The Men Who Would Be King and The Ugly Duckling, Merattic Theatre Company, at the Theatre Building. In Melora Kordos’s new play, The Men Who Would Be King, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Richard III, Claudius, and Cassius meet in hell to elect the underworld’s new ruler. If the thought of watching such a play–scripted in ersatz Elizabethan English–elicits a groan, you’re not the only one to feel that way. Merattic’s hesitant, dispassionate debut feels like a collective groan from a group of young actors who can’t wait for the final blackout....

One night about a year and a half ago Mick Napier was up late channel-surfing with a few other members of the Annoyance Theatre when they noticed some old friends making an appearance on Jay Leno. They were performing bits from The Real Live Brady Bunch as a plug for the show’s national tour. Conceived and directed by the Soloways, The Real Live Brady Bunch, based on the weak premise of acting out actual old Brady Bunch episodes, was paired with a parody game show, The Real Live Game Show, and booked for Tuesday nights, the darkest of dark-night slots....

I’m strolling through Washington Park when he walks up to me. I try to dodge him, but he’s persistent. My smile is all he needs to start reciting other poems–a verse about his rage, a phrase about his crack addiction, words about love. You can’t get a word in once he’s onstage. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He flashes a gap-toothed grin, basking in his words....

Dear sir: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The praises heaped on Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Michael Solot reveal a startling ignorance of the basic facts of German history [“Genocide and the Ordinary German,” June 14]. Goldhagen and Solot’s belief that the Holocaust “expressed the will of the German people as a whole” has been treated with the scorn it deserves by a wide variety of Israeli, English, and American scholars who have no desire to make excuses for the Germans....

AUGUST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sun-Times columnist Jeffrey Zaslow hosts two big singles events this weekend, both at the downtown Hyatt, 151 E. Wacker. Tonight is the fifth annual All That Zazz Singles Bash; 20 bucks (16 if you get your ticket in advance) allows you to cruise an anticipated 3,000-plus unattached attendees. The affair runs from 6 to midnight and includes party games, psychics, and an all-you-can-eat buffet....

Captured at newsgroup alt.coffee Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was experimenting with new methods for roasting coffee beans and just happened to get the clever idea (if I may say so myself) of trying to slowly roast them on a print dryer (with the heat turned up). The results were phenomenal! I found the process to work best with Capulin and Kenyan AA beans....

God Bless Americana Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Jayhawks’ latest record, which cost $1 million to produce, sold a disappointing 100,000 units; Wilco’s A.M. is pushing about three-quarters of that, though its commercial life is not over; the Bottle Rockets sold something more than 10,000 on the small Minneapolis label East Side Digital, and have just seen the album rereleased on Atlantic. None of these figures is embarrassing, but they’re small in this overheated alternative age....

NOT ABOUT HEROES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This statement, which could have come from an exceptionally well-spoken opponent of American involvement in Vietnam, was made in July 1917 by Siegfried Sassoon–aristocrat, dilettante, writer, and war hero, who had earned the nickname “Mad Jack” for his bravery when a sniper’s wound sent him home from the French front. The protest–quite a change of heart from a poet who had written not long before that “war has made us wise / And, fighting for our freedom, we are free”–stirred up considerable debate in Parliament and the press....

Four decades ago Saul Bellow traveled to Galena, Nauvoo, Cairo, Shawneetown, and Springfield to gather material for “Illinois Journey,” an essay published by Holiday magazine in 1957. At the time Bellow, living in New York, had distinguished himself in his fiction as an anthropologist of the human spirit. He’d plumbed the psyche of a Chicagoan and a New Yorker respectively in Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947), and he’d explored the promise Chicago held for the persistent opportunist in The Adventures of Augie March (1953), the novel that earned him his first National Book Award....

TALKING HEADS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bennett’s a TV writer himself–but not the kind to settle for cheap sneers or easy sentimentality, which is probably why he’s not very well known in America. In his collection of monologues Talking Heads, written for BBC television in the late 80s, the now-60-year-old Englishman sketches six small-town eccentrics. They speak not about their own feelings, but about other people–the folks who share or intrude upon their world....

