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WHO KILLED THE DRAGON LADY The latest addition to the small-but-growing repertoire of Asian American plays is Who Killed the Dragon Lady, a murder mystery farce by Seattle playwright Gary Iwamoto. The story begins with the murder of the ruthless Madam Carmen Yaki, aka the Dragon Lady, founder of a multimillion-dollar microwave-sushi empire, and follows the efforts of her survivors to inherit her prodigious wealth. These include Suki Yaki, her goody-two-shoes eldest daughter; Teri Yaki, her rebellious second daughter (“Didn’t it ever bother you that Mama named us all after food?...

RIVER NORTH DANCE COMPANY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sherry Zunker Dow, artistic director of the River North Dance Company, formed in 1989, understands these impulses well. She has a background in jazz dance and has done mostly commercial work (television, movies, music videos) and musical theater, and it shows. Her appealingly extroverted dancers are clearly there to entertain, not to indulge themselves or the choreographer....

When society bandleader Paul Whiteman led his Palais Royal Orchestra in “An Experiment in Modern Music” at New York’s Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924, his intention was (in the words of the original program notes) “purely educational”: he wanted to demonstrate to high-toned listeners that “the discordant jazz” of the streets had evolved into “the really melodious music of today.” To make his case, he offered the premieres of George Gershwin’s landmark classical-jazz fusion Rhapsody in Blue and Victor Herbert’s A Suite of Serenades (the last piece the operetta master ever wrote), as well as a collection of popular tunes by Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Rudolf Friml, Ferde Grofe, Zez Confrey, and others, organized to showcase the sophisticated new arranging styles of the day....

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Levine subsequently signed a new three-year Ravinia contract, and, after two years of conducting only six concerts a season here, his past arrangement of conducting nine concerts a season was restored. Then Edward Gordon, Ravinia’s executive director for 22 years and the man who plucked the unknown Levine from obscurity 20 years ago and set him on the path that would make his name a household word, announced that he was leaving the festival he had so lovingly and carefully developed....

“People are aware that there’s something strange or different in West Chicago.” However . . . Until the mound was coated with soil and asphalt in the mid-80s, radioactive dust blew in the wind or was washed by the rain into nearby Kress Creek. Everyone agreed that the new cover would not stand up to eternity and that something had to be done. The mound’s owner, the Kerr-McGee Corporation, wanted to bulldoze it into a tighter, higher heap and enclose it in a four-story, 27-acre clay tomb....

Bassist Charlie Haden is a giant of his instrument, but not because of any overbearing virtuosity; in fact, you could argue that he has had essentially no influence on the current generation of fleet-fingered (and often soulless) bassists intent on playing as many notes as everyone else on stage. Haden’s music leads elsewhere. He has played an integral role in two of the more remarkable quartets of the last 30 years: the ones led by Ornette Coleman (in the early 60s) and Keith Jarrett (in the mid-70s)....

Between 1941 and 1945 more than 140,000 people were transported by the Nazis to Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia. Nazi propaganda led the world to believe that the vast camp was “the city presented to the Jews by the fuhrer,” but its occupants knew better. Among those incarcerated were some of Europe’s best and brightest young composers and performers, prized pupils of Janacek, Schoenberg, and others. Their creativity in the face of adversity was an astonishing display of spiritual resistance, and the body of work the doomed composers left behind–piano sonatas, chamber music, and vocal and choral pieces written in fairly accessible idioms–hints at the kind of contribution they might have made had they survived the holocaust....

“Looks like everybody’s in there,” the man was telling his buddy as they peered through the glass doors into the Truman College lobby in the troubled heart of the 46th Ward. They were cautiously pulling open the door when a company of young men in expensive sport coats approached them. The Indian instantly stepped away from the door, pushing back against his precariously balanced friend while trying to stay out of the way....

HOLD ME Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Out of this anxiety-riddled determination to pretend that all was right with the world–our world, anyway–came a brand of humor that defied the complacent party line and sought to expose it for the hypocrisy it was. Slyly hinting at the emperor’s nakedness and jeering those who refused to acknowledge it, Lenny Bruce established the identity of the humorist as hip prophet that continues to this day....

Because it’s big and especially because it’s free, the Chicago Jazz Festival regularly decimates attendance at local paid-admission jazz spots; but a couple years ago, Joe Segal finally figured out how to make it work for him. Since many of the festival’s performers stay at the Blackstone Hotel, and since Segal’s Jazz Showcase occupies a room off that hotel’s lobby, he hired a house rhythm section and actively solicited the big-name stars to drop by and jam....

