Ballet Theater of Chicago Ballet Theater of Chicago is an appealing, full-blooded company unbound to the (fatal?) rigors of attempting to be a Balanchine satellite: using the New York City Ballet as a prototype is problematic. Balanchine himself recognized the transient nature of dance and had no specific plan for the concretization of his choreographic legacy; many New York dancegoers now question whether even the NYCB dances Balanchine properly. Dance Balanchine, yes, again and again....

I was hitchhiking on I-80 in 1984 when they pulled up in a run-down Buick. “So are we! Get in!” the guy motioned to me. “I wanna drop out and get a job at Crafty Beaver, right near where I used to live,” he said. She laughed. “You’re so literal.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They rented their first apartment together in 1987 in a run-down building on Kenmore....

With elegance, wit, and precision, the septuagenarian Marian McPartland has made so much good music–which throughout the 70s and 80s traced a steadily progressing arc of creative growth–that it’s easy to take her for granted. It became even easier once she added “oral historian” to her resume, hosting the popular and acclaimed public-radio interview series “Piano Jazz”. Thanks to her versatility and ingenuity, McPartland inherited without challenge the crown of First Lady of Jazz when Ella Fitzgerald retired from performing a few years ago; Fitzgerald’s passing last weekend only underscored McPartland’s remarkable longevity as a creative artist....

It’s common in improv workshops to warn the actors not to “think too much.” This is because it’s generally believed that the rational, language-oriented left half of the brain inhibits spontaneity, and that the best improv rises from the intuitive depths of the brain’s right half. Leave it to the ever-rebellious Annoyance Theatre to create a fully improvised show in which being too rational is the point: Modem Problems in Science....

Othello Which makes the production’s failure all the more disappointing. Though it boasts evocative visual images achieved through gorgeous costumes (by Nan Cibula-Jenkins), highly theatrical lighting (by Frances Aronson), and spare but striking sets (by Donald Eastman), Gaines’s Othello is hollow, gimmicky, and unmoving. It falls down exactly where it aims to soar: in establishing Othello as a rich, complex personality, not just a noble foil to the treacherous Iago, whose crafty manipulations drive the plot....

EUNICE PLAYBOYS 1/28, FITZGERALD’S, 1/29, PROP THEATRE One of zydeco’s preeminent combos, singer, accordionist, and fiddle player John Delafose’s tight-knit family band offers a pair of performances without its ailing longtime leader. Taking his place will be son Geno, who also sings and plays accordion, and from the sound of his half a dozen tunes without his father on the new Blues Stay Away From Me (Rounder) he should do so ably....

Taking its name from the Tower Building at the intersection of North, Damen, and Milwaukee, which once housed the Coyote Gallery, this multimedia arts event includes a sizable theater and performance segment. Running through September 11, the fifth annual Around the Coyote features eleven different productions at Centrum Hall, 1309 N. Ashland, and the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, as well as various other spoken-word and performance attractions at venues listed below....

By Jerry Sullivan Both of these recent sightings were major departures from that pattern. The first clue to the Miami Woods nest was a bird flying toward us, calling loudly–a rapid ki-ki-ki that all the authorities say is given only around the nest. This bird landed high in a tree not more than 100 feet away and just sat in full view while we got a long look at it....

One day shortly after the opening of the Great Ape House at Lincoln Park Zoo, I was standing in a group of about 15 people outside the glassed-in cage that was home to a family of gorillas. Things were quiet in the cage. Some of the animals were sleeping; others just sat. To me, the appeal of a visit to the zoo lies in the possibility of moments like that. I will never be able to study gorillas like Dian Fossey did; with a daughter nearing college age, a mortgage, and a travel wish list that gets longer every year, I will probably never even have the tourist version of her experience....

A beautiful and powerful spiritual epic from South Korea (1991), directed by Im Kwon-taek–Korea’s most famous and popular film director, whose filmography runs to 80-odd titles–from an ambitious script by Kim Yong-ok. Covering roughly four decades from the 1860s through the 1890s, the film charts the growth and eventual stamping out of Kae Byok (from which comes the film’s original Korean title), a radically humanist and egalitarian religious sect founded on the belief that God is everyone and everything; in particular it focuses on the sect’s charismatic leader, Hae-Wol (very effectively played by Lee Duk-hwa), who was born a poor farmer, and his three wives....

