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JOHNNY ON A SPOT Unfortunately, the actors aren’t built to endure such stress, and they begin to malfunction. They interrupt each other and fumble lines. They talk so quickly they become difficult to understand. (Actors refer to the character “Booter” Kusick as “Buddha,” which is especially confusing since he got his nickname by “kicking old friends when they were down.”) They move tentatively, as though unsure of where they’re supposed to be, and when they attempt physical comedy, they look like dancers on the first day of rehearsal, slowly and self-consciously walking through their steps....

It started off as such a routine resolution. A Chicago alderman spoke in favor of renaming a local street after a war hero. Before long, it erupted into a battle of charges and countercharges so common during recent years in the City Council. Others claimed that there was considerably more to the story. One City Hall reporter claimed, “Soliz tried to push the [Perez] name change through the council. He used the opportunity to slam [22nd Ward Alderman] Jesus Garcia....

THE MISANTHROPE Look at The Misanthrope. What a great comedy. Moliere discovered, isolated, and dissected a classic type in his title character, Alceste: the moral bigot who has insight enough to realize that society runs on lies, but who’s too fatuous to acknowledge the lies he tells himself. The Misanthrope bounces along, brilliant and merciless, for a full four acts, while Alceste allows his little bit of knowledge to become a terrible thing–ruining him financially, alienating him from his friends, trivializing his ideals, and finally pushing him so deeply into his moral hole that he can’t climb out....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The mother of a 27-year-old man found hacked to death on the grounds of a Toronto mental hospital is suing the Ontario Ministry of Health for giving a patient the opportunity to commit the murder. The patient charged is David Krueger, 52, who murdered three children 35 years ago and has been hospitalized ever since. Police say he committed the murder during his first brief pass last year....

Ever heard of the Great American People Show? No, it’s not that group of fresh-faced kids who tour the country singing cornball songs. And it’s not the revue you see at Six Flags amusement park. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All right, now it sounds even worse than Up With People, right? But GAPS’s Abraham Lincoln is not a tall guy in a stovepipe hat who walks onstage and shoots a turkey....

It was roughly one year ago that activists first sounded the alarm about overcrowded schools in Edgewater, West Rogers Park, and other neighborhoods on the far north side. Since then, parents, teachers, and principals have formed coalitions, petitioned politicians, and pleaded with school-board officials for relief. They’ve scouted the area, looking to rent classrooms in synagogues, churches, and armories. One school–Gale–will soon go on a year- round schedule so all of its students won’t attend school at the same time....

Club Lucky prides itself on being a 40s- and 50s-style supper club. The cocktail lounge even has vintage martini shakers on the back bar. Talk about fond memories–with two in diapers and a sitter just once a week, that Saturday-night martini was all we had to live for. The economy being what it is I can see why they’re back in style. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Style was no better....

DANGEROUS LIAISONS With Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, Swoosie Kurtz, Keanu Reeves, Mildred Natwick, and Uma Thurman. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The screenplay of Dangerous Liaisons, freely adapted by Hampton from his stage version of the book (which I haven’t seen), reportedly reduces the play’s running time by 40 minutes while restoring more of the plot from the novel. The film begins with a sumptuous account of the two leading characters, the Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close) and the Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovich), being wakened and attended to by their many servants in their separate Parisian residences....

Berneice used to play the piano for her mother, but since her mother died she won’t touch it. Boy Willie, her brother, has come up from the south to sell the piano. He plans to take the money and buy the plantation he used to work on. Berneice refuses. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For Berneice, the piano cannot be sold because of the past it represents....

That’s why you’re embarrassed to buy a lottery ticket. Zephyr, published in downstate Galesburg, reminds us (August 10) that we have one chance in 607,000 of being killed by lightning; one in 1,300,000 of being injured while taking a bubble bath; and one in 26 million of winning the Illinois Lotto grand prize. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Honk if you like to kill birds: On September 23 Springfield will host the “Winchester Masters North American Goose Calling Championship....

