As a truthful account of the life of Tina Turner or as a faithful adaptation of her as-told-to autobiography I, Tina, this can’t be taken too seriously. But as a powerhouse showcase for the acting talents of Angela Bassett (who plays Tina Turner) and Larry Fishburne (who plays her abusive husband Ike Turner, the musician who discovered her) and as a potent portrayal of both wife beating and the emotions that surround it (in this case, professional envy on his part and stoic acceptance of abuse on hers), it’s quite a show....

Be Like Martha: My Secret Obsession With Martha Stewart Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I recall the first time I saw Martha, on her how-to-do-a-perfect-Thanksgiving PBS program. As she set the dinner table, she announced that each guest would be served his or her soup in an antique, turkey-shaped, glass candy dish. Now it’s one thing to have a clever serving idea. It’s another thing entirely to have the dishes....

Baby Richard’s Got Back, or It’s Not Easy Being Bob Greene, Second City E.T.C. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The standard is set by the songs; music director Jeff Richmond makes them as solid and multilayered as the sketches. In the opening rouser a dour minister’s family, who thrive on other people’s sorrows, are ecstatically transformed by an Afro UFO, a soul starship that teaches them the glories of funk....

Bucket Brigade November brought a profile in the Columbia Journalism Review, and it was clear Warren didn’t need us anymore. The stress was placed on Warren’s “Cokie Watch,” his vigil over Cokie Roberts and other media celebs so eager to prove no sum of money can buy them that they won’t make a speech for less than $10,000. But CJR did note in passing that Warren “has also assailed the Gridiron Club ....

It’s another alternative-rock road show! This week, melody and manners division: three irony-free presenters of unapologetically textured and intelligently crafted pop rock. Buffalo Tom are an earnest, somewhat stately Boston outfit who puts their chips on the squares marked sincerity, melody, and friendliness and thereupon bet the house. Bassist Bill Jankovitz, whose expressive voice sets the group’s tone, emotes adequately, and the group is tasteful and together even when turning up the volume, but their albums, including the new Big Red Letter Day, just don’t seem like required listening....

If he keeps at it, practicing every day, sometime in the next few years 16-year-old Norman Mason may make it to the Auditorium stage. His dream is to be a first-class jazz pianist. If he gets there, and his teachers say he has a chance, the Sullivan High School junior will owe some thanks to Deborah Sobol and Larry Combs. The program was conceived by Sobol in an attempt to replace the music programs lost to a decade of budget cuts....

Zaga Petrovic, co-owner of Chicago Hair Goods, will be the first to tell you that nothing in this world is permanent. Not the beauty-supply business. Not permanents, she admits with a sigh. And not the art of wig making. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago Hair Goods, a sixth-floor storefront at 428 S. Wabash, sells products that are difficult, if not impossible, to find anywhere else in Chicago: Becky Lynn Self-Adhesive Silk Overlay, Youthair Creme, Phos-Four Super Gel Cold Perm, Afro Sheen Blowout Kit, Vapon Wig Cleaner, Five-Second Nail Filler, and Nestle Touch of Glitter, along with various hair-coloring systems, blends, tints, toners, sprays, and assorted goop....

Nasty Girls Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With the recent debuts of Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, getting rude and lewd is no longer the exclusive province of male rappers. At any rate, considering that sex is selling better than ever, it’s surprising that it’s taken this long for a few female rappers to shed the loose-fitting unisex uniform of hip-hop and give the boys what they apparently want....

Out of the Limelight “All our research through the years and readership studies elsewhere underscored the fact that jumps are hard on readers,” said senior editor John Twohey, chairman of the committee. “People don’t like the experience of hunting for the balance of the stories that start on the front page. The four or five stories on page one represent our very best work, the pieces we have the biggest investment in, the ones reported and edited by our best people....

I went to the funeral for Robert Sandifer, but not to pay my last respects. Instead, I shot a roll and a half of film. Robert Sandifer, dressed in a tan suit, was photographed more dead than alive. The only picture his family had of him was a police mug shot. Gatling’s funeral home used it on the cover of the obituary program. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sandifer’s grandmother had offered the photographers several opportunities to snap her crying over the body and collapsing into a set of waiting arms behind her....

