To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And, that is why, as recently as 1961, there wasn’t a single resident professional theatre in the Chicago area (the Goodman was then a drama school), and only four such companies in the nation. It wasn’t that such projects didn’t open. They constantly opened. The problem was that they closed summarily, unable to attract those “slothful, fickle” single ticket buyers (who I have by now excoriated on five continents) in sufficient numbers....

THE WAY MEN ACT OR THE SAD LAMENT OF THE PRINCE OF TRUTH This opening instantly brings a potentially heady endeavor–it’s billed as “a new play based on the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli”–down to earth. Not only does the playwright make fun of his characters, depicting them as gentle buffoons who can hardly stay out of one another’s way, but the actors make fun of the playwright, barely putting forth the effort to convince us they’re anything but overworked amateurs....

A friend works on the middle floor of a downtown building behind a heavy wooden desk. He sits in a gold-carpeted room lined with three rows of identical desks. Call him Junior Executive, call his employer Corporeta Bank. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Junior removed his blue suit coat, draped it on the back of a chair, lit a cigarette, and began describing his current frame of mind....

84, CHARING CROSS ROAD Northlight Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The play was adapted by James Roose-Evans from the anthologized letters of writer Helene Hanff and British bookseller Frank Doel, written between 1949 and 1969. Hanff, a Jew from Philadelphia, possesses a keen interest in British Catholicism; living in New York on a bare-bones budget in the years after World War II, trying to make it as a writer, she begins ordering from a shop in London works by poet-preacher John Donne and John Henry Cardinal Newman, and the fourth-century Vulgate Bible....

The latest film of Sergei Paradjanov (1988), a loose adaptation of a story by Mikhail Lermontov about a Turkish minstrel and maiden, is a relatively minor work with much personal and autobiographical significance. But minor Paradjanov qualifies as something very close to major from most other filmmakers. The style is somewhat akin to the frontal tableaux vivants of The Color of Pomegranates with the addition of some camera movement, dialogue, and offscreen narration; the Azerbaijani dialogue and the subtitled Georgian narration tell the story proper, and the limitation of the visuals in this case is that they tend to be more illustrative than is usual with Paradianov....

Although it’s based on a disturbing true story–the so-called cleft-chin murder case that swept the English press in 1944–this period drama, written by David A. Yallop and directed by Bernard Rose, is served up in the form of fanciful and stylish nostalgia (evocative at times of both The Singing Detective and Bonnie and Clyde), perhaps because the power of fantasy is mainly what it’s about. Emily Lloyd and Kiefer Sutherland star as an aspiring 18-year-old movie star and a 22-year-old American serviceman who claims to have Chicago gangster connections....

DANNY’S SHOW-A-GO-GO! Corn Productions at Danny’s Tavern Bouwman and Todd Schaner’s ongoing drag act, Tiff & Mom, about a mother and daughter’s bitchy love-hate relationship, is hobbled by the fact that the two actors take far too long to relax into their characters. Once they do, they’re quite funny; Schaner, as the sharp-tongued mom, is particularly adept at quick, sly, cutting remarks. Unfortunately even when they’re at their best–as in their hilarious guest appearance during Shawn Martin’s musical set–they still lean a bit heavily on getting cheap laughs from the sight of men in dresses....

Twenty-two-year-old Mike Von Bergen gripped the wheel of his parents’ new combine as he took the first pass of the season through the McHenry County cornfields. The lanky blond farmer liked the $125,000 John Deere’s big cabin and quiet engine. But what really pleased him was seeing that the corn-head attachment he’d rebuilt was doing its job. Clarence and Edith Heinkel also farmed in Elk Grove Township, hanging on until 1964, when the land-conversion craze pressed them west several miles beyond the Fox River along the Northwest Tollway....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, since there are only so many minutes to a typical class period and a limited number of days to the school year, teachers are forced to choose what they believe are most important for the education of their students. Since, until recently, this country was mostly settled by Europeans, teachers logically chose what they themselves had learned....

When Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galeano visited Chicago on a book tour in the mid-1980s, he only had one special request: that local friends take him to the Haymarket district, near the corner of Randolph and Desplaines. Galeano laments that May 1–adopted as International Labor Day a few years after the Haymarket episode–is just a day like any other in the U.S., and that “no one, or almost no one, remembers that the rights of the working class did not spring whole from the ear of a goat, or from the hand of God or the boss....

