The matter of what actually constitutes a jazz vocalist has sparked serious debate since the swing era. Do they have to improvise? (No.) Do they have to sing “jazz tunes”? (No.) Does Frank Sinatra count? (Almost, sometimes.) This weekend’s appearances by Laurel Masse and Roseanna Vitro may not resolve the issue, but you may be enjoying yourself too much to notice. Laurel Masse, who left her adopted hometown of Chicago just a few years ago, has resisted scat soloing (a tantalizing option given her velvet-to-clarion five-octave range); instead, the fireworks come courtesy of sprightly pop classics, jazz standards (with jaw-busting lyrics set to previously recorded instrumental solos), and wittily arranged show tunes....

Alone at home on a rare, warm Saturday evening, ready to “bring the noise” to Pilsen, I’m interrupted on my way to the cuarto de los discos (room with phonograph records) by my dog’s loud barking. Duke, a German shepherd, is going nuts on the enclosed porch in back. His bark is usually commensurate with any threat, and this is a three-alarm ruckus he’s raising, so I have to dash to see what’s up....

THE CAFE WITH NO NAME Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I used to agree wholeheartedly, but in recent years a number of Chicago’s smaller, younger theaters have created perfectly respectable shows influenced by both theatrical traditions and television conventions. For example, the Neo-Futurists play on their audience’s expectation that whatever they’re watching will be interrupted in a minute or two by something completely different by structuring their late-night show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind as a series of short sketches–many no longer than a television commercial–performed in no predetermined order....

Chances that your sewer is more than 92 years old: better than 1 in 4 (Chicago Enterprise, June). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Questions we already know the answers to, from Ronald E. Childs in Chicago Journalist (June): “In all fairness, where were all of the human interest stories, including the televised visits from loved ones and home movies of Rodney King’s family life before his tragedy, as was repeatedly done with severely injured White motorist Reginald Denny on NBC’s ‘Today Show’ and other programs?...

THE ODYSSEY Is it a sign of the times, or just coincidence, that in the past three months I’ve seen two stage versions of The Odyssey that suggested the story was mostly a lie? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The duplicity in NTD’s raffish, athletic Odyssey, seen in March at Barat College, was of a fairly innocent sort: the famous stories of Odysseus’s great wanderings were presented as stories told by Odysseus and his men to keep themselves distracted while they waited inside the Trojan Horse until it was time to emerge and sack the walled city....

THE TWO JAKES With Nicholson, Harvey Keitel, Meg Tilly, and Madeleine Stowe. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Screenwriter Robert Towne, who is said to have objected to the downbeat ending to Chinatown that Polanski substituted for his original happy one, has once more provided a yarn in which the private and public lives of the characters dovetail with grim inevitability. In 1948, just as in 1937, Jake Gittes finds himself the victim of a messy con, set up with a fake divorce case that leads directly to huge land swindles and then back to a doomed intimacy....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I guess I must be one of WFMT’s 300,000 [Hot Type, January 11]. I can do without the dippy English muffin commercial, but I’ll live with it and the other canned blather, if the station continues to deliver Brahms and Terkel. I don’t know much about music, but I know what I enjoy, and what I abominate....

Cirque du Soleil Jumps Through Hoops to Broaden Its Audience Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cirque du Soleil’s month-long run here two years ago started out drawing sparse crowds and ended with full houses. This time communications director Jean Heon wants to ensure larger audiences right from the start. Regular visits to major U.S. markets are essential to Cirque du Soleil’s growth, and Chicago–with it’s large, sophisticated, and affluent population–is a major stop on Cirque du Soleil’s U....

THE ICEMAN COMETH Why? The essential reason’s in the blurb: a great excess. Gloriously overwritten, Iceman tumbles and oozes, dribbles, sprawls, and steamrolls over every conventional notion of how much is enough. Do most dramas take a little time at the start to set up the premise and introduce the players? Iceman takes forever. Do most dramas provide a big final moment for the protagonist? Iceman’s final moment is enormous....

No Place for a Writer To test Adler’s assertion of colliding sensibilities, we made a quick and dirty study. Here are the cover stories of Chicago’s last six issues: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Meanwhile, Adler was reflecting on the Annoyance Theatre, the death of Theater Oobleck, the state of the musical, sexual Darwinism in Chicago theater, the transcendence of saints Catherine and Therese as contemplated in a Lookingglass Theatre Company production, the focus on black issues in recent Chicago theater, and the vapid local version of Six Degrees of Separation, a play that had moved him to tears in New York....

