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ROAD and The author is nearly dead. These days a playwright tends to occupy a place somewhere between producer and lighting designer, as lots of directors and actors carefully study the deconstructionist edicts that there’s no such thing as an original text and that interpretations are more valid than the works they’re based on. The result is any number of pretentious, self-serving productions. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Road is the better of the two....

SCOOTER THOMAS MAKES IT TO THE TOP OF THE WORLD The toughest part of dealing with this person was that even while he embarrassed the hell out of us every time we appeared with him in public, we still sort of admired him. Subconsciously, we recognized him as a direct descendant of the quintessential American hero–Huckleberry Finn, or Tom Joad, or the mythical cowboy. An anachronism. So we wrote to his mother asking after him, maybe even gave him a call once in a while, just to let him know that someone would be there to show him the territory on the day he finally got tired of screwing up and bowed to the demands of 20th-century civilization....

Fifteen Thirty One, 1531 N. Kingsbury: Marlon Brando, in full leather, walked in, gave the waitress a look, and played some dicey jazz on the jukebox. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jamie was standing near the bar, drinking a Diet Coke and watching The Wild One on a 12-way split screen. It was the club’s opening night. She saw that her black leather motorcycle jacket looked just like Marlon Brando’s though hers was from Bloomingdale’s....

SOCIAL SECURITY at the Avenue Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To begin with, the production provides almost no dramatic tension. Lines are read without emphasis. Actors’ faces go blank when they’re not speaking. No one seems to listen when spoken to. Everyone more or less knows the lines, and no one trips over the furniture, but of the seven actors in the show only Michael Wasserman as David and Roma Mann as Mom play their roles as if they were imitating real people....

Just when you think there’s nothing unique left under the blues sun, along comes an artist like Sonny Rhodes. Rhodes is from Texas, and he absorbed the usual influences–the smooth jazziness of T-Bone Walker and the jump bands, the stinging virtuosity of Freddie King, the sophisticated balladry of Bobby “Blue” Bland and Percy Mayfield. But unlike some, he’s neither stuck in a T-Bone tribute mold nor obsessed with trying to out-raunch every phlegm-voiced roadhouser in the Lone Star State....

“Tears Won’t Help ” the first and most radio-friendly of the songs on Steve Wynn’s first solo album, Kerosene Man, begins with a churning-burning guitar figure that recalls “Still Holding On to You,” a song he wrote for his former group, the Dream Syndicate. The band was one of the best and most noted of the LA psychedelic scene of the early 80s; for a time, in fact, they were the psych-meisters of them all, playing a series of corrosive live shows that showcased the searing guitars of Wynn and pal Karl Precoda....

While this isn’t quite the return to form for satirist Michael Ritchie (Smile, Semi-Tough) that he apparently meant it to be, given his many years in the wilderness as an anonymous contract director, it’s funny enough in spots to suggest the possibility. Dan Aykroyd shines as a clever inmate at a Chicagoland mental hospital who contrives to escape, fly to LA, and take over the job of a wealthy Beverly Hills psychiatrist (Charles Grodin), who is flipping out and has temporarily retreated to London....

I’ve climbed the highest mountains, searched the darkest depths of the public library and even asked my mother. Still I come up with a blank. So here’s my question: have you ever looked at your zipper? I mean really looked? On 90 percent of them there are the letters YKK. Please tell me what YKK means so I can again know inner peace. –Ken Green, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The most marvelous thing about the theater is also the most obvious: the actual presence of the performer in the room. No film can imitate the peculiar sense of privilege that comes with watching a creator create in real time in a particular space that is not simultaneously in Los Angeles or New York or Mexico City, but only right here now. Donna Blue Lachman makes you especially aware of that sense of privilege, because (1) Donna Blue Lachman is like no one else, and (2) she builds her theater out of that singularity....

For the last two years teachers and members of the local school council at Amundsen High School have worked together in a model of cooperation. They cut truancy by forcing parents to take greater responsibility for their children and cracked down on gang activities by enforcing strict discipline and a dress code. At issue is the LSC’s proposal to establish a special environmental-studies curriculum, which would be used, among other things, to attract higher-achieving students to Amundsen....

