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THE DIVINERS So it’s particularly disappointing to see how inadequately the Pointe company–most of them, including director Louis Contey, recent graduates of the DePaul University Theatre School–have responded to these opportunities. It’s not just a matter of fluffed lines, studied or rushed delivery, and missed cues–though there were plenty of those at the performance I attended. What’s so distressing about this production is the apparent failure of the cast and director to understand the play they have chosen to present....

Out in the waiting room, there’s a guy who’s been here since 8:30. It’s noon now and the commissioner still hasn’t arrived. Another fellow has been waiting since 10. They both want to discuss businesses that they’re planning to open. The other two men give up and leave. Butler seems very comfortable here in his commissioner’s office. He leans back in his swivel chair with his hands behind his head and laughs a lot....

THE SUICIDE Here’s the joke. Semyon Semyonovich Podsekalnikov (hereafter referred to as Semyon) wakes in the middle of the night with a craving for liverwurst. While he’s gone his wife Maria gets it into her head that he’s locked himself in the bathroom and is going to kill himself. You see, Semyon’s been depressed on account of being unemployed. It’s a silly misunderstanding, yet Semyon warms up to the grandeur of the notion of suicide....

Back in the Vietnam era, the National Guard was a nice quiet place to wait for the war to end. According to one military historian, President Lyndon Johnson stopped sending the Guard to Vietnam in 1969, for fear of alarming the public. Though it had seen combat previously, the Guard’s reputation was for fighting fires, floods, and freaks at home. Even the chief publicist of the Guard admits there was a time when “people would chuckle” if they heard the Guard was going to invade a country....

CAPE FEAR With Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange, Juliette Lewis, Joe Don Baker, Illeana Douglas, Fred Dalton Thompson, and Robert Mitchum. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few weeks ago I watched the original Cape Fear on video. (Or I tried to watch it; Universal Pictures had encoded the video with something called Copyguard, meant to prevent people from dubbing it, but it had the unfortunate effect of changing the lighting in every shot from dark to light and sometimes back again....

MOMIX DANCE COMPANY Momix uses the simplest of means: a few well-engineered props, precisely placed lights, and their own highly tuned bodies. But out of this bare landscape grow theatrical images that are not only technically and aesthetically masterful but emotionally supercharged as well. Their dances center around images of birth and the preconscious, suspended in a refreshingly nonrational space. This is the land of association and intuition, of illogic and inspiration....

With his strong, expressive tone and his unflappable rhythmic authority, Eddie Johnson still embodies the devastating mixture of ballroom elegance and roadhouse fire that the swing era brought to jazz. What’s more, he combines the comforting voice of considerable experience with a contagiously fresh approach to tunes he’s played a thousand times. Of course, sharing the stage with someone half your age–as Johnson does with fellow saxist Eric Schneider in this quintet–can help....

Clare Peploe’s accomplished and intelligent first feature is a sunny tale of expatriates set on the Greek island of Rhodes, with a cast of characters and a set of crisscrossing destinies that occasionally suggest Graham Greene in one of his happier moods. The people include a talented professional photographer (Jacqueline Bisset) faced with the possibility of having to sell her house, her teenage daughter (Ruby Baker) and ex-husband (James Fox), an art historian who is her oldest friend (Sebastian Shaw), a tradition-minded Greek peasant (Irene Pappas) and her rebellious son (Paris Tselios), and an English couple on holiday (Kenneth Branagh and Lesley Manville)....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last weekend was typical. As I was washing my car (in my yard) carloads of people drove up and down my street trying to park. One van (from Illinois with six men in it) parked (illegally) in my neighbor’s yard was told to move and ended up getting stuck (there is a lot of sand in Miller) and tearing up the yard trying to get out....

ECHOES AND MIRRORS: NEW DANCES BY MAGGIE KAST AND LEIGH RICHEY Kast’s choreography is quiet and gentle. Like a soft-spoken person whose near whisper forces you to listen intently, Kast uses soft, flowing movements that challenge you to follow them. Especially in the last dance on this program, Vienna, she seems to give in to the movement, falling into the phrases, almost flowing into them like water into a glass....

