APRIL SNOW Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » April Snow focuses on romantic travails among the New York literary set, and aims at the piquant, bittersweet kind of screwball comedy we associate with Noel Coward. Gordon Tate, a 61-year-old writer–four times married, four times divorced–is on the brink of a new affair with 20-year-old Millicent, who is just recovering from a mental breakdown. Grady, Gordon’s ex-wife and a lesbian, warns Gordon against getting involved with someone so young and unstable, and then proceeds to moan about her own ongoing problems with a young, unstable lover....

Though they’re being billed as “hidden treasures,” these Chicago blues mainstays are only hidden to fans who’ve never ventured south of Madison or west of Western. Probably best known on the north side is Kent, whose meaty rhythms, sinewy bass work, and ruggedly soulful vocals provide a savory blend of classic west-side aggression and contemporary R&B revelry. Guitarist Scott has held down the weekend gig at Lee’s Unleaded Blues at 74th and South Chicago for years....

Christa Ludwig, one of the more dramatically expressive singers of our time, returns to Ravinia this year for the first time in two decades. Though I haven’t heard this German mezzo-soprano live in a while, her recent recordings reveal a still richly plummy voice–she’s 63–that hasn’t lost much of its luster with age. Her Ravinia soujourn includes tonight’s performance of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (with tenor Gary Lakes, backed up by the Chicago Symphony under the baton of James Levine), a work that she’s given the definitive interpretations of....

Marty Moltz, 45, is a state appellate prosecutor who has argued more cases in the reviewing courts of Illinois than any other lawyer in history. A former chairman of the Chicago Bar Association Criminal Law Committee, Moltz dreams of becoming a circuit court judge. Before she died, Moltz says, his mother used to tell him why he hadn’t reached his goal. Moltz is far from alone and peculiar. People of all ages and walks of life from around the world are calling this the new golden age of the roller coaster....

POISON “The whole world is dying of panicky fright,” reads the title that opens Todd Haynes’s startling and original Poison. It’s a correct and judicious observation, one that helps to “explain” a fascinating and provocative movie, particularly if one sees it alluding directly to the specter of AIDS. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It could be argued of course that Todd Haynes is well aware of this problem and that Poison is conceived in part as a scheme for both addressing and subverting the reflexes of a fearful postmodern audience....

DAYSTAR: A MEDIEVAL CHRISTMAS PLAY Talisman Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The medieval passion play was designed as religious instruction for a largely illiterate population. Attention spans of such audiences being little longer than those of today’s, the depictions of the sacred texts would often be intercut with low comedy scenes, songs, and dances, or spectacularly contrived special effects. The plays of the 15th century reflect a society in which religion was a comfortable part of daily existence....

Bailiwick Repertory’s Directors Festival 1992, produced by Cecilie Keenan, offers productions ranging from plays and musicals to performance art and monologues; some are well-established classic and contemporary selections, while others are brand-new pieces. They’re mounted by a slew of directors, most of them little known, who are looking for an avenue to showcase their work and get their names out to the public. See? It’s working already. The festival concludes with two “Best of the Fest” programs reprising a handful of shows deemed to be the worthiest of repetition....

Joseph Phelps saw a problem, and proposed a solution. The parks of Chicago are filled with broken glass, he told his colleagues on the Chicago Park District Board of Commissioners, to which Eugene Sawyer had just appointed him. Let’s pass a resolution favoring a deposit on all bottles sold in Chicago, so that people will return bottles to the store instead of littering and breaking them. If Chicago’s bill passes, it would be a first for a major city....

Summer begins to slip away even as the sweat rolls down our faces. I began to notice the signs while at a cocktail party on Navy Pier the evening of July 25. Sipping rum and Coca-Cola, nibbling on prosciutto and melon or strips of smoked salmon wound around asparagus tips, savoring the loveliest of summer sunsets, I watched the gulls fly by. There are a lot of them, and many were clothed in very dark plumage, a mark of birds born this year....

HUGHIE and BEFORE BREAKFAST If you’re familiar with the play Before Breakfast, then you know that it consists of an early-morning tirade delivered by one Mrs. Rowland to her lazy, drunken, unemployed, unfaithful husband, who remains offstage during the entire play, never once responding to her taunts. In the end, much to Mrs. Rowland’s surprise, the husband kills himself. But in this production, there’s no offstage bumping and groaning, and Mrs....

