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A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FILM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In fact A History of the American Film is a rich, complex play disguised as just another parody of often-parodied films–Casablanca, Citizen Kane, On the Waterfront. The parodies are chronologically arranged to reflect movies’ evolution from the silent era to the disaster epics of the mid-70s, but the play also tells the absurdist story of a hapless woman, Loretta, who attempts to find happiness in a world that keeps shifting genres....

BORN IN THE RSA When freedom comes, Johannesburg’s Market Theatre, a troupe launched by Barney Simon in 1973, can be proud. South Africa’s only integrated company, the Market Theatre has pounded a lot of nails into the coffin of “apart-hate”–nails called Asinamali!, Sophiatown, A Lesson from Aloes, Woza Albert!, and Born in the RSA. Even the staid London Times calls their work “tantamount to a revolutionary political manifesto in South Africa....

Friday 15 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s Circa time again for the Museum of Contemporary Art’s New Group; their annual presentation of out-there performance–dubbed, this year, Circa ’92–features radical performance art doyen Rachel Rosenthal, weird drum group Jellyeye, “gender illusionist” and presidential candidate Joan Jett Blakk, theater-performance-dance group X-Sight, poetry slam winner Lisa Buscani, the Loofah method and lots more. Twenty-five bucks ($40 for a reserved balcony seat) gets you the show and drinks....

The early-afternoon light casts a pale glow into the theater at Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet. More than 100 blue-garbed inmates, kneeling barefoot on blankets spread over the concrete floor, bow east toward Mecca. Not a sound is heard. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Fasting is a shield, a protection from temptation,” says Firdausi. “Fasting can save you from abusing someone, from fornication, from backbiting....

John Sayles’s seventh feature, his first in ‘Scope, is a highly ambitious and grimly powerful look at urban corruption that represents a marked improvement over most of his earlier efforts while still revealing Sayles’s relative lack of skill in directing actors, framing, and editing. Set in the fictional Hudson City, New Jersey, which suggests a combination of Hoboken (where Sayles lives) and nearby Jersey City, the film centers on the troubled son (Vincent Spano) of a successful contractor who gets involved in an attempted burglary, which sets off a chain of events that ultimately involves all the other characters in this densely populated film: politicians, policemen, hoods, teachers, street people, and many others....

“When I dance, I feel like I’m not in this world, that I have created my own platform between the sky and the earth,” says Tanushree Sarkar. Her specialty is kathak dance, whose “brisk foot movements” are what first attracted her. Sarkar’s mother–herself a dancer, but not of kathak–began her daughter’s training very young. “I started so small, I don’t remember what age I was.” But Sarkar definitely knows to whom she owes her technique: her “guru,” Pandit Durgallal....

Sensible people tend to avoid nostalgia road shows: the old fans know what they’re getting (and by definition they’re gonna get what they want) but the merely curious–well, they generally don’t end up seeing what the fuss was about. “King of the Surf Guitar” Dick Dale, who played at the Cubby Bear a few months ago, is a cure for this narrow bit of prejudice. Dale was a southern California sensation in the early 60s; though credited by some with kicking surf into gear, and signed to a big-money deal at the height of the craze, he never really went national....

Green Goes to Ballet Chicago Effective June 1 Ballet Chicago’s new managing director will be Randall Green, currently executive director of the Civic Center for Performing Arts. The struggling Ballet Chicago, performing at the Civic Opera House this weekend, was a last-minute addition to the Civic Center’s annual Spring Festival of Dance; at the time Green said he added the Ballet Chicago to the festival because he would rather support a local company than out-of-town troupes such as the Joffrey Ballet, which he dumped this year....

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA at Orchestra Hall Barenboim wanted to make a statement with his opening concerts as music director designate, and he chose the music of Brahms to do so. This was music he had never conducted here before, although as a pianist he had played both of Brahms’s piano concertos back-to-back as recently as two seasons ago. (There were also preconcert Brahms lectures and recitals and a specially prepared book of essays and snippets about Brahms....

What a pair! John Cale and Chris Spedding have worked together before, and one of the things they have in common is that they’ve both built their reputations largely on collaboration with others. One of rock’s most chillingly idiosyncratic performers, singer/producer/songwriter/electric violist Cale has worked with species as disparate as Lou Reed, LaMonte Young, Phil Collins, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, and Aaron Copland–and although I must admit his last couple of LPs haven’t quite knocked me out, he can still put on a hell of a show and has a damn fine backlog of material to draw on....

