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When Shulamit Ran was growing up in her native Israel and looked at poetry–or any kind of verse–she heard melodies. “I just assumed that everyone heard them the same as I did,” she says. Only later, when her piano teacher began to write some of them down for her, did she begin to realize her special gift. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Ran was 14, she auditioned for a television spot on Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concert....

Rap on the North Side The business of live hip-hop on the north side has had its ups and downs over the past month. In late October Ice Cube played two sold-out shows at the China Club. The unapologetic gangster rapper was the biggest hip-hop name yet to play the upscale dance den, and the show was a success for booker Mike Yerke, who conceived the gig, made the deal with Cube’s people, and pulled off the shows with no trouble in front of a mixed audience....

“What’s ironic is that we’re opening in Siberia–and the first musical number is ‘South for the Winter,’” says composer Gregg Opelka, laughing. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But why this little workshop-crafted show from the midwest, rather than some better-known work from New York? “The theater’s done American musicals before–Candide, Showboat, Hello, Dolly–but this will be the first original musical play ever done there,” says Crocker....

Stump the Host’s Trip to the Zoo Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In movies and myth, rock bands are “discovered” and then quickly made stars. In life, it’s a little more complicated. Stump the Host is a successful local club band from the Phyllis’ Musical Inn scene, which also produced Souled American and Shrimp Boat. While the band’s friendly, slightly antique sound has exactly nothing in common with the reigning grunge of today, Stump does have a lot of things going for it: Dawson’s lucid, sophisticated new-country compositions, his and Christiansen’s luxuriantly entangled dual vocals, and a tough and articulate lead guitarist in Brian Dunn....

M. BUTTERFLY But can he play Rene Gallimard? Well, that’s not so easy to picture. The befuddled protagonist of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, Gallimard is not only a good deal older than Anglim can hope to seem, he’s also infinitely less poised. This is a man whose grammar-school classmates voted him “least likely to be invited to a party.” A man who won’t go to the one party he is invited to–even though it’s a guaranteed orgy–because he’s afraid he’ll be rejected....

“It was a bar, you know. A bum’s bar,” says Andy of the space that’s now home to his new club, the Spectrum Bar & Grill on Halsted near Jackson. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The bums don’t give us any trouble,” says Andy. “Not yet.” A young man, who’s stuffed into a red flannel shirt, an unending smile across his round face, sits at the bar, sipping a beer and bobbing his head....

WOOLLCOTT DIED FOR YOU! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bill Thomas is one of them. Worse still, he is a would-be actor too, and he has combined these two avocations into a painfully inept one-man show called Woollcott Died for You! Thomas tries to deflect criticism of his effort by printing “a work in progress” on the playbill, but “in progress” is too ambitious, too optimistic to describe what I witnessed opening night....

Last June the India Tribune, the Chicago-based national newspaper for emigre Indians, named Kanta Khipple its first “woman of the year” for her leadership in founding Apna Ghar, the world’s first shelter for battered Asian women. In 1986 Khipple’s three children urged her to retire. To please them–because she had not always pleased them, having spent many years away from them–she left a job in the Caribbean and joined them in Chicago....

OCTOBER Saturday 27 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The University of Chicago’s Humanities Open House is a yearly cultural lagniappe for the community; it’s a day filled with lectures and tours designed to give folks an idea of what the heck goes on behind those Gothic facades–on the humanities side, anyway (the sciences remain a mystery). This year’s principal address is by Sheldon Pollock, an expert on ancient Indian intellectual history; he speaks on “Sanskrit and Civilization: On Studying a Premodern Language in a Postmodern World....

HAUNTED BY GOD: THE LIFE OF DOROTHY DAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But I suppose that’s part of her charm. Her influence reaches the halls of the Vatican and the Pentagon, but she remains largely unknown outside a small circle of anarchists, socialists, liberal Catholics, peaceniks, skid-row alcoholics, and homeless people. And she probably wouldn’t mind. Her influence comes from a potent mix of socialist thought and Catholic doctrine that started a small but significant social revolution in the U....

When James Baldwin died, just under two years ago, he seemed to have been almost forgotten, a relic of the 1950s and the early 60s, a man whose passionate essays and novels had been early manifestations of the black revolt and whose unashamed sexuality had pointed to the even later gay-liberation movement. Yet his funeral overflowed New York City’s cavernous Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. And this past year has seen the appearance of a documentary film, The Price of the Ticket, and of a wide-ranging memorial volume—James Baldwin: The Legacy, with interviews and articles by friends and critics from Maya Angelou to Mary McCarthy to Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka....

