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How do you describe the indescribable? The Willem Breuker Kollektief sounds like the pit band from a Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht musical; the show they put on is something like Spike Jones, or Sun Ra meeting Madame Florence Foster Jenkins, or the left-wing musical equivalent of the Naked Gun movies–but all of these on a high musical level. The Kollektief’s raw material is modern Europe’s high and low culture: Rachmaninoff collides with rock, sleazy Valkyries ride merry-go-round rhythms, tangos are arthritic and polkas stagger wildly, and boogie and bebop are strangled into a free-jazz hell....

BIRD With Forest Whitaker, Diane Venora, Michael Zelniker, Samuel E. Wright, Keith David, and Damon Whitaker. Two telling documents that we have about Charlie Parker, both from the early 50s: (2) On a TV show called Stage Entrance, aired in 1952, newspaper columnist Earl Wilson and jazz critic Leonard Feather present Downbeat awards to Parker and Gillespie, who go on to play a version of the bebop standard “Hot House.” This is the only surviving sound-film record of the greatest jazz musician who ever lived, and though Parker’s solo is not extended, nor one of his best, it’s enough to show his brilliance....

DRUM SOLO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Drew Richardson has similarly grandiose ideas about the profundity of his work. He fills the program for his play Drum Solo with pretentious quotations about clowns from such diverse sources as Heinrich Boll (“I am a clown . . . I collect moments”) and Jacques Lecoq (“The clowns have taken the heroes’ place”), in the vain hope that we’ll be fooled into thinking that “clown theater and movement” is really an obscure branch of philosophy....

END OF THE WORLD WITH SYMPOSIUM TO FOLLOW Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The direction, by Elissa Bassler, was ill conceived. Even though the playwright specifies in the script that “there must be no waiting for a set change,” cast members lug chairs, desks, and other paraphernalia on and off the stage throughout the play. The blocking was strained and awkward. Even the props were out of control....

Buffalo hunter. He is renowned in the Police Department for his ability to extract confessions from murder suspects. When typed up by a court reporter, these confessions typically are seven to ten pages long, double spaced. Usually the person confessing answers questions put to him by an assistant state’s attorney. The state’s attorney begins by advising the suspect of his constitutional rights, including the right to remain silent and the right to have a lawyer of his own present....

HOLDING UP THE HOUSE Of course, like every artist, Shineflug has had her triumphs and failures, but even her outrageously aggravating failures have been strangely interesting. She has a keen wit, a good choreographic imagination, a sophisticated intelligence, and a curiosity about the society she inhabits. Independence and integrity are the hallmarks of the artist and the woman. I have a hunch she even welcomes sharp critical comment. It’s a sign the audience is awake....

Jodie Foster’s highly distinctive directorial debut, scripted by Scott Frank (Dead Again), gives us the year in the life of a boy genius (Adam Hann-Byrd) between his seventh and eighth birthdays. Foster herself plays his devoted working-class mother, and Dianne Wiest plays a child psychologist and former gifted child who fights for control of the little boy. This is largely played for comedy, and is often quite funny, but Foster also shows a great deal of sensitivity depicting the young hero’s social isolation and weighing the respective strengths and limitations of the two women as parental figures....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “He’s quite a guy” is how a water-department worker in Provo, Utah, described fellow employee Jerry Miller, who volunteered in December to lower himself into nine feet of raw sewage that was blocking the pipes in a residential neighborhood. As of November, at least 72 commercial airline passengers had been arrested at New York’s Kennedy Airport because of X rays that showed heroin, wrapped in condoms or balloons, in their intestinal tracts....

It appeared phoenixlike one recent afternoon as I was stuck hopelessly in the left-turn lane from Clark onto Ridge. Glancing at the southwest corner, I saw what appeared to be the shell of a restaurant, sans signage. “Once these grills fire up they’ll be in business 24 hours a day, except Christmas Eve, forever,” Rehder says. North-side-dwelling sufferers of the occasional hankering for a slider need drive south or west no more....

Jeff Dorchen’s two-character, one-man show about Sardin, a Frenchman inexplicably born to American parents, defies easy categorization. Though the episodic piece contains many comic moments, including some of the best surreal sight gags since Rene Magritte, Dorchen’s work ends with a long meditation on the transitoriness of human existence (“I’m afraid to love my life. It is happening without me”) at once too dark and too moving to pass for mere comedy....

