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THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW Ditto Frank-n-Furter. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Granted, he’s not quite the chronicle of Roman virtues that Antony was. But he’s no slouch either, having led an expedition all the way from his home planet of Transylvania to earth, where he engages in scientific investigations of the most sophisticated sort. Unfortunately, his investigations have gone a little haywire lately, and Furter’s generalship, like Antony’s, has been clouded by a tendency to overindulge himself....

Friday 17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While almost everybody celebrates Saint Patrick’s Day with silly green beer and shamrock pins, DJ Kevin Riordan will host Stone Cold Blarney for the sixth straight year at the Artful Dodger in Bucktown. Riordan’s salute to Irish music will include traditional songs by the Chieftains and Sean O’Riada as well as the sounds of contemporary Irish musicians the Pogues, Horslips, and Sinead O’Connor....

We caught this guy on his lunch break sneaking out of a Loop tower and heading for Buckingham Fountain. His outfit was swapping shop talk with the working masses–buttons battened down, tie firmly knotted, and creased trousers assuring fellow professionals he reports on time to an orderly desk each weekday. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But our fashion lexicologists know the language of apparel isn’t always apparent....

MARVIN’S ROOM But worst of all, Marvin’s Room takes its light from the tube and its inspiration from surefire by-the-numbers formulas. With small-screen predictability, here one character naturally has the key to another’s problem. The surface oddities the characters sport are only decorations to disguise the fact that they’re stereotypes. This play’s inhabitants hide major secrets from loved ones for years–as if they knew a second act was coming. Then they burst out with revelations that, in a moment, break through the barriers of years of silence and misunderstanding....

Lead Story Richard D. Smith, 30, who won the Washington state lottery four years ago and now receives $40,000 a year, was arrested in Everett, Washington, in November and charged with the armed robbery of a grocery store. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nashville police pursued and then dismissed a rape charge against Mr. “Millissa” Fox, 26, in December. Fox was performing oral sex on a man who thought Fox was a woman....

To the editors: I am confused by Albert Williams’s review of On the Open Road by Steve Tesich [March 27]. He says that “Tesich’s story [is] undermined by Robert Falls’s visually spectacular staging” and that “a sensitive, sincere play about suffering is wrecked rather than enhanced by the sheer quality and cost of the production.” He concludes, however, that “all On the Open Road offers is a technically slick projection and a glib, preachy script....

On the wide spectrum of rap–from the bubblegum of Vanilla Ice and M.C. Hammer to the bleak, unfriendly visions of the Geto Boys and N.W.A.–L.L. Cool J has staked himself out a comfortable spot right in the middle. Safely street but just as safely unpolitical, musically diverse but never outre, he trades on an easy, almost facile pop sensibility that has captured the fascination of millions of kids, but dresses it in a disappointingly mundane lyrical ability....

In the 70s guitarist Son Seals blasted out of here like the long-prophesied modern-day savior of Chicago blues: raw, raucous, unremittingly committed and emotionally engaged, he seemed capable of unlimited technical fire which never came at the expense of the primal passion that had kept him scuffling around the west and south sides for years. He developed an international following almost worthy of that initial promise. Meanwhile his music has sometimes teetered on the edge between flashy inspiration and uninspired flash....

Michael Jordan’s most fearsome weapon isn’t his jump shot or his dunk or even his defense; it’s his sixth sense for when a game can be seized and pocketed, even when he and the Bulls aren’t playing well. Though it’s commonly referred to as his killer instinct, I don’t believe there is anything instinctive about it. Jordan has always had a flair for drama, first displayed on the national stage with his game-winning shot in the 1982 college basketball championship game, but that sense of when and how to take control of a contest–especially a playoff game–is something he learned at the hands of the Detroit Pistons....

State of the Arts Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The, MacArthur report also addresses two other thorny issues: the city government’s lack of cultural leadership and media coverage of the arts. MacArthur program officer Nick Rabkin, a former city deputy cultural commissioner who had a hand in writing the report’s introduction, says he gleaned from its findings a strong message: “What the report does in a variety of ways is clearly demonstrate there is a lack of understanding of the importance of the city’s cultural life in the eyes of the media and our civic and public leadership....

THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF THE UNIVERSE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I read Christopher Durang’s comedy The Nature and Purpose of the Universe a few days before seeing Transient Theatre’s current production, I hardly cracked a smile. “This isn’t funny,” I thought, “this is sick.” Here was a play that told no coherent story, that presented instead a series of vaguely related vignettes about Eleanor Mann, a patient, long-suffering woman who is physically and emotionally abused by her family and friends (and even total strangers)....

Two months ago an amazing thing happened in McHenry County. A farmer who was having a pond dug offered to pay the excavator in kind–he could keep the gravel he was removing. But once gravel-sorting equipment appeared on the property, a neighbor called the county zoning office to complain. In some ways, sand and gravel mining is to northeastern Illinois what coal mining is to far southern Illinois: an economic mainstay, sometimes an environmental headache, and always a fertile source of local dispute....

The monks of what was once (until the 1959 Chinese invasion of Tibet) the world’s largest monastery have mastered a highly specialized vocal technique. While singing notes near the bottom of the human vocal range, they can simultaneously exercise exquisite control over the overtones in the natural harmonic series–producing what sound almost like chords rather than single notes. Deep, loud, and eerie, the monks quite justifiably call it the “Awesome Voice,” and in the company of strident cymbals and the bellow of an enormous horn called the dung-chen, it’s the crucial element in the tantric ritual music they’ll demonstrate in this program....

Francis Coppola’s stylish and heartfelt tribute to the innovative automobile designer Preston Thomas Tucker turns out to be one of his most personal and successful movies. While the tone throughout is basically light, the overall treatment–including effective uses of 40s decor, big band music, charismatic performances, and zippy pacing–makes it euphoric. Coppola’s own personal investment in the story (his father invested in Tucker’s cars, and he clearly identifies with many aspects of Tucker’s idealism) gives it an undeniable lift, and Jeff Bridges (as Tucker) and Martin Landau (as his business partner) are especially good in sustaining the movie’s overall high....

The singing on Yo La Tengo’s fourth album, Fakebook, with leader Ira Kaplan flat as always and drummer Georgia Hubley coming out of the closet, vocalizingwise, is delicate and nuanced, weary and lilting, and somehow riveting. A fakebook, of course, is a fast and dirty collection of standards, with melody lines, words, changes, and little else. The joke here is not so much that the songs are stripped down or, once stripped down, rebuilt from the ground up: instead, the group is asserting a new standard for standards; and, finding contenders–worthy contenders–in incredibly obscure material by everyone from Ray Davies to Daniel Johnston to Gene Clark (!...

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mississippi Burning is a film that its producers, for better or worse, have admitted is a FICTIONALIZED account of what happened in a small town when two liberal FBI agents come to investigate the murders of three activists involved in a Black voter registration campaign. Granted the film is problematic in that its fictionalization robs the viewers of a genuinely factual history lesson; and, the FBI agents (who represent a conservative, hardly anti-racist organization) are portrayed as the good guys....

BAAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are also a number of compelling reasons not to put this play on. Seen by many as a parody of German expressionism and/or an homage to the Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”) movement, the play is difficult to perform outside its historical context. One runs the risk that Baal will be seen today not so much as an antihero pointing out society’s alienation and hypocrisy but as a womanizing, masturbatory asshole....

The 60-some one-acts (three per night) in Bailiwick Repertory’s Directors Festival 1992, produced by Cecilie Keenan, range from plays and musicals to performance art and monologues; some are well-established classic and contemporary selections, while others are brand-new pieces. They’re mounted by a slew of directors, most of them little known, who are looking for an avenue to showcase their work and get their names out to the public. See? It’s working already....

1 The subtitle for Man and Superman is “A Comedy and a Philosophy,” and while all of Shaw’s work contains a hefty amount of philosophizing, Don Juan in Hell indulges in pure ideology. Shavian principles are put into the mouth of Don Juan and pitted against societal ideals, which are put into the mouth of the Devil; as expected, the writer comes out the victor. Shaw has a great deal of fun with the debate, even mocking his own wordiness and paradoxical morality....

Fashion often has a nostalgic quality. It seems keen on repeating itself every 20 years or so. Right now, for example, we are somehow back at the early aughts. Nothing against it—after all, there’s always a way of making anything work, and it can be fun to bring back certain styles. But it’s also very […] Rebirth Garments’s founder reflects on dealing with COVID-19 and other challenges. A remembrance and projection...