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WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The play works much better if you view it as what it is–a horror story. The harrowing tale of a seemingly sweet and innocent young couple who venture to an older couple’s house for a pleasant evening and leave with their illusions of a beautiful, peaceful world shattered beyond repair, Albee’s 1962 play has more in common with the works of camp-shock auteurs like Roger Corman and Arch Oboler than those of Eugene O’Neill, with whom Albee has often been compared....

Who among us hasn’t fudged a little in a job interview, left a few things off a resume? At such times anonymity comes in mighty handy. But what if you’re looking for work in Chicago and your employment record is public knowledge? What if you are, say, famous opera tenor Luciano Pavarotti? Everybody knows about Pavarotti being canned by the Lyric Opera in August for poor attendance. Specifically, Pavarotti had canceled 26 out of 41 Lyric performances since 1981, meaning he only showed up for work 46....

HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER With Michael Rooker, Tracy Arnold, and Tom Towles. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Psychomania is an obsessive, persistent legacy that warrants some uneasy reflection. The movie has never been one of my favorite Hitchcock pictures, but even if it were, I doubt that I would have looked forward with much enthusiasm to two sequels and dozens of strict imitations made over the next three decades....

By the time the press arrives, the young professionals and the senior citizens have grabbed the best seats, and the meeting has kicked into gear. He’s absolutely right about that. For Hoyt stands in the meeting room of the Sulzer Regional Library, smack dab in the heart of the 47th Ward, a community in the midst of a rather remarkable political transformation. Home turf to former Park District boss Ed Kelly, this near-northwest-side ward has been resettled by scores of political activists who have used it as a base to launch an aggressive campaign against rising electric utility rates....

Which way is north? The idea today is to see wildflowers. The granddaughter, the ten-year-old one, was given a wildflower coloring book for her birthday; now she’s the expert. “That,” she declares, “is a black-eyed Susan. And that’s Queen Anne’s lace. And that’s a common field daisy. And that’s poison hemlock.” Meanwhile the dog is choking on his chain, doing his best to drag little sister into the brush. But certain places on this earth will never be the same to you....

Attitude Adjustment Attitude, the sine qua non of the greatest sportswriters, galloped into Chicago as the ribbon on the lance of Jay Mariotti. Today, according to the recent ad campaign trumpeting Sun-Times sports, it is flaunted by the entire staff. But they didn’t hire any of them. Frankly, Rosenbloom wouldn’t have minded the job himself. But he didn’t fit his own idea of who should fill it. And as he told us, “I didn’t think I had the portfolio....

Just your basic Afro-Cuban, Afro-Brazilian, Costa/Puerto Rican, electric-acoustic nine-piece Chicago band (and we all know how common they are). For most of the 80s, Chevere has been among the most explosively exciting bands in the midwest, and also one of the least visible–largely because most clubs shy away from booking bands this size. But there’s no wasted motion in Chevere: crowded as it is with top-drawer musicians, the Chevere bandstand merely mirrors the versatility and complexity of this well-oiled machine....

“The story from hell,” one reporter called the Commonwealth Edison franchise hearings before the City Council’s Committee on Energy, Environmental Protection, and Public Utilities, which were held Monday and Tuesday, June 17 and 18. He was right. The negotiation of the city’s biggest contract refuses to fit into a sound bite. Worse yet, the stock story lines have become confused, with the often-arrogant utility claiming that it originally opposed the consumer service charge (a flat-rate fee that accrues even if you use no electricity), with some consumer groups staging their own bit of arrogant theater by walking out of the proceedings late Tuesday afternoon, and with the powerful Daley administration strangely uneasy about letting the public in on the process....

HANGIN’ WITH THE HOMEBOYS Kimberly Russell, and Mary B. For more than half of this century, movie audiences weren’t “targeted” through a divide-and-conquer strategy the way they are now. Even when the theaters themselves were segregated, people of all classes, races, and ages usually went to the same movies. Now that we’re all divided into categories and expected to see “our own” movies at “our own” theaters–largely, it would seem, to serve the business schemes of others–we often get herded into choices that we might not otherwise have made, and movies that we might have liked get lost in the shuffle....

