QUEEN HESTER The Bible tells how at a seven-day feast King Ahasuerus of Persia ordered Queen Vashti to dance seductively before his guests. The proto-feminist Vashti refused, was deposed, and, from among the kingdom’s virgins, the learned Jewish lady Esther was chosen to replace her. Later her cousin Mordecai aroused the anger of Haman, the king’s counselor, because he refused to bow to him. In the vengeful logic of the time, Haman resolved to kill all the Jews to get at Mordecai....

MUSIC OF THE BAROQUE at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall By the 16th century Dutch composers were setting passions to music, and from then on musical settings flourished among Catholic and Protestant composers across Europe, and became almost as standard as mass settings. There were motet passions, which were sung by a choir, and dramatic passions, in which individual parts were sung by individual singers and only the cries of the people were sung by a chorus....

You may know the Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet–recently described by Oshawa/Whitby This Week as “one of the hottest instrumental acts currently performing in Canada”–for their Telecaster-drenched intro to the Kids in the Hall comedy show. But they’ve been proudly instrumental and putting out singles since 1985 and are currently touring on their second album, Dim the Lights, Chill the Ham. The Toronto threesome plays a sort of landlocked but animated surf rock, leavened by the occasional whistling or novelty vocal (“Five American, six Canadian / Five American, six Canadian”) and instrumental lifts from everyone from Procol Harum to Tom Waits to the expected instrumental pantheon (Duane Eddy, the Ventures, Santo and Johnny)....

SOCIAL STUDIES It’s fun to watch Jeff Abell diagram gay-male relationships. Using a black mat board, yellow chalk, and a professorial persona, Abell gets off some good lines. “I realize an argument could be made that the universe is divided into male and female halves,” he says as he begins his elaborate design. “But I’ll stick with the traditional Western approach and just deal with the universe of men.” Then he draws a complex series of bubbles with wild arrows connecting them....

BATMAN RETURNS With Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken, Michael Gough, Pat Hingle, Michael Murphy, Cristi Conaway, and Andrew Bryniarski. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One wants to like Batman Returns with a sense of hopeful desperation, much as one wants to believe in Ross Perot or Bill Clinton; one even agrees in advance to feel depressed about the inevitable disillusionment in the hope that it will at least offer a new kind of depression, a fresh form of doom....

Trouble: “Federal funds to be spent this year on lead-lined trucks to house the administration during nuclear attack: $58,000,000.” Real trouble: “Amount the President proposes to spend on this program next year: $85,000,000” (Harper’s “Index,” August 1990). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Take two aspirin and call me when you’re almost dead. Laurie Abraham writes in the Chicago Reporter (July/August 1990), “Cora Jackson, who lived poor, died with most all the sophisticated medical care money could buy....

The title of Mary Gallagher’s play De Donde? is taken from the Spanish phrase meaning “Where do you come from?” It’s the first question that U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agents ask Hispanics they suspect of being illegal aliens. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gallagher wrote De Donde? over a period of two years–including time spent “in the field,” researching the situation of Hispanics applying for political asylum while in detention in southern Texas....

TURN YOUR HEAD AND KAFKA, OR IT’LL ONLY HURT FOR A MAMET In early 1989, around the same time Second City reached its nadir with Del Close’s shockingly misogynistic and unintelligent return for one show, The Gods Must Be Lazy, several smaller improvisational companies around Chicago–most notably Cardiff Giant and Mick Napier’s Metraform–were showing that Viola Spolin’s improvisation games might still work. Surprisingly, many of the new and better improvisers in Cardiff Giant and Metraform had studied at Second City (Mick Napier even teaches there)....

JOFFREY BALLET The Joffrey is the preeminent repository of “historically important” dances of the 20th century as well as the country’s leading ballet exponent of modernist aesthetics. Their Chicago season included Cotillon, the reconstructions of Nijinsky’s L’apres-midi d’un faune (1912) and Le sacre du printemps (1913), Massine’s Parade (1917), Eugene Loring’s Billy the Kid (1938), Paul Taylor’s Cloven Kingdom (1976), the pas de deux from Robert Joffrey’s Remembrances (1973), and five dances by artistic director Arpino, choreographed over the last 20-odd years....

