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GENERATIONS There’s something insidious about contemporary family dramas–the familiar situations, the archetypal family members, the soap opera undercurrents mobilized by Crisis or Christmas. Then come the routine confrontations and predictable revelations, the resolution of petty grudges that have ballooned over time, usually through the liberal laying on of sentiment. The main objective of a family drama would seem to be the exploration of family relationships, but often these relationships are so pat that exploration is rendered unnecessary....

“Frank Capra died yesterday.” Nonetheless I think Capra was a great artist. Especially in It’s a Wonderful Life he expressed some deep truths about America and Americans–maybe some truths about ourselves that we don’t even want to know. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » George, as we all know, has lived his entire life in Bedford Falls, although his lifelong dream has been to escape that little burg and explore the world....

There is a certain type of woman who eats lunch alone at Marshall Field’s. While others her age need walkers, she can still glide gracefully (if slowly) on tasteful Italian pumps. A hat could upset the balance of her expensively arranged coiffure, but she still dons one on special occasions. And she doesn’t wait for winter to wear gloves. The Walnut Room typically draws these women, although they’ve been known to inhabit even the seventh-floor cafeteria, where they provide a stark contrast to those who survive on soup, coffee, and all the saltines they can stomach....

The Miller section of Gary, Indiana, is only three-quarters of an hour down the skyway from downtown Chicago, so visitors can easily drive out and stay the day. The quickest way to get there is to get off the Indiana Tollroad at the first exit past downtown Gary (the one for routes 12 and 20) and then proceed east on U.S. 20 to Lake Street. The Chicago South Shore & South Bend Railroad (312-782-0676) serves the community, but to really see the area it’s best to have a car....

Al Booth is desperately seeking a white knight for a damsel in distress–or at least that’s the impression he’s trying hard to convey. The damsel, in this case, is the Talman Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concert, a weekly event at the Public Library Cultural Center that regularly draws a standing-room-only crowd of more than 400 and is broadcast live on WFMT to an even wider audience; Booth is its creator and guiding spirit....

OFF OFF LOOP THEATER FESTIVAL North Avenue Productions Reset in a semirural community in Lake County in the early 1900s, High Fidelity concerns a young widow, Aurora Wentworth, who clings indulgently to the melancholy pleasures of pining for her dead husband until she is shaken out of her sorrow by an abrasive male visitor, Theodore Bompass (rhymes with “rumpus” in one of the libretto’s more irritating couplets). Bompass holds Aurora accountable for a debt owed him by her late husband; she can’t pay; and their argument escalates until Bompass, no gentleman he, challenges Aurora to a duel–and she spunkily accepts the challenge....

Ronald Reagan and his officials misspoke themselves so regularly that they seemed to have a certain awkward ballsiness about them, as if they knew they could say anything and get away with it. “We begin bombing in five minutes,” of course, is a favorite. And T.K. Jones, Reagan’s deputy undersecretary of defense for strategic and theater nuclear forces, offered this homespun civil-defense strategy for American citizens in case of nuclear attack: “Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors, and then throw three feet of dirt on top....

In a few months, the City Council will decide how to spend about $2.4 billion over the next five years, for projects that run the gamut from new streets to libraries. In the past, capital-improvement programs got little attention because few reporters or activists thought of them as an accessible single package–unlike the city’s annual budget, which is well scrutinized. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Instead of appearing once a year in a bound book, the capital-improvement budget is a five-year plan revised year by year; it’s much more fluid....

Whether or not this goofy black comedy is a total “success” is debatable, but you’ve got to admit it’s pretty different from anything else around. Postmodern comic magicians Penn Jillette and Teller play themselves in a script of their own devising that is deftly delivered by director Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, Night Moves). After Jillette brazenly announces on national TV that his life would be more exciting if someone tried to kill him, a bizarre series of murder attempts ensues during an engagement in Atlantic City, but it becomes increasingly difficult to determine who’s pulling the strings....

PRINCE IGOR Aleksandr Borodin is wonderful proof that one can be an extraordinarily talented composer and yet devote one’s professional life to something else completely. Borodin’s vocation as a physician and chemist as well as a composer and member of the nationalistic “Russian Five”–Balakirev, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Cui were the others–left him with never enough time to devote to composition. He was frequently pestered by the other members of the group of composers and their mentor, critic Vladimir Stassov, to devote more time to his music....

