“The whole summer is a circus,” goes the promotional saying for that warehouse of fun known as North Pier. With a minor amendment, this slogan might serve as a motto for Chicago: The whole city is a circus. Or at least it’s trying to be. Since its reopening this summer Navy Pier has been thronged with visitors promenading up and down its 3,300-foot length. But as the jolly maritime signal flags displayed in frames in one of the complex’s restaurants admit, it’s an imitation of life, a simulacrum of a waterfront....

AFTERFEST SESSIONS WITH BUNKY GREEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For years, Joe Segal led the city’s club owners in railing against the economic havoc wreaked by the Chicago Jazz Festival’s free admission. (If you’re gonna spend the night giving the music away, the reasoning went, how the hell can we expect anyone to pay for more?) Then Segal figured out how to turn the situation to his, and our, advantage: he booked a house rhythm section, contracted a Jazz Fest star to serve as leader, and invited all the other out-of-town headliners to come by and sit in....

Playwrights for the ’90s The evolution of the efficient, sophisticated But I Get Benefits into the lolling, wasteful The Office typifies a disheartening trend in Chicago playwriting as we charge toward the end of the 20th century. Mainstream Chicago playwrights glut the stage with words, characters, and effects but produce precious little drama. They pen conversations, rarely dialogue. They give their characters platforms but impede their desire to act. Most local playwrights would be much better off writing slice-of-life short stories, where they could wax rhapsodic to their hearts’ content....

In the small, intense, perilous world of Chicago dance, loss is common. People drop out, or move away to try their luck in a more hospitable place. That’s why the Link’s Hall Homecoming Series has been such a great idea–because this world is so small and perilous that people cling to each other and to their joint past. This weekend Jackie Radis–a founder and one of the mainstays of MoMing Dance & Arts Center, who moved to New Mexico five years ago–returns to perform a solo, Dogs, Desires, and Good Digestion....

JUNE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the 14th year Bill FitzGerald presents an unparalleled array of roots music at the annual American Music Festival at his Berwyn roadhouse, FitzGerald’s. The club offers five or more acts per night on two stages–along with a very good Cajun barbecue. Tonight’s lineup includes Terrance Simien and the Mallet Playboys at 8 and 10:45 and Austin singer-songwriter Jimmy LaFave at 11:30 and 1, as well as the Charles Lane Jazz Band at 5, the Blazers at 6:30 and 9:30, Candye Kane at 7:30, and Dave Hole at 9....

CRAZY SWEET DREAMS ANGEL FOOD FOR THOUGHT Mostly autobiographical, Crazy Sweet Dreams is named after two of Patsy Cline’s biggest hits. In the first of its two parallel stories Anderson is just out of college and full of youthful optimism, driving from Chicago to Dallas, Pennsylvania, to perform in her first professional show, which turns out to be a grossly inferior Merchant of Venice. In the second story, she flies to London after serendipitously arranging to be interviewed by film director Mike Leigh, an interview she bungles miserably....

When the Prop Theatre prematurely announced plans to bring Eartha Kitt to town last fall, a buzz of excitement passed among lovers of cabaret; but that gig fell through. So it’s a coup for the Illinois Federation for Human Rights, the state’s most effective gay and lesbian political group, that the legendary singer-actor will instead make her first Chicago appearance in more than a decade at its annual benefit concert. On her latest album, Back in Business (DRG), she makes a welcome return to the smoky nightclub sound that made her a star in New Faces of 1952, when she comically complained of her “Monotonous” love life (her shivery purr suggested that what was ennui for her would be ecstasy for anyone else)....

Eat at Jo’s Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But what’s even more uncommon about Brasserie Jo is its menu, which is peppered with dishes certain to shock those intent on eating healthy. Plats du jour include duck a l’orange and beef Wellington, culinary dinosaurs from an era when low fat was not the mantra it is today. Among the hot entrees, meat and sausage dishes–such as calf’s liver, braised lamb shank, pot-au-feu, hanger steak with bearnaise sauce, blood sausage, and choucroute a l’Alsacienne–far outnumber fish items....

A conventionally made documentary about the Mississippi Voter Registration Project, which existed from 1961 to 1964, this is special because of the precise sense of time and place it manages to impart through archival footage and recent interviews, as well as for the exemplary history lesson it offers about a key branch of the civil rights struggle. Produced and directed by Connie Field (The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter) and Marilyn Mulford and written and edited by Michael Chandler, it not only offers a welcome corrective to the multiple obfuscations of Mississippi Burning; it also furnishes the viewer with enough solid information to reevaluate the subject intelligently....

