BALLET CHICAGO Three years ago he re-created the early-20th-century New Orleans underworld–its ten-cents-a-dance dives, its vaudeville stars and wannabes–in By Django, with music by Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli. This exceptionally good-natured, hectically humorous work was performed again during Ballet Chicago’s first week at the Steppenwolf Theatre, and it’s filled with “dames,” with fellows you have to watch your hat and coat around, with sexual triangles–one section’s called “Two Ladies ....

In a perfect world, the tenants and managers of the Carmen-Marine apartment building would have joined forces months ago. By now they’d be the model of resident-run subsidized housing. At stake is a 27-story, 300-unit high rise at the intersection of Carmen Avenue (5100 north) and Marine Drive. It was built in the late 1960s with a federally guaranteed low-interest loan; in return the Department of Housing and Urban Development regulates rents and limits occupancy to low-income tenants....

CAREENING IS A SKILL: ESTRANGED MUSICALE Before the play opens, as the audience wanders in, we see a man standing alone onstage, frozen in the process of reaching down to tie his shoe. This is the Nothing Is Everything Man (Louis Arata), an everyman who, we learn later, has become so lost and panic-stricken that he cannot act, cannot even tie his shoelace. This untied shoelace so effectively captures the Nothing Man’s debilitating malaise that I immediately wanted to rush out and tie it for him....

UNCLE VANYA Well, the people haven’t remembered, not most of them anyway. Audiences these days don’t flock to Uncle Vanya (1899), nor to most of Anton Chekhov’s plays. Though generally praised for his perceptive portraits of the human condition–the humor and sorrow inherent in the frustration and disillusion of average lives–Chekhov isn’t particularly popular. Audiences have been put off over the years by academic, stiffly “eloquent” translations; by productions that overstress either the comedy or the pathos of each play; and by reams of critical analysis focusing on Chekhov’s insights into the ennui of the Russian soul at the end of the 19th century....

The fifth annual edition of the Chicago Latino Film Festival continues through Sunday, October 1. Film screenings will be held at the Three Penny Cinema, 2424 N. Lincoln, and at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton. Video screenings will be held at the Hokin Center, Columbia College, 623 S. Wabash. Ticket prices per program are $6 for adults, $4 for students, senior citizens, and handicapped persons, and $3 for members of Facets–except for video screenings, which cost $2....

The Grammy Award-winning Chicago Pro Musica offers Chicago-area premieres of two important works by local composers that were given their enthusiastically received world premieres last weekend at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. The extraordinarily high quality of the pieces and their performances at Krannert make this event a must for anyone interested in Chicago new music, and will definitely justify the trip to west-suburban Batavia for the only scheduled area performances of the works....

THE GUARDIAN ANGEL With Philip Zanden, Etienne Glaser, Malin Ek, Bjorn Kjellman, Gunilla Roor, and Lena Nylen. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jacob is no sooner installed than the purity of his ideological purpose is clouded. He comes close several times to carrying out his intention, but delays the decision. Not meant to sacrifice his own life, and probably unwilling to do so, he watches and waits–and our tension inexorably grows with his, for the Birkmans are no ordinary family and may at any time recognize the scorpion in their midst....

The hardest show for the Lyric Opera to market this season is likely to be Richard Strauss’s gory, sensual psychodrama Elektra. Based on the sprawling Greek myth about a cursed clan, this 1909 opera was denounced as the height of decadence by critics back then. But its score, which anticipated the agitated modernism of Schoenberg and Berg, is among the most sophisticated, meaningful, and technically adroit ever written by Strauss. To convey the emotional turmoil and savage downfall of a house plagued by incest and debauchery, Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal focus on the fate of three women: Klytamnestra and her daughters Elektra and Chrysothemis....

It is generally agreed that the bill called the Spousal Health Insurance Rights Act (SHIRA) would never have been passed by the Illinois legislature in 1985 without the concerted midwifing efforts of a coalition of organizations under the direction of the Illinois Women’s Agenda. More than a dozen groups, including the National Council of Jewish Women, the Hull House Association, the Illinois Network of Displaced Homemakers, the League of Women Voters, and the Older Women’s League, participated in the hard-fought, four-year struggle to bring the creature to birth....

Illinois’ Record Year on Film Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Among the rerouted projects was Twentieth Century-Fox’s film adaptation of the play Prelude to a Kiss, which had been written specifically for New York and was hastily revised for Chicago. Universal Pictures’ Mad Dog & Glory, produced by Martin Scorsese, and Columbia Pictures’ Mo’ Money also wound up in Chicago rather than on the east coast....

