Bailiwick Moves Up Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bailiwick plans to christen the new space the Lakeview Performing Arts Center and expects to begin construction immediately on two new stages at a cost of about $100,000. A main theater with flexible seating for between 150 and 200 will open around October 1 with the world premiere of F-64, a play by New York-based Christina de Lancie....

Barbara’s Weakest Link Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Barbara’s Bookstore looks like it may be ready to bail out of the neighborhood, where it’s been a presence for more than 20 years. Within the last two weeks, a large sign with the word “available” appeared above Barbara’s 6,000-square-foot store at 3130 N. Broadway. A real estate agent reached at the number posted on the sign said that the Barbara’s store could be available in 60 days if a suitable offer were made to lease the space....

Some of the precise meanings of this Bill Forsyth comedy eluded me, but the vibes couldn’t have been nicer. What’s off-putting at first is that both the title and the man-through-the-ages format–Robin Williams playing no fewer than five fellows named Hector: a caveman, a Roman Empire slave, a medieval traveler, a Portuguese shipwreck survivor, and a divorced landlord in contemporary Manhattan–promise the worst kind of universalist banality; fortunately, it never materializes....

People who hold that classical music programmers don’t speak to the interests of minorities are obviously unacquainted with the Chicago Sinfonietta, which makes a point of including black musicians and new music, some of it by black composers, in its concerts. That’s been a recipe for success for the 65-member orchestra, which will open its eighth season Sunday under the baton of music director Paul Freeman. The Sinfonietta’s motto this year is “excellence through diversity,” and diversity describes the first program, which includes the familiar overture to Rossini’s Barber of Seville, the unfamiliar Variations for Strings by American composer Ellen Zwilich, and the moderately familiar first suite from Manuel de Falla’s Three-Cornered Hat....

It’s the promise of crystalline, thought-provoking interpretations from the eminence grise of modernism, the 70-year-old Pierre Boulez, now officially the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s principal guest maestro, that makes his winter residency so special. Though confining his attention almost entirely to worthy entries in the postromantic repertoire, Boulez is also rethinking the works that impressed him in his youth. In this week’s CSO concerts he turns to Mahler, whose music he didn’t discover until he was in Paris after the war, after the establishment stopped slighting Austro-Germanic music....

New York, LA, Lincoln, Nebraska–all have community radio stations. Chicago will too if the Peace and Justice Radio Project can get the word out about what we’re missing. Frustrated by inadequate media coverage of the gulf war, community, political, and labor activists started PJRP in 1991 to provide Chicago with a progressive perspective. PJRP aims to establish a community radio station in Chicago that’s free from commercial control, where individuals and organizations with no connections to mainstream media can get their issues heard–by covering those issues themselves....

Few younger-generation blues outfits can fuse reverence for the music with an ass-kicking sense of fun like the T-Birds do. They seem to have mastered every conceivable regional style, from jumping roadhouse romps to hard-grinding Chicago boogie all the way to the crunching, rock and roll-flavored young man’s blues that Albert Collins and his contemporaries forged in Texas in the 50s and early 60s. The nucleus of the group is harmonica wizard Kim Wilson: he’s not only mastered the style of the masters, but he seems to have absorbed their souls as well....

UP AGAINST IT Unfortunately, the Beatles played it safe and turned the script down. Soon after, Orton was murdered. The film was never produced, and Lennon and McCartney told all those calling for a revolution that you could count them out. Maybe Orton should have offered it to the Stones. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And Lookingglass Theatre turns it into one hell of a show....

There’s not much to see. You’d drive right by the laundromat, right by the little Spanish grocery, right by the currency exchange. What? Another J.J. Peppers? You’d drive right by that too. “Inglesia Evangeleo de Jesucristo, Primitiva Pentecostes,” the sign on the little storefront church on Diversey declares. Przeminelo Z Wlatrem by Margaret Mitchell (with Rhett Butler breathing over Scarlett’s naked shoulder) is for sale at the Polonia Book Store on Milwaukee Avenue....

Jazz Update From WBEZ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Malatia describes current ‘BEZ music programming as “attempting to please everybody at some time somewhere,” with a schedule that offers “everything short of chain-saw rock ‘n’ roll.” He wants to “unify and concentrate” the programming, choosing one or two styles of music for a format that’s not duplicated in Chicago and keeping it consistent over seven days instead of just five....

