Annoying Little Show Turns Big Profits Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The silly little show that Annoyance produced for the piddling sum of $1,000 has suddenly become big business for both Delsener and the theater company, which will collect $3,000 a month in combined royalties from the LA and New York productions. The original Chicago production opened in June 1990 in the 110-seat Annoyance space at 31M N....

DONALD LIPSKI: THE BELLS Commissioned by the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, “The Bells” was conceived when curator Jan Riley suggested Lipski use materials from a Cincinnati-based manufacturer. Lipski visited several sites but was most intrigued by the Verdin Bell Company–manufacturer of bells, clock towers, and steeples–because of bells’ connotations. Eventually the work evolved into a collaborative effort–composer Brad Fiedel created an electronic score of orchestrated bell chimes–employing various types of religious iconography....

When the La’s came through town a few months ago on the heels of their slice-o’-heaven single, “There She Goes,” everyone was excited about the prospects of the group live–particularly since the blustery band members kept talking about how great they were onstage. Turned out they were a bloody bore. Now, in contrast, comes Blur, another British jangly pop band. “She’s So High,” the lead-off track on their U.S. debut Leisure–all impeccable technorock–takes a stately guitar change-up and smears it all over a thudding rhythm section and a drifting-on-air vocal....

My son has a Dr. Seuss book called I Can Lick 30 Tigers Today. My dead brother’s ex-girlfriend has a single monkey on her back called heroin. Her story might be called “I’m Trying to Lick a Monkey in 28 Days.” Gail* is in a 28-day detox program. Detoxification. For an addict this means getting clean, quitting the alcohol, cocaine, heroin, or even aspirins they think they can’t live without....

Disco will probably always be a dirty word. When the Bee Gees came through town to promote a comeback album a couple of years ago (it flopped), the local press was condescending–the Bee Gees, it seemed, still had to live down their status as the kings of disco. And kings they were, of course: during one of the most lucrative periods in recording-industry history, the late 70s, they dominated the nation’s Top 40 charts as very few groups ever do, pulling off a dozen or so hits of their own (a couple of them among the decade’s biggest) and writing a bunch more for brother Andy (a couple of them among the decade’s biggest) and associates like Yvonne Elliman and Tavares....

LADY DAY AT EMERSON’S BAR & GRILL The 44-year-old Billie we see is not the woman who played Carnegie Hall. She’s not the confident “jazz singer with a blues beat” (as she calls herself in the play) who sang with the bands of Artie Shaw and Count Basie and recorded with Lester Young, Benny Goodman, and Teddy Wilson. Sure, the voice is there, with all its smoky intimacy. And in 15 selections, ranging from the great “God Bless the Child” to “Them There Eyes,” Jackson shows how Holiday could give a ballad a lush lyricism that disguised the pain and made it seem much more processed than it was....

“You want a live chicken?” asked the short Oriental woman, gesturing to two curious young men on Chicago Avenue. “C’mon in here, I get you live chicken.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She then walked behind a large scale. A hundred chickens, mourning doves, and quails filled their very temporary home–Williams Live Chickens, 1512 W. Chicago–with the sound of squawking. One of the two pointed meekly to a fluffy young hen, and the woman grabbed it by the neck and threw it on the scale....

MOONIE THE MAGNIFICENT at the Theatre Building Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To accommodate both audiences, Moonie is now appearing in a matinee on Saturday afternoons (when the adults usually outnumber the children eight to one) and a late-night stint on Fridays, following The Conquest of the South Pole (also featuring Johnson). Though chunks of the two shows are similar, the later time slot permits Moonie to show his, uh, darker side....

“If at an incurable distance from participation, hopelessly incapable of reactions adequate to the event, we watch men killing each other, we may be . . . profoundly degrading ourselves.” So wrote James Agee in 1944, reviewing grisly newsreels of the Allies invading Iwo Jima. It’s like viewing pornography, he proposed. Perhaps “we have no business seeing this sort of experience, . . . these terrible records of war.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Carlisle Floyd is best known for his 1954 biblical fairy-tale Susannah. But his finest work, according to the late Robert Jacobson of Opera News, is Of Mice and Men, a 1970 opera for which the Texas composer wrote both libretto and score. Jacobson calls it the “American Wozzeck.” On April 2, Chicago Opera Theater will offer its local premiere. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Commissioned to write a work for the San Francisco Opera, Floyd was drawn not just to Steinbeck’s story but to his characters: “I find George and Lennie to be extremely vivid characters in highly dramatic circumstances and a very concentrated story,” he says....