John Donahue is a solid, tanklike man who seems to relish combat, verbal or otherwise. One morning last month he addressed a teeming mass of 500 homeless people gathered in the rotunda of the Illinois capitol building in Springfield. There in those august surroundings, Donahue, dressed in a blue T-shirt and jeans, said he had just heard a radio report about a Chicago woman who was jailed after allowing her baby to starve to death....

I’M 27, I STILL LIVE AT HOME, AND I SELL OFFICE SUPPLIES: AN INTIMATE EVENING WITH JIM CARRANE This performance by sometime Metraform (and former ImprovOlympic) actor Jim Carrane is billed as a one-man show, and that’s no lie. Carrane isn’t only the guy onstage; he’s the guy who takes your ticket at the door, walks through the theater making sure everyone’s got a seat, turns the houselights off when it’s time to start the show, and jumps off the stage to turn them back on again when an impatient stage manager informs him it’s time to clear the house for the next production....

IMPROVOLYMPIA A couple years ago Del Close and Charna Halpern were forced for legal reasons to change the name of their organization from the ImprovOlympic to ImprovOlympia. The change of one letter may seem trivial, but it wasn’t. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The nightly rating of each team’s performance (often by the most capricious criteria) and declaring a winner, which suggested these victories meant something (which in a way they did, since losing teams were often broken up) ran counter to Close’s more nurturing, Zen-like message that process was more important than product, that you were more likely to hit the target if your ego wasn’t on the line....

Now 84 years old and still indomitable, Michael Tippett is assured of his reputation as one of the major creative forces in 20th-century British music. But unlike his near contemporary Benjamin Britten, much of his work has not got the kind of attention due a composer of his stature and musical accessibility–especially not outside his home country. A measure of the neglect is the fact that two of his three early string quartets–written almost half a century ago–are receiving their Chicago premieres in this Lindsay String Quartet debut (sponsored by Chamber Music Chicago as part of its “International Season”)....

My son came down the stairs, way past his bedtime, and told my wife and me he couldn’t sleep because he was worried about his friend Rich. I asked him what was the matter with Rich, and he told me, “Richard can’t go to the store any kind of way he wants to anymore, and he’s not sure he wants to go to summer school ’cause he has to take all kinds of different routes to get around ’cause, you know, the gangs are after him....

CHICAGO REPERTORY DANCE ENSEMBLE One camp is headed by (but not limited to) the choreographic team of Christina Ernst and Sam Watson, who tend to explore in their dances a single movement idea or one abstract, almost platonic concept–as in their most recent work, Color. Although generally very inventive, the result can at times seem rather limited, more like an exercise or a sketch than a completed dance with a distinct purpose....

WATER AND POWER Yet O’Neill’s film is about much more than local California history, though it takes this water diversion as a starting point and frequently juxtaposes the urban desert of LA and the salt-flat desert around the lowered Mono Lake as a reminder of cause and effect. O’Neill’s grander theme is the imposition of human-made patterns on nature, as well as the way in which, in our mechanized landscape and our mechanized perception of landscape, nature and industrial civilization have interpenetrated each other to such a degree that they have become almost inseparable....

NURSE JANE GOES TO HAWAII Nurse Jane Goes to Hawaii, by Canadian playwright Allan Stratton, is such a play. Nurse Jane is actually the heroine of a series of romance novels authored by Vivien Bliss, herself a rather romantic and virginal maiden who intends to remedy at least a part of that condition during a weekend spent in the apartment of Edgar Chisholm. He is the bored spouse of Doris, a successful syndicated advice columnist....

An illustrated feature in each issue of Spy, called “New, Improved New York,” posits some change, usually involving some in-joke, that will make Gotham a better place. In one issue, for example, the editors suggest holding a Thanksgiving-night parade featuring gigantic balloons not of Mickey Mouse or Superman or even of Mutant Teenage Ninja Turtles but of what Spy calls “overinflated” New York personalities, like perennial Spy targets Liz Smith and Donald Trump....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I read your piece on the moonlighting theater critic for Chicago’s two gay papers [Hot Type, May 10] and was left reeling. In that piece a spokesperson for Outlines stated that many of their writers use pseudonyms when writing to protect their identities. There is only one problem–Outlines is one of the most notorious “outting” publications in the gay press....