The Rock Star of Notre Dame Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now Leavitt is convinced the company can hit the jack-pot if it develops and controls original works. Over the next 18 to 36 months, Leavitt and Fox expect to produce a couple of new musicals and at least one new comedy and one drama. By owning the worldwide rights, they can potentially realize far more profit if the show turns out to be a hit....

Three Sisters, Not by Chekhov, Organic Theater Company Greenhouse, Lab Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Eldest sister Matilda is a hypochondriacal yuppie, middle sister Carmen is a peripatetic artist, and youngest sister Tia is a self-obsessed health nut. All three have moved back to the family homestead–Matilda to enroll in law school, Carmen to rediscover her muse, and Tia to assert her independence from her doting husband....

By the time Zimmerman was hauled out of the pits by Board of Trade security guards, he had ruined an old-line trading firm, threatened the Board of Trade with its first default in history, raised serious doubts about its trading system, and changed forever the way business on the world’s futures exchanges is done. Zimmerman spent the next three years trying to stay as far away from LaSalle Street as he could....

A program of recent works by two local video artists. The longest is Pure (1993), an extremely ambitious and highly provocative globehopping video essay by the University of Chicago’s Scott Rankin–a densely packed discussion of exoticism, authenticity, and a great deal more. Mocking the role of the in-person TV commentator while offering nonstop philosophical notations about our dubious and ideologically informed grasp of the world we live in, Rankin may give us more material than we can comfortably digest in an hour–but then so do the world and the media he describes....

Growing up in Cabrini-Green, Liz Thompson never felt deprived or disadvantaged. But in 1975 she enrolled at Lane Tech and discovered the world was larger and more complicated than she ever realized. “I took an honors biology class my first year, and I was hopeless,” says Thompson. “There were Japanese kids, Jewish kids, and white kids, and they seemed smarter. I came home in tears, ’cause I didn’t think I’d make it....

Crossing Boundaries II: The Tower of Babel Project The best piece in the show is Antonio Sacre’s charming autobiographical one-person performance Buscando Papito (“Looking for the Cuban”), directed by James Lasko, which explores with straightforwardness and disarming honesty Sacre’s life and hard times as the son of a Cuban father and Irish mother. To his father’s family, his awkwardness with Spanish makes him “the gringo”; to his Anglo friends his darker features and family history make him “the spic....

A slight but charming parable with metaphysical undertones, this is a romantic comedy about a 21-year-old (Johnny Depp) who believes himself to be Don Juan. After threatening suicide, he’s arrested and turned over to a psychiatric clinic, where a doctor on the verge of retirement (Marlon Brando) takes over his case, falls under the spell of the youth’s imaginary past, and finds his own romantic feelings for his wife (Faye Dunaway) rejuvenated....

When my roommate Harald went back to Germany I stopped going to the Gallery so much. It had been his find and his hangout, and he had reveled in it. “It’s…it’s ze Gallery!” he would crow, basking in the triumph of discovery each time the place revealed some new quirk. Despite his distractions, Ken still remembers the group of Greenpeace activists that Harald hung out with. “My biggest fans from Greenpeace all moved away to Portland and Seattle,” he says wistfully....

The post-Marsalis era didn’t introduce the idea of second-generation jazzmen; it just seems that way, thanks to the current proliferation of talented offspring. But pianist Kenny Drew Jr.–whose piano-playing father lent his silky touch and uncluttered thinking to John Coltrane’s legendary Blue Train album–stands above most of the pack, for several reasons. These include issues of technique and drive, both of which he has in abundance, and of sensitive keyboard arranging and imaginative use of the instrument’s colors, both inherited from his father; he also knows better than many how to straddle the line between public performance and private musical exploration....

Beatles “Real Love” (Capitol) After leaving the Beatles, John Lennon quickly established a new musical identity based on the two loves of his life–old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll and his alter ego, Yoko Ono. The new John first surfaces on the “White Album.” The song “Revolution 1,” a romp to the rhythm of Fats Domino’s “I Hear You Knocking,” had bluesy chord changes and “om-shoo-be-doo-wah” backing vocals. “Revolution 9,” an experimental sound collage, introduced the avant-garde Ono to a mass audience....