When Ross Perot reentered the presidential race in October, the New York Times described voters’ reaction as “overwhelming hostility.” In a New York Times/CBS News poll, 72 percent of registered voters said he shouldn’t have gotten back in, and 56 percent called him a distraction from real issues. Bernarr Macfadden. Macfadden was an early-20th-century crackpot health guru and multimillionaire publisher, guilty of setting into motion such modern evils as confession magazines and gossip columns....

Jazz’s version of the power trio–the tenor/bass/drums alliance that Sonny Rollins essentially invented in the late 1950s–finds a sturdy but flexible exemplar in Chicago’s Ritual Trio. As you’d expect, this is a format that provides extraordinary freedom for each of its members; as you might have guessed (since this is a recommendation), the Ritual Trio’s individual members can more than meet the challenge. Best known is bassist Malachi Favors, a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, whose deep hardwood sound seems to stem directly from beneath his feet; completing the base of the triad is drummer Kahil El-Zabar, who combines spirituality and sensuality in a single rhythmic context....

The trees in front of the Picasso have turned, and their yellow and brown leaves are beginning to fall. Across Washington Street, under a striped awning, a vendor in the Brunswick Lofts building shows a blue-and-orange rug to two customers wearing loose, wide-sleeved garments. A clock shows that the lunch hour is almost over: a preacher in his open-air pulpit (built into the side of the Chicago Temple building) must be winding up his sermon....

Ray Hanania fell on his sword for his newspaper last week. He resigned over a woman–a woman his paper could not comfortably champion so long as he stayed on the payroll. The gesture was not wholly noble: the editor of the Sun-Times made it clear that if Hanania didn’t quit he was fired. And so it did. Avis LaVelle, the mayor’s press secretary, remembers, “I told Ray a long time ago I know affairs of the heart are difficult to control, but this was a bad idea on both of their parts....

A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY Zillah gets into big fights with her family over this Hitler/Reagan thing. “They think my problem is a tendency to get overexcited,” she complains. “I think the problem is basically that we have this event–Germany, Hitler, the Holocaust–which we have made into the standard of Absolute Evil. . . . but now that we have this standard people get frantic as soon as anyone tries to use it....

Music is like politics in that it is too important to be left to professionals. –Michelle Shocked While 1988 was a banner year for critical and commercial acceptance of overtly political popular music, I suspect that the vast majority of self-consciously “political” songs, made cultural inroads far smaller than, say, George Michael’s Grammy-winning derriere last year; the most widespread political imagery derived from popular music teetered between cheerful indifference (e.g., George Bush’s misreading of Bobby McFerrin’s hit as “Don’t Worry, Be Complacent”) and self-righteous sanctimony (e....

On the wall of the dim, book-cluttered office of Professor Dick Simpson on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago hangs a framed black-and-white photo of an outraged Alderman Dick Simpson on the floor of the City Council being restrained by two squat men, one a policeman. Simpson was demanding the disclosure of details of city insurance contracts given to the sons of Mayor Richard J. Daley. Daley ordered Simpson to sit down and shut up, and when Simpson didn’t obey, his microphone was turned off, as was customary when Simpson wouldn’t shut up....

TOMFOOLERY Different Drummer Music Theatre at Urbus Orbis Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His theme was upwardly mobile America’s effort to stifle or hide its baser instincts–its lust for sex and violence, its capacity for intolerance and inhumanity–and his darts were aimed at the squares and the hipsters alike. After deflating the conservatives’ Norman Rockwell image of small-town American innocence in such diabolical ditties as “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “The Old Dope Peddler,” and “My Home Town,” he would take aim at liberal idealism....

TRAVELER IN THE DARK The precipitating context for the play is the death of a lifelong family friend. The central character is Sam, the father of said family and the doctor who operated on, yet failed to save, Mavis, the family friend. Glory is Sam’s long-suffering wife. Their son, Stephen, is a preadolescent bookworm and parental shuttlecock. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Act one is consumed by the backyard version of feather dusting....

The name of the ensemble is Sound in Rhythm, empashizes Ajaramu; the interplay of percussion has been the heart of his concerts of recent years, with horn players added just to flavor the stew. Ajaramu is a tireless champion of the power of the drums. A veteran of the bop era, he was house drummer at McKie’s, the Chicago jazz club where Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt, James Moody, and similarly top players of the hard-blowing school held forth for years....