Paul Simon only discovered Ladysmith Black Mambazo in the same sense that Columbus discovered America, of course, but credit him with helping bring their ghostly and irresistible a cappella groove to the rest of the world. The South African group–a phalanx of seven singers who croon, moan, whisper, dance, and shuffle their way through extremely complex rhythmic and melodic hoops–have been in town for weeks in Steppenwolf’s The Song of Jacob Zulu, and even took the stage at China Club a week or so back....

Eighteen years ago the Monastero family–owners of Monastero’s Ristorante at 3935 W. Devon–decided to hold a contest in their restaurant to give young singers a chance to perform before an audience. To fund the prize–an all-expenses-paid trip to Italy to study opera–they charged their dining clientele a fee to watch the contest. The event proved to be so popular that the family founded the Bel Canto Foundation, a separate organization to run the contest, in 1976....

THE BRIG Originally produced by the radically experimental Living Theatre in New York in 1963, The Brig is a study of dehumanization and regimentation in a military prison. (Though the specific setting is a U.S. Marine brig in Japan in 1957, those details are irrelevant to the play’s Kafkaesque scheme.) The play’s dialogue consists entirely of public exchanges between the prisoners and their supervising officers: there are no contrived dramatic moments here, no breakout plans, no secret romances, no private vendettas to be settled....

Maybe the girl revolution won’t take shape in the public world, the world of men. It certainly won’t happen out on the street, where girls aren’t safe. Maybe it will begin in a private, enclosed space men never enter, a generic space women enter and leave, often together, writing messages for each other on the wall: a restroom. That is where Nikki McClure believes the powerful future of girls lies, and her vision came to her when, as she writes, “in 1990-91 a list of men who date raped was kept on the wall of the 3rd stall, 2nd floor of the Library Building at Evergreen State College....

The shaman of postmodern jazz hasn’t visited Chicago in years, and that alone should impel you to his doorstep next week: Ronald Shannon Jackson’s continually evolving music may give you either palpitations or merely a headache, but you sure won’t be bored. As a drummer, Shannon can create rhythms that are actually unique in their layered metric complexities–but he’s just as likely to settle into a simple Texas blues. As a composer, he has done more than anyone else with the Harmolodic Concept of his former employer Ornette Coleman, writing some of the most exhilarating speedlines–but also some of the most purely gorgeous ballads of the decade....

Where the heck have the Silos been? After two scintillating expositions of American songcraft and atmosphere manipulation, chief grain elevators Walter Salas-Humara and Bob Rupe let the band languish for two years. Rupe produced a rocking album for a group called the Children; Salas-Humara recorded the moody, gorgeous solo record Lagartija, did an acoustic tour with his brother, and helped produce the Vulgar Boatmen. None of this is the sort of stuff you’d expect from a group after Rolling Stone names them the best new band of 1987, but that’s life with the Silos....

Like that billboard? You paid for it. “Next time you see one of those heartwarming ads telling you to make more phone calls,” says CUB News (Spring 1989), “remember that Bell is asking the ICC to make ratepayers foot the bill for $31 million in advertising expenses next year.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If this were a restaurant… “Every day at Juvenile Court great numbers of the public and professional persons are kept waiting, in part because their cases were all set for the same time,” reports a special committee of the Chicago Bar Association....

“The City’s record on energy conservation is open to question,” writes Mary O’Connell in The Neighborhood Works (June/July 1990). “The Harold Washington Library, for example, is being built all-electric–despite the fact that electrically heated buildings are much less efficient and more expensive to operate.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When the Titanic goes down, make sure I’m in the luxury lifeboat. From our a-great-city-deserves-a-great-yuppie-newspaper file: “Scientists warn that if we continue to cut and burn vast stretches of forestland and consume fossil fuels at our current rate, a so-called ‘greenhouse effect’ will ensue....

THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD There’s a mystery to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, all right. The mystery is how this musical-comedy mediocrity ever got onto a professional stage in the first place. It must have been an awfully lean season in New York when this turkey won five Tony Awards, including three for Rupert Holmes, author of the script, music, and lyrics. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But what they’re working on is utter rot....

LICKIN’ GRAVY Once you listen to the music, you’re still befuddled. Butler’s style has been described as everything from Chicago blues to swamp blues, and none of it really begins to describe what he does. It might help to take note of Butler’s primary influences. From harpist Rice Miller (aka Sonny Boy Williamson Number Two) he picked up much of his raw, sidewinding harmonica technique and penchant for showmanship; he also seems to have absorbed Miller’s obstinate individualism and his skills as a blues storyteller....