Mike Baur at the Chicago Cultural Center, through June 30 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Baur refers not only to ancient history but to our own more recent past. Of his many ship shapes he remarks that “most of us got here by boat.” And one inspiration for the series was the detritus from would-be immigrants’ flimsy boats washed up on Florida beaches a few years ago....

LOOT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nurse Fay has just bumped off yet another patient in order to acquire the woman’s well-heeled husband, McLeavy: she’d like him to become her sixth mate, the first five having died under suspicious circumstances. Then McLeavy’s son Hal bursts in with Dennis; they’ve just pulled off a bank heist, and frantically hide the loot in the coffin, moving Hal’s dead mother to a broom closet....

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE Closely following the 1962 novel, Burgess’s script details the adventures of a 15-year-old punk named Alex who leads his “droogs” (comrades) in nightly escapades of aimless vandalism, robbery, assault, and rape. The prototype of the alienated adolescent, Alex is no dispossessed ghetto kid but the product of a respectable middle-class upbringing: out-of-touch parents, an irrelevant and ineffectual educational system, an impotent social-welfare structure, and a political establishment whose liberal and reactionary wings are equally well suited to screwing up the people they’re supposed to serve....

REX Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rex drummer Doug Scharin used to play in a trio called Codeine that mastered the art of stasis. The group’s sorrowful melodies didn’t drift along so much as they hovered, while Scharin slowed time down to a crawl without ever missing a beat. Unfortunately, their sound became a straitjacket: they got better at their one trick, but never learned any others....

A sturdily made and beautifully acted comedy-drama about aging from Bob Balaban, whose Parents showed him to be an imaginative director who knows what to do with a set and how to enter the worlds of lonely people. The story here, adapted by Balaban and John McLaughlin from a Richard Bausch novel, concerns a retired violinist (Armin Mueller-Stahl) living in Brooklyn who puts up a homeless former neighbor in her early 20s (Olivia d’Abo) and develops an unexpected relationship with her....

The Magic Flute Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the best things about this Lyric Opera production of The Magic Flute, which was first presented ten years ago, is its straightforward fairy-tale charm. With a sharp, childlike imagination, German stage director August Everding (with an assist from the Lyric’s own Matthew Lata) has laid out a rich pageant of beguiling theatrical flourishes: the Three Genii’s spangled wooden boat sails across the backdrop sky, lions and rhinos jig, the Queen of the Night sports a bloodred fright wig....

Written in 1941 and only produced after its playwright’s death in 1956, Bertolt Brecht’s broad satire of Adolf Hitler and his cronies seems an unlikely hit in post-Cold War America. Yet this comic allegory, which makes the obvious comparison of the Nazis to Prohibition-era gangsters, works surprisingly well. In part this is because Brecht is quite clever at finding gangland analogues to people and events in Germany in the 30s: Weimar president Hindenburg appears as a softhearted but easily corrupted saloon keeper named Dogsborough; Germany’s absorption of Austria becomes Chicago’s annexation of Cicero; and Hitler himself appears as Arturo Ui, a bullying, uncouth Al Capone wannabe....

The Sea and Cake is one of the most refreshing bands to appear on the local rock scene in a long time. Band members Sam Prekop, Eric Claridge, John McEntire, and Archer Prewitt have past or ongoing associations with wayward local outfits like Shrimp Boat, the Coctails, and Gastr del Sol, so it’s no surprise that they deliver a hushed, occasionally quirky minimalist pop. Their debut record, The Sea and Cake (Thrill Jockey), is awash in carillon-toned guitars and tastefully placed Brian Eno/Allen Ravenstine-styled synthesizer sputtering....

Twin City Even in the off-season, Cassville has more than its share of twins around. No one, not even Cassville Historical Society president Chuck Lange or Twin-o-Rama board chairman LaVern Kirschbaum, offers any plausible explanation for the high incidence of twins in this sleepy little river town with a population of only 1,144 or 1,270 depending on which border sign you believe. Jane Bernhardt, a writer with the Grant County Herald Independent blames it on “that Mississippi River,” but that can’t be taken as more than a joke....

The music of this aptly named New York trio pits contrasting elements against each other on a number of levels: bristling guitar racket stands out against moments of quiet; hook-filled riffs compete with artless but earnest singing; and vocal arrangements feature the old female/male, sweet/sour dichotomy. On the band’s debut full-length record, The Stars Are Insane (TeenBeat), this tug-of-war results not in fragmentation but in a cohesive and instantly likable set of tunes that are neither cloyingly cute nor repugnantly gruff....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As I see it, there is an unhealthy underlying assumption in what Marty is saying. It is that the purpose of the church is to maintain its institution, rather than help people. If the goal is to maintain a meaningless institution called “the church,” then by all means don’t find out how people are hurting, what questions they are asking, and how the church might best serve them in building their relationship with God....