CABIN FEVER Fisher has also always been attentive to creating personas, at times assuming the guise of a dangerous, powerful femme fatale, at others of a sprite or nymph. She’s always managed to keep her audience at arm’s length–her demeanor is icy cool–yet her intensity, concentration, and sinuous, disciplined movement style (which seems to be rooted deep into the earth) and her highly charged, sometimes erotic choreography are engaging. One looks because one is pulled into the world she’s created, but there’s always an uneasy sense that one might be intruding, one might not be welcome–it’s like peering surreptitiously into the recesses of a teenager’s bedroom....

SOMEONE WHO’LL WATCH OVER ME Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two political prisoners, a kindly, soft-spoken African American doctor and a brash, swaggering Irish journalist, are joined by a third prisoner, a prissy English university professor, in their bleak Beirut cell. Chained to the walls of the prison, the three try to stave off their feelings of fear, misery, and helplessness by exploring the universal human bonds between them....

A Leaner Meaner Sun-Times? Last month Nigel Wade, deputy editor of the Telegraph of London, came to Chicago to study the Sun-Times operation. The Telegraph is owned by Hollinger, Inc., parent company of American Publishing, and Wade submitted his report to David Radler, president of Hollinger and chairman of APC. Wade focused on the editorial product; he’s due back in Chicago this week, and this time he’ll presumably focus on the people who create the product....

EDWARD WILKERSON’S SHADOW VIGNETTES Perhaps the best analogy in Chicago is to the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Both the AACM and Steppenwolf were started by small groups of like-minded performers. Both have produced performers of striking talent and originality. And members of both have gone on to earn international acclaim. But while Steppenwolf’s reputation is certainly well deserved, the record of the lesser-known AACM is in many respects even more impressive. The AACM has nurtured more performers over a longer period of time....

APRIL Bunnies bought this time of year are often abandoned by irresponsible owners when the novelty wears off. Dog and cat shelters are ill equipped to deal with homeless rabbits and reluctant to take them in, but not the House Rabbit Society. This all-volunteer outfit based in Highland Park rehabilitates bunnies who’ve become “aloof, fearful, or aggressive” due to mistreatment and places them in good homes. The organization holds its second annual fund-raiser tonight at 6 at Pyramid of Cairo, 720 N....

“I love the city,” says Tom Moss, who’s sitting in the living room of the mint green two-story house at 115 Beachwalk Lane in Michigan City, Indiana. “I miss working downtown–the buzz of the Loop, seeing six people you know on the way to a meeting.” “The article clicked with me,” says Moss. “There was a problem with development, and I had 106 acres of land to develop. I wound up learning the land-development business and neo-traditional town planning at the same time....

Germany Year 90 Nine Zero Like most of Jean-Luc Godard’s recent work, Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991) and JLG by JLG (subtitled December Self-Portrait, 1994) are annexes to his Histoire(s) du cinema, a work on video in multiple parts scheduled to premiere in its finished form at the Locarno film festival in Switzerland in early August. (Four portions of this video have already shown at the Film Center.) Like the various parts of Histoire(s) du cinema, these films (each about an hour long and being shown together at Facets Multimedia) are above all collections of carefully arranged quotations–interwoven anthologies of extracts from prose, poetry, philosophy, films, musical works, paintings....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Please, Mr. Bermingham, show some control. The correct way to respond to a critic who has sprayed bladder juice on your recent opus is to attack him with more wit, knowledge, and style than he himself showed in lambasting your show. The wrong way to do it is to use a string of incoherent, capitalized four-letter words and macho threats–and you can let a noun go by now and then without tacking adjectives (“aspiring snob,” “third-grade tirade,” “snotty little nose,” etc) on it....

Ice Cube is a talented numbskull; even his occasional primo tracks are undercut by their derivativeness, lyrical pratfalls, and serious moral problems. I don’t like a lot of things about him, starting with his idea of comedy–his latest album, The Predator, for example includes a dramatization of a prison strip search (“Reach down and lift up your nut sack”), I also don’t like his unapologetic (and received, sounds to me) hatred of whites, particularly Jews: his use of braggadocio as a rhetorical device; the pointless, superficial let’s mourn-our-dead-and-return-to-fight-anew romanticiziation of ghetto life; and a lot of other things....

