Clash of the PR Titans Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The multimillion-dollar Beauty, based on the popular animated movie, is still pulling in cash like gangbusters after nearly three years on Broadway. It’s already spawned two successful national touring companies and a number of international productions. But the Disney folks have delayed bringing the musical here while they negotiated to take over the Chicago Theatre under a three-year lease with an option to extend for an additional year....

My father bought a can of ant killer from the hardware store. I think he liked this can because it was so compact, square with a pointed dusting nozzle, and it packed such a wallop. He stuck the nozzle into the entry hole of a pavement ant colony, in the crack between two sidewalk slabs, and squeezed the deadly cyanide in. Then he called us to see the dissipating mounds of coppery, sandlike corpses, some still twitching in Brownian death motions....

From the slurry chords that introduce “Happier,” the flat-voiced portrait of urban dissonance that leads off her Cockamamie album, to the remarkably catchy choruses dotting most of the songs to the unhappy lullaby that ends the record (besides the now obligatory hidden track) Jennifer Trynin impresses. Her voice is supple, she writes hooks, and she seems dedicated to saying something passably interesting in her songs. She has a punky setup (guitar, bass, and drums), but her production is so clean and her voice is mixed so high that punk’s clearly not what she’s about; at the same time she’s too idiosyncratic to be straight pop, and she’s too smart to play hard rock....

The food in India varies vastly from one region to another, but what most Americans are accustomed to eating in restaurants is north Indian, which was influenced by the high-living Moguls (the refined word for the marauding Mongol hordes who conquered Delhi in the 16th century and made it the seat of their empire). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The food at Raj Darbar, “the Royal Court,” is more prosaic, but definitely Mogul-influenced....

Rose Regroups Like the once-vaunted Kroch’s & Brentano’s, Chicago retailing legend Rose Records is undergoing a wrenching downsizing and reorganization. The 63-year-old chain is reeling from the effects of cutthroat price wars, overambitious expansion, and an inability to adapt in a rapidly changing retailing landscape. Within a few weeks all that will remain of the chain that as recently as a year ago numbered 49 outlets will be four stores: the flagship operation at 214 S....

It happened fast. Police officer Robert Perkins had stopped a man at the corner of 61st and Wabash. It was 10:30 in the morning on March 7, 1992. Perkins suspected him of burglary. As the intersection filled with squad cars, Eldridge Smith, a fellow Third District officer, moved close to his downed friend and spoke into his ear. An ambulance arrived and the paramedics went to work. Ramona Perkins, a student at Lindblom High School, lived with her father in Prairie Shores, and they were extraordinarily close....

By Ted Cox Those were the only two three-point shots Kukoc made in the first game against the Sonics, but in the second last Friday he again hit a pair in the course of a minute to turn the game around, this time in the third period. (It’s no accident that all of them came in the second half; he seems to have a marked preference for the east basket at the United Center....

Perhaps the most intriguing fact about this clever, touching, and well-directed independent feature is that the script was written by the late Endre Bohem in 1935 and revised by his son Leslie only a few years ago–a form of generational continuity reflected in one of the delayed revelations of the plot as well. The story–set in the present, though one can imagine it set during the Depression–concerns the fate of a single $20 bill that’s dropped on a city street, picked up, spent, given away, lost, and pursued by many people for multiple reasons, always gaining new significance with each new setting....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The one question that we must ask is: “Is there a place in West Town for working families?” The answer to that question is central to the struggle occurring between the Eckhart Park Community Council, Alderman Jesse Granato, and the working families trying to create a sustainable home in the community in which they were raised. The Erie cooperative is a cooperative in its most basic sense–it is a corporation owned and managed by residents (not tenants)....

Plenty of rock bands are bicoastal, but Ashtray Boy is the only one I know of that’s bihemispheric. In Sydney singer-guitarist Randall Lee lives and plays with one rhythm section, and in Chicago, the home of his record company, Ajax, he plays with another. Lee’s songwriting traits–a broad stylistic range and an even broader streak of ridiculousness–are both evident in Nice, his other Sydney-based trio, which played at Lounge Ax three weeks ago....

