As much as one might like the classically styled pop whose revival over the past few years has come as a subset of the alternative boom, the genre can have an archness about it that makes its music a little empty. Problem solved with Superstar, like Teenage Fanclub a Glaswegian pop confectionery, who replace the irony with sincerity of the most irreproachable sort. To make their commitment clear, they carefully unburden the music of anything heavy lyricswise....

By Harold Henderson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The unprecedented media focus on America’s epidemic of domestic violence is having a dramatic impact on public attitudes and behavior,” the San Francisco-based Family Violence Prevention Fund reports in a recent newsletter–but it may not be the impact the group wants. Polls commissioned by FVPF show that, in November 1995, “nearly one in three female respondents (30 percent) say they have been physically abused by a husband or boyfriend sometime in their lives; in July of 1994, that number was just 24 percent....

WEETZIE BAT Zebra Crossing Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Weetzie Bat, an award-winning book for young adults by Francesca Lia Block, has been adapted for the stage by director Ann Boyd and Julia Neary, who plays the title character. Boyd makes the grit in Block’s up-to-the-minute poetry come through, and the result is a sometimes frantic, sometimes graceful, and nearly always effective production....

To the editor, Bill Wyman ignores the economic issues and problems that give rise to many of Ice Cube’s and Chuck D’s lyrics [Hitsville, February 11]. At the HotHouse panel discussion on gangsta rap, he held up Cube’s lyric “You let a Jew / Break up my crew” without mentioning the inequity in the way goods and services in America are produced and distributed. For example, although two-thirds of poor Americans are white, the average white in this country has 12 times the financial assets of the average black....

My father was a marble worker on the Stevens Hotel, now the Hilton. This went up in 1926, ’27, ’28, and when it opened it was the largest hotel in the world. Josephine said, “Oh, no, Maude. You’ve been out of it too long. There’s no chance that you could ever color again.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now my mother had not worked in 20 years....

The sky is clear and cold as midnight approaches in the rolling farmland northeast of Freeport. It’s a Saturday night in mid-April, and as windows go dark in the farmhouses people are just beginning to gather at Saint Vladimir Russian Orthodox Church. At midnight the priest emerges through the altar doors, dressed now in white to symbolize the risen Christ. As the bells peal in the darkness, he leads the congregation out the church’s door clutching a ring of candles and lilies and singing “Christ is risen” in Slavonic....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The unnamed Mattel, Inc. publicist quoted in Michael Miner’s report on the discredited Barbie exhibition (“New Art Examiner’s Toy Story,” January 5, 1996) continues to rattle off the type of half-truths and self-serving remarks which have tainted this radically censored show. For the umpteenth time, I must set the record straight. First, I have a signed contract with the organizer, Exhibitions International/David A....

MARCH The organizers of Bizarre-o-rama promise you’ll be able to find “everything any self-respecting fetishist, lover of leather, or bondage enthusiast would ever want” at their Fetish Fair & Bazaar. Dungeon Dynamics will show off a new line of handmade stocks, and House of Whacks will present a complete selection of rubber and latex clothing. Lots of other vendors will proffer everything from jewelry and art to games and videos at 5145 N....

FEBRUARY We’d have called it Lennypalooza!, but Northwestern went with Bravo Bernstein! as the title for its evening of Leonard Bernstein music. The latest in a series of tributes to giants of American musical theater, the event will feature students and faculty members making runs at gems from the Bernstein repertoire, including songs from Candide, On the Town, West Side Story, and Mass. The review plays at 7:30 tonight and tomorrow and at 3 PM Sunday at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, 1977 South Campus Drive in Evanston....

Niagara Falls: Straight to the Top Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From the moment Monte Carlisle and Niagara Falls mount the Famous Door stage, it’s clear that Paula Killen’s latest show will continue her campy, over-the-top tradition, this time with a pinch of Gong Show and a dash of Vegas mixed in with the usual monologues. Carlisle (Chuck Larkin) is 90 percent hair, a red mass of uplifted locks that accent his sequined jacket and deadpan accompanist’s face....

