This deft showcase of selections from the Illegitimate Players’ wicked parodies is comedy with a conscience. Using their spoofs of Tennessee Williams (The Glass Mendacity), Steinbeck (Of Grapes and Nuts), Dickens (A Christmas Twist), and their recent Wisconsin bit, Cheese Louise, they erect a bulwark from which to defend government funding for the arts. But not to worry–the down-and-dirty attacks on Gingrich and Dole are leavened with laughs more telling than any diatribe....

The Decline of the International Theatre Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There were signs from the start that this year’s festival hadn’t caught much of the theatergoing public’s attention. The low-key opening-night performance, Jardin de pulpos by Mexico’s Taller del Sotano at the Wellington Theater, played to a less than full house. Perhaps the festival’s most anticipated work–Alan Ayckbourn’s new play Communicating Doors, which opened the next evening–proved to be a weak effort from one of Britain’s important play-writing talents, and one festival source indicated that ticket sales for the production’s two-week run fell well below expectations....

A team in mere disarray would be an improvement at this point. The Bears’ defense is inept, rendering their offense useless even on its good days, and the coaching staff is clueless. The season is in tatters. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Monday we again made an attempt to immerse ourselves in the game, watching the line play first and foremost and following the ball as an afterthought....

CONDOMS VERSUS AIDS, ROUND 2 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You point out that the 5-micron “intrinsic pores” scare is based on the latex in rubber gloves, not condoms, and you point out the vast differences in manufacture of the two. Good. You cite studies about correct, consistent use of condoms, a distinction the anticondom, antisex troops never make while making the rounds of talk shows....

Two ambitious, high-profile political figures aim in next Tuesday’s primary election to take the next critical steps in their promising public careers. One is Attorney General Roland Burris, who is seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination for governor of Illinois; if he wins and goes on to defeat Governor Edgar in the general election next fall, he’ll be Illinois’ first African American governor. The other is Du Page County state’s attorney Jim Ryan, who narrowly lost the attorney general race to Burris in 1990; endorsed recently by the Chicago Tribune, he’s heavily favored to earn a second chance at the job by winning the Republican primary next week....

Boston’s Joe Morris is one of a handful of contemporary jazz guitar practitioners who have carved out a wholly distinctive style, and over the course of a half dozen albums he’s honed his deliciously lean attack to razor-edged sharpness. Through his clean, pure tone you can still hear a trace of James “Blood” Ulmer’s influence–particularly in the chunky, knotty phrasing–but with each new outing Morris seems more and more his own musician....

JOE SHOW If you’ve lived in Chicago long enough, you’ve probably come across people very much like the characters in Joe Liss’s dreadfully titled yet expertly performed one-man Joe Show. Sitting through the production is kind of like taking a guided tour of the northwest side of the city. There’s the crabby laundromat proprietor who knows everybody’s business, the tripped-out flier distributor, the sarcastically indifferent cop, the fast-talking, chain-smoking cabdriver, the show-biz failure who runs a karaoke joint....

When the old-timers in the local movie business gather round to moan about their industry’s woes, they invariably tell the tale of the director from LA hired by the state to film a commercial promoting tourism in Illinois. “If you want to know why the film industry here is hurting so much, that about sums it up,” says Peter Donoghue, a veteran film-crew worker here. “The state might as well put up a billboard saying, “Don’t come to Chicago....

For more than 15 years pianist Marian McPartland has gained fame for hosting “Piano Jazz,” her popular National Public Radio program of interviews and performance; in fact, her reputation as an oral historian now stands equal to–and sometimes threatens to eclipse–her fame as a piano player. It shouldn’t. Beating George Shearing by a year, in 1946 she became the first Britisher to move to the U.S. after mastering jazz. Her husband, Jimmy McPartland, the premier cornetist of the Chicago style of prewar jazz, certainly influenced her early lessons; but within a few years, she had already moved beyond the trad style to craft an elegant and brainy approach to jazz modernism....

If guns are like viruses, then a suburban murder wave is coming. “Residents of suburban low-crime areas are much more likely to own handguns than those living in the city,” according to a recent press release by the Metro Chicago Information Center, taken from its 1991-95 polling data. “Sixteen percent of suburban residents [and 25 percent of downstaters] own handguns, compared to 11% of city residents….Even residents of Chicago communities with the highest murder rates (over 5....