Jerry Lee Lewis Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth once wrote that the reason concertgoers pay for tickets isn’t just for the music but to watch performers believing in themselves. If that’s true, the 20 bucks it takes to see Jerry Lee Lewis in the flesh might be the biggest bargain in rock ‘n’ roll. He defies the rules of grammar the rest of us take for granted; while some people occasionally refer to themselves in the third person, Jerry Lee has invented a form that can only be called third legend, singing his own name something like 36 times over the course of a recent Cubby Bear evening....

League of Chicago Theatres Self-Destructs Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One source sympathetic to the former executive director maintains that his job was made impossible because of the many conflicting agendas of board members. The league’s staff must now be completely rebuilt. A bookkeeper is apparently the only full-time employee left. The first several months of 1996 already look promising. Director Andrew Davis, who shot most of the hit movie The Fugitive in Chicago, will be in town again to film his new picture Dead Drop with John Travolta....

Almost 35 years ago McCoy Tyner made his big-league jazz debut in a short-lived band known as the Jazztet. That band was led by Art Farmer and Benny Golson, each of them an important and compelling artist; nonetheless it is Tyner who has established himself as the most influential member of that group, and among the most dynamic and original stylists in the history of jazz piano. Once you’ve heard him, you don’t mistake anyone else for him–except for the scores of younger artists who have built their own styles on his (or amalgamated it with those of Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, or Keith Jarrett)....

The zarzuela, a folk opera still wildly popular in Spanish-speaking countries, hit a new height in craftsmanship a century ago when Tomas Breton’s La verbena de la paloma premiered in Madrid. Never mind the slight plot; the music is delightful and fiery and the lyrics are amusingly sardonic. It’s easily the most familiar of all zarzuelas and a favorite of Placido Domingo, whose parents were zarzuela troupers. The action moves fairly swiftly toward a climax at the Festival of Our Lady of the Dove–hence the title–in which Julian, the lovely Susana’s jilted boyfriend, confronts the elderly Don Hilarion, her ardent suitor, and a big brawl ensues....

There’s a not-very-subtle distinction between treating a folk music tradition as a fragile heritage to be sheltered against corruption and treating it as a tough, grizzled system of roots that serves as a sturdy foundation for perpetually changing bursts of inexplicable greenery. Living traditions, oral or otherwise, change over the years like any living thing, and Robin Williamson–singer, songwriter, multiinstrumentalist, poet, and storyteller–understands this, knowing when to yield to the weight of history, as on his extremely listenable 1984 Legacy of the Scottish Harpers, and when to throw himself headlong into a more idiosyncratic mode of expression....

LUNG 4/22, LOUNGE AX This New Zealand trio seems to be doing everything in its power to emulate fellow homelanders Bailter Space, who play this club Saturday night (see Critic’s Choice). The band’s earliest recordings as the Clear clearly mimic the awesome roar charted by the Gordons, the ground-breaking trio that eventually morphed into Bailter Space, and Lung’s new album, Three Heads on a Plate (Restless), almost shadows the other band’s transformation: tightly framed blasts of guitar noise stand in contrast to shyly delivered melodies....

Harold Henderson’s article on the “‘new urbanism” (“Come a Little Bit Closer,” July 7) contained a lot of interesting ideas–with one glaring omission. Citing planner Joel Stauber, Henderson wrote that neotraditional communities may not become popular until “more efficient economies, such as Japan and Europe, out-compete us because they don’t waste money building on the fringe while closing down their inner cities.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The omission?...

When the phenom Wynton Marsalis left Art Blakey’s band to form his own, trumpeter Terence Blanchard–a Marsalis pal from hometown New Orleans–was chosen to replace him. Right time, right place–right? Blanchard, who (like Marsalis) shifts from sweet-souled sensitivity one moment to firecracker intensity the next, had to benefit from the connection; on the other hand, stepping in after the jazz hype job of the decade, no one could have benefited in the comparison....

The NEA Comes to Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Scheduled for April 14 through 16 at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, the meeting, pretentiously titled “Art-21: Art Reaches Into the 21st Century,” will examine four rather broad themes: “The Artist in Society,” “Lifelong Learning in the Arts,” “Expanding Resources for the Arts,” and “The Arts and Technology.” Formal invitations hit the street last week....

Robert De Niro’s honorable directorial debut takes on Scorsese material–Chazz Palminteri adapting his own play about growing up Italian in the Bronx during the 60s–without copying Scorsese’s style; the results may be soft in spots, but it’s encouraging to see De Niro going his own way. The narrator-hero, seen at the ages of 9 and 17 (when he’s played by Lillo Brancato), oscillates between two father figures, a local gang boss (Palminteri) and his law-abiding, bus-driving father (De Niro)....