Looking for a different way to make puppet shows, Blair Thomas went to hear Argentinean puppet master Javier Villafane speak in New York last year. Villafane, now in his 90s, said he had been inspired by Federico Garcia Lorca to become a puppeteer: Villafane took a wagon full of marionettes and hand puppets into the Argentinean countryside and gave shows from it for much of his life. He met Garcia Lorca in Buenos Aires in 1937 or 1938, at a time when the playwright had become disillusioned with conventional theater and was dabbling in puppetry himself: he wrote several marionette plays about a brute named Don Cristobal who seduces the landlord’s daughter and makes a fool of a well-born doctor....

In just three and a half hours you too can be in the fabulously tacky Wisconsin Dells, one of my favorite places on earth. (Don’t forget to take a break in Janesville on the way up and check out the gigantic fake cow!) Take the Wisconsin Dells exit and brace yourself. You’ll think you died and went to heaven (or hell, depending on how much you enjoy trashy American pop culture)....

A SOLDIER’S PLAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The U.S. Armed Forces may have evolved somewhat in the last 50 years, but the whole gays-in-the-military issue points out that it will never be an institution associated with forward thinking or generosity toward minorities. Still, it’s a shock to hear Fuller’s Captain Taylor, a white officer in command of a black troop, greet the protagonist, Captain Davenport, who’s come to investigate the soldier’s death, with an apology for staring....

Dead Man With Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, Eugene Byrd, Mili Avital, Gabriel Byrne, John Hurt, Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton, Jared Harris, Jimmie Ray Weeks, Mark Bringelson, Michelle Thrush, Alfred Molina, Robert Mitchum, and Crispin Glover. The first of many violent episodes in the film, this one sets the tone for Jarmusch’s distinctive, unnerving handling of violence. (“Why do you have this?” Blake asks Thel, fingering her gun before her former lover turns up....

CARNEGIE HALL JAZZ BAND directed by JON FADDIS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band came into being a few years ago, most people assumed it would compete with the older Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra for bragging rights as New York City’s top jazz repertory ensemble. Like its predecessor, the Carnegie Hall band planned to draw upon the great compositions and arrangements of jazz history; and while the Lincoln Center crew had the 80s trumpet wunderkind Wynton Marsalis as its musical director, the CHJB would operate under the figurative baton of Jon Faddis – the trumpet wunderkind of the 70s....

The 11th Chicago International Children’s Film Festival runs from Friday, October 7 through Sunday, October 16. Apart from the opening-night screening, which is at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, all screenings will be at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton. Tickets are $3 for children and Facets members, $5 for adults; discount booklets of four tickets are $10 for children, $15 for adults. For further information call 281-9075....

Chicago can boast some terrific percussionists these days, and you ought to count Damon Short among them–not only for his drumming, but also for his wide-ranging, highly personal skills as a composer. Short’s drumming percolates up from the swing beat of his father’s record collection, from the chunky street rhythms he absorbed while living in New Orleans, and from the energetic free-jazz pulse vulcanized by Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians....

Doyle Bramhall has been a drummer for more than 30 years, but his recent solo debut, Bird Nest on the Ground (Antones), proves that at heart he’s really a singer. For years a regular around Austin and Dallas, he’s worked intermittently with Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan–he’s written or cowritten a bunch of songs recorded by the latter–and recorded and/or played with, among others, Lou Ann Barton, Marcia Ball, and Zuzu Bollin....

Cleopatra Block arrived at Englewood High School about three weeks ago from her family’s house in Mount Prospect to begin her career as a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools. Young, smart, and full of enthusiasm, she was a needed addition to our aging faculty. But here she was in a back corner of the faculty lounge, attempting to hide behind a row of lockers. Her freckled face was red and distorted by tears....

If a coalition of housing activists has its way, the city will soon unveil a Marshall Plan for low-income housing–a plan that would spend $1 billion over the next five years to build or rehab 35,000 units of housing for the poor. The proposed plan, called the Chicago Affordable Housing and Community Jobs Ordinance, was introduced several months ago by 20th Ward Alderman Arenda Troutman. All summer housing activists have been leafleting el stops, wooing editorial writers, and conducting rallies at City Hall in support of the ordinance....