My One and Only, Candlelight Dinner Playhouse. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This 1983 musical started out as a revival of George and Ira Gershwin’s 1927 hit Funny Face–the first show in which Fred Astaire danced in top hat and tails. Several directors and librettists later (Peter Sellars and Mike Nichols were among the guys caught in the revolving door), it became a vehicle for Tommy Tune and Twiggy, which is why the lead characters are a twangy Texan and a British beauty....

Sometime in the early 1980s, the Tribune tossed out a mountain of bound volumes. Deemed obsolete by management after being copied onto microfilm, the bulky archive fell into the hands of an amateur sports historian the company consulted after acquiring the Cubs. After clipping the sports pages for his personal collection, the hobbyist, a retired airline pilot, hauled the tomes off to a suburban storage locker. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Most of us wouldn’t bother to improve on excellence, but Kathy Randels has applied new heat to her smoldering cauldron of a one-woman show and extracted pure gold. In Rage Within/Without, which premiered in Chicago in July 1991, Randels weaves together personal narratives, scholarly writings, and lyrical musings into a mesmerizing exploration of the relationship between women and violence in Western culture. Now she’s also distilled away needless ambiguities and mixed in monologues based on interviews she conducted with women incarcerated for murder....

Ramon Salvatore is a champion of American piano music, the unjustly neglected repertoire he’s already highlighted in two well-received CDs (the second of which is on the local label Cedille). For this free recital, sponsored by the Chicago Historical Society in conjunction with its ongoing exhibit on the Columbian Exposition, Salvatore’s compiled a sampler from the Newberry Library’s collection of solo piano pieces and transcriptions written by composers who visited the 1893 fair....

HAMILTON POOL 5/12, SCHUBAS Comprising a couple folk rockers transplanted to Austin–Fairport Convention cofounder Iain Matthews and Michael Fracasso–and producer/musician Mark Hallman, Hamilton Pool does not equal the sum of its parts. After hearing Matthews’s solid if unspectacular 1994 album The Dark Ride (Watermelon) and Fracasso’s superb When I Lived in the Wild (Bohemia Beat), the overpolished singer-songwriter turf traversed on Hamilton Pool’s Return to Zero (Watermelon) sure doesn’t bristle with purpose....

One Nation, Under Fraud at Organic Theater Greenhouse Lab Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I suppose hopeful expectations had something–maybe a lot–to do with my disappointment. I’ve enjoyed director Burns’s work as an actor; in Wild Men and the old Friends of the Zoo shows, he displayed a dark, nervy edge sadly lacking here. And the title One Nation, Under Fraud leads one to anticipate some much-needed satire on the political and religious hypocrisy that dominates our culture....

SHONEN KNIFE Their first performance in Chicago, in December, also at Metro, hadn’t seemed this way at all. I’d expected a strange little garage band that might or might not be able to keep a steady beat. But what I found was a tight, raw rock outfit cranking out one incisive gem after another, all performed with unself-conscious showmanship. I’d been interested in the cheerfully strange music of Shonen Knife ever since the release of Shonen Knife on Gasatanka records in 1990....

The question Hitsville has always wanted to ask Jon Langford is this: When the Mekons reinvented themselves in the mid-80s, with the ragged, entrancing Fear and Whiskey, where did that countrified, punky, sprawling sound come from? Fiddles and power chords, drawls and shouts–it seemed to have no provenance. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And so they are: From their garage-punk beginnings to their unstable but still defiant status today, the Mekons have evolved in not-so-splendid isolation that’s kept the members’ hands clean and heads high but pockets empty and morale somewhat inconsistent....

The early years of baseball’s so-called “modern era,” after 1900, used to be part of the dark ages, as far as visions of the athletes went. Their stories existed, for the most part, in the form of statistics. The few photographs that remained in circulation were like the woodcuts peppered sparsely through old novels. Only in oral histories like Lawrence Ritter’s “Glory of Their Times”–still one of the best baseball books ever printed– did the figures come to life....

