PLAYBOY OF THE WEST INDIES The “playboy” of Synge’s story is Christy Mahon, a handsome youth who staggers into a tiny, clannish community telling a tale of patricide: while they were digging potatoes, he crushed his abusive father’s head with a spade. This deed, rather than making Christy a pariah, turns him into a celebrity, feared and lionized for his bravery by the men and pursued by the women–most notably Pegeen Mike, the hot-tempered daughter of the local saloon keeper....

ALL SHOOK DOWN Now, the transformation complete, Westerberg’s signature is his wiseass copping to the selling of his soul–he’s half-embarrassed by it, but he gets a new kind of thrill out of the process as well: “They put a checkbook to my head,” he smirks on the Replacements’ new album, All Shook Down. I can’t think of anyone who has so gleefully tracked the progress of his own debauching. The band’s last album, the ironically titled AOR breakthrough Don’t Tell a Soul, had a heady reflexiveness in songs like “Talent Show” (“We ain’t much to look at so / Close your eyes and here we go”); All Shook Down brazenly continues this tradition in razzle-dazzle fashion–it’s the cleanest and poppiest Replacements album yet, with more than its share of nifty radio blasters, a selection of songwriterly cream puffs for the English majors, and subtext aplenty for the critics....

Sun-Times Sports Shuffle The column Hewitt now writes used to belong to Rapoport, who won all sorts of awards for the Sun-Times and then got dumped. Publisher Robert Page and executive editor Ken Towers tired of Rapoport’s voice of reason, and in 1987 they busted him down to feature writer. The Sun-Times already had one gentlemanly sports columnist in Ray Sons, and Page and Towers saw no reason for two. As Towers told us then, they wanted “somebody who’d look at things in a different way and express an opinion that maybe wouldn’t be the type of opinion people would agree with....

1: The Train Your countryside is beautiful, Jane said gamely, and no pollution on the beaches. I gave him a weekly magazine with Gorbachev on the cover, and he hurried back to share it with his compartment mate, an eminent Party historian who spent the whole trip in pajamas. Later Kiem told me that the magazine didn’t give him much new information; he’d already heard most of it on the BBC World Service....

A PHOENIX TOO FREQUENT If the story was timeworn when Fry wrote it in 1946, the passage of almost 40 years has done nothing to make it fresher. Boy meets girl, boy almost loses girl, boy gets girl. In a time when “meeting cute” was almost a requirement of love stories on stage and screen, the initial encounter between the lovers-to-be was a little offbeat–but only because Fry had lifted his plot from Petronius, that ancient master of black comedy and the author of the Satyricon....

After three unsuccessful swings of the wrecking ball, the top of the southeast corner of Comiskey Park finally peeled off in a chunk and smashed on the ground. Then pandemonium set in. Dozens of onlookers swarmed upon the bricks like buzzards on carrion, while hundreds more on the wrong side of the temporary fence pleaded to have some thrown over. “I’ve gotta getta brick! Hey buddy, gimme a goddamn brick!”...

ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m no fiend. I agree with him. To “reflect light into the dark places of the world” is a great and worthy mission. But while watching All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten!, Ernest Zulia’s adaptation of Fulghum’s books at the Apple Tree Theatre, I began to wonder whether those dark places were ever going to be acknowledged....

If comedy improv can be likened to a suit of clothing, most companies in town are factory seconds. Avant-Garfielde is pute haute couture. Their work is innovative, the details carefully constructed, and crowds throng to see their newest creations, as their unheard-of six-and-a-half-year run at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap in Hyde Park demonstrates. This group of impossibly quick-witted performers present some of the funniest, hippest and smartest comedy material I’ve run across....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The term “aborted fetus,” which Achy Obejas used in her article to describe a baby that has been killed by abortion, is not only incorrect, but it dehumanizes a child that died a brutal and horrible death. The word fetus, derived from Latin, is defined as an unborn child or little one in the womb. The word connotes the location of the unborn baby....

BACH’S MASS IN B MINOR The Chicago Symphony virtually ignores early music, and what token older music (pre-19th century) it does perform is usually done by conductors trained to present it in a bombastic 19thcentury manner: slowly, with romantic phrasing and tempi, an exacting approach to rhythm uncharacteristic of the time, unbalanced orchestra] and choral forces often up to five or six times larger than the pieces were scored for, and hordes of strings employing the vibrato and rubato associated with Brahms....

