it, multitrack themselves, remix, and otherwise revel in second thoughts. But Jeff Abell and Barbara Steg, who call their new CD, Natural Acts, a collection of studio improvisations, clearly treat the studio (specifically Chicago’s unique Experimental Sound Studio, where they collaborated intermittently over the course of a year) as an instrument in free play, a place in which to blur the lines between freewheeling and reworking....

In titling Mario Grigorov’s debut album Rhymes With Orange, the folks at Reprise Records dredged up a quite appropriate allusion. As even fledgling poetasters know, English contains no word that rhymes with “orange”; and American music contains very little in the way of precedent for this Bulgarian-born, Austrian-trained classical-jazz pianist. Grigorov’s creations owe much to his conservatory background; even his most astonishing improvisations are based in the scales and tonal relationships of Eastern Europe....

Moon Under Fire Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While there were certainly plenty of stunned observers at the Moon Under Miami opening on April 30, few were delighted. Trib critic Richard Christiansen said the play “is destined to go down as one of the great train wrecks of Chicago theater history.” The Sun-Times’s Hedy Weiss agreed, calling the show “as thick and motionless as its swampy setting....

Even in her thrift shop duds, G.B. Jones can’t play down the glamour. Statuesque, with her long hair a shade between fuchsia and Miss Clairol’s Sparkling Sherry, this artist, filmmaker, guitarist, and self-described “dyke from hell” easily holds the rapt attention of a roomful of surly punk kids. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Instead of using a mainstream middle-class heterosexual model, ‘queer’ really celebrates more the real perversity and diversity of sexuality in general,” says Steve Lafreniere, a Chicago promoter and publisher of his own queer zine, The Gentlewomen of California....

Despite the many California wine makers over the past decade who have tried to create beverages that can stand alone, wine is really meant to complement and be complemented by food. When the mix is right, there is no marriage on earth more perfect, transitory as it may be. And there is no simpler way of proving the hypothesis than a wine maker’s dinner. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

In 1932 Leo Pevsner wrote a song about the Depression for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s campaign. The song, “Next Year,” like other Depression-era tunes such as “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime,” took the perspective of a downtrodden man trying to find a glimmer of hope in a bleak economy (“Next year you’ll be able to eat again / Chances are you’ll find a job by then ....

WINIFRED HAUN & DANCERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What makes Haun’s dances even more interesting is that, though some things may be clear as a running brook, others are teasingly murky. In It’s Both the relationship between the dancer and the musician is obvious. Haun begins and ends in a position of power over Coleman–kneeling on his back like a succubus and, at the end, putting her chin in her hands with a Cheshire grin of triumph....

Dessert? Well, since we’re moving to Detroit next week, I’ll have the triple hot fudge sundae. Attorney Sharlene McEvoy, in the Chicago-based Human Rights (Summer), laments the lack of laws against fat bias: “Congress could amend the ADA [Americans With Disabilities Act] to specifically include obesity as a disability. This would set an example for states to follow. Currently, only Michigan has a law affording civil rights protection to people of size....

THE LANGUAGE OF BIRDS: ROSA LUXEMBURG AND ME Blue Rider Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1992, on the 73rd anniversary of Luxemburg’s death, a young performance artist listens to a lecturer on WBEZ unenthusiastically list the achievements of this all-but-forgotten woman. And in The Language of Birds: Rosa Luxemburg and Me, written by Donna Blue Lachman and Tim Fiori, that young artist turns to those letters for comfort....