MUSIC OF THE BAROQUE at Mandel Hall MOB blazed the trail, and its tremendous success has served as an inspiration. Nowadays, the group’s renown is nationwide, bolstered by a profile in the Wall Street Journal and by regular broadcast over the WFMT network. MOB lives up to the hype: in its specialty of baroque choral (and instrumental) music it has few equals; as an exponent of Purcell’s masques, Handel’s oratorios, and Bach’s cantatas, it is among the very best....

Lerner and Labor: A Decomposing Relationship The Chicago Typographical Union calls this a sneaky trick. Gilbert Cornfield, the union attorney, tells us Web Set is a corporation created by the CompuComp Corporation of Broadview strictly to do Lerner’s printing. Lerner has leased space in the Niles building and that’s where Lerner’s production manager and makeup editors now have their primary offices. And they aren’t the only familiar faces. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Lewis Grizzard’s Chicago: Bad Memories “Well, it’s on the New York Times goddamned best-seller list. How about that!” Grizzard reported. “I just went to Macon, Georgia, and signed 700 of the suckers.” “Holtzman looked puzzled. Finally he said, ‘Lewis, you don’t understand. Those are my cliches.’ . . . Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gleason, now at the Southtown Economist, and Holtzman, now with the Tribune, do not remember young Grizzard fondly....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite the anguished protests and weird theories proposed by Ute Ranke-Heineman, Donna Quinn, and others [“A Silenced Woman,” January 3], the fact remains that the Roman Catholic Church in the United States is a private and completely voluntary organization. Like most organizations, the Church maintains a body of rules which one must obey to be considered a member in good standing....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tom Valeo in his review of the Theatre of the Reconstruction’s current production makes himself out to be some kind of authority on Sam Shepard, but he has obviously never read the play, or he would know that the printed title is in fact The Mad Dog Blues. Still worse, he doesn’t seem to know that “Sam Shepard” is the pen name for Steve Rodgers....

MAN AND SUPERMAN The worthy opponents in this battle of the sexes are Ann Whitefield (played by Lisa Kaminir) and Jack Tanner (Peter Aylward). The conflict starts with the death of Ann’s father, whose will has appointed Jack as Ann’s guardian, or coguardian rather, along with the stodgy, very 19th-century Roebuck Ramsden. This poses a problem for Jack, a self-styled “revolutionist” and iconoclast, who rejects everything Ramsden believes in. But more importantly, Jack fears Ann’s way of doing whatever she pleases as if she were just following the wishes of her mother, her late father, or, now, her newly appointed guardians....

Late in the evening, a couple of young professional types are screaming at each other on Halsted Street. It sounds like one of those all-day arguments that begin on the telephone, pick up steam over drinks and dinner, and then blow up during the walk back to the car. “What does that mean?” “If you want sensitivity it’s in the dictionary between shit and suicide!” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The presence and influence of African music on the British jazz scene goes back nearly three decades; so in 1982, when the kinetic and forceful saxophonist Trevor Watts founded the Moire Music Drum Orchestra, he had an established tradition on which to draw. The use of the name “moire” suggests the layering of two patterns to create a third, and in a way that also describes the makeup of the Drum Orchestra, in which Watts heads a saxophone/bass/drums free-jazz trio augmented by a quartet of Ghanaian drummers....

BUDDY . . . THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Originally created for London’s West End, Buddy is making its way through the American heartland following a Broadway run. Last month a big-budget road company played two weeks at the Shubert; now a second, smaller-scale tour is being launched here by Pegasus Players and Big League Theatricals. Pegasus’s Buddy can’t compete with the Shubert show’s level of glitz and glossiness, nor does it try....

Michelangelo Antonioni’s first feature in color (1964) remains a watermark for using colors creatively, expressionistically, and beautifully; to get the precise hues he wanted, Antonioni had entire fields painted. A newly struck and restored print of the film makes clear why audiences were so excited a quarter of a century ago by his innovations, which include not only expressive uses of color for moods and subtle thematic coding but striking uses of editing as well....

“All of us are stars. Some are greater stars, and some are smaller stars. It’s like a constellation. If you’re Orion, and you’re the belt in Orion, then you’re Mr. Domingo, or Mr. Pavarotti, or Madame(s) Caballe or Freni. But then there are the other people who fill out the heavens like the Milky Way. That’s the chorus. And they are stars, too. And they’re us.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....