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DON JUAN COMES BACK FROM THE WAR Don Juan’s life and death furnish no plea for the pleasures of promiscuity. Nor do the two best-known dramatic treatments of the legend, Lorenzo da Ponte’s libretto for Mozart’s Don Giovanni and the “Don Juan in Hell” episode from Shaw’s Man and Superman. (Though Shaw, with typical perversity, sends him off to heaven.) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Don Juan Comes Back From the War, by the Hungarian-born German playwright Odon von Horvath (1901- 1938), is another sardonic take on the philanderer’s fate....

“A behavioral observation will also help. A passing raptor will notice a group of people standing on a mountaintop all looking its way. An accipiter that must drop a shoulder or turn its body to study the crowd is a Sharp-shinned Hawk. A Cooper’s Hawk simply swivels its head, like a turtle looking back over its shell. The body stays firm.” Hawk watching requires identifying birds from quite a long way off....

Hard Times: The Heidi Chronicles Chronicles Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week, CH&P broke off discussions with the Apple Tree Theatre Company in north-suburban Highland Park about a possible joint production of Heidi. Apple Tree artistic director Eileen Boevers, who is a big fan of the play, had postponed planning on the company’s next scheduled production, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, to try and cut a deal with CH&P for a first mounting of the show....

As saxophone quartets have proliferated and established themselves in modern jazz–a process exemplified by the pioneering World Saxophone and Rova Saxophone quartets–new-music lovers may have found themselves pondering this question: What could be more transparently remarkable than four saxophonists playing without the aid of any other instruments? The answer, of course, is five saxophonists. By adding a fifth part to the mix, the Koln Saxophone Mafia achieves an even denser ensemble sound and the potential for thicker polyphonal textures; by concentrating on compositional form and predetermined arrangements, it avoids the musical chaos that might easily ensue....

The striking thing about the 17 or so American flags rippling over State Street like giant red, white, and blue bedsheets on a clothesline is how filthy they are. I noticed the soot in the stripes last Saturday when I stood atop a planter on the corner of State and Washington. I was trying to get a better view of the “fashion show” going on there. The sidewalk show was sponsored by the “anti-interventionist” Pledge of Resistance in protest of the July 3 fireworks display over Lake Michigan....

Medusa’s Rising To something less than the great dismay of certain neighbors, the hundreds of skinheads, skate-rats, 708 weekend warriors, and punkettes of every description who used to swarm around the intersection of School and Sheffield every weekend night are now gone. The attraction was Medusa’s, the venerable juice bar, dance hall, and punk club for kids. The nine-year-old club began as a no-alcohol after-hours joint where one could spend the dead time before daylight in the company of friends....

Book and manuscript shows usually frustrate everyone. Book lovers want the displayed volumes out from behind the glass and in their hands, where they can turn the pages and smell the dust. Art lovers find texts, especially those in dead languages, a yawn. For other, more casual viewers–those who may glance at book display cases while walking in the quiet, ill-lit corridors of libraries–such shows literally hold only passing interest. But with “America in 1492,” the Newberry Library does the impossible: breaking with this unhappy tradition, it has launched what deserves to be a blockbuster rare-books show....

“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, is a rose” is a familiar example of Gertrude Stein’s idiosyncratic way with words. So is “Pigeons on the grass alas.” But how about this description of a petticoat: “A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm”? Or this definition of a sound: “Elephant beaten with candy and little pops and chews all bolts and reckless reckless rats, this is this”?...

THE LIGHTHOUSE By the early 70s, Maxwell Davies’s music began to shift toward modern expressionism and dramaturgy, motivated in part by his move to the Scottish Orkney islands to get away from the noise and distractions of London. Soon after moving to his cliff-side house, Maxwell Davies finished a piece that he felt signaled this new direction. Immediately after, he had a rather unusual experience that he recently recounted to me....

Meet Ruby L. Oliver, feature filmmaker. She demonstrated her purpose-fulness early on in her first career, day care. “As a little girl,” she says, “I’d wanted to be a principal of a school. I loved children; it was second nature.” Instead, she settled for something close to it. A poor girl from the south side, Oliver spent a few years in the Navy and then found work in the post office....

