LES ARTS FLORISSANTS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The estimable French Baroque ensemble Les Arts Florissants–which mounted here last fall an imaginative revival of Charpentier’s musical adaptation of Moliere’s Le malade imaginaire–returns with another worthy half-forgotten work. Handel’s Acis and Galatea is a two-act masque telling a simple myth from Ovid, a tale also believed to have been elaborated on by Sicilians to explain the eruptions of Mount Etna....

Twenty years ago newcomer Karen Mason wowed Chicago cabaretgoers with her big, phenomenally rich voice, shown off in songs written and/or arranged for her by accompanist Brian Lasser. Now an established presence on Broadway, where she’s standby for the lead in Sunset Boulevard, Mason is back home starring in the world premiere of this quasi-autobiographical musical, composed for her by Lasser before he died of AIDS. Mason has ripened into a performer of captivating warmth and honesty, and these qualities help her convey the poignant, amusing realities in this potentially mundane piece: a Manhattanite returns to suburban Chicago to help her widowed mother sort through a lifetime of mementos and memories....

JAMES ROSENQUIST: GIFT WRAPPED DOLLS Gift Wrapped Doll #16 shows a moonlike face with the plastic arranged in mostly vertical folds and reflecting mostly red and yellow, but with a wider range of colors at the edges. The doll’s right eye is round and wide open; presumably the left is too, but it’s partly obscured by the dense red light reflected off the plastic. Her hair is apparently blond, but the plastic over her hair often reflects yellow or brown, making it hard to distinguish the reflected light from the doll’s hair....

In 1969 the National Governors’ Conference voted 48 to 1 to turn welfare over to the federal government. Now the governors overwhelmingly favor a plan to take it back. (Bills doing just that have passed both houses of Congress.) Did the governors know what they were doing back then? Do they know what they’re doing now? Does a pendulum know which way it will swing next? welfare is very expensive,...

Dear Reader: I was riding home on the Howard-Dan Ryan line last Tuesday at about 10 PM. At the Washington stop, a group of gay men wearing “Rainbow ’93” name tags boarded the train. Most also were wearing pink triangles or other pride buttons, and some were holding hands. Two stops later, about 20 young men from a Christian youth group came on board wearing T-shirts that read: “Music Mission ’93: A Whole New World....

The muffled clatter of hands on computer keyboards is the loudest sound greeting Don Phillips as he enters his office on the fourth floor of the venerable Monadnock Building. The receptionist, himself busy at two side-by-side computers, offers Phillips a hushed hello, careful not to break the morning quiet. Phillips’s voice mail will do that. When he presses the phone button for his early messages, he opens his day to an international panic–the recorded voices of half a dozen frantic reporters pleading for a callback....

The statue of Christopher Columbus, at Columbus and Lake Shore Drive, seemed to be pointing the way to Soldier Field as we walked over from the CTA stop at Roosevelt Road. There was something appropriate in that. The crowd had such a distinctly international flavor that it was almost as if we were all part of an allegorical reenactment of the entire huge process of settling the United States, manifest destiny and all that, the mass of us swarming toward that great gathering place in the New World, which in this case turned out to be a match in the World Cup soccer tournament....

This 94-minute Imax documentary by Stephen Low (1991) has the same nonaesthetic features of other films in this format–most notably a TV-like lack of precise composition necessitated by the curved screen–but its subject, the risky Canadian-American-Russian expedition to pick over the wreckage of the Titanic, has an inherent fascination and haunted poetry that triumphs over the sometimes hokey, often trumped-up presentation; at times the film becomes a kind of undersea 2001....

It’s hard to believe but Ned Rorem, the Dorian Gray of American music, turns 70 this year. The son of a University of Chicago business school dean, he prepped with organist Leo Sowerby, then headed east–first to New York, where he attended the Juilliard School, then, in the 50s, to Paris, where he studied with Milhaud and Poulenc during the day and frequented salons and clubs after dark. His Parisian adventures are recounted in racy detail in several diaries, which, along with his essays and reviews, established his reputation as a belletrist....

Teen queen Sindee, a budding bulimic, fights dirty to reclaim her spot on the cheerleading squad in Sean Abley’s long-running late night examination of the politics of popularity. When it was produced a year ago in the Factory Theatre’s storefront space on Loyola, directed by Abley and Amy Seeley, Bitches proved itself a satire with resonance as well as camp comedy at its best. Remounted at the new Bailiwick Arts Center it has lost some of its intimacy but none of its bite or playfulness....

