Success on TV can expand a performer’s reputation, but it can also obscure her accomplishments. Charlotte Rae is best known as a sitcomedienne from her long stint on NBC’s warm and fuzzy The Facts of Life, as well as for her supporting roles on Sesame Street, Hot L Baltimore, and Car 54, Where Are You? But she’s also a singer and stage actress of great distinction. Her knack for eccentric comedy made her a magnificent Mrs....

CAMEL GOSSIP III In this dreamlike world, distractions and transformations are far more real than continuity and stability. “You mean there isn’t a story?” my daughter asked incredulously before the show began. “It’s just people spitting water?” Well, yes and no. There is a story of sorts, but the characters split in two, appear and disappear, die and then revive. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Camel Gossip III seems to reflect the circumstances behind the mounting of the show–Dogtroep tailors its pieces to the sites at which they’re performed....

Just as I walk into the living room a young woman, who will be back immediately following the commercial, is telling Maury Povich she had sex with an alien. I settle into a chair that faces slightly away from the set. Should we watch this thing together, or should we talk about the important things of life? For instance, what has the cat been using since she stopped using the litter box?...

The 72-year-old Eddie Johnson is no museum piece, but his music does belong to a previous time–the Swing Era, when such legends as Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young made the tenor saxophone the most exciting instrument in jazz. The swing tenor style treats the horn less as an external instrument than as a natural extension of the human voice, and it expresses the sweet elegance– punctuated by episodes of guttural joy–to which the era aspired....

“You have to realize that Einstein was going through a divorce at the time,” Marsha Malinowski explained to a well-dressed handful at Sotheby’s private exhibition of new acquisitions at its gallery on West Huron. “The editor of the journal repeatedly tried to get him to finish the draft, but Einstein politely declined. This is the longest unpublished manuscript by Einstein known to exist, and the earliest known draft of his theory of special relativity....

One night only, step right up, ladies and gents, for perhaps the most oddly instrumented “group” in jazz. Dwike Mitchell plays piano; Willie Ruff plays French horn and bass (though not at the same time), and for 40 years they’ve managed to make this unbalanced tripod stand up. Give much of the credit to Mitchell: his voracious technique turns the piano-bass duets into paragons of that format; and when his partner picks up the horn, Mitchell’s stylistic elegance and keyboard ingenuity remind us that the piano can act as a miniature orchestra....

STORIES I AIN’T TOLD NOBODY YET In less skilled hands, a collage can degenerate into a near total disregard for structure. Images–the more disparate the better–are simply strung together in a series, without regard for how they unfold in time or resonate with one another. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfortunately, such is the case with Jo Carson’s Stories I Ain’t Told Nobody Yet, being given its Chicago premiere by Tour de Femme....

STRANGE SNOW It’s the strangest coincidence: in both these living-room dramas a male character expresses his uncontrollable anger by putting his fist through a window. At face value, this show of passion might be a symptom of an uninventive playwright. Thankfully, these two plays both use simple story structure and standard conventions of drama with intelligence and charm. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Strange Snow, author Steve Metcalfe serves a meat-and-potatoes tale that is so simple structurally it seems criminal....

Getting strange for the holidays. According to a recent UIC press release, nutrition instructor Janet Regan Klich urges holiday shoppers to use the supermarket as a gym. Park at the far end of the lot, she suggests. Choose items from top and bottom shelves only. And “pick up two 46-ounce cans of juice and do arm curls and lifts while walking around the store.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“Our broccoli will not look like the widgety California broccoli ’til cooler fall weather arrives,” Kimberely Rector advises Chicago subscribers to the Angelic Organics community-supported farm in Boone County, in Farm News (August 5). “Unless you have gardened yourself, unless you have become used to the vagaries of weather, become used to the variations in vegetable appearances, you may judge our broccoli harshly, asking ‘What kind of broccoli is this?’ Ours is a perfectly valid manifestation of broccoli, but one to which the supermarket shopper is unaccustomed…....

