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Who could have predicted that a 30-year-old verse play by a dead poet about a tiny Welsh fishing village would have become a long-running off-Loop hit? Barto Productions’s staging of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood opened last October in the tiny basement of Cafe Voltaire and quickly gathered enough steam to warrant an open run at the Theatre Building’s 144-seat west theater, where it’s still packing ’em in. The ingredients for this extraordinary success include an atmospheric production, which conjures up the script’s seacoast setting and shifting moods through evocative and imaginative use of musical and ambient sounds; the protean and passionate performance by Michael A....

Friday 23 Not everyone is waiting for you-know-who’s arrival. In fact, lots of folks will probably be at the Oy Vay Alternative to Xmas Eve, tonight’s extravaganza at the Limelight. Israel Torres’s Panama performs hot funk, swing, disco, and salsa at 10 PM. At 11, Mark Sticklin (currently playing Frank-n-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show at the Organic Theater) hosts the “Fur/Cruisewear Fashion Presentation.” Also on the bill: a raffle at 12:30 (winners get a trip to Jamaica), top-40 music all night, David A....

WHO KILLED VINCENT CHIN? Item: In 1982 in Highland Park, Michigan, Vincent Chin, a 27-year-old Chinese auto engineer, got into a fight with Ronald Ebens, a somewhat older Caucasian autoworker, in a topless bar called the Fancy Pants. According to witnesses, the fight was precipitated by Ebens’s remark: “It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work”–which implied that he thought Chin was Japanese and therefore somehow responsible for the massive layoffs in Detroit brought about by the influx of Japanese cars....

You can read the history of our state in the pages of The Birds of Illinois by H. David Bohlen. Species by species, Bohlen lays out the effects our remaking of the state has had on the birds who share this land with us. Of the loggerhead shrike he writes, “An interesting and unique bird, the Loggerhead Shrike unfortunately is losing in its struggle to survive in a world dominated and manipulated by people....

Grant Park Concerts Society Scrambles for Funds To cover operating expenses for the Grant Park Music Festival’s upcoming season, the Chicago Park District has asked the Grant Park Concerts Society to come up with about three times the amount it did last year. It’s mostly Park District money that pays for the annual summer season of free orchestra concerts and other performances; the 16-year-old Grant Park Concerts Society works with the Park District to raise additional funds–primarily from corporations, philanthropic foundations, and individual contributions....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your cover article of November 26 stopped just short of telling readers that Josef Mengele is alive und vell und living in Argentina . . . with Elvis. The outlandish descriptions of Nazi medical experiments being made by professional “holocaust survivors” are reminiscent of Simon Wiesenthal’s 1977 allegation that Mengele was living the life of luxury in an armed camp full of SS men in Paraguay; long on hype and hysteria, short on facts....

MALCOLM BILSON Some 30 years later the young Mozart wrote to his father about the wondrous fortepiano, and then proceeded to order one for himself from the Vienna firm of Anton Walter. Most Mozart keyboard works before this time were conceived, written, and played on the harpsichord, though we rarely, if ever, hear them performed on one today. The harpsichord plucked its strings with a series of quills, which meant that once a key had been depressed there was no dynamic variation possible by touch alone....

Lynda Barry slowly drove home to Chicago last week after taking New York by storm. Her play The Good Times Are Killing Me, an adaptation of her novel of the same name, is a hit off-Broadway, and a lucrative deal has just been cut for a film version to be directed by Norman Jewison. Barry was profiled last week in Newsweek, the New York Times, and Theater Week magazine. She’s hot....

Lead Story Police in West Yarmouth, Massachusetts, arrested four people at the Windrift Vacation Resort who were loading TV sets they had stolen from the hotel into a getaway taxicab. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From the May 17 Fort Walton Beach (Florida) Daily News: Steven Parker of Fort Walton Beach said he’d confronted a man trying to open a screen door at his home at four in the morning....

When Aristotle wrote that metaphor is a sign of genius, he’d never read a bad detective novel. The threadbare comparison, the overcomplicated simile, are staples of the genre. Pulp writers treat these devices like wrestling holds; they’re thrown in to lively up the action, to demonstrate a certain professional proficiency, and most of all because the crowd loves it. Metaphors, like puns (and detective novels), are a currency cheapened by heavy use....