Shot Down With an Empty Gun Of course, he also drank. And he also shared the beds of defense contractors. He had his flaws. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But various senators and reporters pretended that the mysterious FBI report was crucial. This reminded us of one of the press’s chronic problems. Press investigations try desperately to reach conclusions, however marginal, that warrant language on the order of “in what appears to be the illegal use of ....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In reviewing Jungle Fever, Jonathan Rosenbaum noted that Spike Lee’s “beginning to listen with profit to his actors” who’ve helped him broaden his conception of his characters. But such apparent praise points to Lee’s fundamental limitations as an artist: he cannot imagine characters developing beyond the racial stereotypes they represent. In a movie such as Do the Right Thing, whose subject was racial stereotypes, he came close to creating a masterpiece, composed of short undeveloped sequences that revealed our prejudices and hatreds....

JACOB’S LADDER With Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Pena, Danny Aiello, Matt Craven, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Jason Alexander, and Patricia Kalember. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The perpetual displacements experienced by Jacob Singer (Robbins), rudely awakening from one dream only to find himself in another, carry the appeal of a thriller, as they do in Total Recall. Jacob wakes from a troubling nightmare/memory of Vietnam in 1971–some of his buddies are undergoing mysterious violent seizures just before an enemy attack, during which he gets wounded by a bayonet–to find himself on a subway on his way home from work at the post office, about six years later....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I think I must be alienated from most people today, because I wish I could sympathize with one side or the other about the Land Battle, but the whole issue is entirely and dangerously distracting in the face of what is really happening on our planet. Stop Taking Our Land, I know this is supposed to sound literal, direct, and alarming, but come on, didn’t it sound a little childish in your heads?...

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Allow me to describe three of the six characters who comprise intimacies: Big Red is a black street hooker who happens to be a single mother with an eight-month-old AIDS baby and a teenaged daughter. Although Big Red continues to ply her trade, she does it safely (“mostly hand jobs these days”) and supports her daughters....

Originally entitled The Story of Asya Machina, Who Loved a Man but Did Not Marry Him Because She Was Proud, Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky’s remarkable 1967 depiction of life on a collective farm, one of his best films, was shelved by Soviet authorities for 20 years, apparently because its crippled heroine is pregnant but unengaged and because the overall depiction of Soviet rural life is decidedly less than glamorous. (The farm chairman, for instance, played by an actual farm chairman, is a hunchback....

BLACKHEART Bailiwick Repertory deserves some credit for providing Chuck Ferrero, a young, inexperienced playwright, with a place to practice his craft. With time, Ferrero might become a competent playwright. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But believe me, you don’t want this rookie practicing his craft on you now. Ferrero’s play Blackheart is a monument to pretension, incoherence, and ineptitude. Aspiring to be a sprawling epic about hypocrisy and evil, it is in actuality a juvenile fantasy constructed out of fragments collected from popular films and TV shows....

Visitors to Nouvelle Experience, the new production from the Montreal circus troupe Cirque du Soleil, run the risk of getting carried away–literally. So if you’re attending this delightfully flashy mixture of mime theater, dance recital, electronic-jazz concert with stadium-rock lighting, and performance art, keep your eye on the Flounes. You can hardly miss them; outfitted in bizarre and colorful amalgams of medieval, Renaissance, and futuristic fashions, these comic-grotesque hybrids of court jesters and alien insect-people remind us of circuses’ roots in the anarchic, improvisational street theater practiced by traveling commedia dell’arte troupes in the 16th and 17th centuries....

The studio in the Ruth Page building is cheery–yellow walls, bright lights, plants hanging in the windows–but it’s cold. The dancers look like children dressed a little too warmly for bed: some wear long underwear, and all are in long-sleeved tops, often layered, with leg warmers and socks. There’s a big puddle in the middle of the floor from a leaky pipe, and when no one comes to mop it up, Tara Mitton runs out for a mop herself....

Sure he was just in town (in fact Eddie Harris appeared in three different contexts at the recent Jazz Fest), and sure, he played here earlier in the summer with Les McCann. And yes, you need to see him again–if only because this time, Harris gets to run his own show. But there’s more: By all the relevant criteria, Harris ranks as a saxophonist and innovator of the first order. He possesses an explosive technique–I can’t name a more virtuosic modern saxist–and he has created a unique, instantly recognizable system of improvising; he has built upon the music’s tradition and incorporated new elements, arriving at a quirky, angular swing that’s all but inimitable....