In the wee morning hours of April 6, 1991, eleven members of the Ghost Research Society decided to spend the overnight at Billy Siegel’s That Steak Joynt in an attempt to document some of the strange paranormal events that have been attested to in the past. On the fateful evening in question, the press release goes on, the investigative team was made up of Kaczmarek, Heim, a psychic named Jan, and eight GRS members....

At a time when U2 prattling and droning about Martin Luther King dying with love in his heart (and a song on his lips, I imagine) is thought to be political art, the left desperately needs an art and a politics that are more clear-cut and specific than ever, an art and a politics that spell out exactly who and what it’s fighting for. This benefit for medical aid to West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestinians is getting there....

JAZZ FREDDY at Live Bait Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It was probably inevitable that someone would think of creating a dream team of the better improvisers in the city. It was not inevitable that a dream team would create great improvisations. When I used to hang out at the ImprovOlympic six years ago, the dream team Harold Be Thy Name–made up entirely of rising stars at Second City, among them Chris Barnes, Mark Beltzman, and Joel Murray–routinely created the most dismal improvisations....

An easy drive from Chicago (125 miles via I-80 or I-90 to I-65 South), Lafayette and West Lafayette are not really twins, like, say, Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Lafayette is a typical Indiana industrial burg. West Lafayette, across the Wabash River and home to Purdue University, is a college town. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In fact, aside from Von’s Bookstore (315 W. State, 317-743-1915) and a couple of places to eat or sit with coffee, the west side offers little to delight the visitor....

In 1988 Montreal’s Carbone 14 performance company brought its rivetingly physical yet poetic Le rail to the International Theatre Festival of Chicago. That same year founding director Gilles Maheu unveiled Le dortoir (“The Dormitory”), which only now is receiving its Chicago-area premiere in a brief engagement by the touring troupe. Specializing in an emotionally expressive theater of images notable for its evocative use of crisp detail and its sharply focused movement (Maheu’s teachers include the great mime Etienne Decroux), Carbone 14 in this piece focuses on the sexual turbulence of youth in relation to the volatile politics of the 1960s....

With his aggressive, love-me grin and oily good looks, Michael Feinstein comes across like the ultimate cocktail-lounge crooner, so the fresh phrasing that makes old standards shine like new is especially impressive; there isn’t a cliched inflection to be heard in Feinstein’s performance. At his best–when he’s singing the best material–he’s a sublime dramatic interpreter. The nagging flaw in Feinstein’s art is that he’s as good with junk as he is with the good stuff....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A review is, presumably, a service–not only to the theaters and artists but also to the audiences involved in a given production. And while Tom Boeker is entitled to his opinion, no one is served by his bilious attitude. (Except, possibly, Boeker himself.) His unfavorable reviews are so extreme and so odious that they render his favourable ones suspect....

FALSTAFF Shakespeare packed other fully fleshed lives into the Henry IV plays and the 14 busy years–1399 to 1413 –they depict: the haunted title monarch, elaborately guilt ridden about having usurped Richard II’s throne and terrified that his maverick son will complete his kingdom’s ruin; the splenetic rebel Hotspur, whose homicidal defense of his honor shames Hal into testing his own warrior valor; and Hal, who, having fled his father’s predatory court, seems almost schizophrenically skillful at playing both the monumental rakehell at the Boar’s-Head Tavern and the valiant defender of his father’s throne....

They have such nice pictures in them, don’t you think? Richard Sax in a recent Distinctive Taste newsletter: “Americans sit down less and less to a meal at home. Yet, there are more cookbooks being published than ever–600 to 800 new titles each year.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The problem, as described by Patrick Barry in Chicago Enterprise (January 1990): “In 1970, only 16 of Chicago’s 77 community areas had more than 20 percent of households living below the poverty line and only one, Oakland on the south lakefront, was an ‘extreme poverty’ area where more than 40 percent of families were poor....

There is never a shortage of performances of Handel’s Messiah this time of year, and it can be nearly impossible to distinguish between them. Some practical advice for novices would include: avoid the do-it-yourself variety, which makes about as much sense and is as aesthetically meaningful as a dance-it-yourself Nutcracker; also avoid community performances, unless of course you have a friend or relative singing in one. If you want to hear a first-class Messiah done the way its composer intended, attend the best Messiah in the city, put on by the City Musick....

