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INTO THE WOODS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, writing their musical comedy Into the Woods, the stories of Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Cinderella, and Jack the Giant Killer represented variations on themes of 1980s urban living: the breakdown of the family, loss of faith, random violence, and an epidemic of a disease, AIDS, whose social ravages seemed to confirm the sternest and most restrictive attitudes toward sexual freedom....

“I could use more than moments with you, baby / And I know where you steal them from / There are so many things I will teach you / But they’ll call me a useless bum…. Stolen moments…sto-len mo-ments…” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Intense and ponytailed, 23 years old and fretful that time may be running out for finding his bliss, let alone for following it, Elling’s dual interests in things musical and metaphysical find their roots in his “churchly family” in Rockford, Illinois....

Le Perroquet Redux: Can Fine Dining Beat a Down Economy.? If he is to succeed, Foley may have to employ some of the survival tactics his competitors use. Alan Tutzer, who operates both L’Escargot restaurants, says he has maintained market share by aggressively courting more than just what’s left of the high-end eating establishment. “We’re trying to hit the middle ground with a pretheater menu that’s $16.50,” explains Tutzer, “and if there’s a Cubs game we will open up early to accommodate them....

In the wave of free improvisation and hyper-expressionism that characterized the avant-garde of the 60s and 70s, the most important players were pianists and reedmen; for some reason, the trumpet players have gotten scarce, and finding two such worthy practitioners in one weekend series makes for a rare treat. Leo Smith, a member of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), has impressive credentials–he took part in the AACM’s first official New York concert, in 1971–and musicality to match....

LOVE COMICS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s from these pages that Sarah Schlesinger and David Evans conjure up their new musical comedy Love Comics, premiering at the Illinois Theatre Center, located way out in Park Forest. Romance comics seem a clever subject for a musical: the plots are lively, the characters are colorful, and the subject–love–is always an appropriate one to set to music....

Brazilian-born Chicagoan Venicio de Toledo heads up Malukosamba, a group with a constantly changing lineup of players that brings to life Toledo’s quirky mix of rock fused with samba and other Brazilian musics. Over the last year or so the group has achieved varying results, ranging from awkwardly patched together pop songs to exhilarating explosions of atavistic rhythm, often within the same set. The last couple of times I’ve seen them, though, it’s become clear that this band is hitting its stride, holding tight to what it does best....

Lead Story In June, three days after their wedding, Milford Jackson (a Detroit Pistons fan) and his wife (a Portland Trailblazers fan) argued during the basketball playoffs. She ordered him out of their house, in Long Beach, California, but he returned a short time later to set their garage on fire, causing 20,000 dollars’ worth of damage. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Police in Boynton Beach, Florida, charged 48-year-old Mary Grieco and her daughter with the murder of Mary’s 52-year-old husband, Joe, because he was “miserable” and wanted to watch TV all the time....

Lead Story Ed Stevens, a school superintendent in Duncanville, Texas, resigned in July after a Dallas TV station taped him during work hours as he visited several adult bookstores and theaters–sometimes staying inside for several hours at a time. Stevens said he went to these places to investigate allegations that some of his colleagues were there. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Dallas grand jury decided in June not to indict on charges of aggravated assault the five police officers who arrested Roberto Longorio for firing a shotgun into his ex-girlfriend’s home....

John Wells doesn’t need to leave the city to get away from the noise and crowds. He just climbs the nearest railroad embankment, and is in a different world. The souvenirs he brings back are black-and-white photographs. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But it looks like whoever abandoned the structures, ages ago, left the lights on. Wells loves to photograph by artificial light, adding flash to accentuate whatever man-made light illuminates scenes....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reading in Cecil Adams’s column “Straight Dope,” Chicago Reader [May 6, 1988], the letter about the novels of yesteryears in which the ladies swooned easily, I wondered as to what period were the novels the writer of the letter had in mind. To begin with, the novel was not invented until the Eighteen Century, and the writers who wrote in the new genre such as Swift, Addison, Fielding, Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, Defoe, to name only a few, didn’t write romances, that is, in which extreme emotion is expressed–emotion that could cause a lady’s swooning....

Our Hand in Latin America “You have some of the most full-hearted people anywhere working in the Latin American church,” author Lawrence Weschler was telling us. “The tragedy is that John Paul cannot see the similarities. When Arns was trying to do things the Vatican felt were too radical he’d say, ‘I’m not at all committing apostasy. I’m doing in Brazil what the Holy Father does in his native Poland.’”...