Only one Comet, an aircraft known as the world’s first jet airliner, is still flying. This vintage airplane landed at O’Hare recently, then taxied to the northeast corner of the airport and parked on the spot reserved for Air Force One. Every president since Eisenhower (also the Beatles, popes, kings, generals, and United States cabinet members) have entered Chicago by way of O’Hare’s Air Force Reserve base. Air Force One always faces east; Comet 4 XV814 faced west....

THE MISANTHROPE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Or better yet, The Littlest Nietzschean. There’s a sort of Triumph of the Will bravado to the compensations of this Alceste. He looks disconcertingly Aryan when we first see him stripped down to a tank top, wearing a modified bristle cut a la von Hindenburg, looking grim but pink cheeked, and doing exercises. His surroundings are sleek and hard....

The season of the Chicago White Sox, which began with such promise after the acquisition of George Bell from the Cubs, came grinding to a halt last week. It was almost as if they’d proved to themselves after the All-Star break that they were a good team, but then reality set in; they admitted they had dug themselves too deep a hole with their slow start and they gave up....

In a recent review of Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex I read that Renaldus Columbus discovered the clitoris in 1559. I can’t make sense of this. Wasn’t it right under his nose the whole time, so to speak? Who discovered the penis? And who was Renaldus Columbus, anyway? Any relation to Chris? –Mark Lutton, Malden, Massachusetts Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But seriously. According to Thomas Laqueur, Columbus, aka Matteo Realdo Colombo, was a lecturer in surgery at the University of Padua, Italy....

THE SOCK MONKEYS Unlike most Chicago performance artists, the Sock Monkeys develop their pieces from a movement base. As a result the work tends to be more intuitive, less intellectual, than most of what’s found on the local performance scene. This has its charms, but it can also be frustrating. The group’s often startling images may seem too abstract or esoteric. Sometimes the only way to accept the work is to believe that it has its own internal logic....

Chances are you’ve never heard of Sherman Park. It’s a relatively small (60 acres, or about a dozen square blocks) south-side park that hasn’t had all the maintenance it could use. But even if you pass it every day on your commute down Garfield Boulevard (its southeast corner is 5500 south and 1200 west) you might not have seen it, as it’s hidden from the street by a grassy berm. And if you did drive into the park, through the entrance off Racine, say, you might notice that it’s seen better days....

If you want to talk contributing factors, the Public Enemy mess has three of them. Those who would participate in the debate about the group ignore them at their peril, so it’s probably worth spelling them out at the beginning: The first explains how the controversy got started in the first place; the second explains why it has not yet died down. But the third explains why you should care nonetheless....

Over the last few days I’ve been incessantly spinning this little cassette of C.K. Mann’s Ghanaian highlife hits from the 1970s, and frankly I’m starting to get a bit delirious. It could just be the heat, but I swear there’s something positively surreal about the way that corny roller-rink organ slides so smoothly over the incessantly loping bass lines. Mann’s music has a good beat and you can dance to it, but it’s also historically significant–Mann has been credited with having kept Ghana’s homegrown highlife style alive in the African pop world at a time when it was threatened by an inundation of other sounds, including disco....

Of the many contexts in which Douglas Ewart has appeared, the Clarinet Choir is probably my favorite: his concepts seem more concentrated, and the limitations of the format–the choir usually includes four to seven clarinets and no other instruments–paradoxically nudge his compositional skills to another level. What’s more, Ewart himself is one of the unsung masters of the bass clarinet, and he attacks the format with a gusto and scope beyond the efforts of other such ensembles....

When you’re a 325-pound drag impersonator of an internationally famous pop star, people can get their facts wrong in the heat of the moment. Tanian will be in Chicago at Ka-Boom! this weekend for a show called “Everything Old Is New York Again,” an evening of imported stars from the Big Apple club demimonde. The show is hosted by the enterprising Manhattan party thrower Chip Duckett, who’s bringing along Tanian and a bevy of other polymorphously perverse scenesters of the sort known in the midwest only as characters in the Village Voice’s “La Dolce Musto” column....