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To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michael Miner’s “Hot Type” column describing the demise of the Chicago Tribune’s middle east correspondent Jonathan Broder [March 11] constituted a weak defense of and apology for Broder’s plagiarism. In describing Broder’s middle east coverage, Miner states that: “Every line he wrote was carefully read, and as he wrote what he saw, which was Israel stumbling toward chaos, protest rained on the paper....

CHARISMA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Joe Butler mysteriously disappears from a party celebrating his high school graduation. His worried parents eventually discover him preaching with a fringe religious sect, and he’s rumored to have effected a bona fide miracle. Unconvinced, the boy’s mother, Maggie, takes steps to restore her son to his former self, a mission with which her husband, Roger, initially concurs....

THE GOOD DOCTOR Back Rent Players Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chekhov’s society, on the other hand, was fairly fixed. His comedies, usually based on the ruthless exploitation of the weak by the strong, frequently fail to communicate with American audiences, and Neil Simon, possibly the greatest farceur in American theater, knows this. In The Good Doctor, an adaptation of several Chekhov tales, he is very careful to see that bullies are overturned by those whom they would bully, or at least are confronted with the error of their ways....

In the mid-30s Benny Goodman became music’s first crossover phenonmenon, moving impressively from jazz to the classical staple. He later credited his success to basic training in “classical” techniques in Chicago, where he was born in 1909. The King of Swing’s debut as a classical clarinetist, with the venerable Budapest String Quartet, resulted in a noteworthy recording of the Mozart Clarinet Quintet. An even more lasting achievement, however, was the 1938 piece written for Goodman by Bartok....

CAUGHT IN THE ACT Before the state strips them of their hard-won humanity, Fugard fills it in. Philander is a wise lover; he sees Frieda’s fright and soothes her with the thought of the vast antiquity of the land they’re lying on; he finds special solace in a line from the geologist Sir Charles Lyell: “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.” In that timeless state–and not in 1966–Frieda and Philander are just humans in love....

He doesnt chew much gum, and when he does, it’s usually sugarless, but Marshall Larks is known in certain circles as the “Gumball King.” His store, also called The Gumball King, is dedicated almost solely to antique gumball machines, antique gum, and gum-related items. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Down a stairway, in the basement, are shelves of gumball-machine parts: hundreds of red metal bases and plastic and glass globes....

This show at the Bop Shop is being billed as a “tenor battle” between Lin Halliday and E. Parker McDougal, but it’s hard to imagine what these tried-and-true veterans have to dispute. It’s true that they’re both romantics, and full-voiced swingers; nevertheless, they’re too different to be fighting over the same turf. Halliday is an edgy saxophonist whose broken phrases are full of quirky flashes of irony and ingenious wit, and his great strength is his lyricism....

EVELYN DANCES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But fortunately Cynthia Hanson, who wrote and performs this 75-minute monologue, is both competent and canny. As a writer, she manages to avoid most of the traps of overt sentimentality. As a performer, she is warm, believable, and aware of the pitfalls of messy displays of emotion; dramatic tension is better served when tears are withheld. Rather than weep into her dead husband’s shirt, Evelyn dons it and goes about her business....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Achy Obejas’s piece on the prolife picketers at Lutheran General Hospital [Our Town, May 19] leaves the impression that abortion opponents are motivated by a horror of nonprocreative sex. As a representative of a prolife group which contains a goodly number of gays, lesbians, and contraceptive users, I can safely say that this need not be the case....

When I was a little kid, I didn’t know many birds. I could recognize a robin or a house sparrow. When I was about eight years old and staying on my grandparents’ farm, I knew what pigeons looked like. I was even allowed to shoot them with a .410 shotgun. They were very good to eat, as I recall. These were grain-fed farm pigeons, not city pigeons raised on pizza scraps and leftover french fries....