Commercial Break: Theater Owners Play Hardball, Producers Cry Foul Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just when the theater scene could have used a little peace and quiet, a battle has broken out in the ranks of commercial producers–a battle that could have a lasting impact on the way the game is played in Chicago. Proclaiming that fair play had been abandoned, the veteran commercial producing team of Michael Cullen, Sheila Henaghan, and Howard Platt (CH&P) spent much of last week decrying the manner in which the operators of the Wellington Theater, Wes Payne and Michael Leavitt, ousted the CH&P production of Shirley Valentine and replaced it with the David Dillon-John Pasinato production of the musical Nunsense, which is moving into the city from the Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace....

COMPANY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In none of this, as barbed and bitter as George Furth’s script often gets, is there any questioning of the institution of marriage itself; even such alternatives as divorce and unofficial cohabitation are seen as minor variations on the real thing. As the exploratory 70s have passed into the retro-traditional 80s, Company’s conservatism seems as comfortably familiar as the all-American horniness of South Pacific or the good-natured bickering of Roseanne–and very much at home in the plush confines of the suburban Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace theater....

“Sweet corn is better than money,” says an Illinois farmer who uses the former to get things the latter can’t easily buy. Richard Layden’s sweet corn fetches great seats at ball games, shady McCormick Place parking spots, a prime location for the Labor Day weekend 49th Annual National Sweetcorn Festival. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Vermilion County native says he’s the only fresh-market corn producer still operating near this town of 5,000....

The music of the avant-garde fumeurs will form the core of the local debut of Ensemble Project Ars Nova, a group of American early-music singers and intrumentalists whose founders met at the Schola Cantorum in Switzerland in the early 80s. Their program, “Myth, Magic, and Machaut: A Surrealistic Excursion to 14th-Century France With the Aid of a Fumeur,” presents the music of a group of 14th-century French musicians, poets, and philosophers who called themselves fumeurs (“smokers”) because they smoked opium for artistic inspiration....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Karen Hoffman, the letter writer, makes some valid points, but let me tell you a story. In 1954, at the age of 18, my sister was diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Therapy never helped her–the Thorazine and Stelazine did, at least enough so that she could function and work. The problem was that she was always returned to our mother after being released from the hospital....

It’s tempting to regard Richard M. Daley’s two years as mayor as a well crafted but very long reelection campaign. He has tended his political bases with care, adroitly deflected assaults, studiously controlled public images and information, and deferred some touchy major issues until after the election. Even critics often acknowledge that he has been very skillful. They even say he may have been a better mayor than they expected, though they hasten to add that their expectations were always low....

Do you know what to do if the Bomb drops? Until recently, I sure didn’t. The bulk of my civil-defense training had come from those black-light posters that were popular in the early 70s, the ones that listed ten steps to prepare yourself for a thermonuclear explosion. I forget what the first nine steps were, but number ten was always “Bend over and kiss your ass good-bye.” The advice looked cool hanging next to the Day-Glo poster of Jimi at Monterey, but as a practical reference guide to surviving a nuclear war, it didn’t pack much megatonnage....

We stumble down some steep steps and through a heavy door to reach the bowels of the Dance Center. My guide to this well-lit, overheated underworld starts gesticulating and talking as soon as we hit the basement floor. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Grigsby sits on a chair with a dangerously raked seat and says, “It’s quite comfortable really–if you’ve been drinking heavily.” He explains that the set’s schematic windows will have real curtains, which will blow in a gentle breeze, and points out that the coffee table has two drink glasses painted on it....

In the last 30 years the field of psychiatry has undergone a major paradigm shift. Where we were once taught to look for the root causes of our suffering in the psychodynamics of our childhood, we are now encouraged to look to our genes, or perhaps our neurotransmitters. Friedberg was a French major at Yale, graduated from the University of Rochester medical school in 1971, and completed a residency in neurology at the University of Oregon in 1978....

It just hung there for a minute, a globby, dangling blob, then snapped, trailing along a spit stringer like the tail of a comet. It issued from the crimson lips of a kid with black hair. His chin rested on the railing spanning the bridge. He was maybe ten. And the temptation must have been great. I know how it is. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So out it came, stringing out, pulling and stretching the viscous limits of saliva, hanging there in a white froth....