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BE CAREFUL, THERE’S A BABY IN THE HOUSE Sorrels strides bravely into areas where many other folksingers fear to tread. She thus avoids the notorious folkie pitfalls–earnestness and preciousness. The expected children’s songs and prairie ballads are vital to her repertoire, but so is an unblinking acknowledgment of the limits of optimism in the face of life’s cruelties. Her gallery of heroes extends from the usual valiant proletarians and pioneer women to street hookers and irascible old barflies, and she makes it a point to avoid judgment....

Reviewing a work like South Pacific or a star like Robert Goulet seems, in a way, like an exercise in futility; both are products of a bygone era, and they really don’t make ’em like that anymore. But if an audience attending this touring production is prompted to reevaluate the standards by which it judges current entertainment, that’s all to the good. Since making his Broadway debut in 1960, Goulet has had sizable ranks of both admirers and critics; that’s what happens to a performer with such a distinctive vocal instrument and individual style....

MARCIA BALL BAND 5/15 & 16, FITZGERALD’S “Long tall Marcia Ball,” a 15-year veteran of the southern roots-music scene, struck it rich again last year with Let Me Play With Your Poodle (Rounder), a slab of sprightly piano-based New Orleans R & B inspired by the Tampa Red title tune. (In a nice twist on the double entendre, the album is dedicated “to poodles everywhere.”) While the album has a few minor missteps–“Crawfishin’” comes off a bit more campy than Cajun–the closer, Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927,” is pure gold....

Headline that would have quite a different meaning if it had appeared in a newsletter for salespeople, rather than in the newsletter of the Illinois Society for the Prevention of Blindness (Visionary, Fall 1989): “Sleeping with contacts a no-no.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Drug wars: carefully selecting the enemy. “All of those [drug-enforcement] television documentaries show poor Blacks, whites, and Latinos spread-eagle across every possible surface....

THE MARRIAGE OF BETTE AND BOO The play focuses on the causes and ramifications of a failed marriage. It is narrated by the one child of that marriage (later children were stillborn), Matt–or Skippy, as everyone calls him. Between scenes he attempts an intellectual analysis of the events onstage. But gradually he’s drawn into the scenes himself, like Tom in The Glass Menagerie, and his analyses become more emotional. Ultimately, re-creating the events of his life and his parents’ lives acts as therapy for him, and in a true psychological breakthrough he can finally let go of some of his anger and genuinely mourn for his family....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That notwithstanding, on a literal level, nothing could be simpler to stage than a Beckett play, especially Krapp’s Last Tape [August 11]. All you need, for all practical purposes, is a table, a tape recorder, some tapes, a dictionary, and two bananas. In fact, some Beckett plays seem tailor-made not only to be staged, but to be staged by a company without much money and by actors who for one reason or another can’t learn lines....

How much is “all the tea in China” worth? And why are so many people not willing to do things for it? –Charlie, Palm Beach via Madison, Wisconsin Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I regret to say that my most recent tea statistics are from 1983. However, the Chinese have not been very cooperative since that column about having the whole population jump off chairs at the same time (see Earth: threats to orbital stability of, in my first book)....

Set up a festival providing free gallery space, giving hundreds of artists a chance to see each other’s work and letting the public view it unjuried and uncensored. Throw in some music, dance, plays, and performance art and you’ve got an aesthetic utopia. At least that’s what the organizers of Around the Coyote, the arts festival being held in Wicker Park this weekend, would say if you asked them. But a noticeable grumbling is rising from the ranks....

These three acts represent the flowering of post-De La Soul hip hop. While each are in a strict sense rap artists, their deliberate injection of such elements as pure pop, free jazz, found or acoustic instruments, psychedelia, and (at last) a sophisticated but stiff radical political sensibility into the groovy basics of the music promises something futuristic, almost utopian. Arrested Development boast the toughest beats and densest mix, and bruit about the hardest issues as well, from fierce essays on sexual politics to a blistering attack on politically passive black churches....

In 1988 a fire roared through his Chinatown studio. Months later another blaze devastated several River North galleries, including the one representing him. “I lost everything,” says painter Weiliang Zhao, who was in his mid-40s and had been a U.S. resident for only two years. “So I must do new work.” The time had come, he resolved, to change his style. Within days he made a dramatic shift toward abstract painting....