Concertante di Chicago’s season finale, which marks this top-notch ensemble’s tenth year on the local music scene, is distinguished by its hallmark eclecticism. Foremost is an anniversary commission from Gustavo Leone, who was born in Argentina, got his PhD at the University of Chicago, and now teaches at Columbia College. His Concerto for Harp and Orchestra reflects both his Latin American heritage and the postmodern notions of harmony and tonality taught by such U....

The first 18 years of my life were spent in dark flatlands where the nighttime skies were flabbergasting. In southeast Texas rice fields stretched across the plains, interrupted only by small towns and oil refineries. Mall sprawl conquered much of the land after I left, but in the 1960s the skies darkened thoroughly and revealed a panorama of stars after each sunset. Later my family moved to rural Indiana, so far removed from urban America that Evansville, 30 miles distant, was the only place large enough to make even a mild glow on the horizon....

While it takes only two to tango, the best jazz usually demands a crowd of three or more musicians (with at least one of them being a drummer). Yet in this ravishing duo of vibraphonist Gary Burton and his onetime protege, pianist Makoto Ozone, other contributors would simply get in the way of the spectacularly conceived–and even more impressively executed–music. For sheer technique Burton stands alone at his instrument: no previous or contemporary vibraphonist has performed at this level of complexity and exactitude....

Dwight Yoakam has made a career of pissing people off, from his overt dissing of the Nashville establishment to his often brittle and unsympathetic interviews. Last Friday at the Aragon he tried it with his own fans, but they couldn’t stay mad at him long. The crowd was largely country, but there were also signs of Yoakam’s wider appeal. The guys in Stetsons and women in fringed jackets brushed elbows with punkish hipsters in vintage-wear....

The Kronos foursome are a cottage industry unto themselves, having commissioned and premiered hundreds of new pieces and put out almost two dozen CDs in two decades. But are they still a fresh act? Well, the trademark mod-squad affectations that so wowed the downtown and Park West crowds in the 80s have become rather predictable. And their playing, after all these years, has not quite matured to the level of top-notch classical quartets....

Even among Chicago’s current hordes of talented solo performers, Marcia Wilkie is a standout. At once relaxed, unassuming, and riveting, she’s living proof of the rightness of Lenny Bruce’s (perhaps apocryphal) advice to young stand-ups to “throw away your act.” Wilkie’s act is no act at all: it’s pure Marcia, alone onstage, telling the truth, unencumbered by the posing and pretentiousness that sink other better-known performers. She courageously lays her soul bare, talking freely, frankly, and quite wittily about her lesbian lover, her selfish, self-destructive sister, her bittersweet memories of being the only girl in the sixth grade attracted to other girls....

Barry White Arie Crown Theatre, June 7 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps nobody embodies our desire to recycle more than Barry White. With his lush musical arrangements and that deep voice, the portly maestro seduced his way to the top of the charts throughout the 70s, taking with him the hearts of the pantie-waving multitudes that packed his concerts. The women in the audience during White’s recent performance at the Arie Crown Theatre were more conservative in their enthusiasm but no less vocal....

OFF YOUR CENTER One dance by each seems to be a choreographic study using all the techniques they’ve been taught. The choreographer selects a signature set of movements–in Carpenter’s Power Motive, one movement was a dancer drawing her hand slowly down the inside of her turned-in leg–and weaves a dance with them. These three choreographers prefer postmodern patterning, where each dancer in a group does her own variations on the movement, rather than the more familiar unison patterning, where every dancer does the same phrases....

Hey, Faggot: Hey, SISF: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hey, is everybody as excited as I am about Independence Day opening at theaters everywhere next week?! I don’t usually fall for Hollywood hype–really I don’t. I don’t like action movies, and I hate science fiction. But I have fallen for the hype this time–and I can’t get up! I’m even taking July 3 off work so I can see Independence Day before any of my friends....

Perhaps the best commercial cinema France has to offer these days, this slickly produced spy thriller explores the moral ambiguities in manipulating lives for the sake of patriotism. At the center of the web of intrigue is the Mossad, Israel’s much-feared intelligence service, whose rival chieftains jockey for control. Director Eric Rochant, who also wrote the script, takes the issue of loyalty as the departure point in a sprawling narrative that chronicles the two major assignments of a young operative in the 80s....