RAGE WITHIN/WITHOUT “It’s a good story,” she insists. “It’s about women and anger. You’re going to like it.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This striking opening creates a performance persona full of compelling contradictions. She is strong and defiant, her gaze locked on us unerringly. Yet she uses cheap theatrical lighting to make herself look more imposing. She is confident of her material, speaking deliberately and directly, clearly in control of the situation....

The notion of the “testament”–the final work of a major filmmaker–is an important one to film lovers. It can be traced back to the 60s, specifically to the French New Wave and the forging in this country of the concept of the film auteur, a time when these and related phenomena were altering the official canons of movie culture. Starting next Tuesday, May 17, the Film Center of the Art Institute will present a weekly series of testaments to run through the end of June....

In the last several years, a half dozen or so bands–most recently the Yellowjackets–have entered the Weather Report soundalike derby, attempting to at worst copy, at best re-create that group’s striking and musically adept body of work. (Small wonder: for its mixture of acoustic and electronic sounds, jazz and rock, composition and improvisation, Weather Report was the band of the 80s and wielded an influence commensurate with that epithet.) But my money remains on Tribal Tech, which uses many of Weather Report’s signature sounds and rhythms as the jump-off point for exciting if not strikingly original jazz fusion....

From the levee camps and country jukes of 1920s Mississippi to European concert halls, Sunnyland Slim has been carrying his indefatigable blues message of survival, hope, and determination to music lovers of all stripes for over 65 years. His piano style–cascading treble flurries and staccato note clusters overlaid on a steady rolling bass–is as immediately identifiable as his remarkable voice, which some claim used to shatter microphones. At 79, Sunnyland’s status as elder statesman of Chicago blues is unchallenged, and both his musical prowess and the seemingly unquenchable spirit that burns inside him remain an inspiration to admirers, friends, and proteges the world over....

Rear-guard action. The Dairy Council of Wisconsin, Inc., has been moooved to issue a three-page release denying that the Dairy State’s ranking first in obesity nationwide has anything to do with its being the Dairy State. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We don’t care. We don’t have to care. David Fremon on the demographic changes in Chicago wards: “The newcomers to the [lakefront] 42nd and 43rd wards don’t feel obliged to be regular Democrats....

THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND Midemax Players Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The only thing worse than reviewing an Agatha Christie-type whodunit is reviewing a play about two critics sent to review an Agatha Christie-type whodunit. In The Real Inspector Hound, critics Moon and Birdboot have the advantage of playwright Tom Stoppard’s lovely language, which shapes their fatuous, long-winded insights about the travesty unfolding on the stage....

Twenty years ago, Jim Bouton kept the diary that became the baseball book Ball Four. The anniversary has gone unremarked–perhaps because magazines and television news shows are waiting for the anniversary of the book’s publication, next year, perhaps because with all the ballyhoo surrounding Woodstock and the moon walk and the Cubs’ choke and the Miracle Mets there hasn’t been enough time, enough resources. Of course, more likely than either of these two answers is that no one thought the occasion important enough, which is indicative of the state we are in....

The French Travel Showcase came to town on Saint Patrick’s Day, not an ideal day for concentrating on things French: somehow the peculiar poisonous color of the river kept coming to mind, and even some of the most avid Gallophiles–the kind who were wont to burst out practically unsolicited, “Oh, I just love France”–were wearing green ties and blouses and sweaters. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Around us, in a meeting room in the basement of the Holiday Inn on East Ohio, exhibitors stood behind tables covered with maps and brochures and pamphlets....

A CHRISTMAS TWIST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Illegitimate Players, who previously trashed Tennessee Williams and skewered Steinbeck in their shows The Glass Mendacity and Of Grapes and Nuts, have launched a preemptive strike against the Christmas season, which they take on with the deliberate, devilish glee of Charles Addams’s cartoon characters tipping a cauldron of boiling oil onto a cadre of carolers....

ARMS AND THE MAN With the play’s cerebral slant and pacifist intention, it’s strange that Arms and the Man (1894) should have inspired Oscar Straus’s 1908 The Chocolate Soldier, a blithely simple-minded operetta that also exploits the plot’s farce. (Of course Shaw repudiated this spin-off, as he would have My Fair Lady if he’d lived to see it.) What G.B.S. aimed to satirize in Arms is exactly what’s lauded in “My Hero,” The Chocolate Soldier’s famous paean....