OBA OBA ’92 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oba Oba ’92 features, among other things, a lambada that makes the version danced at Casanova’s look like a Texas two-step–the top couple moving in ways generally thought possible only in figure skating or gymnastics. But any suggestiveness in the dance–described in the program as “voluptuous, sensual, and downright carnal”–is dispelled by the gleeful innocence with which the dancers execute their exuberant duets....

You never know who’s going to get on the 36 Broadway bus. I remember riding it late one night when it stopped at Broadway and Wilson to pick up a lone woman. She had a hard time getting on. Once aboard, obviously drunk, she pulled out a gun and pointed it at the bus’s ceiling. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There were only half a dozen of us on the bus....

Rose Farina–her blue jacket draped over her shoulders like a cape–is on the phone in the lobby of the Daley Center. She’s the manager of the center’s events and puts together all of the noon shows, so she’s almost always on the phone. “I was gonna,” he starts to say, but Farina cuts him off. “I got my start when Mayor Daley hired me to work with Colonel Reilly–who used to be the executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Special Events– as ethnic-groups coordinator for the Chicago Bicentennial Committee....

RUM AND COKE Newly elected president Kennedy initially approved this crackbrained scheme; hatched by cold warriors of the Eisenhower administration, it was a big departure from the official policy of merely “containing” communism. But in the end Kennedy refused to provide the military support the insurgents required, and Fidel Castro’s troops captured and killed most of the betrayed exiles. CIA chief Allen Dulles resigned, saying philosophically, “Obviously you cannot tell of operations that go along well....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thomas Sheehan of Loyola U. is first and foremost a social activist. Everything he writes or says professionally must be taken in that context. His major goal is to move the status quo from Christian belief into Christian action. All well and good. But the inflammatory and exaggerated rhetoric he uses has produced a backlash that will inhibit the reforms he so passionately desires....

AKASHA DANCE COMPANY Dancers like these can persuade us to swallow almost anything, even persuade us that they aren’t dancers at all but plants and animals. In Ginger Farley’s A Beastie Piece (1985), the dancers are creatures of fantasy–a whacked-out ballerina in frothy pink, a Napoleonic figure sporting three shiny red horns, and a quirky character in what seems to be a 1920s bathing costume. In Joseph Novak’s Pas de Plant (1979, rechoreographed 1989), the dancers are an iridescent palm tree and a cat....

And now for all you appendectomy patients out there, here’s Mantovani playing the all-violin version of “Twist and Shout.” “The music helps reduce patients’ anxiety,” says Swedish Covenant Hospital chaplain Ruthanne Werner (in SCH’s Care Letter, Summer) of the hospital’s program offering headsets to patients before and during surgery. “Originally, we created a selection of in-house tapes of easy listening music. But we found that patients preferred to choose their own favorite radio stations....

THE ORNITHOLOGISTS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The central character is an all-purpose guy, named Guy, who’s tired of the rat race and enjoys nothing so much as his new hobby, birdwatching. So Guy quits his job and neglects his family. The hobby becomes an obsession. Gall, Guy’s wife, becomes alienated. And his son Jamie will do anything to regain his father’s attention, even test-pilot a pair of strap-on mechanical wings that Guy whips up in the garage....

THE PEDICAB SHOW Anyone who’s ever wondered what most actors do for a living should check out Kevin L. Burrows’s autobiographical The Pedicab Show. In an hour or so this self-described actor, writer, and mystic not only discusses his lifelong “quest for the perfect odd job” but also reveals something of his personal philosophy, most of it derived from various Taoist writings. Unfortunately, Burrows seems to have taken to heart the Taoist belief that “the way that can be spoken is not the true way”–hardly the best philosophy for a storyteller....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfortunately, Miner steered the course of possible answers down the same old beaten path: Perhaps “Chicago just doesn’t have the free-lance talent to sustain many publications,” he quoted James Warren as having recently suggested in the Tribune. Yes, perhaps. But neither Miner nor Warren think so. Nor do the editors and free-lancers canvassed by Miner for his piece....