Economists have a reputation not for asking simple questions but for giving simple answers–for knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. Supposedly they spend their professional lives trying to fit the human variety into a handful of preconceived notions. Don Coursey, of the University of Chicago’s Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, says he got over that early. Since then Coursey has focused on collecting basic information and asking questions that people assume they know the answers to....

THE FIRST The First opens with the Dodgers blowing the final game of the 1946 season, after which scout Clyde Sukeforth, manager Leo Durocher, and Branch Rickey (Joel Hatch) discuss signing the Kansas City Monarchs’ shortstop Jack Roosevelt Robinson (Alton Fitzgerald White). At first unsure as to whether Rickey’s offer is genuine or whether he’s just making a token gesture to “this year’s nigger,” Robinson takes the train to New York and signs with the Dodgers, fulfilling his lifelong dream to be “the first....

Stanley Tigerman has picked King Vidor’s 1949 version of Ayn Rand’s novel as the first in a series of four films selected by four local architects. By some accounts Frank Lloyd Wright’s writings helped inspire the book, whose lead character, Howard Roark, is a visionary architect who brooks no compromises and ultimately blows up one of his buildings when its design is altered. But Rand’s architect is utterly unlike Wright, who on reading the novel’s early chapters wrote that Roark could “never lick the contracting partnership,” and later deflected an offer to design the movie’s sets by demanding his usual commission–10 percent of the total budget; one irony is that many of Roark’s buildings are in styles Wright hated....

WILLIAM FERRIS CHORALE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cesar Franck, one of 19th-century France’s most important composers, embodies the William Ferris Chorale’s ethos. Conservatively inclined in an era that also produced the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel, Franck earned a living in relative obscurity as a church organist and teacher; many of his best compositions were written for choirs and organs. His harmonic idiom, derived in part from Wagner, is majestic, idiosyncratic, and spiritual....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You know, you’re right. Your front-page article about the convicted murderer, and how he should be let out of jail already, really made a good argument [“No Mercy,” February 16]. I mean, after all, why should he have been put in jail at all? Why not just put him in a program for murderers, a few hours per week, and they could be talked to gently and counseled with understanding and sympathy, and I’m sure they’d understand that what they did was bad, and they wouldn’t do bad things anymore....

George Balanchine looked for a certain savagery in dancing. Former New York City ballet principal dancer Daniel Duell, now artistic director of Ballet Chicago, once overheard Mr. B complaining to a dancer about English training: the choreographer described it as being like the elaborate process of making a very small, very polite cup of tea, from which one was allowed to take only one tiny sip. “Not me,” he said. “In Russia we have bread in one hand and a big bowl of soup in the other....

Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn’s tuneful folk-pop is notable for both its restrained tastefulness and its author’s humane decency. Whether incorporating eclectic world-beat influences (as on his 1980s records) or working from a country-blues foundation with the help of producer T-Bone Burnett (on 1991’s Nothing but a Burning Light and the new Dart to the Heart), there’s little that’s excessive, portentous, or loud in his music. Instead, you find sturdy, low-key songs with lovely melodies and subtle embellishments–an understated harmony here, a subdued organ accompaniment there, a twangy guitar part if he’s feeling rowdy....

CHICAGO BAROQUE ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You don’t have to know anything about antique instruments to enjoy the Chicago Baroque Ensemble’s collaboration with Rachel Barton, but if you do you may get an extra kick out of these performances. Over the summer John Mark Rozendaal, artistic director of the ensemble, took out a loan to buy a bass viola da gamba made circa 1650 by English master craftsman William Turner....

Four of the films on the seventh program in X-Film Chicago’s current series succeed by restricting themselves to single subjects, focusing the viewer’s attention on the act of seeing by repeating similar images with small variations. The 1967 Pigeon Lady, one of Tom Palazzolo’s earliest films, follows a lonely woman as she wanders about Chicago feeding pigeons. Monumental music by Wagner and others seems part of an attempt to ennoble her, but only underlines the distance between her plight and traditional ideas of heroism....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since most of the researchers on the subject can’t find someone who will say it, I will: I LIKE porn. I also like Westerns, comedies, love stories, action films, science fiction and horror flicks and stories. After viewing or reading porn, I have never had the desire to rape a woman nor tie her to anything....