During the years playwright Paul Peditto was writing Buk: The Life and Times of Charles Bukowski, Bukowski wrote him a series of letters. Many of them were sympathy letters, flavored with a strong dose of Bukowski philosophy and encouraging Peditto to press on in the often difficult struggle to get the play produced (one friend of Peditto’s suggested that if no one would produce Buk, he could write a play called Dear Charles)....

CASTRATING EUGENE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Man–that’s a character’s name in Castrating Eugene is such a person. He caroms noisily off the furniture while watching football games on television, plays catch with raw steak, and has the disturbing habit of donning his camo fatigues late at night and restaging what may or may not be his own Vietnam war experiences. Woman, his mate, is all kind and gentle nurturance....

It’s eight in the morning, Mother’s Day, and Marian Tompson finally has a chance to talk. The last few weeks have been tough for her, a widow shuffling between her Evanston apartment, the toy store she manages, and her ill mother’s home in Franklin Park. In 1956 Marian Tompson was on child number four. Nursing the first three kids hadn’t gone well. She knew nothing about the supply and demand of the breast-feeding process, nothing about taking care of sore nipples....

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When act two begins, there is much talk about the chandelier, virtually none about the hanged man. There, in a nutshell, lie the priorities of Lloyd Webber’s lavish, lumbering, phenomenally popular musical. The insignificance of the man’s death is right in line with the emotional and moral emptiness of the piece, as well as with the sloppiness that pervades its narrative reworking of Gaston Leroux’ much-filmed 1911 novel....

It was early morning, June 1981, when Randy Fried drove into Chicago. He’d been on the road for three days, driving east from LA: a 29-year-old graduate of the film school at the University of Southern California, his movie-making dreams shattered by a screenwriters’ strike. At the end of his third year he entered a school-sponsored contest and was one of seven students awarded the money to make a half-hour featurette....

My bags have been packed for a week. Toiletries, change of clothes, coffee, and several home birthing books. The balloons I tied to my gifts are already deflated, but at least I’m ready. “Every woman goes through it.” “They have to put you in restraints, you won’t be yourself, you might kick the nurses.” He seems refreshingly humble. “I just can’t sleep. Feel like walking around.” “When my friend Mary had her first baby,” I say, “they stayed up and played rummy....

They used to call Jimmy Dawkins “Fast Fingers” but Blisterstring, the title of a recent LP, might be a more appropriate appellation. Dawkins came of age in the late 50s and early 60s alongside such Chicago legends as Magic Sam and Otis Rush and played a significant role in developing the busy, arpeggio-laden style associated with what’s become known as the west-side school of Chicago blues guitar. His current style is a stripped-down variation on the revolutionary techniques developed during that time–he plays as if his guitar were on fire, tearing off intense flurries and then leaving long, chord-filled spaces between them....

Americans speak of their social crisis gingerly, if at all, with the practiced euphemisms of a people deep in denial. Like “codependent” spouses attempting to cover their partners’ alcoholic indiscretions with apologies and excuses, too many Americans seem to think that the best way to deal with the country’s worsening divisions of class and race is to pretend that the problems aren’t there at all, and to attack those who insist on bringing the issue up for being “divisive....

In 1943 Daniel Senise was a $53-a-week conductor on the Illinois Harbor Belt Railroad. In February of that year he was approached in the Blue Island switching yard by a young man. I work for the government, said the man, and I want to take your picture. “I told him exactly what I was doing,” recalls Jack Delano, the photographer, “and what it was for, and asked him if I could go to his house and photograph his family and so on....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have for many years been aware of the methods with which biblical scholars analyze scripture, and I am also familiar with many of the philosophers and theologians mentioned by Sheehan (Heidegger, Schillebeeckx, etc.). In spite of this I still believe in the divinity of Christ, His virgin birth, and His bodily resurrection and ascension. Knowledge of biblical criticism, the significance of the natural and social sciences, and an appreciation for history and philosophy need not rob one of the faith Christians have adhered to for centuries in spite of being ridiculed by the so-called enlightened and educated people who “know better....