The gulf war has faded from the front pages–and even the memories of many Americans–but it is not over for the Iraqi people or for a handful of local activists. One year ago the Persian Gulf was on everyone’s mind, and thousands of people took to the streets to protest the mobilization of American troops. But shortly after the bombing of Baghdad began, the Bush administration managed to convey the idea that their protest was somehow un-American....

When armies collide, the toll of war is obvious. For most of its history the geographical entity that is the United States has been spared that price, yet in preparing for foreign conflicts the U.S. military has subjected our own land and our own people to a taste of the destruction it can inflict. Richard Misrach’s new polemic, Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West, is a look at the history of that war at home....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I heard Bettelheim speak at a high school in the evening, in the northwest suburbs, in the 70’s. The auditorium was full of teachers who were clearly desperate because they did not know what to do with their students who, as anyone who was there can remember, were hostile, angry, uncontrollable, suspicious (as well they might have been, listening over and over to how pot would kill you) and experimenting with dangerous drugs, specifically LSD....

Probably wouldn’t hurt it you added some cheese too. The official rules of the “Wisconsin Apple Recipe Contest” specifically exclude Granny Smith apples “until they become of commercial importance in Wisconsin.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In a 1991 Northern Illinois University poll, 77 percent of Illinois voters would support state spending increases for public elementary and secondary education”–from a press release from the Committee for the Future of Our Children, which supports the Education Constitutional Amendment assigning preponderant ant responsibility for education funding to the state....

THE HAUNTED MAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Haunted Man, written five years after A Christmas Carol, shares ideas with the earlier work, particularly the notion of a person’s soul being healed through a dream journey taken in a single night’s time. Dr. Charles Latham is a lonely old professor disturbed by painful memories–the loss of his sweetheart to his best friend, the suicide of his beloved sister–who wishes only to forget the images that dog his sleeping hours despite the opiates he ingests....

This third annual showcase of avant-garde theater in Chicago (with a taste of Kansas City for good measure) is coordinated by Scott Turner, Valerie Turner, Jim Krulish, and John Oartel–with a bow to Salvador Dali, whose use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real big) inspired the event’s name. It runs August 21 through 29 and features 18 companies in 20 different at three locations in the area around North and Damen avenues: Latino Chicago Theater Company (the Firehouse, 1625 N....

If there was a theme song to the White Sox’ season, it was the old Prince B side “17 Days,” a mournful yet percolating tune about unrequited love and the rain coming down. I don’t know if it was in Nancy Faust’s repertoire, but it should have been. During a 17-day stretch in August, the White Sox won 2 games and lost 15. The team, which pitched, fielded, and hit well through most of the season, saw all these talents disappear during the slump....

TRASK & FENN A capsule synopsis of Ken Stone’s script suggests a sort of Sweeney Todd Meets Maurice. Schoolboys Roderick Trask and William Fenn try to pursue their not-so-secret romance after graduation, but when Trask arrives at Fenn’s London mansion for an extended visit, the lads find that what was barely tolerated by adolescents is actively opposed by adults. Faced with his father’s threat to disinherit him–and his lover Fenn’s own guilty ambivalence about his homosexuality–the handsome and manipulative Trask contrives to marry Fenn’s sister, Olivia....

Truth in Political Advertising! With assistant city editor Steve Huntley, Sweet has been primarily responsible for designing her paper’s coverage of this fall’s elections. Britton gave the two of them top reporters such as Mark Brown and Jim Merriner to work with and plenty of space to fill; they’ve stuffed it like a New Age fruitcake, with tasty odds and ends high in protein, low in fat. We can’t remember seeing more useful information, more accessibly presented....

The 797 swung wide around McCormick Place and coasted in over Lake Michigan. The old Meigs Field shot by underneath, then the Shedd Aquarium, Lake Shore Drive, Buckingham Fountain, the Petrillo Music Shell, the Art Institute. The plane came gliding down onto the virgin runway on the second floor of 78 E. Washington, Chicago’s New International Cultural Center and Airport, and rolled to a halt just inches away from the back wall of Preston Bradley Hall....