Friday 8 Saturday 9 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “You mentioned your name as if I should recognize it, but beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a Freemason, and an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever about you.” That’s Sherlock Holmes greeting a visitor to his digs at 221B Baker St. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930, but Holmes and Watson live on, most particularly in the activities of a worldwide network called the Baker Street Irregulars, who view the detective as real, Watson as the actual author of the manuscripts, and Doyle as merely the literary agent for the series....

I felt it coiled up inside of me, so bottled up that sometimes it caused aches and pains in my legs. I let it out in running and talking, in pounding on the piano, in making things, in school. But there was so much of it. At times, my life seemed to be not my own. Hundreds of people lived through me, lives that had been cut short in the war....

EXHUMED Supposedly Turner’s previous play, Enemies of the Moon, the first installment in the Festival of Light Trilogy, had its intriguing aspects–something I don’t doubt. Even Exhumed had its moments–but they were only moments. Some of Turner’s ideas for staging Exhumed are interesting, though not all of them work as well as his eccentric–although not terribly original–decision to stage the play on various platforms and performance areas set throughout the Garage’s huge auditorium, or his insistence on breaking the audience into three groups, spreading us throughout the performance area....

Crows are as common as aircraft in the skies over Chicago. I don’t think anybody has been keeping careful count, but I’m sure there are far more of these big black birds around than there were ten years ago. I see them all over the city, from Michigan Avenue to Cicero Avenue, decorating trees in the park and perching on church steeples. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rooks–Old World birds of the same genus as crows–have enough status to allow an architect to name an elegant building the Rookery....

The twin Japanese demon faces on Blu-Bak’s buttocks stare. With a twitch of his ass muscles, one stare turns into a menacing grimace. Kapra Fleming caught this narcissistic gesture in her documentary portrait of Blu-Bak, Full Suit, shown two weeks ago at Chicago Filmmakers to a standing-room-only crowd. The gesture is at once fascinating and unsettling. Tattoos may be in vogue, but only an intrepid few have made it the obsession Blu-Bak has....

Picture the landscape of downstate Illinois–the view from the interstate anywhere south of Joliet. What landscape? you say. It’s just flat ground and cornfields dotted here and there with grain elevators and farmhouses with their obligatory six trees. No rippling lakes, no cascading waterfalls. No hill high enough for a good bobsled run. Not even enough rocks to build a stone wall. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Consider, for example, one of the drabbest scenes Illinois can offer: late winter–February, probably–mild enough to melt the snow but not warm enough to melt the heart....

KENNEDY’S CHILDREN The play itself is pretty simple. In fact, it’s just a collection of monologues. Five characters meet in a bar on Valentine’s Day and reminisce about the 60s. There’s a Viet-vet junkie, a gay actor, a schoolteacher with a Kennedy fixation, a commercial actress with a Marilyn Monroe fixation, and a lawyer who used to be an activist. There’s a minimum of dialogue, just enough patter to either punctuate or set up each ensuing monologue....

Lie Witness: How We Got Into Vietnam Next Monday is the 25th anniversary of the shameful day when mendacity swept America into its longest war. And Congress wasn’t told that the second attack never happened at all. A malfunctioning radar, freakish weather conditions, and jumpy nerves caused the two destroyers to open fire on an enemy that wasn’t there. Soon Lyndon Johnson realized it. “Hell,” said LBJ a few days later, “those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish....

In India six-year-old girls are sold by their fathers to traveling circuses for four-year stints for a sum that will feed their families for a year. One of these girls, trained to perform as a “plastic lady,” appears on the cover of the catalog for photographer Mary Ellen Mark’s mid-career exhibition, which is on international tour and is currently at the Chicago Cultural Center. The unnamed girl stares out intently, with her little puppy “Sweety” nestled between her cheek and her heel....

FRIENDLY WITNESS The first thing one notices about Friendly Witness is that not only is there no dramatic narrative, but there is no continuity in space or time. Sonbert cuts effortlessly across several continents and several decades, juxtaposing footage of parades, circuses, cathedrals, cities, natural settings, couples, people alone. If there is one central principle operating in his editing, it is that each cut pulls the viewer away from an image just at the point when one is becoming most involved with it....

THE SPIRIT MOVES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This holds true even if, as in this case, you don’t find the show particularly convincing. The Spirit Moves was written by Beverley as a showcase for herself; though effective as a display of theatrical virtuosity, its substance doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. On the surface, the play (directed by A. Dean Irby) is an autobiographical account of a woman’s journey through her own personal valley of sorrows, and of the role of her Christian faith in guiding her down her difficult road....