“You had better shove this in the stove,” 29-year-old Samuel Clemens wrote in a postscript to his older brother Orion and Orion’s wife, Mollie, on October 19, 1865, “for . . . I don’t want any absurd ‘literary remains’ & ‘unpublished letters of Mark Twain’ published after I am planted.” But then there’s the matter of candor. The aforementioned anonymous AP writer’s lament is certainly understandable–today more than ever, when we seem to have developed an insatiable appetite for the minute details of the private lives of our literary (and other) lions, fueled by decades of revelations about Scott and Zelda, Arthur and Marilyn, Gertrude and Alice, Elvis (like Edgar Allan) and his teen queens, Ernest and his manhood....

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO NEW MUSIC ENSEMBLE at Orchestra Hall The major turning point in the recognition of Ives as a major composer came in a now-famous concert in December 1939, by pianist John Kirkpatrick. The 50th anniversary of that concert was recently celebrated by the University of Chicago’s New Music Ensemble with an all-Ives program, an unusual event, even today. The centerpiece work on the 1939 and U. of C. programs was the Second Piano Sonata from 1919, subtitled by the composer: Concord, Mass....

Susan Seidelman’s funniest film since Desperately Seeking Susan is a feminist revenge comedy, adapted from Fay Weldon’s novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil by Barry Strugatz and Mark R. Burns, and delivered as a broad farce starring Roseanne Barr as an abused housewife and Meryl Streep as the wealthy and famous romantic novelist her husband (Ed Begley Jr.) leaves her for. Considering the potential bitterness of the story line, the movie is surprisingly upbeat, high-spirited, and even inspirational, with lots to say about the empowerment of exploited women and the neglect of old people in this culture without ever being unduly preachy about it....

Since their fiddle-fortified tone poems evoke corn silos more than missile silos, you could get pretty suspicious by paying attention to written descriptions of the way these wide-eyed urban cowpokes get their country kicks. After all, after George Bush in overalls stumping for the farm vote, the last thing this country needs is a mannered bunch of Manhattan bohos who use textured harmonics and jingly guitars to create a carpetbagger’s vision of the heartland....

Old Town is being ambushed by sneak development. In 1978 the city designated the Old Town Triangle a Chicago Landmark District. But home owners and developers are still lifting up one- or two-story homes and tucking a garage or basement underneath. Whole floors are being added to the tops of buildings, and newly constructed rooms bulge from the sides and backs of homes. Rooftop patios abound. Front yards are being converted to parking lots....

SOPHIATOWN Pat Van Hemelrijck Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For reasons never fully explained, Jakes, a black writer for Sophiatown’s Drum magazine, places an ad inviting a “Jewish girl” to come live in the house he shares with his family. And for reasons never fully explained, Ruth Golden shows up one day, suitcase in hand, ready to move in. Ruth fascinates Jakes’s brother Mingus, a petty gangster who supports the family through robbery....

Twenty years ago, when he was a young teen living with his grandmother, Ron Tate would sneak a radio into his bedroom at night and sit under his covers listening to Blackhawk games. Tate is thinking a lot these days about the notion that some activities are off-limits to blacks: he’s organizing a campaign to force the Chicago Park District to build an indoor skating rink somewhere in the black community....

The Lookingglass ensemble has long enjoyed a reputation for its energetic, intensely physical, artistically adventurous brand of theater. In David Schwimmer’s seminal adaptation of The Jungle, for example, the ensemble willingly endured the sort of physical hardship–hanging upside down, doing handsprings across the stage, performing on stilts–that would have sent lesser actors screaming from rehearsal. However, it took director Mary Zimmerman, using her own adaptation of The Arabian Nights: The Book of a Thousand and One Nights, to show just how rich and seasoned an ensemble Lookingglass could be, capable of resonant, multilayered work that is both athletic and tender, experimental and coherent, dynamic and emotionally honest, visually stimulating and intellectually satisfying....

Playwright Wallace Shawn loves to ask difficult questions. Like why do couples who seem so bad for each other stay together (Marie and Bruce)? Or why are arguments tainted with evil the most compelling (Aunt Dan and Lemon)? In his most recent work, The Fever, which recounts the identity crisis he suffered when he became deathly ill traveling in an unidentified Latin American country, Shawn asks the most bedeviling question of all: How can a man of liberal convictions continue to live in comfort knowing that his love of luxury depends upon the exploitation of people poorer and less fortunate than himself?...