It was just about this time a year ago that the Bulls were being told–and in some cases were telling themselves–they couldn’t win a championship with the players they had. Now, the Bulls–who remain essentially the same–are arousing speculation that they may be the greatest team in the history of the National Basketball Association. There is persistent, albeit unwanted, talk of the Bulls becoming the first team to win 70 games in a season; with Sunday’s win over the Detroit Pistons they went to 33-5 almost midway through the 82-game campaign, which puts them on a pace to do it....

We return to our baseball teams unusually late in the season, to find that they have each taken drastically different paths. At the end of last weekend’s games, the Cubs were in first place, the White Sox in last. For anyone looking at the big picture, this season has been particularly excruciating for the Sox. The standings last weekend bore much worse news for Sox fans than that the Cubs were in first....

Eighteen theater companies are presented in six different programs of two to four plays each, organized along loose thematic lines by producer Doug Bragan and associate producer Judith Easton. That’s two more companies and two more programs than last year, when Bragan first stepped in to revive this non-Equity showcase founded and then discontinued by the League of Chicago Theatres. At the Theatre Building, May 1 through June 2. (Previews April 24 through 28; regular schedule....

A TESTIMONY TO YOUR LOVE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The image is not accidental. At all social levels, black women are increasingly finding themselves grappling with opportunities–and burdens–traditionally regarded as male. The “Queenie and Joe” stereotype from the musical Show Boat–the good-naturedly domineering mammy and her shiftless, self-pitying man–continues to wield its oppressive influence among both blacks and whites, exacerbated by contemporary social problems such as a drug-fueled crime epidemic that is stuffing prisons beyond the bursting point....

The French are generally credited with staging the world’s first recognizable jazz festivals (Nice in 1948 and Paris in 1949); using that as a premise, and pushing the rules of logic a bit, I suppose you could say there’s something fitting about celebrating Bastille Day with the sounds of jazz. (In any case, the music should easily supplant such attempts at justification.) Organizer Kahil El-Zabar has lined up a fair enough sampling of the city’s jazz scene, from the music’s roots (blues pianist Erwin Helfer) to its future (saxist/composer Ed Wilkerson), with stops along the way for bebop, free jazz, and new directions in the mainstream....

CASINO EVIL Take the wonderful “Pencil”: an office worker confronts a colleague who has innocently asked to borrow his pencil. As this guy sees it, it’s clearly a request to touch his penis–his friend must be gay. This sudden bout of homosexual panic could easily have triggered the usual knee-jerk macho reactions. Instead the lonely bachelor-inquisitor (played by Scott Adsit with a precise abandon) slowly launches a monologue: it turns out he longs for the risks and rewards he imagines come with being gay (a parade of his own, all those beautiful girls flocking around equally beautiful–and presumably unthreatening–gay men)....

ZERO POSITIVE Maybe Himmer’s reaction is a denial mechanism; maybe it’s a distracted mistake. He certainly has enough on his mind. His mother has just died after a long illness and a horror-show marriage; his father, the poet Jacob Blank, has retreated silently into a fantasized past in which he is an adulterous newlywed–free of such baggage as a gay son and a marriage gone wrong. Himmer’s two closest companions, Samantha and a gay man named Prentice, are beset by romantic turmoil–Samantha’s lover has turned out to be married (just like all the others before him), Prentice’s is an abusive con man....

CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS Whether through fear, habit, or fate, Sam Shepard’s characters in Curse of the Starving Class just can’t figure out the jumps–how to see the patterns in life. For them the big links –within the family, between the family and outsiders, between humans and the land, and between generations–snapped sometime before the play begins. What we see merely completes the curse. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

DESIRED AFFECTS: THREE ONE-ACT PLAYS The play takes place in the squalid apartment of a roofer named Perry, whose wife Sandy is paralyzed from the waist down. She’s sitting propped up on the bed in her pajamas, reading a magazine, and Perry is making himself a sandwich at the kitchen table, when the front-door buzzer sounds. Sandy hears the voice of Eddie over the intercom and gets upset. “Don’t let him up,” she tells Perry....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The answer to Moberg’s query isn’t even arguable. The puppet regime that occupies the office of the mayor in City Hall rushed to embrace the Circus Circus-Hilton Hotels-Caesars World casino proposal on the very day that it was first unveiled last March because the proposal meets every one of its criteria for successful “economic development.” (In the Orwellian sense of the term, that is....