David Moss summarized the physical immediacy of the voice like this: “Singing and sex give approximate answers to the same question: What does it feel like to be in someone else’s body?” When singer and performance artist Lynn Book left Chicago for New York three months ago, she took with her the city’s most adventurous female voice. Highly expressive, intense, and often theatrical, Book is part of a worldwide wave of outrageous vocal explorers that includes Maggie Nichols, Sainkho Namtchylak, Vanessa Mackness, Dorothea Schurch, Greetje Bijma, and Shelley Hirsch....

Molly Sweeney Brian Friel’s 1979 Faith Healer, seen last year in a splendid TurnAround Theatre production that relocated to Steppenwolf’s studio, concerns an itinerant miracle worker whose mysterious gift for curing the blind leads to his destruction; structured as a series of long monologues by the healer, his wife, and his assistant, the play turns a strange scandal into a cross between Irish folk drama and Greek tragedy. In his haunting 1994 drama Molly Sweeney–beautifully directed on Steppenwolf’s main stage by Kyle Donnelly, who’s making a most welcome return to Chicago theater–Friel again probes a curious little episode for depths of meaning few other writers today could approach....

In their Chicago Jazz Fest appearance last month, this unusual trio proved that with an imaginative concept and highwire virtuosity, you can break a lot of rules and make it come out right. Monk’s Dream features the relatively odd combination of piano and organ–played by Mike Kocour and Steve Million, respectively–and concentrates on the 70 or so compositions left behind by Thelonious Monk, who died in 1982 (but really stopped writing nearly 20 years earlier)....

The Sutherland Hotel and Ballroom still stands on the corner of 47th and Drexel, but it’s been a long time since it counted the jazz greats among its guests. For more than 30 years it was a jazz mecca. Located down the street from the old Regal Theatre in a neighborhood known for its nightclubs, the Sutherland regularly hosted such musicians as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk....

An entertaining if somewhat uneven departure by Mohsen Makhmalbaf–perhaps the most versatile contemporary Iranian director, and certainly one of the most talented, prolific, and controversial–this 1992 film can be regarded in part as a kind of peace offering to the Iranian government after the banning of his two previous features (loosely comparable as a gesture to The Story of Qiu Ju as a follow-up to the banned films of Zhang Yimou)....

Foremost among conductor Christoph Eschenbach’s pet causes is the art of the lied, a 19th-century German form that fuses poetry and music. Next week at Ravinia, he’s scheduled two lieder recitals, one featuring a veteran (Tuesday) and one featuring a young Turk (Thursday); he’ll accompany both on the piano. My bet is on the former, German tenor Schreier, who is one of the most accomplished singers around–though Danish baritone Bo Skovhus is no slouch either....

“Do you prefer chunks or bits?” asks the inquisitor. Microphones hang from the ceiling, and we’re told there are video cameras behind the mirror. “Do you associate quality with chunks?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I answered the questions right, and I’ve been hooked ever since. I’ve tasted experimental cookies, munched prototype cheese. I’ve passed judgment on TV commercials, tested laser printers. I’ve even been in mock juries for asbestos lawsuits....

Near North is so full of pricey steak houses these days that it’s become a home on the range for conventioneers, Gold Coast fat cats, and other aging carnivores. But head west and you’ll find plenty of people on a very different diet. It isn’t just a matter of finances: the older set may have just found out that they don’t have to pay attention to cholesterol counts if they can make it to the age of 70, but younger gourmets can’t think that far ahead....

A few months back, long after her retirement, Rochelle Lee received a letter from a student she had taught many years ago. He had been a problem child who had pulled himself together and now lived a productive life working with children. “He wanted me to send him a picture of myself,” says Lee. “I called him up and asked why. He said, ‘Mrs. Lee, it was in your library that I read a book about Martin Luther King Jr....

I only know the 30s radio show by hearsay, so I can’t vouch for the faithfulness of this big-scale movie version, but if I had to choose between a sequel to this and another Batman or Indiana Jones romp, I’d opt for a second Shadow, if only because the visual design of this one–a comic-book fever dream of 30s Manhattan so well imagined and lived-in that one could almost crawl inside it–has more enchantments than the Wagnerian pretensions and Pavlovian cliff-hangers of the other two cycles....