VAMPIRE LESBIANS OF SODOM KKT Productions The Passion of Dracula, an offering from KKT Productions, and Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, continuing at the Royal George Theatre Center, offer dramatically different approaches to the death-defying legend. The first takes it deadly seriously, while the second (an equal-opportunity version for women) laughs it into camp. And one sinks while the other soars on its silliness. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All that remains of the original cast is Alexandra Billings as the younger vampire....

HAIRSPRAY As John Waters is the first to point out, Hairspray is “a satire of the two most dreaded film genres today–the ‘teen flick’ and the ‘message movie.’” But one of the nicest things about this exhilarating, good-natured pop comedy is that it actually is both a teen flick and a message movie. Satirical or not, it redeems as well as revitalizes both genres while celebrating their excesses. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“Their policy is ‘Pay what you wish but you must pay something,’” I told a student when she asked how much admission cost to the Art Institute. “But they do have suggested fees–check over at the cash register.” “I think it’s $40.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I guess it’s a matter of civic responsibility,” she said somewhat stiffly. By this time the rest of the class had arrived....

The prospect of Richard M. Daley as mayor of Chicago fills many civic activists with a curious mixture of anticipation and terror. The latter is probably uppermost in their minds at the moment. No one has forgotten how Daley’s father ran the city: whatever else might be said for the old man, City Hall during his tenure was a closed shop. The thought of returning to those days, when those not in the old-boy loop were simply ignored, is depressing....

To the editors: I am insulted by Jack Helbig’s review of La Barraca ’90’s current play, The Sleepwalker’s Ballad, which appeared in your May 1 issue. In it he states: “Even when the stage picture seems like a parody of bad Fellini–a dwarf sits half-dozing in a chair on a box above a man pulling yards of red silk out of an older man’s chest while others look on–the overall effect is still sublime....

In the world of record production, months, even years, can be spent in pursuit of perfection: the perfectly rhythmic snare precisely crashing, or the pristine guitar dispensing its music without a hint of human participation. Voices have to be perfect too–a difficult proposition. So if the voice comes close once, say on a chorus, you can just strip the same recording in each time you need it. Now, there are a lot of reasons production is done that way these days, some pathetic (anal or blindered people with too much money on their hands), some logical (why not get it right if you can?...

HAPPY END One of the most valuable functions that a nonprofit, institutionally based theater can perform is the revival and reinvestigation of neglected, historically interesting works. The Court Theatre’s staging of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1929 musical Happy End, produced in conjunction with the University of Chicago’s New Music Ensemble, is just such a venture. But sometimes a neglected work is neglected for good reason: in the case of Happy End, the reason is an almost arrogantly slipshod script....

“I’m moving in the wrong direction,” laughs veteran drummer Bill Bruford; “we’ve all heard of jazz musicians going rock to make money, but a rock musician going jazz?” As former drummer-laureate for such mega-progressive rock groups as Yes, King Crimson, and Genesis, Bruford sees his recent excursion into jazz with his new quartet, “Bill Bruford’s Earthworks,” as a natural extension of his earlier work. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

MAKING NOISE QUIETLY “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” –Dwight D. Eisenhower Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Being Friends” is straightforward and disarming. Two men, misfits for different reasons, meet in a Kentish field near the end of World War II. Eric Faber (James Marsters) is a gay artist and novelist with a fractured spine and tuberculosis....

The man was wearing a suit and driving an American car. Inside, there was a haze of cigarette smoke. He was leaning over the passenger’s side, his outstretched arm rolling down the window as he talked across the front seat. It took me a moment to realize the man had said anything. His voice was a slow-motion roar over the water’s lapping at the rocks nearby. It was mid-afternoon and cool; my right leg was outstretched and my black-and-white checkered tennis shoe rested up on the dashboard....

Lead Story In November 32-year-old Danny Shaune Clemons was released from the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution in Greensburg (after having served five years for assault and burglary) and was by custom given $75 by the state to tide him over. Less than an hour later, while waiting for a train to take him to King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, where a job awaited him, he was robbed. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

It’s almost hard in 1988 to imagine postwar Chicago. A spirit of optimism pervaded the city. After all, Chicagoans were among the troops who defeated Hitler and saved the free world. That optimism even extended to the baseball diamond. Cubs fans knew their team could rebound from a disappointing third-place finish in 1946 to recapture the National League pennant that was theirs only two years earlier. The independent was Robert Merriam, of Hyde Park’s 5th Ward, son of former alderman and mayoral candidate Charles Merriam....

DEAD POETS SOCIETY With Robin Williams, Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke, Josh Charles, and Kurtwood Smith. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Elite private schools like Eton in England or Groton here appear in cinema as shimmery objects of nervous nostalgia (Tom Brown’s School Days [1940, remake 1951], A Separate Peace [1972]) or else as insidious institutions that warp their inmates and so deserve destruction....

RIGHT HO, JEEVES Wodehouse’s reputation, for better and for worse (his fans included Evelyn Waugh and Hilaire Belloc, who called him “the best writer of our time,” while Sean O’Casey dismissed him as “literature’s performing flea”), stems from an uncanny ability to make the idiotic actions of a socially inbred caste of useless nincompoops entertaining. Where a writer like Waugh used such characters to satirize the decline of the British Empire, the benevolent Wodehouse had about as much capacity for mockery as Bertie, with his all-purpose put-down “Tinkerty-tonk....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One only has to read the music listings at B.L.U.E.S., B.L.U.E.S. Etcetera, Kingston Mines, Blue Chicago, etc. to see that the same (mostly local) bands and singers perform every week at the above clubs or alternately between them week after week. It’s the same bands (and singers)–the same songs over and over–all playing for the most part what one would categorize as traditional “lump-dee-dum” blues....

SNATCHING AND TEARING, LIVING AN’ DYING Steps Must Be Gentle provides a tantalizing peek into Williams’s preoccupation with death, suicide, and creativity. The Williams estate has recently reversed its decision and the one-act has been restored to this collection, a compendium of the themes, obsessions, and characters that recur in Williams’s work. Identifying the threads in these one-acts that also run through his better-known plays provides most of the entertainment this show has to offer....

One 17-year-old’s reason for cosmetic surgery, as relayed to us by the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery: “For years, all I saw in the mirror was this nose looking back at me.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reporters should avoid covering scientific controversies the way they would Chicago politics, says Mike Moore, editor of the Quill and of Health Risks and the Press, which is reviewed in Info (July 1990), the newsletter of the U....

The Cubs and the White Sox finished play with both of their managers expecting to be elsewhere next year. Nothing could have brought the baseball season to a more definite conclusion–at least as far as a Chicagoan was concerned–and I planned to leave the sport behind as soon as possible this fall. It didn’t turn out that way, however. Instead, baseball loaded its playoffs with the most likable set of four teams ever to take part in the league championship series....

On the same Friday that the VFW first rushed to the Art Institute to rescue the flag, a show they might have liked a lot better opened at another gallery associated with the School of the Art Institute. This was a performance-art piece by student Renee Landry called The Crying Room; it took place at the school’s Gallery 2, in a former lamp factory on West Huron that the vets would have needed a map to find....

HUBBARD STREET DANCE COMPANY Other aspects of that heritage were represented by other works on the opening-night program last week–works by such modern choreographers as Twyla Tharp and Daniel Ezralow, and by the more classically oriented Margo Sappington and John McFall. Given the range of choreographic styles, Hubbard Street’s versatility cannot fail to impress. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The company premiere of Percussion Four was the highlight of Hubbard Street’s engagement, but the company has yet to make the piece its own....