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JOSEPH HOLMES CHICAGO DANCE THEATRE And now there’s Patrick Mullaney, in the new solo Randy Duncan created for him. Unarmed, the only new work on Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre’s program at the Civic Opera House last weekend, offers an almost perfect marriage of music, visual design, choreography, and the dancer’s abilities. Mullaney, who first trained as a gymnast, is everything you’d want in a dancer: strong, elastic, secure, and capable of astonishing definition and speed, he’s like some gorgeous mechanical creature....

SUMMER WORKSHOP OPEN SHOWING But the pleasures of virtuosity can pall. When 20 ballerinas in the corps do triple pirouettes in unison, we enjoy it, but we also recognize that a pirouette is a skill that can be learned with enough practice. Watching virtuoso dancing can be like watching a sport: we get over our astonishment rather quickly and take our primary pleasure in the competition, as we would watching gymnastics in the Olympics....

BARBARA KRUGER The few white words on red background strips within each composition transform a familiar aphorism into a pseudo ad slogan, often expressed interrogatively. For example, “No one is beyond the law” becomes “Who is beyond the law?” Similarly, “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time” becomes “Who does the crime? Who does the time?” By making these slight but crucial changes, Kruger turns the phrase against its own original meaning, questioning the authority that invented it....

Jose Lopez walked into the teachers’ lounge at Tuley High one day 20 years ago, hoping to relax for a few minutes between classes. One of his fellow teachers, who had been his own teacher a few years before, was napping on a cot with a sign across her body that read “Do Not Disturb, Puerto Rican at Work.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At about the same time, Lopez worked on a citywide study of Puerto Rican students, which found that almost 75 percent of those who made it to high school dropped out....

CANDY MOUNTAIN With Kevin J. O’Connor, Harris Yulin, Tom Waits, Bulle Ogier, Roberts Blossom, Leon Redbone, and Dr. John. The collaboration between Frank and Wurlitzer as directors was reportedly a difficult one, and certain scenes in the film do have a tentative and/or rough-hewn quality, but the overall flow of the film is relaxed and amiable, the overall tone wry and humorous. As suggested above, the film seems controlled more by the viewpoint of Wurlitzer than by that of Frank....

Body Politic in Bad Shape The future looms gloomy at the Body Politic, one of the oldest of the off-Loop theater companies. Strapped for cash, the company last week found itself rushing to mount a season-ending production to replace the world premiere of Clever Dick, which was canceled when producer Malcolm Rosenfeld failed to raise the necessary money to open the show as planned in April. Now, the theater will substitute two plays running in repertory: Athol Fugard’s Hello and Goodbye and John Godber’s September in the Rain....

HARD FEELINGS The English yuppies and trendies in Doug Lucie’s Hard Feelings are very skilled at smashing things up–mainly themselves. But only after they’ve hurt others even worse. What’s more, they’re not alone. Like High Hopes, Owners, Knuckle, Road, and Pravda, Hard Feelings supplies more ugly proof that racial bigotry and moneyed arrogance are respectable traits in Margaret Thatcher’s unmerry England. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The class clash is implicit in the situation: privileged young people are living in gentrified splendor amid the poverty of London’s Brixton; ironically, it’s just before the 1981 riots break out....

This article is excerpted from John A. Jenkins’s book The Litigators, which is being published this month by Doubleday. Copyright 1989 by John A. Jenkins. Automobile accidents, unsafe products, workplace accidents, plane crashes, and medical malpractice are the sordid stuff of Corboy’s lucrative practice, and in a career that spans a third of a century he has redefined the art of personal-injury law, taking each desperate case of human suffering and molding it into a commodity marketable to any jury in Cook County....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Telling us that he is “sick of the self-involved whining and self-absorbed demand for attention concerning the Holocaust” of those featured in two recent Reader articles [Our Town, May 4, and “Children of the Holocaust,” July 6], the anonymous letter-writer seems to be giving us clues to his own “fetishes” far more than responding objectively to those texts....

LOST IN YONKERS “The one place in the world you’re safe is with your family,” says a character in Neil Simon’s almost perfect comedy-drama Lost in Yonkers. But if the family–yours, or the institution–isn’t safe, what then? Like the best of Simon’s other work (The Odd Couple, the Brighton Beach trilogy), Lost in Yonkers is comedy driven by desperate fear that the security, affection, and sense of place we associate with family are in imminent danger of crumbling forever....