THE CORPSE GRINDERS Not that The Corpse Grinders doesn’t have plenty to offer. It features Nazis, necrophilia, rape, murder, cannibalism, killer cats, a gay cop, and women who can’t get enough sex. If all that weren’t enough, feline superstars Garfield, Sylvester, and Bill the Cat show up for cameos. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Director Timothy M.P. Lynch told me after the show that the whole idea had started out as a joke and just got out of control....

Dr. Louise Cainkar grew up in Evergreen Park and calls herself “a nice Catholic girl.” For the past five years she has also been the executive director of the Human Rights Research Foundation and head of the foundation’s Palestine Human Rights Information Center. After the gulf war began, people started calling her office, asking what was really going on in the Middle East. At the end of March she went to Iraq as an observer with the fourth Gulf Peace Team medical-relief convoy, which was working in cooperation with the Jordanian National Red Crescent Society and the Iraqi Red Crescent....

THE PORNOGRAPHIC MAN And even if I did, I still wouldn’t have gotten much out of the Organic Greenhouse’s production of Jim Marcus’s The Pornographic Man, which raises these and other questions about human–well, male nature. But it’s all done in a most dull and pretentious way. We could go on and on debating the philosophical underpinnings of this misguided work, discussing whether the play exposes or exemplifies misogyny, arguing over whether it objectifies women or decries their objectification, but I think we’d be wasting our time....

It’s commonly said that there are 17,300 Blackhawks fans in the Chicago area–no more, no less. That’s because the Chicago Stadium seats 17,300 for a hockey game, and while the Hawks have played to sellout crowds for decades (with lulls here and there), it always seems to be the same people going back game after game. Everyone knows one or two Hawks fanatics, but these people always seem to be on the fringe of society: the young man who takes legal briefs from office to office, or the guy who always wears tennis shoes and jeans with the mandatory office necktie....

On almost any cool afternoon, you can find Paul Hansen shuffling up and down Broadway between Diversey and Belmont. Tucked under his arm is his black leather bag, slightly worn and fairly heavy for someone of any age. Around his neck is his prized possession–his Rolleiflex–a large boxy camera that dates back to the days when most people relied on the services of a professional photographer to document events in their lives....

3 SHIKSAS, A GOY AND 4 JEWBOYS So I guess the honor goes to this group of Northwestern drama students, whose improv-comedy revue 3 Shiksas, a Goy and 4 Jewboys (a title that invites abuse, especially since one shiksa and three Jewboys were MIA for this performance) is currently playing in the densely packed quarters of the No Exit coffeehouse. Midway through the show, the two female IFs present, Karen Jensen and Kat Moynihan, balk onstage at playing a steamy scene with IF Greg Shore, requesting to play it with IF Dominic Hamilton-Little on the grounds that his English accent is sexier than Shore’s....

EL SALVADOR Inside the hotel, six half-crazy yanquis play out the rituals of a culture that believes it can control world events if it just watches enough news footage. Interestingly, Rafael Lima’s play never leaves the relative safety of this hotel room. We never see the war outside, we only hear about it, as it’s described by the infantry of the unnamed network’s news army, the cameramen and reporters who daily leave the hotel to film another bang-bang or photograph yet another tangle of disfigured corpses by the side of the road....

ALBERT HERRING The average operagoer often considers Benjamin Britten a one-opera composer. Peter Grimes is his operatic masterpiece, but there are a good dozen Britten operas that are neglected. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It was a decade ago that Chicago Opera Theater gave Chicago its first hearing of Albert Herring, revealing it for the comic gem that it can be when placed in capable artistic hands....

Among the different groups at the antiwar and radical gatherings here during the late 60s and early 70s, one contingent stood out in marked contrast to the rest. Instead of the standard uniform–tie-dye, bell-bottoms, sandals, and buckskin–they wore dark T-shirts, leather jackets, baggy slacks, and pointed boots. Carrying a banner proclaiming “Revolutionary Grease,” they looked more likely to bust up a demonstration for peace than to participate in one. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

JOSHUA CHORAL ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO If I have one overall complaint about the Basically Bach performance of the work, it is that conductor and music director Daniel V. Robinson did not evoke much in the way of Handelian spirit or energy. There should be a bouncy liveliness to Handel that was largely missing from Robinson’s often heavy-handed approach. (One wonders what a master Handelian such as City Musick’s Elaine Scott Banks might do with this score....