Friday 18 Think the 47th Ward needs cleaning up? So does Alderman Gene Schulter. The 47th Ward Fall Cleanup–where businesses, organizations, and just plain folks pitch in and clean up the streets from Andersonville to Ravenswood–gets under way today. You can pick up supplies starting at 8:30 at the 47th Ward Sanitation Office, 2414 W. Cuyler; give Schulter’s office a call at 271-4423 or 728-6300 for more details. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

DISSONANCE At one point in Dissonance–a “full-evening work derived from Holocaust images” recently performed by Robin Lakes/Rough Dance at Northwestern University–a spotlight shines on a man half-asleep with his arm draped over a suitcase. Like a lover, he caresses it lightly with his fingers. He begins kissing it, licking it, knowing it’s just a suitcase but wanting so badly for it to be his lover. In a neighboring block of light, another man takes two small cream-colored leather shoes in his hands....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It is not because it (the article) was dull or trite, not at all, it is because I was left with many more questions than when I started. For example, who is Keith Rudman, or where does Jerry Lehrman hang out on weekends, who’s the one winning at poker games–and most importantly–why is Mr. Yates running?...

“I got 13 years in this business. That’s enough,” Dean Karabatsos explains over a beer in the front room of Gaspars, a lovely old nightclub at Southport and Belmont that pioneered the local new-wave music scene. The Karabatsos family has sold Gaspars (the asking price was a half million dollars), and Dean isn’t sorry. “It’s a rough business,” he says. “The hours are real weird. People come by and say, ‘Dean, you got it made....

DANCING, CHICAGO STYLE Lane Alexander and Kelly Michaels had an idea: to combine tap and modern dance in their choreography. They formed a dance company–Alexander Michaels/Future Movement, or am/FM–to showcase their works. But because the two forms have traditionally varied in both audience appeal and artistic goals, there’s an automatic tension built into the combination. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Modern dance, on the other hand, has its roots in ideas: Isadora Duncan, when she shed her corset, wanted to liberate the spirit along with the body....

LYNDA MARTHA DANCE COMPANY This concert also offers, however, several striking examples of a newfound artistic imagination and maturity. I’d guess that a good part of that comes from the sleek virtuosic talents of her eight dancers, most of them new to the company. They cope effortlessly with complicated lifts, demanding leaps, rolls on the floor, and split-second timing and speed in close partnering. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

MIAMI CITY BALLET Multiply this sense of possibility by 30 dancers, and you have Miami City Ballet. This vibrant young company (it was founded in October 1986) is full of eager young faces with big, bright smiles. You look at Miami City Ballet and think “potential.” Not that the company isn’t already professional or technically sound. Its performances are good now; they might be great. I imagine this is how the cognoscenti felt in the early days of New York City Ballet, when there were jeers at Balanchine’s neoclassical aesthetic....

In her earlier solo show, Reno in Rage and Rehab, the comic monologuist Reno spoke of living on New York’s Lower East Side–“which is about an empty-syringe throw away from Wall Street.” Like the city she calls home, with its head-on collisions of poverty and plenty, this adopted Latina daughter of white-bread Long Islanders is a fierce, funny, and sometimes genuinely frightening bundle of jumbled contradictions. Her stage style–assaultive yet weirdly compassionate, seemingly on the edge of bursting out of control–suggests a cross between early abrasive Joan Rivers and recent, raucous George Carlin....

Simpson Says: Bad Times Are Coming American politics has no language of pessimism. We want to be told that there’s nothing to fear but fear itself, especially when we know it isn’t true. Former alderman Dick Simpson published a book this week that will do his political career no good. It despairs. The book is also a look inside the mind and soul of one of the more important and intriguing figures in post-’68 Chicago politics–Simpson himself....

If Guy Maddin’s Tales From the Gimli Hospital whetted your appetite for more comic/nostalgic/facetious strangeness–or if you haven’t seen the Maddin film but have such an appetite anyway–you’ll probably get a kick out of this entertaining assortment of shorts by Maddin’s neighbors and colleagues, all members of the Winnipeg Film Group of Manitoba, Canada; producer Greg Klymkiw will introduce and discuss their work. The ones I’ve been able to sample include Tracy Traeger and Shawna Dempsey’s We’re Talking Vulva, a funny rap-music video featuring performance artist Dempsey in a vulva suit; John Paizs’s hilariously deadpan evocations of 50s educational shorts in Springtime in Greenland and The Obsession of Billy Botski; and Lome Bailey’s memorable The Milkman Cometh, about a businessman who becomes so entranced by the Alpine landscape on a can of evaporated milk that his life gradually becomes overtaken by it....