MORDINE & COMPANY Proximities is a lissome dance set to Brahms’s Serenade in A, all gaiety and good cheer. The dance opens with a solo danced by guest artist Michael McStraw, a solo full of quick little circles of the head, foot, and hand. If Ken Bowen’s sunny lighting and Frank Garcia’s lame-trimmed orange and yellow unitards hadn’t signaled the tone of Proximities, McStraw’s obvious pleasure would have: he thinks the dance is fun and funny, so we do, too....

CELEBRITY BEAT And if you’re Cheryl Lavin, you plan a bitchy little jeu a clef about the backbiting, ethics-bending world of celebrity journalism–only to find yourself producing a two-act testament to your ambivalence, your extreme ambivalence, your extreme but inchoate ambivalence over your own role in that world. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now what’s happened here? Two things. Thing one is that Molly’s achieved considerable prominence in her field....

PLAY WITH REPEATS at Angel Island Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Instead, Crimp’s antihero, Anthony Steadman, not only discovers how helpless he is to improve his life, but also must face just how truly miserable he is, was, and ever will be. (If Crimp had written It’s a Wonderful Life, the movie would have ended with Jimmy Stewart leaping to his death moments after telling Clarence the Angel to piss off....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let’s talk about the reviewer’s obligation to the reader. Obejas never acknowledges the consistent laughter from the rest of the folks. By what rationale? Those laughing people looked just as real as Obejas’s scowl. Seems to me the reader’s entitled to the facts, even the ones that undermine the reviewer’s dogma. This is a general circulation paper, not Obejas’s diary, and with that comes responsibility....

To the editors: I was one of the early counselors at the school, in the late 1940’s, following WW II. A number of us were veterans, who had probably seen more of life by age 21 than Bettelheim had seen at age 40. That fact never seemed to penetrate Bettelheim’s low threshold of awareness of the true nature of the world around him. He tried to bully the counselors as much as he did the defenseless children in the school....

THE OFF OFF LOOP THEATER FESTIVAL Instead Merc trader, theatrical entrepreneur, and part owner of the Wellington Theater Doug Bragan has produced the festival, which for the first time in its brief history is being run as a for-profit enterprise. Whether the festival will actually make money remains to be seen. But where else could we ever hope to sample the work of 16 different off-off-Loop theaters, served up in four equal portions, with no single play in each four-play program running longer than 50 minutes?...

Here is one I have been trying to find the answer to for years. I have asked flight attendants on airplanes all over the world. No one knows. No one even hazards a wild guess. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Doc, your prayers have been answered. First an inside secret: the bag does inflate, but only when you exhale. Here’s the deal. Passenger oxygen masks give you a continuous flow of oxygen (as opposed to oxygen on demand, which only flows when you inhale)....

I know you’re not Doctor Ruth, or even an endocrinologist, but can you tell me why men get less horny as they get older? I’m 35 and don’t seem to want to boink anywhere near as much as I used to five or ten years ago. Is there some nutritional or chemical substance that can rectify this, such as the much-heralded bee pollen? –J. Hiller, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Frankly, however, I can’t stand listening to WXRT before 8 pm anymore. Increasing condescension from daytime dj’s, obnoxious pre-produced ads replacing live scripts and flooding drive-time, and even hit-and-miss programming “After 8” despite an outstanding nighttime staff have alienated many longtime listeners whose musical preferences do not necessarily revert as we find ourselves getting older. Nor do we fall for thinly disguised lowest-common-denominator programming....

This gathering of Chicago blues masters-slide guitarist Johnny Littlejohn, bassist Dave Meyers, drummer Sam Lay, young harp traditionalist Harmonica Hinds–would be noteworthy anytime. The presence of lead guitarist Willie Johnson, however, elevates it to the ranks of the unmissable. Johnson is one of the architects of postwar blues guitar. He was Howlin’ Wolf’s original lead man in Memphis; his piercing, dangerously amplified leads and thunderous chording helped define the raucous Memphis style that evolved into the primal rock and roll of Jackie Brenston and Ike Turner....