“Today, Holden Caulfield is in his early fifties, has a beer belly, and commutes from the suburbs. The angry young women and men of Earth Day [1970]–who poured sewage on corporate carpets and pounded polluting automobiles apart with sledgehammers–are now middle-aged. The first generation with strontium 90 in its bones has parented a post-Chernobyl generation with iodine 131 in its thyroids. “Twenty years after Earth Day, those of us who set out to change the world are poised on the threshold of utter failure....

Letters we’re glad we didn’t send: “I am faxing a release which flushes out this story idea…” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Life is different at the top. In Inland Architect (September/October 1989), Robert Bruegmann describes McDonald’s exquisitely landscaped new 80-acre headquarters in Oak Brook: “Before any construction started, in fact before any plans were drawn, McDonald’s hired a forester, Chuck Stewart of Urban Forest Management, to inventory the parcel’s 1,500 trees, many of them majestic oaks....

HAUPTMANN That same process is the driving engine of Hauptmann, John Logan’s powerful historical drama about the crime of the century–the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. Did the German-immigrant carpenter Bruno Richard Hauptmann kidnap the only son of America’s hero Charles Augustus Lindbergh? Or did Hauptmann go to the electric chair the victim of prejudice, hysteria, and poor judgment? We can’t know. But at the end of the evening, after studying Hauptmann’s words and manner for some clue to the truth, we come away with a sense of mysteries that, though they’re all around us, we haven’t sensed before....

Theater League’s New Head Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whether McCord can effect change in a troubled theater industry, of course, remains to be seen. At the moment, anyway, she is striking a decidedly aggressive note. “The theater community has to become more proactive,” said McCord. “The arts are under attack in this country, and we have been too passive.” McCord is particularly interested, she said, in emphasizing the fact that the theater industry is a part of the city’s business community....

WHITE DWARF My counterargument was that there were some questions (How do we live now? When did this particular character’s life go astray?) that the arts are better suited to answer. I never persuaded him. And he never converted me. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Certainly this is true of Regal’s ambitious but fatally flawed work. In attempting to deal with a cloud of questions about life and death–among them, “Why do we grow old?...

ANYONE CAN WHISTLE Sondheim attributes the Broadway failure of Anyone Can Whistle to a lack of creative “abrasion,” i.e., to collaborators not willing to challenge Laurents and Sondheim on their choices. Victoria Bussert, director of Pegasus Players’ current revival of the work, believes that the original show was hampered by bad design. I think they’re both right. The musical’s three acts of political satire cum goofy love story don’t quite add up; there are times when the intentional illogic of the script and score becomes frustratingly incomprehensible....

A couple of years ago, in Roanoke, Virginia, deputy U.S. marshal Mike Thompson and his female partner were escorting a 43-year-old convicted bank robber from jail to a local clinic. As the deputies walked their charge back to their car in the clinic parking lot, they were ambushed. A man holding a long-barreled .357 yelled, “Freeze! Put your hands up!” Thompson raised his hands and deliberately stared into the eyes of the man, who was only a few yards away....

Chicago Women in Philanthropy throws the spotlight on some unsung local heroes in an exhibit featuring the art of three local photographers. Celebrating Women’s Leadership features portraits by Melissa Pinney, Olga Lopez, and Reader contributer Kathy Richland. Their subjects–hardworking advocates for social change–have made contributions from Winnetka to Gary in fields ranging from education to welfare to industrial jobs. The show will travel to nine different locations, all LaSalle banks, over the next few months....

GRANT PARK SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA But match a second-class orchestra with a first-class conductor, and something very special begins to happen; do it often enough, and it is the orchestra’s standards–not the conductor’s–that will change. Early this month (fortunately just after Taste of Chicago), the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra proved this with its most adventurous weekend of the season, a Friday night concert under the direction of John Adams and a Saturday night program (repeated on Sunday) led by Andrew Parrott....

A check of my phone book reveals four listings under the heading “Wild Onion.” They include a restaurant and a yoga center. And though it’s not in the phone book, there is also a group called the Wild Onion Alliance, whose goal is to promote bioregionalism. Chicagoua first entered history in the late 17th century, when French missionaries and explorers entered this region. Maps dating from the 1680s show a place at the southwestern tip of Lac des Illinois (Lake Michigan) that is designated by such a name....