ESCAPE FROM HAPPINESS The family at the center of George F. Walker’s dark comic farce Escape From Happiness is sick–and entertaining. Headed by a mother who maintains only the most tenuous connection to reality, the family consists of three daughters who display a panoply of neuroses and a chronically ill old man who may or may not be their father. When the youngest daughter’s husband is beaten up by local thugs, the family is thrown into a crisis....

EVELYN AND THE POLKA KING Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Olive’s story is the sort of one-sentence plot beginning screenwriters are encouraged to create: washed-up, recovering-alcoholic, former polka king Henry is united with young, perky Evelyn, the illegitimate daughter he never knew he had, and together they tour America’s heartland rebuilding his musical career, searching for her natural mother, and running from legal representatives of her adopted parents, who want their daughter back (along with the suitcase full of cash she stole)....

The Hundreth Monkey No Limit Productions Chicago Fringe Festival, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the immortal words of Chuck D, don’t believe the hype. Stagebill may be packed with superlatives so hyperbolic they’d make P.T. Barnum blush, but this Fringe is a far cry from the cutting edge. There’s hardly a countercultural impulse within 20 miles of the thing. Many pieces are straightforward theater, and most of the other performances–by comedians, magicians, monologuists, puppeteers, and clowns–owe a greater debt to the century-old tradition of vaudeville than to any 20th-century avant-garde theater movement....

HAMLET! Great Exploitations at ImprovOlympic Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But these days productions of his comedies most always seem dreadfully labored and outdated. Jokes make so little sense that actors guffaw at intolerable levels after uttering them, attempting to suck the audience into thinking the jokes are funny. And to a modern, jaded audience, some of the physical humor can seem sub-Benny Hill....

This veteran Chilean folk group hit the world stage during the heady days of the Allende regime in the late 60s, when it looked for a while as if ideas, goodwill, and a liberated human spirit could actually transform society. The CIA-backed Pinochet coup took care of that dream, but Inti-Illimani have carried on, even through a 15-year exile from their home country. In the process they’ve widened their thematic scope....

Another thread in the broadcloth of England’s uselessly named acid-jazz scene, Jamiroquai, like the considerably more diverse Brand New Heavies, play music saturated in the soul sounds of the 70s. Considered a major act by the press in their homeland, the retro-baked group have yet to make much of a dent stateside, and it’s doubtful that their latest and finest effort, The Return of the Space Cowboy (Work), will do much to change the situation....

Les Deux Camilles Cloud 42 at Body Politic Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Daly means to strip Dumas’ story, based on his own ill-fated affair with a famous courtesan, of its unearned romance, exposing the true-life liaison as obsessive and one-sided. No languid martyr, the flesh-and-blood Marie Duplessis was a self-made woman who prostituted herself up the ranks till she met Dumas (love child of the author of The Three Musketeers)....

You probably haven’t noticed, but for the last month TV has been showing you its best stuff. TV stations use their ratings in May (the “May sweeps”) as the baseline for setting their commercial rates, so they have traditionally loaded these few crucial, arbitrarily chosen weeks with their most glamorous product. In past years, this has meant an orgy of sleazy exploitation–night after night of psycho killers, kinky sex, true-life crime sprees, lurid diseases, wacky terrorist attacks, and that perennial favorite, ordinary citizens fighting back....

To the editor: In your Section 2 annotation for Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut, you identify Joe Turkel as an actor playing one of the five replicants that Harrison Ford is tracking down. Turkel, though, plays Tyrell, the designer of the replicants. The performer you should have named is Brion James–a fine character actor who, since his appearance as Leon in Blade Runner, has a lock on psycho killer/monsters in B movies....

The Stone Temple Pilots have a unique niche in today’s popular music as perhaps the most critically despised best-selling rock band since the halcyon days of Grand Funk. Several factors contribute to this status. First, there’s the overheated iconoclasm of indie alternative rock, which makes scapegoats, particularly popular ones, necessary. Second, STP sound an awful lot like Pearl Jam wannabes, and Pearl Jam, remember, were dismissed as Nirvana wannabes from the start....