Jumpin’ Jack and Lazy Jim, twins, emerge from a fancy restaurant only to find all the valets have split and a heavy rainstorm lies between them and their car, 100 yards away. Jumpin’ Jack bets Lazy Jim that if he runs and Jim walks, he will arrive at the car not only faster but drier. Jim accepts the bet, arguing that Jack’s broad chest will run into more raindrops than will hit Jim on the top of his slow-moving but small head....

ARTIST DESCENDING A STAIRCASE Anticipating other time-machine plays like Pinter’s Betrayal and David Hare’s Plenty, Artist reverses course in order to show how pivotal moments in the characters’ past haunt their present, how the despair of artists injured by love makes them want to crowd life out of their creations. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It seems complicated, but Stoppard writes these symmetrical, dovetailing scenes so forcefully and with such telling detail that it’s easy to connect the splintered halves....

ROMEO AND JULIET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Likewise, Romeo and Juliet has been given many operatic settings, but few of them have been successful adaptations. In fact, there are no operas based on a Shakespeare play that can in any real sense be said to capture the poetic essence of the original, however close they stay to the plot outline (and few manage even the refinement of Cliff Notes)....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Conspiracy theories always abound, and all presidents in recent times have been the object of some. But probably never before has an incumbent had so many serious charges leveled at him backed by considerable evidence. The evidence is overwhelming that the CIA, going back to the sixties, engaged in the lucrative heroin trafficking out of Southeast Asia in order to raise money to finance covert operations for which the Congress was unwilling to appropriate funds....

Bad News at the Tribune After the Tribune supposedly revamped its arts department last fall, John Twohey, who was then overseeing the department, said the quality (if not the breadth) of the paper’s cultural coverage could compete with the New York Times or any paper in the country. But two examples from last week’s Tribune have proven him wrong and shown that the paper’s attempt to clear the cobwebs hasn’t exactly succeeded....

At 1:30 in the morning, Julie Collins, program developer at the Field Museum of Natural History, figured what the heck. She had always had the fantasy, and now she had her chance. She said to herself, “Go ahead. Do it. Do it.” First she spread her sleeping bag and two pillows on the carpet in the Indians of the Southwest hall. Surrounded by a couple of colleagues and several glass cases filled with antique clothes and relics of the Mogollon and Hohokam tribes, and just a few cases away from a stuffed bison, she did a couple of cartwheels....

This festival of films, and videotapes from more than 25 countries, will be held at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, from Friday, October 13, through Sunday, October 22. Single tickets are $2.50 for adults and children; a pass good for five films is $10. For more information call 929-5437. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 14 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » BODO Gloria Behrens’s live-action feature from West Germany concerns a little boy who clones himself with the aid of a computer in order to catch the interest of the girl of his dreams....

It all started when Nancy Sreenan looked out her back-porch window and saw two garbagemen hauling her Christmas tree away. “They were dumping the Christmas tree with the regular garbage,” says Sreenan, who lives with her husband and daughter on the near northwest side. “I knew that wasn’t right because I knew the city was supposed to collect the Christmas trees separately and then recycle them.” “The great thing about mulch is that we can use it to help other trees and plants grow....

A musical polymath, David Owen Norris was already well-known in his native England for his piano broadcasts and TV commentaries when he was named last year as the first Gilmore Artist. Valued at $250,000, the award–given by Kalamazoo’s Gilmore Festival–is intended to promote a touring career by subsidizing much of the fees and expenses. Norris is a bit old at 38 to be in the company of precocious winners of international competitions, but his introspective musicianship projects intelligence at the keyboard, and his tastes reveal a fondness for the unconventional and for the much-maligned modern British repertoire....

It was a beautiful day, and everyone’s fancy had turned to thoughts of love–or more specifically, to love’s toxic by-products: acrimony, bitterness, division of property, and child support. Maton not only examines divorce’s financial ramifications but will testify as an expert witness at divorce trials. “I do settlement comparisons, compare their incomes and assets, how they want to distribute it, and how that’s going to impact them over the course of time,” she explains....