The possibilities of Phil Alvin as a solo act have turned out to be greater than one might have suspected back when he was the tortured, mannered lead voice of the Blasters. Since parting company with that band and with his guitarist/songwriter brother Dave, Phil has undertaken one of the decade’s more fascinating explorations of endangered American song forms. You can listen to Alvin’s excellent Un”Sung Stories,” an LP that for my money equals anything the Blasters ever did: accompanied by the Sun Ra Arkestra and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, among others, Alvin ambles surefootedly through a musician’s gallery of Americana, calling our attention to songs like “Someone Stole Gabriel’s Horn” and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime....

REACHING OUT: DIMENSIONS IN SACRED DANCE Recently Jane Siarny, a former member of Chicago Repertory Dance Ensemble, put together a concert of sacred dances for the Sacred Dance Guild. Performed at Mundelein College, it was a fascinating example of how music and movement can unite a diverse group. This writer, who has no particular religious convictions, was moved by the commitment and devotion expressed in these dances. The most theatrically effective were performed by Siarny and Maggie Kast, gifted professional artists; and although their dances are based in Christian faith, these were the most ecumenical in spirit and style....

At a time when communism seems moribund, it’s ironic that Paramount Pictures is reissuing Bernardo Bertolucci’s spectacular utopian socialist drama 1900. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Starting today, the Music Box is screening the complete 311-minute director’s cut, with more than 70 minutes restored to the version Paramount released in 1976 (the same version that’s now available on video). It is split into two parts, both of which will be shown each evening....

Chicago has more than its share of wonderful Italian restaurants, from the elegant and innovative to the down-home and cozy, but a new entry threatens to eclipse them all. In a dazzling debut, Sole Mio rushes to the first rank of Chicago’s Italian kitchens. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sole Mio is rooted in the cooking of northern Italy, aiming for a more diversified, more balanced cuisine than that of the common neighborhood Italian restaurant....

SHOUTS AND WHISPERS But Edward Parone is not, judging by his adaptation, also called The Way We Live Now. This word-heavy, sometimes soporific one-act–one of two in Lifeline Theatre’s “Shouts and Whispers”–never allows us to forget that behind it stands Susan Sontag. But what you’d never glean from Parone’s muffed effort is what an extraordinary and moving short story “The Way We Live Now” is. Originally published in the New Yorker in November of 1987, and later anthologized in The Best Short Stories of 1987, Sontag’s story reports from the point of view of an unnamed third-person narrator the various quips, opinions, and fears of a group of 26 friends and acquaintances (“one for every letter of the alphabet”), all of them desperately concerned with a mutual unnamed friend suffering from AIDS....

JAN BARTOSZEK AND DANCERS You can get around that, of course, by making dances that look like other people’s or by avoiding personal subjects. Jan Bartoszek does neither, and with so much of this figurative nakedness in her dances, the impulse to cover up must be strong. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the reasons Bartoszek is so good at personal subjects is her knack for making movement, however small or simple, suggest psychological states....

THE QUINTESSENTIAL IMAGE Danny: As a physical preference, or from political beliefs? –from Sexual Perversity in Chicago, by David Mamet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Moving to New York at age 20, she found a niche for herself in the artistic avant-garde of the fledgling off-off-Broadway movement. She also worked in television, eventually winning the distinction of writing the first black situation comedy ever optioned for the medium (it went unproduced because the powers that be considered it too much too soon)....

How did Fido become the more or less generic name for the family dog, when in fact there are few canines that actually answer to that moniker? –N.D.G., Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Our high school French teacher always insisted learning French was important because it was going to become the international language of business. Now I hear English is mandatory in international aviation, and the Chinese students in Beijing spoke English to the international media....

WASTED: A BRIEF HISTORY OF GARBAGE Wasted: A Brief History of Garbage, a half-hour performance work incorporating dance, mime, and installation elements, is topical, politically correct, and utterly unaffecting. If it weren’t for the performers’ deadly earnestness and sophomoric intensity, you’d think the performance itself was meant to be garbage. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wasted begins with Abiogenesis director Angela Allyn performing a spoken and danced prologue, a factual recital of acres, tons, and viruses accompanied by relaxed, flowing movement punctuated with short, chopped hand gestures....

Nobody’s saying George Bush is the Antichrist . . . just a lousy president. But the Antichrist had a helluva bad year too, and Bush’s humiliating defeat was a big part of it. Highlights of the EEC’s year began when Danish voters rejected the Maastricht Treaty, which would create a single European currency if all 12 countries ratified it. Next the stubborn German Bundesbank’s high interest rates fueled currency speculation that drove the British pound so low that Britain dropped out of the European monetary system....