Ritual Clowns Kinetic Delta Cor The ritual they enact is a variation on Del Close’s long-form chestnut, the Harold, in which actors improvise on the basis of an audience suggestion for 30 to 60 minutes, creating scenes that may involve the whole cast or only two or three performers. In Grace’s ritual, the “audience” suggestion is a videotaped selection from that night’s news. A ragtag assortment of television sets are arranged along the back wall of the Improv-Olympic’s new second-story space, some black-and-white, some color, some on their sides, others with tubes so bad they deliver only ghostly out-of-focus images....

Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie Directed by Jim Mallon Written by Michael J. Nelson, Trace Beaulieu, Mallon, Kevin Murphy, Mary Jo Pehl, Paul Chaplin, and Bridget Jones With Beaulieu, Nelson, Jeff Morrow, Rex Reason, Faith Domergue, and the voices of Mallon and Murphy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The kind of humor that characterizes the Mystery Science Theater series has existed almost as long as the teenager has existed as a marketing concept–that is, since the early 50s, when television started becoming widespread....

Romeo and Juliet And when it comes to romance and passion, no story has endured like Romeo and Juliet. Ballet choreographers have staged over two dozen versions since 1785, and for good reason: as James Monahan wrote in the notes for a 1984 staging by the Royal Ballet, “Romeo and Juliet…is essentially a lyrical Pas de deux, and lyrical Pas de deux are ballet’s home ground, its prime business.” In the 20th century, over a dozen versions of Romeo and Juliet have been choreographed to Sergey Prokofiev’s powerful 1935 score, originally conceived to accompany a (thankfully, never produced) ballet with a happy ending....

Until Rich Melman’s Cafe Babareeba! made tapas a household word a half a dozen years ago, Spanish cuisine was a mystery to most diners, who often mistakenly assumed it was hot like Mexican. In fact, except for a few dishes from the Basque region, in Spain’s northeast comer, the cooking is savory but uses no hot peppers. Garlic, yes. Sometimes lots. But nothing with a chili burn. It’s closer to French Mediterranean food than to Latin American, though Cuban cooking shares a few classic dishes with Spain....

WAYNE KRAMER 3/24, DOUBLE DOOR Journeyman guitarist Wayne Kramer is often credited with inventing both heavy metal and punk rock during his stint in Detroit’s influential MC5 back in the 60s. Now that his more famous bandmates Rob Tyner and Fred “Sonic” Smith have died off and punk rock’s suddenly become a lucrative venture, the time must have seemed ripe for a Kramer solo record, so encouraged and joined by second-gen punks who revolve around the Epitaph Records/Bad Religion axis, Kramer graced the world with The Hard Stuff, a potent testament of his ability to peel off fat, driving riffs and slashing, acidic wah-wah-drenched leads....

Do-it-yourself music like free improvisation crops up in the most unlikely places. Enclaves of improvisers have appeared in out-of-the-way spots from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Arkhangel’sk, Russia. Count Milwaukee among those smaller cities with a fairly active free scene–multiinstrumentalist Paul Gaudynski, drummer Tony Finlayson, percussionist Terry Smirl, and instrument inventor Hal Rammel all hail from America’s beer-and-brats capital, as does saxophonist Steve Nelson-Raney. Though he’s been at it for many years, Nelson-Raney, who’s also a composer and pianist and plays jazz with his group Eastern Earlines, recently issued his debut CD, a solo effort called Summer 1994 (Cody)....

How on earth can the Chinese and Japanese use computers, given that their writing uses thousands of different characters? The keyboard must look like something off a Wurlitzer pipe organ. –Nora Krashoc, Knoxville, Tennessee Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (1) Figure out which of the 50,000-plus Chinese characters you want to use. It should not be necessary to point out that each character stands for a word or concept (usually) rather than a sound as in English....

What’s the name of that black stuff athletes smear on their faces to deflect the sun? Does it work? –Rita J., Kansas City, Missouri Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Does eye black work? It’s debatable. Most soccer players don’t use it and God knows what it’s supposed to do for football linemen. But it does seem to reduce the glint off your cheeks in bright sunlight, obviously a matter of some consequence if you’re a baseball outfielder, and word from the physics department is that in one respect it’s better than sunglasses, in that it doesn’t slow down your reaction time....

Highly acclaimed in its summer run at Apple Tree Theatre, this superb production launches the 1995-’96 season with a bang. David Darlow etches an unforgettable portrait in Kenneth Hoyle, a man wrecked by success in Jon Robin Baitz’s play. Hoyle, who changed his Russian Jewish name to a WASPish one, is a master of euphemism: vice president of an American baby-food manufacturer in charge of “developing nations,” he peddles formula to African mothers as a substitute for breast milk, fires unproductive managers, and defends his company’s bottom-line policies at international health conferences....

