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The thrill of hearing Jimmy Smith stems partly from the knowledge that you’re hearing history. When you listen to the Hammond organ played by the man who turned it from a novelty into a jazz staple, there’s bound to be at least a slight frisson–like you might get, say, if Alexander Bell showed up to install your phone jack. But in Smith’s case, there’s also the danger of familiarity: he’s not doing much that’s different, and since his sound echoes in the style of almost every other jazz organist of the last 30 years, one can easily feel it’s all been heard before....

LA TRAVIATA Let’s face it: not only is La traviata the least musically interesting of all the standard Verdi operas, it is also probably the least dramatic. Moreover, it is a work where the link between music and drama, which Verdi interwove ingeniously in later works like Otello and Falstaff, is usually weak, often even nonexistent. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s not that this is a bad production; in fact, in some ways a “bad” La traviata might be more interesting–at least it would have a point of view....

SOME CANDY The members of Cardiff Giant don’t try to be clever. They are clever. And smart. And on the whole, remarkably skilled actors. The humor in their work is drawn from the nearly impossible situations in which the highly polarized characters suddenly find themselves. Each performer has to think like an actor as well as a playwright–knowing when to lead, when to follow, and when to make a timely exit....

DAVID RUSSICK For Thee features a thick white outline of a bell with a cross emerging from the top. Its stencillike quality is reminiscent of a child’s illustration as well as a road sign. It could be a church bell, signifying collective religious or individual spiritual feeling. The metallic copper-colored rectangle behind it could be a metaphor for spiritual worth and illumination, since copper is a valuable metal with light-reflective properties....

We were riding south on the Clark Street bus on one of those hot, dizzy afternoons. Not much talk, everyone floating in various stages of wakefulness. Mostly male, mostly young. One of the exceptions was a middle-aged man with an avalanche of graying hair, overdressed in a stained, wounded blue suit. He was of indefinite ethnic lineage, probably a European but long enough in America to have lost the major signs of his nationality, not to mention his dignity....

If 1990 was the year of freedom and democracy–you know, when all the huddled masses yearning to breathe free in Eastern Europe gained their liberation–why do I feel so depressed? Maybe it’s just me. (My favorite Dylan song always was “Desolation Row.”) Or maybe it’s that it all looks like a stage show. The people get on their feet, give a push, and the walls come tumbling down. The tyrants turn out to be little, frightened men–Straub of Hungary, Zhivkov of Bulgaria, Honecker of East Germany, Husak of Czechoslovakia: who can even remember their names without a crib sheet?...

New horizons in innumeracy. Sandra Conn in Chicago Enterprise (June 1989): “One Chicago manufacturer, wondering why many of his products were defective, traced the trouble to the factory’s boiler rooms, where workers monitored the gauges that measured steam levels. ‘Half [of the employees] didn’t know what temperature created steam,’ he says. ‘So they thought the boilers were running OK at anywhere over 200 degrees [Fahrenheit]. As a result, the boilers were putting out inconsistent steam....

AS YOU LIKE IT And since people come into the marketplace with vastly different desires and qualifications, the chances of a mutually satisfying trade are remote. One of the two parties is bound to get a better deal. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Shakespeare is no sentimentalist. He is not offering some sugar-coated celebration of romantic love. On the contrary, he offers a dissenting viewpoint–instead of lamenting the failure of real life to equal romantic ideals, he makes gentle fun of the romantic ideals for not coinciding with real life....

JUST THE THOUGHT OF YOU A sequel to a previous Hayford piece called From This Moment On: A Tale of Love and Exhaustion, the current performance is described on the front of the program as being about “forced utterance and prosthetic love.” But what, you might ask, does that mean? Love of prosthetics? Love by prosthetics? And just what does Hayford mean by “prosthetic” anyway? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The title of drummer Ed Thigpen’s new CD proclaims him to be “Mr. Taste,” and there exists no stronger evidence for that appellation than his association with Oscar Peterson. Before Thigpen joined him in 1959, Peterson’s trio used no drummer, relying instead on Herb Ellis’s guitar to supply percussion; that Thigpen could replace a guitarist and maintain the essential balance of the trio says much about his taste, not to mention percussion skill....

