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PATRICE MICHAELS BEDI, JEFFREY COHAN, AND DILEEP GANGOLLI Things had started to change by the time viola da gambist Mary Springfels arrived almost ten years ago and founded the Newberry Consort. Some of her early-music colleagues came to take a look and then stayed. Eventually there were several fine original-instrument groups–the City Musick, the Orpheus Band, His Majestie’s Clerkes. New-music and chamber-music composers and performers also began settling down here, glad not to be part of the east-coast rat race....

CHOREOGRAPHERS SAMPLER But not anymore. Or not for long. The Choreographers Sampler, inaugurated last year, ends this year, with final performances this weekend (there will be a party after the last performance, on December 9). And so ends MoMing, a place that has always valued the whimper as much as the bang. Maybe more. This Choreographers Sampler is a noisy one, with performers slamming against walls, slapping their bodies against the floor, hooting and grunting and chortling and singing–the music more often than not is people’s voices....

League of Chicago Theatres Ponders the State of the Art Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The mood this year is markedly less belligerent. But the organization’s concerns–the need to find new funding and new audiences–are as pressing as ever, and the League’s new executive director, Keryl McCord, is getting a clearer picture of the magnitude of her challenge. “There are days when I’ve questioned my sanity,” says McCord, who’s been in her post now for five months....

Lead Story Letty Catchings mounted a challenge last winter to a determination by San Francisco city officials that she was not entitled to her late husband’s municipal pension. Mr. Catchings, who’d worked 37 years for the city’s rail system, died of a heart attack on October 1, 1985–eight days after he had agreed to cooperate with a company bookkeeping change and move his retirement date from September 30 to October 2....

THE FILMS OF CHANTAL AKERMAN On one hand, the films of the 39-year-old Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman are about as varied as anyone could wish. Some are in 16-millimeter and some are in 35; some are narrative and some are nonnarrative; the running times range from 11 minutes to 205. The genres range from autobiography to personal psychodrama to domestic drama to comedy to musical to documentary to feature-in-progress–a span that still fails to include a silent, not-exactly-documentary study of a run-down New York hotel (Hotel Monterey), a vast collection of miniplots covering a single night in a city (Toute une nuit), and a feature-length string of Jewish jokes recited by immigrants in Brooklyn exteriors (Food, Family and Philosophy), among other oddities....

A fascinating and masterful melodrama from Japan, written by Goro Nakajima and directed by former independent Shunichi Nagasaki, that may remind you in spots of both Vertigo and Lilith, although the treatment is strictly Japanese. A Tokyo psychiatrist (Masao Kusakari) who is engaged to his receptionist (Kiwako Harada) becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with a beautiful tourist guide (Kumiko Akiyoshi) who claims to have been beaten by her lesbian lover; further events reveal that this lover is dead and that her identity is being schizophrenically re-created by the tourist guide....

DOUG ELKINS DANCE COMPANY But being controlled from the outside isn’t always pleasant or ecstatic. In The Patrooka Variations one man passes his hand like a magic wand over another man lying down, making each body part writhe in turn, then mimes spitting on him. In an earlier section, a quartet performed on two chairs, one dancer sits in another’s lap and his or her hands are grabbed, arms manipulated–it’s sexual in an icky kind of way....

THE TANGLED SNARL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why, why, why, why, why would anyone try to do yet another parody of detective movies? Everyone from Neil Simon to the Firesign Theater to the Bowery Boys to Roger Rabbit, not to mention hordes of improvisational comedy troupes, has tackled this genre, and if there is anything new to say about Sam Spade and company, you won’t find it in The Tangled Snarl, the very talky, not very funny, nearly actionless parody of 1940s detective movies currently being performed at the Raven Theatre....

WHEN SHE DANCED Such artists are the stuff of legend, whether their name is Isadora Duncan or Arthur Rimbaud or Judy Garland or John Lennon. They exert an intense hold on the imagination, though their grip sometimes seems disproportionate to their lasting achievements. This is especially true in the case of someone like Isadora, an extreme eccentric even by the standards of the particularly eccentric world of dance, who worked in an age before technology was able to accurately preserve the artistic experience....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Additionally, many projects or studies which are identified and proposed by DOC are actually carried out by other groups. For example, the Illinois Natural History Survey has conducted a $15,000 mussel survey on the Mackinaw River and Northern Illinois University did the $25,000 winter bald eagle use study of the Mississippi, Illinois and Ohio Rivers....