The story’s almost apocalyptic: during one of those fire-and-brimstone thunderstorms last August, Joel Hall’s studio and offices on School Street burned down; the company lost everything, from its costumes to 20 years’ worth of photos. After that the Joel Hall Dancers subsisted in an unheated South Loop location, until in January it got too cold to work there even with the space heaters going. But somehow Hall has pulled things back together: the troupe has moved into new digs at 934 W....

In the first of his independent features as producer-director (1953) Otto Preminger adapts his most successful stage production, a light romantic comedy by F. Hugh Herbert that ran for over 900 performances. Released without production code approval and condemned by the Legion of Decency for its use of such taboo phrases as “virgin,” “seduce,” and “pregnant,” none of which bothered anyone in the stage run, it’s regarded today mainly as a curio....

WHITEWATER FOR CHOCOLATE at the Body Politic Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (A shill’s review.) Brilliant! Bloody brilliant! That sketch about the lounge singer with a bad toupee trying to make up a song about AIDS represented the height of comedic invention! (Enthusiastic #1.) The show’s at its best when it experiments with form and uses its cast’s energy to maximum effect. As in “Geography,” a madcap romp as a young man in a flying can travels the globe to bone up for a geography test....

Derrick Phillips is one of two passengers on a small blue-and-white bus lurching down South Chicago Avenue this snowy Tuesday morning in February. He’s on his way to a grammar school to give a speech. Under his black topcoat he has on a three-piece charcoal suit, a white shirt, and a black tie. The bus driver, Ernest, is urging Phillips, who’s blind, to pray for a cure. “Because they’ve heard over and over that they should go to church and believe in the Lord and wait for a miracle....

Betrayed by the Tribune? “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible,” the journalist Janet Malcolm asserted famously. She would have been right if this were a child’s world in which only things that are morally pure can be morally defended. Because this world is not, she sounded silly. Reporters Bonita Brodt and Maurice Possley spent 13 days in Pirruccello’s clinic asking questions, taking notes, speaking to the stream of indigent patients....

He got on the Ravenswood el at Armitage–an elderly, birdlike man, smartly dressed, with an impeccable white goatee. He took the seat next to mine and fussed for a few moments with his worn leather briefcase. I didn’t pay him much attention. He seemed normal enough. He looked like a music teacher, or a curator at a museum: someone who’d been riding the el into the Loop every afternoon for decades....

Choreographer Daniel Ezralow and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago are in many ways a heavenly match: both stylish, both full of sizzle, both entertaining but eager to be more, too. For Ezralow’s new piece, In Praise of Shadows, the stage is stunningly draped and lit; Thom Willems’s score hovers tantalizingly between rock and traditional Indonesian music. The seven dancers resemble Eastern gods and goddesses in graceful, often erotic poses; couples wrapped in winding-sheets look like pieces of statuary, icons to be alternately worshiped and torn down....

Late afternoon, midsummer’s day, an outdoor jazz concert with an unhurried agenda: that premise suggests such halcyon occasions as the Newport Jazz Fest of the 50s and the Monterey festivals of the 60s–even though we have a prime example much closer to home. The Jazz Institute of Chicago sponsors this annual free party, knowing full well that the circumstances surrounding it give it a life of its own: held on the grounds of the DuSable Museum, in conjunction with the museum’s Arts and Crafts Promenade and Family Festival, the concert places jazz in a larger and quite sanguine setting....

The sidewalk outside Orchestra Hall teemed with children who’d arrived early for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s 12:30 family concert. The hour-long program featured “Beethoven Lives Upstairs,” a story about Beethoven’s life told against a backdrop of excerpts from his best-known works. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The lobby was full of families emerging from the sold-out 11 AM performance–an in-crush and out-crush of children....

Veronica calls and says that Matt has just come home with a big bag of p-o-t and that maybe I should come over for dinner. “Yes,” I say, “maybe I should.” Veronica is glad to see me. Really glad. For dinner she’s made her favorite, noodles with pepper and garlic. Lots of pepper. Lots of garlic. Matt is glad to see me also but is much less physical about it. No juicy lip kisses from Matt....

The Cuban-born, New York-based percussionist and singer Orlando “Puntilla” Rios–known for his virtuosic work with jazzy Latin pop stars like Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, and Eddie Palmieri–comes to town with an unelectrified presentation on the folkloric roots of Afro-Cuban music and dance. The rituals and songs in this show can be traced to a time of cultural upheaval in the Caribbean, when west African lucumi pantheism blended with 16th-century Spanish Christianity to produce a syncretic religion, santeria, that placed the Yoruba orishas, or deities, in a one-to-one correspondence with Christian saints....