Loop buildings built in the 1990s have the highest vacancy rate–41 percent–according to a recent survey by CB Commercial Real Estate Group. Next are 1970s buildings (23 percent) and pre-1950 buildings (19 percent). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Greenways: so popular they can’t pass a referendum? Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission senior adviser Lawrence B. Christmas, in Illinois Issues (April): “The popularity of open space was brought sharply into focus recently when the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission (NIPC), in partnership with the nonprofit Openlands Project, released a regional greenway plan calling for a 1,000-mile linked system of parks, waterways, trails and other linear land forms…....

The Wooing of Loud Lucy Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The band plays a dramatic and crisp Nirvana-derived rock, with Lane’s young but rapidly evolving songwriting skills the kicker. Worried about their development and the possibility of getting swallowed up by a large corporation, Lane, bassist Tommy Furar, and drummer Mark Doyle retained the ability to put out material not on Geffen. “It’s a Michael Jordan clause,” says Lane....

For years I’ve had an old friend’s words fixed in my head. He was fond of saying, “I don’t understand all I know about that.” At first I thought the comment a sort of paradox. Later I began to think of it as a way of seeing how things are. Growing up, I learned that people do not always try to understand what they take for granted. Take coal for instance, that black vegetable harvested by miners from deep pits, a source of both life and strife to my grandfathers....

The Neon Bible Two paradoxical facts about Terence Davies’s first film adaptation: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I suppose it could be argued that Davies’s capacity to make something at once completely different from and exactly the same as his earlier work is a rather uncommon achievement–shared perhaps with Yasujiro Ozu and Howard Hawks at various points in their careers, but not with many others....

TWO BY SHAW, Writer’s Theatre Chicago, at Books on Vernon. Writer’s Theatre Chicago’s last production was a literate, compelling, if a bit histrionic play based on the life of the literate, compelling, histrionic poet, Anne Sexton. This time around, as if to prove they can also perform cooler, more comic, but no less literate material, the folks at Writer’s Theatre bring us two one acts by George Bernard Shaw, one written near the end of his writing life, the other near the beginning....

The Oprah people were on the phone with my mom. Someone had given them my name as an expert on wiggers. You know, Wiggers. White kids who identify themselves with hip-hop. I was an expert on that. How do I dress? My own thoughts about race started pretty naively. Not that anyone would have thought to ask, but for moments in my early life I must have believed that black people ruled the Earth....

In any hour of any day the phone can ring, bringing another tale of woe. Not surprisingly, most hot line callers are north-siders; the three communities providing the most complaints are Lakeview, Rogers Park, and Edgewater; Uptown and Lincoln Park are also on the top-ten list. There are surprisingly few calls from impoverished communities like Woodlawn, Oakland, and West Garfield Park. “There’s not a lot of calls from these areas because there’s not a lot of people there anymore,” says Carpenter....

Richard Rezac’s 12 new abstract wood and metal sculptures at Feigen are easy to miss at first. Often small, sometimes mounted in corners or perched high on a wall, they look a bit like manufactured objects whose original function is now obscure. Rezac is not surprised by this comparison. “In undergraduate art school I fixed on the value of simplicity,” he says and compares his work to hand tools. “The use of materials in tools is usually close to perfect–they have a rationale and simplicity....

Campaign for Culture MCA executives are counting on the campaign, developed by the Chicago office of Hal Riney & Partners, to establish their new $46 million museum as a must-see destination long after the initial wave of curiosity has subsided. Throughout its 29-year history, the MCA has lived like a poor relative in the long shadow of the Art Institute. But executives at both insti-tutions are looking forward to the opening of the MCA’s new digs and the attention it will attract....

Limon Dance Company In a way, that’s to be expected; American society has changed, and good art reflects the changes. Yet it’s amazing that 49 years after its founding–it’s the oldest modern-dance company in the world–the Limon Company can still communicate Humphrey’s indomitable spirit to a society with decidedly different concerns. And they succeeded in doing this in most of her dances on this program, which opened the 1995 Spring Festival of Dance....