STAND-UP HELL: A COMEDIAN, A HECKLER . . . AND A GUN Ross Bennett, a stand-up comic portraying himself (sort of) at Zanies in his play Stand-Up Hell: A Comedian, a Heckler . . . and a Gun, follows in that tradition of yuppie angst and self-effacement. Approaching 40, having never made it big, unsuccessful in his relationships with family members and significant others, Bennett spills his guts in the standard patter of autobiographical anecdotes and one-liners that mask a wrenching inner pain....

Necessity has taken William Hohri in some surprising directions. Over the past 18 years, the 61-year-old Albany Park man, a computer programmer by trade, has learned how to lobby congressmen, how to bring a class-action suit against the U.S. government, how to raise funds, how to get the attention of the press, and most recently, how to author a book. “The redress movement began with a conservative effort,” said Peter Irons, a lawyer and political science professor at the....

THE ABYSS To satisfy these new cravings of human vanity, the arts have recourse to every species of imposture; and these devices sometimes go so far as to defeat their own purpose. Imitation diamonds are now made which may be easily mistaken for real ones; as soon as the art of fabricating false diamonds shall become so perfect that they cannot be distinguished from real ones, it is probable that both will be abandoned, and become mere pebbles again....

BURNING BRIGHT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story goes like this. Joe Saul wants a child in the worst way, but he and his much younger wife, Mordeen, can’t produce one. So Mordeen, who knows herself to be fertile, secretly conceives a child with the help of the hired hand, Victor. When the news is broken, Joe Saul is elated at the prospect of fatherhood, but Victor feels sorely used....

Friday 23 The Puerto Rican Cultural Center in West Town is best known for its alternative high school, which graduates more students–85 percent–than many public schools. But the center has a lot more to offer–a day-care center for preschoolers, an adult-education program that includes child-care services for students who are also parents, the largest private Puerto Rican library in the country, and a cultural program that includes music, poetry, and drama....

M. William Karlins, Robert Lombardo, and Alan Stout have at least a few things in common: they’re all well-established local composers about to turn 60. This joint birthday salute by the chamber collective Cube may shed some light on their other attributes. Karlins and Stout, who’ve been colleagues at Northwestern University for more than a quarter-century, can be called mild atonalists–adroit at loosely exploiting the 12-tone system and unusual instrumentation for lyrical effect....

DISCUSSING GEORGE at the Elbo Room Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All of this stimulates lots and lots and lots of talk–about Susan, about George, about pregnancy–most of it straining desperately to be funny and falling far short. During the course of the play it’s revealed that George is a hermaphrodite and pregnant too (yes, he did what many of us have been told to do at one time or another)....

Those taking the easy way out usually describe the Either/Orchestra by lists of, and comparisons to, its heroes and influences–which can either impress or daunt, given that the group’s far-flung repertoire encompasses reworked pieces by Charles Mingus, Bobbie Gentry, Miles Davis, Robert Fripp, and Roscoe Mitchell. While such lists suggest the postmodernism of this scale-model Boston big band that thinks like a combo, they fail to express the nature of its performances–wildly humorous, unfailingly propulsive–or the luminously clever way founder-leader-saxophonist Russ Gershon ties up the whole package....

THE ICICLE THIEF With Nichetti, Caterina Sylos Labini, Federico Rizzo, Heidi Komarek, Renato Scarpa, Carlina Torta, Lella Costa, and Claudio G. Fava. This is the opening sequence of a poetic, lunatic farce called Ratataplan (1979), the first feature of director- writer-actor Nichetti (who plays Colombo), the world premiere of which I happened to see quite by chance at the Venice film festival, where it won the Golden Lion, then went on to become a monster hit, running as long as six months in some Italian cities....

The musical synergy between Lester “Big Daddy” Kinsey and his funk-obsessed sons is often shaky, but his gutbucket traditionalism juxtaposed against the boys’ harsh, metallic, urban-contemporary onslaught creates one of the more arresting sounds in contemporary blues. Kinsey is an unreconstructed devotee of Muddy Waters–his slide work on standards like Funny Paper Smith’s “I’m a Howlin’ Wolf” is lifted almost note-for-note from Muddy’s live performances. The addition of west-side harp master Mad Dog Lester Davenport in recent years has significantly strengthened Big Daddy’s ability to cut through his sons’ accompaniment and deliver blues of subtlety and substance....

First Jack Kemp tossed the ball up. The two centers leaped for it, but other than that nothing happened. Nothing athletic, that is. A whole lot of cameras clicked and whirred. Next it was Mayor Daley’s turn. Same thing. No jostling or running for the ball, but lots of flashes and snaps. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Long before last week’s opener at Malcolm X College, the Midnight Basketball League, the Chicago Housing Authority’s new program to keep gangbangers’ shooting and stealing confined to the gym, had attracted a full-court media press, including two stories in the New York Times....