Fugees Half a year ago, the Fugees were an obscure hip-hop trio from New Jersey with a two-year-old debut album that had gone almost nowhere and a perpetually budding reputation among hip-hop heads for great live shows that included “real instruments.” Then, on the second Tuesday in February, Columbia/Ruffhouse Records released the group’s second album, The Score. In its second week, the album zoomed into Billboard’s top five on both the pop and R & B charts; as we pass through the second full month of summer, it has slipped to number six in R & B but hasn’t budged in pop....

Industry Surrenders on Used CDs Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s difficult to refute the industry’s arguments against used CD sales, mostly because it doesn’t really have any (“New and used CD sales simply don’t mix,” wrote Bach last month). Mostly the labels didn’t want consumers to have the opportunity to avoid paying their cartel prices. Rather than consider lowering them, CEMA, which distributes Capitol records and a host of smaller labels, led the industry’s campaign to take advertising co-op dollars away from stores that retail both new and used products....

Luther Allison came of age on the west side of Chicago during the late 50s and early 60s, alongside artists like Freddie King, Magic Sam, and Otis Rush. The sound they forged–an aggressive blend of emotion and technical virtuosity–paved the way for the blues-rock explosion. While a lot of its progenitors were left in the dust, Allison made the transition easily: by the late 60s he was winning accolades on the hippie ballroom circuit with his fiery playing and counterculture garb....

MARLENE DUMAS: WORKS ON PAPER AND PAINTINGS The faces show a wide range of age, race, and expressivity, the beautiful and sensual set alongside the plain and elderly. But their placement is also eerie, as if this were a photo arrangement of missing persons, family snapshots used to identify crime victims. By titling the piece Female and placing the images as she does, Dumas slyly indicts our culture, which makes women anonymous and betrays their histories by ignoring them: Dumas seems to see women of different circumstances and races melting into a plethora of forgotten beings....

To the managing editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When the Beat poets came to Chicago in late January 1959 to give a benefit reading for Big Table “a reception was given in their honor at the Lake Shore home of socialite Muriel Newman.” True. But Muriel was never a socialite–she always had more important things to do, mostly build a collection of modern art that is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she is a trustee....

As a concerned black American male I find Hank De Zutter’s story “What Makes Obama Run?” (December 8) quite revealing in terms of what we can expect from young African-American political leaders like Obama, as we approach the year 2000. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Franz Faron’s brilliant book “White Skin Black Mask” he dabbles with the effects of colonialization and the colonized mind....

“In high school, Stephen Dedalus was my Holden Caulfield,” says Lookingglass Theatre cofounder Joy Gregory, explaining why she wrote Dreaming Lucia, a play about James Joyce’s troubled daughter. “I wanted to be just like Stephen Dedalus: this suffering, tortured, melodramatic, melancholy, little, tweedy, Irish poet boy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The only daughter of one of the great writers of the 20th century, Lucia Joyce early on showed an artistic bent of her own....

The Whispers of Angels Rousseve engages us immediately, walking out to a microphone and telling us that when he was a boy he wanted to be a superstar like Diana Ross, flashing a megawatt smile as Ross’s voice comes booming over the speakers. We know instantly that Rousseve’s character is the kind of gay man who loves the campy star power of female pop singers. But Rousseve also explains why, saying that as a boy he was “sorry,” which is Southern English for being a wimp–one step above being a punk....

One of the more interesting shifts in the music industry over the past few years has been its increasing reliance on sales data from a company called SoundScan. Based in Hartsdale, New York, the operation collects its info from computerized scanners that count an estimated 85 percent of the albums sold in America. Extrapolating from this data, the organization comes up with what it claims is a fairly accurate accounting of the more than half-billion albums sold annually in the U....

Depending on how charitable you want to be, Stereolab’s musical base can be described as either an extended homage to or a direct pilfering of the droning, rubber-band pulse of the German electronic group Neu. I go with the former, because that pulse is just one of the components of the band’s gorgeous, intriguing sound. Stereolab adds an amused, articulate bass, a palpably real drum track, and an assortment of oddly human ancient keyboards and synthesizers overseen by Tim Gane....