*** THE LITTLE GIRL OF HANOI With Lan Huong, Tra Giang, The Anh, and Kim Xuan. ** THE RETIRED GENERAL “16 January 1990 This talented filmmaker–who thanks to Apocalypse Now is widely regarded as an “expert” on the Vietnamese war, which for many Westerners is equivalent to the American experience of the war–indeed has a great deal to tell us about our own navel gazing. But to understand the experience of that war (and the gulf war) from the vantage point of the locals–some of whom are automatically excluded from Coppola’s definition of “everyone,” since they foolishly don’t own TV sets or, even more foolishly, don’t believe everything they see on them–it’s possible that we have to spread our nets a little wider....

AIDS Mag Dies Unlike Poz, a similar magazine based in New York that is published for profit and aimed at an affluent market Crump describes as “gay white men, downtown New York gay white men,” Plus Voice wanted to reach a broader audience. “We did some really aggressive outreach in poor minority communities,” Crump told us. This included a promise of free copies to any person or institution who asked for them....

Catchy melodies are pop music’s constant. But with millions of them floating around, it takes something more for a band to rise to the top of the world’s blurry pile of hooks. The best pure-pop artists have always leavened their tunefulness with some sort of quirk: addled masters like Brian Wilson, Alex Chilton, Scott Miller, and Martin Phillipps, for example, left personal stamps on their work with the Beach Boys, Big Star, Game Theory, and the Chills....

“Can you imagine going to college during a civil war?” asks Amanda Kay Dunsmore, an artist who divides her time between Chicago and Northern Ireland. “Yet Belfast has the most unpretentious art environment I’ve ever been in. When you have friends who have been blown up, you’re nearer to the fundamental things in life that matter. Universities are a neutral ground. Catholics and Protestants meet for the first time because they’re raised in separate schools....

Though macho actioners and goofy comedies have dominated the Hong Kong cinema for more than a decade, the women’s picture–a favorite genre in the 50s and 60s–is waging a strong comeback. C’est la Vie, Mon Cheri updates a 1960 weepie classic. It’s trendy among Asian producers these days to put French titles on the versions of their films distributed outside Chinese-speaking areas; unfortunately this film’s rather pretentious French title misses the blunt romanticism of the Chinese original, which translates as “Eternal Love....

This showcase of international performance features clowns, monologuists, cabaret singers, stage magicians, dancers, and even a cantor. Performers from Chicago are augmented by artists from around the U.S.–New York to California and Minnesota to Hawaii–as well as from Russia, Brazil, and Canada. Produced, as it was last year, by John T. Mills and James Ellis, the Fringe Fest runs through June 23, with shows six days a week–as few as 3 on weeknights or as many as 21 on weekends....

Some day years from now the city may regret ticketing Mark Thomas’s car for violating a residents-only parking zone in Lakeview. Thomas says he’s not inconsistent. Life, he argues, is a series of compromises; very rarely, almost never, do we do exactly what we want. In his case, Thomas, 40, was an idealistic and entrepreneurial hippie who developed three pricey north-side clothing stores from a funky little head shop he opened in Old Town more than 20 years ago....

Peter Margasak’s review of Combustible Edison [Rock Etc., June 10] smacks of the purist’s dismissal. In fact, it was premeditated. He went to their Chicago debut with poison pen in hand, eyes closed and ears shut. His contention that lounge music “was never designed to be exciting in performance; it was background fodder, mood music” reinforces this fact. His reference to other lounge and exotica artists as “their ilk” seems almost derogative as he lumps them into a holding tank for further dissection....

MORDINE & COMPANY DANCE THEATRE But as a choreographer Mordine is a terrible contradiction. Skilled at making sense-filling movement, she hasn’t been able to form a satisfying artistic vision. Her dances don’t reach out to the world or to other people, too often remaining locked in the orbit of her strong personality. Mordine will work on a piece for years, gradually stripping away strident elements until the dance is boiled down to pure form and movement....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let’s first dispose of Garvin’s assertion that FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) is a financial supporter of NPR. You could say that I am a financial supporter of the Chicago Tribune because on occasion I buy a copy–FAIR has once or twice purchased some cassettes from NPR, if NPR chooses to list them as a financial supporter that’s their problem in veracity....

Judy Baar Topinka had always been a favorite with the voters and the media. Her frankness and quotability helped her move up from state senator to state treasurer in the 1994 Republican sweep, and “Governor Topinka” didn’t seem out of the question someday. But on April 26 she suddenly found herself alone in a cross fire of words. Topinka battled back. She pointed out that Quinn had settled a similar hotel loan at a loss in 1992 when he was treasurer....