It was an unusual picket line. About 20 people had arrived at the offices of the Chicago Access Corporation, CAC, to protest the showing of a cable talk show, Race and Reason, hosted by a rabid white supremacist named Thomas Metzger. Three members of a local group called the Committee for Labor Access entered the building and came out with one of CAC’s portable video cameras; they began interviewing participants in the protest, which by now had grown to more than 50 people....

JERKER, OR THE HELPING HAND I couldn’t believe I’d been assigned this play. I had no desire to watch two naked men jerking off onstage–my understanding of what this play was about. You can pay 50 cents at a peep show for that. But although Robert Chesley’s Jerker does indeed center around two naked men whacking off while exchanging fantasies on the phone (well, to tell the truth only one bares all), it is finally a funny, thoughtful, tender story that emerges from Bailiwick’s well-crafted production....

Joan LaBarbara is surely one of the most ardent and intelligent interpreters of experimental music since the early 70s. Not only an expert purveyor of tough vocal music herself (and an astute critic), LaBarbara has also played muse to a legion of iconoclast pioneers (and is married to fellow avant-gardist Morton Subotnick). With her trademark vocal effects–throat clicks, ululations, high flutters–she’s proven realizable the elaborate and precise textures of vocal pieces by the likes of Robert Ashley, Philip Glass, and John Cage, some of which were tailored to her voice....

COMEDY OF HORRORS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Somewhere in Thompson’s brain an idea is percolating–an idea for a play dramatizing, in strong but funny fashion, the situation of a Chicago off-Loop nonunion actor. In Comedy of Horrors, that idea surfaces from time to time–in abrupt, tart references to Actors’ Equity, the League of Chicago Theatres, and the “Joker Jefferson Committee.” Certainly the basic premise of Thompson’s play, which is having its world premiere as the opening production of the Commons Theatre’s tenth season, is the worst nightmare of any actor, regardless of union affiliation or geographical location....

Last summer, when Bob Hercules used James Bond’s high-powered sound equipment to stage an open-air video show in Wicker Park, Hercules says people were drawn like flies to the flickering light of the screen. Now Hercules and Bond are back–with fancier gear, as in any good sequel. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hercules left his native Michigan in the mid-80s with a master’s degree in film and video production....

SYLVIA PLACHY’S UNGUIDED TOUR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Often she captures a particular moment so private you wonder how and why the subjects allowed her to photograph them. You marvel at the poetry of that personal instant so intense it becomes not only universal but, crossing back on itself, even more poignantly personal. Being at the right place at the right time is one thing, but being allowed entry into that esoteric moment that reveals the innermost self is another....

The burgeoning interest in 1940s American culture has recently borne the TV series Homefront, which focuses on the postwar scene in a small Ohio city; last year’s “Art of the Forties” show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art; and Loyola University’s recent conference on “The War in American Culture.” Fiftieth-anniversary commemorations of World War II are probably only part of the explanation. The rest may be due to nostalgia for that era’s sense of unity, national purpose, and industrial expansion with jobs for everyone–all so notably lacking in the 90s....

When I can’t look at another plate of pasta, there’s nothing like a real ethnic neighborhood place (Italian restaurants having become too mainstream to qualify), especially one with singing and dancing, to refresh my palate. Invariably, they’re Eastern European, Greek, or German. I’m stymied as to the common denominator. Greeks and Eastern Europeans have a reputation for being emotional, full of joie de vivre–but Germans? But there they are at Chicago Brauhaus in Lincoln Square, noisily eating, drinking, table hopping, and dancing to “Lili Marlene....

At the mouth of the Kalamazoo River, the twin cities of Saugatuck and Douglas once had a third sibling, the port of Singapore. Singapore was expected by its 1830s boosters to rival Chicago, but instead it was buried by 1890 in a shifting dune that loggers had stripped of its anchoring trees. Ecological mismanagement (and the Yellowstone-like fires of 1871) eventually left the area unable to sustain its basic industries–lumber, tanning, and shipbuilding–but industrial decline perversely permitted it to become a haven for artists and for summer people from as far away as Saint Louis....

How foolish can one get? Four or five governors later, they’ll open it again. I quickly soured on a career as a ditchdigger for Science, but I went back to Dickson Mounds many times as a tourist. The burial wing of the new museum has been carefully built around the partly excavated mound that gives the place its name: the mound looks just as it did when it was exposed nearly 70 years ago....