INTO THE WOODS I don’t know Stephen Sondheim personally, so I don’t know if this scenario accurately describes the mindset behind Into the Woods, the fairy-tale musical he wrote with playwright James Lapine. I do know that the brilliant production directed by William Pullinsi at Marriott’s Lincolnshire Theatre (scheduled for transfer to Candlelight Dinner Playhouse in late June) reveals the work as a captivating exercise in dream theater, as well as a virtuosic showcase for Sondheim’s songwriting genius and the extremely gifted performers Pullinsi has assembled....

WEST Berkoff’s work isn’t really as troglodytic as this parody suggests. In fact, if you see the Lookingglass Theatre production of West, you’ll find Berkoff can be pretty witty and erudite. West is written in what the Lookingglass press release calls “Shakespeak”: a sophisticated mix of Shakespearean diction and 60s London street talk, yielding a half ludicrous, half marvelous poetry that resonates with the ambiences of all its sources. When some gang members, for instance, tell their young leader, Mike, about their encounter with a warlike “geezer/all armed ....

BEST OF DANCE& MORE FOR $1.98 The notable exception was Krista Willberg’s strikingly inventive Waiting for Pancakes. Willberg, dressed in cotton panties and a huge white T-shirt, begins the piece upstage, sitting with her arms resting on her knees and staring at an offstage television that we could hear but not see. After a few moments, in an utterly engaging imitation of a bored child, she lets her legs flop to the floor and then bats them back up into place, as if her body were a kooky toy that she was just learning to operate....

The ninth annual Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, featuring films and videotapes from about a dozen countries, runs from Friday, October 9, through Sunday, October 18. Unfortunately, the selections are from fewer countries than in the past, and English-language films dominate. (Does this reflect a growing isolationism and xenophobia in this country?) In the listings below, films and videos not identified by country are from the United States. All screenings will be at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W....

The fourth annual edition of the Chicago Latino Film Festival will show 50 films, virtually all of them subtitled, from 19 Latin American countries, Spain, and the U.S. (including several independent works from Chicago). All screenings will be held at the Three Penny Cinema, 2424 N. Lincoln, from Friday, September 23, through Sunday, October 2. Ticket prices per program (short and a feature) are $6 for adults, $4 for students, senior citizens, and handicapped persons; a festival pass can be purchased for $50....

CLOSE TIES Close Ties is about three sisters, and playwright Elizabeth Diggs recognizes that the only possible way to understand each one is by way of the other two. Her skillful dialogue exposes the perverse emotions that sustain this unholy trinity, emotions that create a taut little drama out of what could easily have degenerated into sentimental pap. But Diggs does not focus obsessively on the sisters. Rather, as Chekhov did in The Three Sisters–an obvious model for this play–she allows the emotional preoccupations of these young women to emerge gradually as they loll around at their grandmother’s summer home in the Berkshires during two lazy August days....

WE’RE JUST ONE HAWAIIAN DANCER After they left, I examined the candy wrappers under their seats. There was even one intact Perky there, licorice, no doubt lost in the darkness and chaos. A young woman who had sat in front of me commented, “They were just going to town.” They sure were. They reminded me of those dull Lutherans who play minor roles in Garrison Keillor’s monologues. God only knows where that couple came from, whoever they were, the missing link in audience-development campaigns....

A lot can happen to a person in ten years–especially someone who’s poor. The cadets are by and large in their 20s and 30s, and about three-quarters of them are men. At least 80 percent are black, and most if not all of the rest appear to be Hispanic. They are a raucous crowd: they pound palms and bellow as classmates step forward and receive their diplomas. In subsequent years, Wilson’s son would periodically terrorize his sisters, threatening them with knives, cutting them with pieces of glass....

In what should prove to be a historic joint appearance as well as the local early music event of the year, the Evanston-based choral ensemble His Majestie’s Clerkes (hands down the best chamber choir in the area) will join forces with the Newberry Consort under the direction of Mary Springfels for the season close of the “Early Music From the Newberry Library” series. The program focuses in the music of two 17th-century contemporaries, Claude le Jeune, a Protestant composing in Catholic France, and William Byrd, a Catholic composing in Protestant England....

It takes considerable vocal talent to sound as perfectly dreadful as Jean Stapleton sounded when she screeched her way through “Those Were the Days” on TV’s All in the Family. Stapleton established herself as a delightful comic soprano of the Broadway variety back in the mid-1950s, when director George Abbott featured her in Damn Yankees; later she ran the Susanswerphone answering service staged by Judy Holliday in Bells Are Ringing and advised Fanny Brice’s mother of what happens when a girl isn’t pretty in Funny Girl....