Friday 11 Saturday 12 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The resplendent homes of Logan Square–part of the best preserved and most complete stretch of Chicago’s beautiful boulevard system–will be on display today in the 11th annual Logan Square Boulevards Historic District Housewalk. The district housed Wieboldts and Schwinns, Goldblatts and Kimballs in its fin de siecle heyday. The walk begins at 10 at the offices of Logan Square Preservation, 3024 W....

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF Though it fits any play, “mendacity” is an especially apt term for this 1955 Pulitzer Prize winner. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with its delicious deceit, may be a perfect embodiment of theater as “the lie that tells the truth.” It’s Williams’s shrewd powers of illusion that make us want so much to see the Pollitts’ lies exposed–whatever the characters do to each other is nothing compared to the subterfuge the playwright forces on the audience....

What this town needs is a good variety show, thought performance artist Brigid Murphy. And next week Murphy celebrates the two-year anniversary of her own rowdy and raucous, intelligent and provocative Milly’s Orchid Show. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Murphy’s dream was to get the whole spectrum of arts and entertainment together onstage. An unpretentious, even amateurish vaudeville show seemed the answer. “I’ve always loved vaudeville,” Murphy says....

ROUGH TRADE To get the full effect of “Rough Trade,” you have to see both the Friday and Saturday shows. On Friday Steger performs his own Bliss, and then Moore does her The Illusion of Conspiracy. On Saturday, however, Moore inhabits Steger’s work, and Steger takes on Moore’s. The result isn’t merely gender bending, it’s transgressive. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Consider the opening of Bliss, a lip-synched dance to Yoko Ono’s “Open Your Mind....

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF Still, the basic distinction remains–and deserves to be respected, I suppose. Each mode has its uses–has its folkways, its glories, even its classics. Certainly, the Broadway musical from the age of Broadway musicals represents some kind of apotheosis, whether it teaches you something or not. I know I consider Oklahoma! a masterpiece. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » How perfectly reassuring....

Six mornings a week in a big bright room high above Buckingham Fountain, a few score citizens take up their X-Acto knives and settle down behind particle-board tables for a quiet day of newspaper reading. They work for a national clipping service. Hired by PR firms, individuals, associations, in fact anybody who expects publicity to come along, systematically or otherwise, a clipping service goes through more newspapers in a day than all the fish-and-chip shops and puppy pounds in the universe, and uses up more workers than Karl Marx would have cared to unite....

RAW With Eddie Murphy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » More than anything else, Murphy comes across as pathetic, a terminally undeveloped child forever seeking a shortcut to adulthood. The little vignette that opens the film features an episode–supposedly drawn from Murphy’s childhood–in which he shocked his family and their friends by telling an extended scatological joke. This kind of confessional reference to the source of one’s humor is supposed to have a disarming effect, but it almost never works satisfactorily....

STRANGE WEATHER In ’87, I slapped the remorse-inspiring item in question onto the turntable on Christmas Eve, as others in the house puttered with gift wrapping. The album had gotten buried in the living room, to be excavated only when it made an appearance on several other critics’ top-ten lists. So much for infallibility. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have to admit that I ignored Strange Weather with inordinate ease....

BUCHANAN’S FINEST HOUR From the Oxford E.T.C. the team has finally come to Second City E.T.C., thanks to Quando Productions’ staging of Buchanan’s Finest Hour. Written as part of a bill of two one-acts (the other was called Underhill’s Finest Hour), this one-hour comedy apparently has been presented only once before, at its 1976 world premiere at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England. The reason for the play’s neglect is hard to fathom, given not only the popularity of all things Python-related but also the fact that Buchanan’s Finest Hour is a screaming laugh riot....

SCROUNGING CHANGE Joe Larocca has discovered a way to do this, too: his characters seem to be giving uncensored voice to some vast reservoir of distress that he harbors within himself. Their monologues are rants–fevered confessions of hatred, or impassioned complaints. They don’t speak their feelings, they spew them out, as though venting some of the anger and fear building up in Larocca’s mind. Best of Chicago voting is live now....