For the last 15 years Chicago-style improv has been long on talk, short on physicality. And even when the humor has gotten physical, it’s usually the Jerry Lewis, spazzed-out shtick that ImprovOlympic alum and SNL regular Chris Farley has built his career on. Which explains why it takes an improv troupe from, of all places, Milwaukee, to do the coals-to-Newcastle thing and show us how much better improvised material can be when actors have a dancer’s control over their instruments....

Dear Reader Staff: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I could not fault anything Mr. Ervin wrote. As far as I remember, everything was true. But certain things were left out. Yes, everyone there is supposed to be active in their churches at home, nonsmoking, nondrinking, abstaining from sex if unmarried. But is that all negative? I realize it is restrictive, especially to the late-20th-century urban dweller....

Jeff Dorchen has always been fascinated by the Ishmaels and Cains of the world, the loners, losers, and disenfranchised who see things more clearly because they’re on the outside looking in. In Birth of a Frenchman, which he also wrote, Dorchen played a French citizen–complete with an outrageous French accent–inexplicably born to provincial American parents. And in his latest one-man show he plays three outcasts in one: a Jew among goyim, a folksinger among rock and rollers, and a white southerner adrift in the north....

THE PROGENY CHRONICLES Hope and Nonthings and Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The title character of Scott Sandoe’s Texanna Rearranges the Planets and Saves Your Family From the Gates of Hell–one-half of “The Progeny Chronicles”–is a housewife and mother turned author. Her children didn’t object when she first took up writing, finding it in their own interests to keep her busy and out of the way....

victoria williams Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even a willing listener has to get through two small matters before appreciating Victoria Williams. One is the singer-songwriter’s voice: an expressive but slightly cartoony instrument that most will find an acquired taste. Second is to understand that much of her acclaim–great reviews and a host of big-deal famous-artist friends–is based specifically on her talents as a songwriter as opposed to a performing or album artist....

Friday 17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The circus is in town, i.e., The Dime Circus, an exhibit of the evocative etchings by Tony Fitzpatrick that grace the pages of the Reader. Fitzpatrick and gallery owner Edward Varndell have pledged to give 40 percent of the net proceeds from tonight’s opening to Project: Protect, which provides legal assistance and housing for abused women and children....

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s a school of thought that compares maestros to vintage wine: the older they get, the riper and wiser they become. By this criterion, Tokyo-born Takashi Asahina, who at age 87 is the world’s oldest active conductor, must be a fountain of musical wisdom. If only it were the case. To be sure, Asahina is an engaging and thoughtful interpreter of the Germanic canon–which has always been held in the highest regard by the Japanese cultural elite–but he’s no Herbert von Karajan or even Georg Solti, leaders of the postwar pack....

It’s a simple idea, really–making an avant-garde play about avant-garde plays–and so well executed here that it traces a new direction in the avant-garde. Clowns Plus Wrestlers incorporates many of the most current ideas in avant-garde theater: a fragmented plot made up of several miniplots that intentionally go nowhere, New Vaudevillian clowns, text appropriated from other sources, postmodern dance. The new element in this stew is its two wrestlers, small-town boys who speak leaden English and want to prove their manhood by violently overcoming other men....

The last couple of dances that Zephyr Dance Ensemble artistic director Michelle Kranicke has choreographed have had an understated elegiac quality, a sorrow that insinuates itself into every movement. Her new Memory Slipped conveys a feeling of quiet abandonment, perhaps the feeling of a woman with two children asleep in the house gazing at the trees outside her window, wondering if anything will start again. An abstract dance that evokes the suspended time between dreaming and waking, it’s also about memories being distorted over time, according to Kranicke....

GUSH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Derek Bailey, the pioneering British guitar improviser, has often frowned on repeat matchups of musicians. The idea goes, once you discover the basic MO of another musician, there are no surprises left to cajole the music into unexpected directions. Sweden’s Gush doesn’t necessarily topple Bailey’s idea, but it provides a hearty challenge. Pianist Sten Sandell, percussionist Raymond Strid, and reedist Mats Gustafsson have been performing as Gush since the late 80s, but each brings such a bounty of ideas and techniques that they seem to collectively possess dozens of distinct personalities, daring themselves to discover new terrain with each performance....