LA PETENERA (A SPANISH SEPHARDIC TALE) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is the third time he’s produced La Petenera (A Spanish Sephardic Tale), which sets the poetry of 20th-century writer Federico Garcia Lorca to flamenco music. The Lorca poem from which the musical work takes its name, Utrera explains, is based on a Spanish tale of a beautiful Sephardic woman who refused to convert to Christianity during the Spanish Inquisition....

LEANDER STILLWELL Watching the play unfold, you can see that Rush knows this period inside out. All of his characters are pitch perfect. The soldiers sound like soldiers, the farmers like farmers. Leander’s father (ably played by Greg Bryant) is every inch the protective, pragmatic parent, Leander himself every inch a romantic, glory-drunk young recruit. And Rush has peppered the dialogue with dozens of expressions that have since fallen out of use: “beholden,” “wumped,” “quick step” (a disease), “going to see the elephant” (going into combat for the first time)....

Directed by Hugh Hudson (Chariots of Fire, Greystoke), this film about a troubled youth (Adam Horovitz) who is sent to a psychiatric hospital for middle-class teenagers, where he gradually grows to trust a caring doctor (Donald Sutherland), contains many echoes of liberal, socially conscious movies of the 50s and early 60s, such as Rebel Without a Cause and The Mark. Written (by Michael Weller), directed, and acted with some tenderness and sensitivity, it doesn’t always live up to its models, but is an intelligent and thoughtful treatment of its subject on many levels–in its grasp of adolescent confusions, troubled family situations, institutional cynicism and expediency, and the fallibility of even exceptional doctors....

The Polish Film Festival, which is being presented by the Film Center of the Art Institute and the Polish Museum of America in cooperation with WPNA radio, runs from Saturday, September 30, through Sunday, October 8. Screenings will be at the Copernicus Center, 5216 W. Lawrence, and at the Film Center, Columbus Drive at Jackson. Series passes for any five evenings (two programs each) at the Copernicus Center are $20; tickets for any single evening are $6....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You, Ms. Barnidge, are the classic half-ass liberal masking her real homophobia and hatred behind a well-intentioned collection of arrogant lies, condescension and wincing toleration. In your finite wisdom, you maintain that “schoolgirl-league cuddling and kissing” do not a lesbian make. Well, just what kind of visual justification do you need? Full-scale cunnilingus? And if memory serves me correctly, there was some pretty intense groping and foreplay on display that the Brady Bunch girls never explored....

SOME HAVE HAIR PRESENTS SOME HAVE HAIR: THE MAKING OF Some Have Hair is a scathing look at the whole theatrical community, but it focuses most particularly on Michael Butler’s hit production of Hair, which ran at the Vic Theatre earlier this season. While they don’t come right out and say that’s what they’re doing, the names have barely been changed to protect the innocent. Most of the events in this satire are either fictitious or blatant embellishment, but there are a lot of striking similarities....

Honored trustees, respected colleagues, distinguished members of the academy. We have been circling the Blue Planet for 365 of what I shall now call “days.” Ours has been a difficult mission in a hostile environment; nonetheless, we have persevered, and our task is now almost complete. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These signals apparently were intended for a group of citizens called “the audience,” who communicate by means of an instrument called “the telephone” with a broadcaster, called “the talk show host....

Something of a first, this is a serious movie about rape, and as such might be said to represent penance of a sort for the crude milking of antifeminist sentiments in the previous film of producers Sherry Lansing and Stanley R. Jaffe, Fatal Attraction. Sarah Tobias (Jodie Foster) is gang-raped in a bar, and Deputy District Attorney Katheryn Murphy (Kelly McGillis) agrees to take over her case. A courtroom drama with certain faint echoes of Anatomy of a Murder and the more recent Nuts (the latter of which had the same screenwriter, Tom Topor), this attention-holder explores such issues as the public’s received ideas about rape and the question of ultimate responsibility without ever stacking the deck or being unduly preachy; and director Jonathan Kaplan, who previously gave an edge to Over the Edge, guides things along capably....

New frontiers in international trade, as reported in the Greater North-Pulaski Business Times (February/ March 1989): “Royal Crest Designs, Inc., at 3123 N. Pulaski, makers of ‘Sittin’ Soft’ cushioned toilet seats, found a market in England for ‘soft seats’ that play ‘Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here’ when the lid is up.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Huh? What’s that? Sorry, I can’t concentrate without the air-conditioning on....

Dept. of kids. Natural Resources Defense Fund senior staff attorney David Doniger, in the NRDF’s 20-year report: “Once I tried to explain to my daughter, who was then three years old, what I do when I go to work every day. I told her I was trying to stop pollution–the smoke that comes out of the back of buses, that kind of thing. We were outside one day when a big bus rolled by, and she pointed at it and said, ‘There’s a smoky bus, Dad....