Multiinstrumentalist Lucky Peterson, who’s in his mid-20s, has already logged more years of musical experience than some people twice his age. Billed as a prodigy, he had an album produced by Willie Dixon and was touring and appearing on national television shows at five years old. Back home in Buffalo he sat in with the likes of Jimmy Reed and Koko Taylor at his father’s nightclub, and took keyboard lessons from visiting greats like Bill Doggett and Jimmy Smith....

A milestone anniversary like the Mozart bicentennial ought to be an occasion for discoveries and revelations; appropriately, the well-regarded Mozartean Players are proffering a program of delectable pieces from Mozart’s early and middle periods this weekend. Though the chamber ensemble performs on period instruments, founder Steven Lubin has shown a healthy skepticism toward the authenticity movement. “What is actually vital is the playing, not the instrument,” he has said. Lubin is a formidable fortepianist and musicologist and an engaging and intelligent communicator, and the scaled-down versions he and his colleagues will deliver of piano concerti 12 and 14 should be a treat....

JOHNNY SHINES Johnny Shines and Snooky Pryor Disgusted, Shines retired from music in the late 50s. It wasn’t until 1965, when some tenacious European aficionados coaxed him into the Vanguard studios, that he recorded again. He remained the same independent, headstrong man he’d always been, and his talents were undiminished, especially the wit that had brought such unusual poetry to his old lyrics. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A debilitating stroke several years later virtually eliminated the possibility of a full comeback....

SUMMER OF THE SEVENTEENTH DOLL Which brings us, oh ye brothers and sisters currently pushing 40, to the Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. Because it’s about two couples in their late 30s. The men, Roo and Barney, cut cane in the north of Australia seven months out of the year, heading 2,000 miles south to Melbourne each summer to party away the layoff season with their girlfriends, Olive and Nancy. And so it’s been for 16 wild summers, each one marked by a souvenir doll that Roo gives to his gal, Olive....

Aliteracy in action, from Cat Tales, the newsletter of Second Editions bookstore in Skokie: “A very nice lady discovered Second Editions one day while she was out shopping with a friend. While the reader was browsing, the friend stood at the counter, staring into space, and finally announced to Hope ‘I don’t like to read….I have other hobbies that are more productive.’ ‘Oh, what kind of things do you enjoy?’ ‘I like doing laundry....

THE WAR NOTEBOOKS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dark Ladder Ensemble’s world premiere production of The War Notebooks purports to give an overview of four wars through the letters of the soldiers and civilians of each period, which have been adapted for the stage by ensemble members Vic Flessas and Valerie Gorman. Representing the Civil War are three volunteers from Company K–Private Alex Chisholm, his brother Corporal Daniel Chisholm, and one Sergeant Samuel Clear....

In this musical alliance between Italy and America, the Italian side is being represented by Chiara Benati (from Bologna) and Silvana di Lotti (Turin), the American side by Libby Larsen (Minneapolis) and local composers Rami Levin and Janice Misurell-Mitchell. Benati, who will speak after the concert, is considered an important emerging voice on the European scene. Her Variazioni su una sequenza di Maderna for harp (1991), achieves the almost impossible–transforming that rather limited instrument into a colorful chameleon imitating a variety of other instruments....

On the day Marya Veeck’s famous father Bill died, she picked up a tiny toy figure in the street that was missing a leg, just like him. The next day, when she awoke and saw it, it reminded her of reality. “Otherwise, it was like a dream,” she says of the period following her father’s death. “You can’t believe it’s happened. You lose whole days.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

‘TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE Three and a half centuries down the line, it’s nearly impossible for a contemporary viewer to take seriously the blood-and-guts “tragedies” that so enthralled audiences in the days of Queen Elizabeth I and Kings James I and Charles I. Built on notions of “poetic justice,” plays like John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy–with their excessive gore and relentless carnage imposed on victims whose sins generally consisted of loving someone society didn’t want them to love–can’t lay claim to the sympathies of an audience whose own age records such grand-scale slaughter as the fascist Holocaust and America’s bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki....

GRANT PARK SYMPHONY Most people readily recognize that voice in Copland’s ballet scores and other programmatic pieces. Appalachian Spring, Rodeo, and A Lincoln Portrait, all composed in the 40s, helped establish his popularity far beyond art and intellectual circles. Exuberant as a square dance, expansive as the plains, somber as a New England church, they are deservedly classics of Americana. Copland also wrote highly evocative movie scores in the 40s, one of which, for The Heiress, garnered him an Oscar....