HARVEY But the other actors in Steppenwolf’s revival of this 1944 comedy seem acutely aware of the rabbit’s presence, judging from the muted deference they bring to the production. Despite the presence of some of Chicago’s best character actors, Harvey plays like a star vehicle without a star, in which the supporting actors deliberately work below their form in order to spotlight the unseen fellow playing the title role. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

ILLEGITIMATE PLAYERS COMEDY REVUE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Library” suggests an eerie future in which “readers” plug hand-held metallic orbs into their foreheads, thereby providing themselves with the outlines and condensed themes of the great novels. This scene has overtones of Reader’s Digest meets 1984: the books are stripped of their subplots and “extraneous” details and electronically force-fed into people’s brains (some books are offered in suppository style, a more direct method of gaining and holding knowledge)....

MY SOUL TO KEEP Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And I have to admire the company for tackling an issue like sexual abuse, daring to say what many are too afraid or ashamed or angry to say: that children do not easily overcome sexual abuse, and that these horrifying traumas come back to haunt adults 20, 30, or 40 years later. A recent Tribune article estimated that “one in three girls suffers some kind of sexual molestation before the age of 18....

Springfield’s claims to fame–and to the pocketbooks of other Illinoisans–derive from its selection in 1837 as the state capital. The statehouse complex downtown at Second and Capitol is dominated by the capitol itself, a magnificent 1860s pile newly revealed in its original splendor by an expensive refurbishment; it’s been decades since the General Assembly has lived up to its setting. The statues and memorials would make the grounds an Illinois theme park if more Illinoisans knew history well enough to get the jokes....

THE GRACE OF MARY TRAVERSE Grace is anything but graceful. Mary, the rapidly disillusioned title character, is mercilessly jerked from a cloistered girlhood–where she’s taught only to please–and thrown into careers as a gamester, whore, and political firebrand. As it follows these careers, Grace rides an emotional roller coaster as tumultuous as anything Les Miz inflicted on its all-suffering characters (and audiences). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The generosity of spirit of this female Tom Jones almost redeems its excess....

The man was probably in his 50s, but his lined face and matted hair made him look older. He was standing in a small plaza across from Columbus Hospital in Lincoln Park one recent weekday afternoon. The hat he wore read, “I’m not completely worthless. I can always serve as a bad example.” The weather was cold enough that the small cement drinking fountain in the middle of the plaza had been turned off for the season....

Last week, for the first time in years, I dusted off the Super Bowl XX video and put it in the VCR. Nostalgia had little to do with it. Like a coach, I wanted to study the things that had made the Bears successful; like any fan, I wanted a glimpse of the glory days to get me through the present darkness; and, like a cheap detective, I wanted to study a picture of the troubled family in better times, thinking that it would provide clues to the current problems....

Jell-O. It was the purest of comfort foods, cheerful and unthreatening, one of the major food groups of childhood. Not many of us are without some memory of its quivering, of carrot shavings dancing the tarantella in a lime- or rose-colored sea. Our mothers knew the power of this soothing primordial soup. They knew that when cooled and released from its circular cradle, it gave life to fruit cocktail. They knew its unlimited potential....

AN EVENING OF CHEEVER To make matters worse, each of the three one-act adaptations in “An Evening of Cheever” ruins his work in a different way. It’s as if the director–Jane E. Dillingham–and the cast wanted to make a point of showing just how many ways there are of getting it wrong. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first one-act, The Enormous Radio, based on the short story of the same name, concerns Jim and Irene Wescott, a pair of aspiring middle-class Manhattanites who love nothing so much as listening to classical music on the radio....

BOY’S LIFE What Boy’s Life never taught was how to get Dad out of the office on a Saturday to go fishing in the first place. Nor did Boy’s Life (or the Boy Scouts, for that matter) do a particularly good job of informing us of the importance of male friendships. Howard Korder’s flawless comedy Boy’s Life is about the painful time in men’s lives when they discover that giving up childish things means drifting away from their male friends....