Dave Marsh–rock critic, author of several books, and editor of Rock & Roll Confidential–has just published 50 Ways to Fight Censorship and Important Facts to Know About the Censors, a slim volume that moves from admonitions to register and vote through how-to advice on publishing newsletters to boycotting and suing the censorship bastards. It ends (way number 50) with the admonition to “make the real obscenities the real issues” (meaning things like “homelessness, unemployment, war and militarism, racism, sexism, AIDS, homophobia”)....

The book’s jacket promises a tale of “grief, recovery, codependence, and love,” making it sound like a perfect bedside companion to the typical 12-step manual. Until, that is, Emily slides her fingers between Catherine’s legs in a scene a few chapters in and turns it into a passionate sexual romp. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Writing a lesbian novel was a new thing for me, and I think it’s a healthy and almost inevitable thing,” Osborne says....

THAT WOMAN IS POISON! Thomas’s musical history is intertwined with the development of the Memphis R & B scene. In the early 50s, his growling, declamatory “Bear Cat” (a variation on Big Mama Thornton’s theme in “Hound Dog”) was the first hit for Sam Phillips’s soon-to-be-legendary Sun record company. In the 60s, Sun changed its name to Stax and forged the sound that became a prototype for soul music of the next decade; Thomas stayed on with such stars as Otis Redding, Booker T....

SCENES FROM THE DEATH OF WOYZECK Created by faculty members from the theater department of Illinois State University–the department that produced many members of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company–Scenes would be better named Images, for it breaks Woyzeck down into a series of stark, compact, and mostly silent images. Almost all the dialogue has been stripped away, and what remains is delivered in snippets of three languages–French, German, and English. One of Buchner’s innovations in Woyzeck was using dialogue primarily to reveal the emotions of his characters, not to promote a narrative, and the foreign sounds in this adaptation highlight that technique....

Sue Foley’s ability to combine roadhouse raunch with a sensitive feel for nuance and phrasing brings a welcome multidimensionality to her blues guitar playing. Her voice tends to be thin, sometimes detracting from the intensity of her music, but she excels on country romps (Memphis Minnie’s “Me and My Chaffeur Blues” and her own “Walkin’ Home”), and she can provide masterful guitar workouts of taste and maturity far beyond her years on instrumentals such as Earl Hooker’s “Off The Hook....

TALK RADIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Bogosian really wasn’t too avant-garde. Not by the time I saw him, anyway. For all the crazy energy and immanent violence he gave it, FunHouse was nothing more at heart than a series of character studies tending to suggest that it’s a jungle out there. Whoopi Goldberg and Lily Tomlin worked the same territory in a somewhat lighter vein....

THE FROGS Well, you can’t fault this show for its dry humor, its refusal to make waves, or any lack of buoyancy, let alone chlorine. Written in 1974 for the Yale Rep and performed in that school’s Olympic-size swimming pool (Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver were in the original swimming chorus), Stephen Sondheim’s The Frogs is as amphibian as its title: his “semi-aquatic” musical effectively splits itself between land and water....

I read recently in the paper that approximately 1,000 frogs rained from the sky on a city in France. Is this actually possible? Do I need to take cover next time I see a dark cloud overhead? Help, I don’t want to croak! –Joe Athey, Annandale, Virginia Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You might think waterspouts or their inland cousins, whirlwinds, would be the source of the expression “raining cats and dogs....

The presumption behind most ten-best lists is that they include items available to everybody. One can always look at such lists and say, “Too bad I missed such and such. Maybe I’ll catch up with it on video.” But few people seem to be aware that they may never catch up with a film, because it never made it to Chicago at all–either to theaters or to video stores. In a consumer culture like ours we aren’t supposed to think too much about what merchandisers choose to put in front of us; it’s better for business if we assume that new movies just fall from the sky into theaters and video stores–and that those that don’t make it don’t deserve to....

To the editors. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bill Heirens, threatened with the electric chair, confessed under a plea bargain and for 44 years he has professed his innocence and litigated his case in the hope of obtaining the trial he never had. Recently, he has been back in court on a post conviction petition, William Heirens vs. The People of the State of Illinois....