Captured via Andrew Warner’s World Wide Web home page http://www.nashville.net/aww Brooklyn Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This town of 300 has the largest per capita police force in the US. 1 mile above the speed limit and it’s a ticket. Why Brooklyn? It’s across the river from St. Louis and it has a thriving porn/striptease/ prostitution strip. So unsuspecting tourist and business folk come to Brooklyn for a good time and end up paying for the Brooklyn P....

For 123 years, the Chicago Public Library has held a bond of trust with the city’s citizens. The library is expected to acquire and make available information free of bias, distortion, and censorship. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » CPL recently published, with taxpayer’s money, the Chicago Historical Engagement Calendar 1996. It is an illustrated calendar that contains for each day of the year information items about Chicago and its history....

Chana Halpern, the driving force behind ImprovOlympic, makes a lousy first impression. Take my word for it. During one of her classes on the fundamentals of comedic improvisation, she abruptly stopped a student in the middle of his first scene and demanded he immediately fork over the tuition fee. I was that student, and at the time it seemed downright rude. Then Halpern walks out wearing a black velvet dress with sparkling fringe....

One of the basic tenets of European improv is to avoid the obvious, like quoting, hitting upon grooves, and reactionary interplay. Rudiger Carl’s mind-rattling Cowws Quintet turns this notion on its head with its most recent album, Grooves ‘n’ Loops (FMP), the title of which indicates the kind of improvisations engaged in by this freewheeling group–accordionist-clarinetist Carl, guitarist Stephan Wittwer, pianist Irene Schweizer, violinist Phil Wachsmann, and the late bassist Jay Oliver (Barre Phillips has since replaced him)....

Call Bill Clinton “Mr. President,” but also call him “human crime wave.” Though he busted a gut getting his crime bill through Congress, over the last two years Clinton has been implicated in a string of murders and suicides that’s surprisingly long, even for a politician. Last month, Clinton’s crime spree finally reached Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On August 17 Robert Armstead, 36, of south suburban Harvey, stabbed his roommate John King because President Clinton told him to....

Chicago Sinfonietta It sometimes seems that the big-time popular classical-music universe can support an almost unlimited number of professional piano and violin soloists. And it will harbor a somewhat smaller quantity of cellists and sopranos. But then the support dwindles rapidly. With flutes it’s pretty much Jean-Pierre Rampal or James Galway, and with other instruments, such as the clarinet or harp, there’s usually room for only one. For instance, it seems that the only recorder player with enough clout to make widely available recordings is Michala Petri....

Clueless It seems unlikely that Jane Austen would have enjoyed the MTV beach-party premiere of Clueless, Amy Heckerling’s savvy new film version of Austen’s novel Emma. Even when she was alive, Jane never had much use for watering places–in 1801 her father’s ill health forced her to move to Bath, and she left there in 1806 with “happy feelings of escape.” But no doubt she would have understood perfectly the impetus behind the whole affair....

FOOL FOR LOVE at A Red Orchid Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This play is vintage Shepard, turning the myths of Marlboro men and coyote country inside out, revising a standard country-and-western tune like “Stand by Your Man” until it becomes “Lie by Your Half Brother.” Down-on-his-luck cowboy Eddie tracks down his old flame and half-sister May at a seedy motel on the edge of the Mojave Desert, where he reignites their forbidden passions and mutual hatred and terrorizes May’s new nebbish of a boyfriend, Martin....

One of the delightful things about Rose Troche’s stylish, low-budget, filmed-in-Chicago black-and-white lesbian comedy is that its characters all register as real people, even when bits of the dialogue are stiff or some of the lip sync is off; this isn’t a movie about lesbians, it’s a movie about these lesbians, and we’re likely to think of them afterward as if they were people we knew. As in the better American underground movies of the 60s, which this sometimes resembles, the youthfulness and the footloose free spirit–evident in everything from the performances and Ann T....

MISSISSIPPI JUKE JOINT CARAVAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In northern Mississippi hill country lives a blues sound so raw and primal even hardened Yankee critics have been left awestruck. Characterized by melodies based on modal themes, it’s driven by rhythmic patterns that were around long before modern shuffle backbeats were conceived. Guitarist R.L. Burnside is one of the form’s leading practitioners. His performances at fellow bluesman David “Junior” Kimbrough’s juke on Route 4 between Holly Springs and Senatobia can transform a Saturday evening bash into a summoning of ancestral spirits: Burnside’s slide sears into the night like an invocation; drums and dancers’ feet pound out rhythms that feel as if they’re emanating from the tortured Mississippi earth itself....