A couple of weeks ago, I sat in on a meeting of professional environmentalists who had gotten together to discuss that perennial favorite topic: whither the movement? Or, more fundamentally, is there a movement? And if there is, what is it? The Washington focus increased through the decades, especially after the passage of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. In 1981, Reagan gave it a real boost. When he took office uttering assorted menaces in the direction of environmental protection, the major groups beefed up their Washington forces....

This group of young choreographers decided to “jump giant”–to bypass the usual route for independent choreographers of putting on a few individual concerts a year at small venues. Instead they’ve pooled their money and rented the Athenaeum Theatre, an ornate auditorium that seats a few hundred, hoping to attract an audience outside the die-hard dance crowd. The program of nine pieces by seven choreographers is danced by more than 20 dancers, with plenty of talent sprinkled throughout: there should be something for everyone in this show, which offers a promising mix of dances and ideas....

Museum With a Mission Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Art Institute undertakes this audience-broadening mission with the help of a substantial chunk of change–$1.28 million to be exact–from the New York-based Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, a philanthropic organization known for awarding unusually large grants for specific goals. Reader’s Digest Fund program director Holly Sidford says, “We did some research in the museum field, and it became clear fine arts museums needed help in broadening and developing their audiences....

Macena Barton’s large 1936 painting Salome would stand out in virtually any exhibit anywhere. In Barton’s stripped-down treatment of the story, a nude Salome, standing alone against a strident yellow background, contemplates the filigreed platter at her feet from which the blue-skinned head of John the Baptist, eyes open, seems to return her gaze. She’s an ordinary, contemporary looking young woman–a far cry from the idealized girl in a flowing gown we’ve come to expect from Renaissance-era depictions....

Twin Houses By Terry Brennan Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But how? Because realistic theater focuses on the surface of things, it promotes the illusion of self, the illusion that a body on a stage is one person, whole and indivisible. Even words betray the analysand’s experience, since they belong largely to the social world and its steel-reinforced edifice of illusions. The experience demands radical methods....

PASSION, Pegasus Players. Stephen Sondheim’s most unabashedly romantic musical is also his lamest–a musically derivative, dramatically unconvincing soap opera that wouldn’t have made it past its first backers’ audition if not for the composer’s name. This pseudooperatic adaptation of Ettore Scola’s 1981 film Passione d’amore concerns an unattractive, neurotic divorcee named Fosca (Anne Tolpegin, whose makeup and bearing recall an Edward Gorey cartoon) who becomes obsessed with an idealistic young military officer (the very strong James Weitzer), who in turn is having an affair with a married woman....

HANK WILLIAMS JR. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This was his core audience, the people who have stayed with him even when country radio hasn’t–the middle-aged woman in a Bocephus T-shirt who waved two rebel flags; the guy who cruised to the show in a four-wheel-drive pickup with the words “Hot Shit” stamped on the tailgate; the people who angrily inundated ABC with calls and letters when the network yanked their boy as musical spokesman for Monday Night Football....

Hey, Faggot: It’s one of those two or three days a year when everyone and everything conspires to heighten our expectations to absolutely unrealistic levels, assuring us a miserable letdown of an experience. If we dare watch TV, or pick up a paper, or leave the fucking house anytime around Valentine’s Day or Christmas or Thanksgiving or New Year’s Eve or Mother’s Day we’re barraged with images of impossible-to-attain levels of material and emotional comforts, images that force us to draw unflattering comparisons with our own piddling less-than-Hallmarked lives....

ERIC LUGOSCH 10/28, NO EXIT Like admitted influences John Prine and David Bromberg, this local singer-songwriter places his tunes within pleasant, folkish guitar settings. While Lugosch’s voice isn’t particularly strong, he masterfully exploits his prodigious finger-picking skills, embellishing his simple, flowing songs with appealing baroque flourishes that sound homey rather than flashy. This performance comes on the heels of last night’s record-release party for Making Models (Whitehouse), which provides ample proof of his piquant playing and effectively straightforward writing....

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18 Three narratives: Stephen Eckelberry’s Going Home from the U.S., starring Karen Black and Jeannette Nolan; Kirkham Jackson’s Pieces of the Moon from the UK; and Johannes Stjarne Nilsson’s Nowhere Man from Sweden. (Three Penny, 6:30) Bitter Sugar An honorable failure, this intelligent adaptation of one of Kurt Vonnegut’s best early novels falters in part because it rejects Vonnegut’s narrative structure of alternating several time frames for more chronological flashbacks....