Extending the episodic construction of his four previous features and the principle of simultaneity underlying the last of these, Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch creates a comic sketch film out of five taxi rides and existential encounters occurring at the same time: a teenager (Winona Ryder) driving a Hollywood casting agent (Gena Rowlands) in Los Angeles at dusk; a former circus clown from Dresden (Armin Mueller-Stahl) chauffeuring–or being chauffeured by–a streetwise hipster (Giancarlo Esposito) from Manhattan to Brooklyn, with the hipster’s sister-in-law (Rosie Perez) getting corralled en route; an angry driver from the Ivory Coast (Isaach de Bankole) picking up a self-reliant blind woman (Beatrice Dalle) in Paris; a speedy cabbie (Roberto Benigni) in Rome delivering an obscene confession to an ailing priest (Paolo Bonacelli); and a morose driver (Matti Pellonpaa) in Helsinki recounting a hard-luck story to three drunken passengers (Kari Vaananen, Saku Kuosmanen, Tomi Salmela) at dawn....

Dear Pal Ted: I never saw Pal Joey. I remember you did when it opened on Xmas day in 1940 in N.Y. You said it had me down perfect. I guess thats good. After all, Gene Kelly who played me was a charming chap, and Rodgers and Hart always wrote good tunes. I used to get requests at the club for that one song from the show, “I Cld. Write a Book....

The Re-Birth Brass Band treat the New Orleans brass band tradition like a scratching hip-hop deejay treats recorded music: they mix and match snippets with an abandon that sometimes seems anarchic, but their sound is actually the result of a carefully thought-out strategy. True to their legacy, the Re-Birthers create a music whose essence is rhythm–Crescent City second-line march cadences filtered through the funky grease of contemporary R & B, with an underlying polyrhythmic complexity that harks back to the city’s Afro-Caribbean heritage....

Screwed by the Sun-Times, Part 2 In April, having faced down the distributors in court, the Tribune did the deed. It switched from these independent wholesalers to “agents” who were paid flat fees to service retailers and subscribers. Yet in mid-May, the Sun-Times sent the distributors another upbeat letter encouraging them to continue carrying the paper. “We are . . . offering you new programs of promotional and competitive allowances to help you compete ....

Fans of the late Walt Kelly’s long-running comic strip Pogo know what a keen ear Kelly had for the American vernacular and what a Joycean delight he took in playfully twisting the language until sense and nonsense were one; even the most familiar Christmas carols were transformed into absurdist hymns like “Deck us all with Boston, Charlie!” and “Good King Sauerkraut looked out on his feets uneven.” Admitted Pogo-phile Frank Farrell collected a representative sampling of Walt Kelly’s work, including 13 of Walt Kelly’s best nonsense songs with music by Norman Monath, and selections from his humorous and autobiographical writings, and shaped it into a three-man musical-comedy revue starring Farrell, Jon Beliveau, and Ben Masterton....

The Evanston-based Symphony of the Shores is a lively little orchestra with a penchant for the unconventional; earlier in the season it gave a fairly traditional program then followed it with a pops concert. Now it has thrown caution to the winds for its season finale, a multimedia affair that juxtaposes opera’s past and present with the Windy City’s. In one number a video depicting the city’s architectural history will be accompanied by Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite....

Normally I don’t recommend a play with a Critic’s Choice until after I’ve had a chance to write my long review for section one. This Critic’s Choice is appearing before the full-length review. Does that suggest an unusual degree of enthusiasm on my part? I hope so. Goodman Theatre’s The Iceman Cometh is great. Excessively great. Great in its excess. Four and a half hours of an obsessed poet named Eugene O’Neill, doing everything any dramaturge would tell him he absolutely can’t do and coming out of it standing firmly on his two dark, transcendent feet....

THE MYSTICETI AND THE MANDELBROT SET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Kid and the Kat are the leading characters in Theater Oobleck’s new show, The Mysticeti and the Mandelbrot Set. In Jeff Dorchen’s new play, the Kid and the Kat are psychedelic time-and-space travelers, trying to understand the nature of chaos and find the place where language (i.e., rationality) ends and whatever comes after that begins....

In 1965, four individualistic and visionary Chicago jazzmen established the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians; in 1990, for the organization’s 25th anniversary, three of those four mandarins–pianists Muhal Richard Abrams and Jodie Christian and trumpeter Phil Cohran–will be put to work. (The other founder, drummer Steve McCall, died in 1989.) Of course, there were many others who played important roles in the A.A.C.M.’s early years–particularly Anthony Braxton and the members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, who sojourned in Europe and spurred the jazz world to refocus its attention on events in the midwest–but if you’re gonna start a historic celebration, it might as well be at the beginning....