FRANKIE & JOHNNY Frankie & Johnny is about the difficult courtship of two working people who, though they work side by side eight hours at a time, cannot quite manage to communicate. If the idea sounds familiar, it should. Though based on an original play by Terrence McNally (who also wrote the screenplay), the movie echoes the plot of innumerable romantic films, probably the best and best-known of which is Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner....

In 1985 the Museum of Contemporary Art presented an anniversary commission at the Goodman Theatre, an opera by composer and performance artist Robert Ashley called Atalanta (Acts of God). The work exemplified Ashley’s longtime interest in the coordination between musical ideas and visual media–in this case, video. Now Ashley returns to Chicago for the local premiere of My Brother Called, the first section of El Aficionado. The text–presented in a first-person monologue and incorporating a mixture of traditional vocal technique, jazz vocalizing, and ordinary speech–is based on incidents in the life of a secret agent....

When doubled, the quietly splendiferous sound of acoustic guitar can approximate a small orchestra, while still retaining its unique intimacy; in the right hands (such as those belonging to Sergio and Odair Assad), it seems to be the only instrument in the world. The Assad brothers were discovered in their native Sao Paulo in the late 60s and sent to Rio de Janeiro to study. Like many classical guitarists before them, inspired by the example and legacy of Segovia, the Assads have opened their repertoire to the works of modern Latin and South American composers; unlike most, however, the Assads have chosen to concentrate almost exclusively on this music....

A microsurvey of Great Lakes microbreweries. Best Name: Burning River Ale (Cleveland), named for the once-flammable Cuyahoga River. Best Label: Kalamazoo’s Third Coast Beer, with 20 different segments of the state’s Great Lakes coastline (collect all 20!). Best Taste, according to Noah Eiger in the Great Lakes Reporter (May-June): Legacy Lager (Chicago) and Eisbock (Niagara Falls, Ontario). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Since the white-owned media has displayed very little interest in showcasing the serious allegations of police torture, most white Chicagoans are unaware of the issue and how their city is being internationally tarnished,” writes Salim Muwakkil in In These Times (July 10-23)....

The Last Voice for Choice In her farewell column, published August 23, Ashkinaze described Chicago as she’d found it: “Our town’s racial and ethnic boundaries were straining at the seams. Its schools were on the brink of disaster. Its infant mortality rates rivaled those of Third World nations. It seemed full of invisible people. Chicago was their town, too, but it was just beginning to feel their behind-the-scenes machinations, gentle persuasions and rage....

Too Much Joy are a surpassingly bratty foursome from Scarsdale, New York, who traffic primarily in power-pop jokes and a peculiarly lyrical snottiness. Their latest record, Son of Sam I Am, was recently picked up by mini-major Giant, and though it’s been out more than a year it’s only now getting all sorts of notice. It’s basically deserved: there’s a terrific, transforming remake of L.L. Cool J’s “That’s a Lie,” the band’s own “Clowns” is a tour de force, “If I Was a Mekon” (“I’d drink pints of beer / And talk about Adorno”) and “1964” (“I wasn’t alive”) work work work, and almost everything else has hooks and more hooks....

Few blues musicians bear the burden of history as heavily as Buddy Guy. Along with fellow west-siders Magic Sam and Otis Rush, Guy stormed onto the Chicago scene in the late 50s with a searing, high-voltage guitar attack augmented by tormented lyrics, a passionate vocal delivery, and an energy level far more intense that that of the more traditional south-side men. That style, soon characterized as west-side blues, was the style most admired and copied in the 1960s by young white bluesmen such as Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, and was the primal influence behind the music of Jimi Hendrix....

Harmonica player George Butler’s career of obscure recording sessions, restless travels, and eccentric stylistic mergings has confounded critics and delighted fans for nearly 30 years. His harmonica style is raw and exuberant and drawn from virtually the entire blues harp tradition, although predictably he shows a special fondness for Rice Miller (the second Sonny Boy Williamson), another legendary individualist whose persona was nearly as overwhelming as his musical gifts. Butler’s lyrical imagination is among the most delightfully twisted in all of contemporary blues: he tells stories, makes outlandish boasts, and piles on the outrageous imagery (“I got to lick gravy, woman / Girl, your meat too high to buy”) while a lurching rhythm grinds underneath....

On Wednesday, March 8, the sun shone, and there was a promise of 60-degree weather over the weekend. In my tiny urban garden, sparrows fluttered at the feeder, spilling seed on the melting snow. Pigeons announced, cooing and peeping, that babies were being raised in the hole left last fall when part of our crumbling back porch fell down. Stray cats crept into the light and sat still and grew warm, blinking their eyes at the sun....