Craggy, slightly bowed, mostly mended: with his tenor saxophone in hand and a cigarette peering out between his bony fingers, Lin Halliday looks like an advertisement for what used to be considered “the jazz life.” Fortunately, the experiences that led to this image are regularly transmuted through his horn; in the process they become vibrant, sometimes even electrifying examples of what bebop has to offer. Halliday carves out a tough, three-dimensional sound on the tenor....

If my paranoid suspicions are correct, Hollywood has embarked on a 12-year plan regarding the public consumption of trailers. The plan, which has become fully apparent to me over the past year, will come to fruition in the year 2000, and its basic goal, as I see it, is to turn movies themselves into full-fledged commercials that people will pay money to see. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Already there are many alarming consequences to this trend....

Elaine Scott Banks is breathing easier this year. After an incredibly successful and risky 1987-88 season for the City Musick, which included Chicago’s first period-instrument opera to be presented in an aquarium, things are settling down for the group’s upcoming fourth season, which opens Friday. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This weekend’s two concerts feature an all-Bach program: the Brandenburg Concerto No. 6, the Trauer Ode, BWV 198, and the Missa Brevis in F, BWV 233....

One of the most accomplished musicians around, pianist Richard Goode has both versatility and range: he’s an ace accompanist (especially in lieder recitals) and an uncommonly intelligent interpreter of a variety of styles. But he seems most at ease with Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. With Beethoven, Goode has already gone through the rite of passage: he’s played and recorded all the piano sonatas. For Performing Arts Chicago’s celebration of the composer he’ll perform 19 of the 32 sonatas in four recitals (two won’t take place until the new year); his busy schedule, I’m told, keeps him from undertaking the entire cycle....

Losing Kendall Gill for about a third of the season was, in hindsight, the best thing that could have happened to the University of Illinois basketball team this year. No one–not even Gill’s greatest admirer–was aware of how important he was to the Fighting Illini. Quick and thin, intelligent on the court, with a fine shooting touch, a sense for passing, and long, spidery arms reminiscent of the 70s star Charlie Scott, Gill remains if not the best player on the Illini then certainly the most difficult to replace....

The Bears are off to yet another 2-0 start. They are not entering a new golden age but are, rather, living out their golden years. The distinction is important to any valid appreciation of the 1991 Chicago Bears. This is not a great team; it isn’t even on the threshold of greatness. It is a team out on the back porch of greatness, rocking away, living out its years in a suitable manner: meaning that every now and then it’s time to get up and go out and do some work, but it’s done swiftly and efficiently and with an eye toward returning to a sitting posture as soon as possible....

I’ve been hearing commercials for discount round-trip airfares that have a peculiar requirement: you have to spend a Saturday night at your destination before returning home. In other words, if you leave Tuesday and come back the next day, you pay full fare, but if you leave Tuesday and come back eight days later, you save big dough. This makes no sense. Why do the airlines care where you spend your Saturday nights?...

I had just bought some future beachfront property in Nevada, counting on the greenhouse effect to melt the ice caps and inundate California, when I heard about the “Gaia” theory. In a nutshell, this theory says that living things on earth change the environment to suit themselves, instead of just adapting. One result of the “Gaia effect,” which threatens my get-rich-quick scheme, is that CO2 in the atmosphere has decreased, not increased, over geologic periods of time and will continue to do so–hence no greenhouse effect....

THE WIDOW’S BLIND DATE Gang rape is one of the ugliest of crimes: not as certainly fatal as, say, an arson fire in a day-care center or a fragmentation bomb in a sports arena, but certainly one of the most shameful and humiliating acts, not only to the victim but to the perpetrators and witnesses as well. It’s impossible for any participant, active or passive, to think himself–or herself, for the role of rapist is assigned not on the basis of gender but of power–a moral, rational, compassionate human being....

THE WOOLGATHERER The best-known, most vivid example is the improbable temporary match between Laura Wingfield and Jim O’Connor in The Glass Menagerie. This brief encounter between a glad-handing extrovert and a frightened rabbit works, even though Laura and Jim’s connection evaporates in the heat of reality. Throughout their candlelit scene, Tennessee Williams provides the one true recipe for all love scenes: show how the strengths of one lover fit the needs of the other, how what’s missing in one is, often unknowingly, offered by the other....