Total Eclipse With Leonardo DiCaprio and David Thewlis. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oddly, considering that Holland is a much more subtle artist than Stone, the wellsprings of her art and of his political rants are similar. It makes sense for Stone to be inspired by orgiastic, self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, melodramatic, beautiful young men, because his films display similar characteristics, like self-indulgence and lack of control....

At a sparsely attended press conference last week, John Richman seemed surprisingly subdued. Richman, chairman of the board of trustees of the Orchestral Association, parent organization to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, had just succeeded in wresting a unanimous vote from his fellow trustees to launch a whopping $92-million expansion project that will test the limits of the CSO’s fund-raising and management skills. It may be a decade before we know whether the decision ushers in a new and glorious era for one of the world’s great orchestras or leaves the CSO foundering under an imposing edifice it cannot afford....

I heard Andrew Sullivan speak at a fund-raiser for a gay rights group just a few months after his 1993 essay “The Politics of Homosexuality” appeared in the New Republic. In that essay Sullivan argued that the liberal pursuit of antidiscrimination legislation relegates gays to a “permanent supplicant status,” and that such a political agenda is “more than a mistake. It is a historic error.” As I sat in the grand ballroom of a downtown hotel with hundreds of other gay men and women–many of whom, it was not difficult to imagine, would slip on fake wedding bands before returning to the office Monday morning–I eagerly awaited the hubbub that would erupt when Sullivan lambasted the crowd for playing victim politics and then disappearing into privileged middle-class lives....

Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It is interesting that Ross considers homosexuality to be such a highly correlated trait with child molestation when, in his own words, 35 percent of pedophiles are homosexual. One need not be a mathematician to realize 65 percent therefore are not gay, and that 65 is a bigger number than 35. His comment “Given that . ....

If her recent biographers have it right, Wallis Warfield Simpson applied the skills she learned in a Hong Kong brothel to Edward VIII’s impotence, back in the 1930s, and thereby got him to give up the British throne and marry her. Then she needed a special dress for the occasion. She turned to Mainbocher, the most exclusive couturier in Paris. No one could turn a great lay into a great lady like this former Marshall High School baseball team water boy....

By Michael Miner On Friday morning, her first opportunity to appraise this phenomenon, Tribune columnist Mary Schmich mused, “We’re just hapless riders strapped onto the mindless beast. We can’t control it and we can’t get off.” Among the other news organizations the New York Times inquired at was the Chicago Tribune, where an editor acknowledged “gnawing concerns” about the story. The Tribune managed to overcome these, splashing “Possible break in bombing” across page one with a full-color picture of Jewell....

IN SO MANY WORDS, PART ONE: THE MOST OF SHAVE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wilhelm Hahn’s efficient set consists of a single seven-foot plant, which somehow looks stupid, a beige couch, and a fake flagstone bar. Both couch and bar are on casters and can be swung in and out of view by the actors. One entire wall is made of piled-up cardboard boxes painted white, which look jaggedly sculptural in a cubist style....

Nursery Crimes Warren G’s Regulate…G Funk Era is the final part of an unholy trinity of releases–beginning with Dr. Dre’s The Chronic and continuing with Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle–that has turned rap upside down. Each of them marries the grooviest, smoothest sounds available in rock ‘n’ roll today to a particular form of lyrical outrage: in the first two cases Dre’s nasty, almost cretinous sociopathology and Dogg’s astonishing, bottomless self-absorption....

Out of the Ashes Company member Michelle Banks could see the emergency lights two blocks away as she ran toward the theater. A police car was parked lengthwise across Damen at Wabansia, and an officer was rerouting traffic onto the side streets. A helicopter hovered over the intersection of Damen, North, and Milwaukee. Banks could hear snippets of conversation as she passed people on their way home from work: Best of Chicago voting is live now....

It’s Wednesday evening, and Jeff Gramm has been fretting over the sparse turnout for his band Dingle, which is headlining Lounge Ax for the first time. His mother Wendy, an economist, happens to be in town for a meeting at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Now she’s sitting off to the side of the Lincoln Avenue rock club, sipping Huber draft from a plastic cup. Today’s her 51st birthday. Best of Chicago voting is live now....