TWO ROOMS Blessing stirs us with quiet monologues that make up the couple’s individual fantasies. Somewhere in Beirut, blindfolded and handcuffed, the hostage clings to his sanity by “writing” mental letters to his wife Lainie. “Talking” to her, Michael travels in his mind–backward to their first meeting and forward to the son they haven’t had. In Michael’s office at home (from which his wife has removed all his furniture and belongings, as if to re-create his prison), Lainie spends most of her time talking to him, as much to keep him alive in her thoughts as to will him to live until he can be freed....

“Our strategy is grassroots-based–media by the people,” says Jim Wrecks, cofounder of the Chicago CounterMedia project. “We want people to know that if they capture acts of dissent and resistance, we can get the message out to the larger community–and blast the images around the world.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » CounterMedia may not be beaming its broadcast signal to the world, but during the next week the coalition of political and media groups is promising to offer an alternative to the canned news product sure to pour from the tube during the Democratic National Convention....

Infatuated with progressive rock groups such as King Crimson while growing up in Tokyo in the late 60s, Akikazu Nakamura at first took up the electric guitar, but after being introduced to the shakuhachi–an elongated, end-blown bamboo flute dating from 14th-century imperial courts–he decided to devote himself to redefining the ancient instrument’s role in contemporary music. By the early 80s Nakamura had not only mastered the shakuhachi and its playing tradition, he’d also broadened its capabilities by incorporating a new breathing technique and phrasing tricks appropriated from jazz saxophone....

BLAH BLAH FUCKIN BLAH As if the title of the show weren’t sufficiently problematic, in the program Kosmas explains that after hearing a story about a crazy woman who’d given all her power away, “i went to my teacher, and friend, jim spruill, and asked him to make sense of it for me–this world–and he said, “the kinda anger you’re talking about makes art, crime, or revolution.’ so, i went back to my collaborative playmaking class and started making this piece....

When people talk about the great Texas bluesmen, Buddy Ace’s name doesn’t come up nearly as often as it should. Ace was already a local sensation as a teenager; his first 45, on Don Robey’s Houston-based Duke label, came when he was all of 16. In 1966, his “Nothing in This World Can hurt Me” propelled him into national R & B celebrity: he toured with the likes of Bobby “Blue” Bland and Johnny “Guitar” Watson and solidified his reputation as a powerful blues crooner who can ride the rhythm of a tune to extract maximum emotional heat....

The Digable Planets are the latest groovy entry from the sparking and restless world of alternative rap. Our players are three insect munchkins (Doodle, Butterfly, and Ladybug) who groove on abstract existentialism, gentle and percolating beats, and irresistible bebop samples. The title of their unlikely but ingratiating hit single “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)” pretty much says it all about the group; they’ve taken a jazzy, forgotten cool, harnessed it to those caressing drum tracks, and given a constantly changing musical form its newest spin....

By Bonnie McGrath Exactly a year ago to the day, Cochran had been cross-examining Los Angeles police detective Tom Lang. He asked him about his knowledge of throat slashings in drug-related killings, suggesting through his leading questions that Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman were killed by drug dealers, not his client. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “He is a great trial lawyer,” said Maloney, adding that he came from San Antonio because he admires so much the job Cochran did for Simpson....

It’s often music, more than verbal political commentary, that enables Americans to make truly intuitive connections to other cultures, which in turn adds dimension to our impressions of international political events. Given this, WBEZ’s recent dismissal of Stuart Rosenberg–who in his programs “The Earth Club” and “Radio Gumbo” generally ignored nationalism, elitism, and even the very notion of hipness in pursuing a willful, idiosyncratic eclecticism seems particularly myopic. Fiddler-mandolinist Rosenberg has now assembled what appears to be the first in a series of live shows geared to the same principles that informed his radio programs, juxtaposing musics in a way that invites listeners to compare and contrast the unlikeliest idioms....

Two decades ago a film history professor complained to me that his students were now making videos. Videotape is much cheaper than film, so instead of viewing three-minute films of the forest he now had to view hour-long unedited videos that panned around dorm rooms. But artists had been using long takes since the beginning of video art in the 60s. “Reel One,” the first program in a four-night video series, is quite gripping....

John Darnielle, singer and songwriter with the Extra Glenns, is a man in love with language. Flush with vividly evocative phrases and economically rendered narratives, his songs may seem a bit out of sync with the times: in an age when the self-conscious deployment of obscenity is a viable marketing tool, he makes old-fashioned phrases like “You strike me as mean-spirited” as chilling as a thousand contemporary vulgarities. Darnielle’s local performances with his other group, the Mountain Goats, have revealed him to be a rousing performer with a knack for captivating audiences even when he’s playing a succession of unfamiliar new songs....

Lead Story According to serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s autopsy records, which were released in March, officials kept Dahmer’s body shackled at the feet during the entire procedure. “Such was the fear of this man,” explained pathologist Robert Huntington. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to a May story by Reuters columnist Sherwood Ross, psychic advisers Phyllis Schwartz and Hy Kaplan of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, have been retained by nearly 100 firms, including several of the Fortune 500, to read the vibes of prospective employees....