One unwelcome discovery in Charles Newell’s dogged, faithful three-hour revival of Wilde’s masterpiece is how much its wit can wear you down. Not a few lines belabor the obvious or distract without amusing. But instead of rendering the comedy crisper, Newell makes this mannered comedy of manners more deliberate. Lance Stuart Baker’s Algernon is almost sinister, his courtship of Cristen Paige’s ebullient Cecily almost predatory. Wilde aims to show how social repression warps natural–that is, sexual–impulses (consider Lady Bracknell, whom Mary Beth Fisher portrays as more shrew than Gorgon)....

Weekend afternoons, Michael Bonfiglio crawls into the window of his Andersonville storefront gallery and either stands or sits cross-legged before an easel. There, surrounded by boots, handbags, and mannequins decorated with dots of acrylic paint, he applies more dots to a canvas. Passersby ignore him; others stop and stare. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Hopefully people will come inside, see my stuff, and buy,” says Bonfiglio....

Back to Normal Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Martin Riker, who ran the Chicago office, is now camped out in Denver, editing half-time for the center and working on a novel. He says O’Brien, who founded the organization in 1980 in Elmwood Park, “wanted to make Chicago another Minneapolis–the one city in this country that has a bunch of foundations that actually fund literature....

Beast on the Moon, Lincoln Square Theatre, at the Berry Memorial United Methodist Church. There are a few false notes in Richard Kalinoski’s 1995 script about survivor’s guilt among Armenians after the Turks’ attempted 1915 genocide, but none in Leah Rose’s performance as the refugee bride of an Armenian who made it to America without managing to escape his history. Playing every facet of her character, from childlike and terrified to impatient and defiant, Rose is appealing throughout....

This organization, founded by Lane Alexander, is branching out. For one thing, last year the CHRP began hosting a concert in honor of National Tap Dance Day (May 25, also Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s birthday) in addition to its annual shows in August, now in their 13th year. And though the CHRP festivals have often welcomed performers who aren’t straight tappers, like Israel’s Sheketak and local percussive-movement group Jump Rhythm Jazz Project, this year’s National Tap Dance Day program–“Ritmo Uno!...

Two years ago, Kristin Doll was selling ads for Conde Nast. Then came 9/11, and suddenly the magazine group had lots of salespeople but not many buyers. “The advertising industry hit a big wall and I was laid off,” she says. “But it was perfect timing. I had known for a long time I wanted to do something different. Losing my job was the push I needed.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Jazz violin earned its first starring role in the 1920s, when earthy virtuoso Joe Venuti appeared; in the 30s you had Stephane Grappelli and his sweet rococo swing. For years after, most jazz fiddlers combined these two influences. But in the 70s, when the electrified violin found its voice in jazz-rock fusion, the old dichotomy resurfaced in the persons of Jean-Luc Ponty and Michal Urbaniak. Ponty inherited and updated the glittering brilliance of fellow Frenchman Grappelli; Urbaniak offered a rougher-hewn tone and ballsy attack reminiscent of the Venuti school, ornamenting his playing with piquant folk music phrases from his native Poland....

Imagine a kingdom shrouded in permanent wintry gloom, its young king grown crabbed and selfish in his dark castle. But liberation is at hand in the form of a gardener-errant determined to restore the kingdom’s purloined flora to its rightful home–a heroine whose comrades include acrobats, aerialists, rope walkers, jugglers, mimes, and a canine gymnast. The Flower Thieves, which premiered in 2001 at the Metropolis Performing Arts Centre, is G. Riley Mills and Ralph Covert’s musical fable, an allegory of springtime rebirth, brought to splendid life by the Midnight Circus in this tightly integrated spectacle of movement and imagery....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In September the Industrial Christian Fellowship, a British think tank, complained that churchgoers’ prayers go disproportionately to teachers and nurses, and claimed that it had already used its Web site to distribute a set of prayers for the financial sector (under the heading “When did you last pray for your stockbroker?”). And in November the Saudi Arabian government established new restrictions on the export of sand, fearing that increased regional demand (from the reconstruction of Iraq and from Bahrain’s land-reclamation projects in the Persian Gulf) would create a shortage....

Velvet Underground Bootlegs occupy a special niche in the library of any hard-core rock ‘n’ roll fan: a copy of Dylan’s “Great White Wonder” or “The Lost Lennon Tapes” confers a certain serious status on a record collector. But in recent years, the format has exerted great influence on the mainstream music industry as well. Why? Many a band has been signed on the strength of its live show, only to spend weeks and thousands of dollars holed up in three rooms trying to eliminate every last happy accident from its set....

The 1952 MGM movie musical starring Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O’Connor had too much energy for two dimensions–hence this 1985 stage version. A tribute to American pluck and resourcefulness, the original saluted the advent of the talkies and the colossal egos of Hollywood’s golden age, represented here by Monumental Pictures. The show teems with infectious tunes by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed, perfect numbers like “You Are My Lucky Star” and “You Were Meant for Me....

The mood was very different at White Sox Park last weekend. Saturday was clear and sunny but a chilly wind blew in off the lake, and few fans turned out for batting practice. The parking-lot attendants, food staff, and other stadium employees anticipated a large crowd, with the Sox playing a team hot on their heels and fireworks scheduled for after the game. But by that time, though the numbers said the playoffs were still possible, the Sox were all but out of contention....

Celestine Harvey’s up early, applying makeup and selecting her clothes. “If I’m going to be seen,” she says, “I want to be seen looking right.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Folks are more than what they did for a job,” says John Wesby, or Frog, who used to work in a spring factory. “I’m a dancer. I learned to dance at a pool hall at 31st and State....

SWEENEY TODD, DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET | Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 cannibalistic “musical thriller” proved that a composer-lyricist can tell any damn story he likes. In Hugh Wheeler’s book, a barber’s revenge and a meat-pie maker’s opportunism expose the power of hate over love. Alternately folk opera, revenge tragedy, neo-Brechtian protest, and penny-dreadful melodrama, this piece is above all an ensemble effort. And that’s the secret to the success of this scorching Porchlight Music Theatre Chicago production....

Rock, Pop, etc. RUBEN BLADES, CESARIA EVORA Tue 6/19, 8 PM, Pavilion, Ravinia Festival, Green Bay and Lake Cook Rds., Highland Park. 847-266-5100. CATIE CURTIS “Girls on Top” benefit concert for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. Sat 6/23, 6 PM, Firstar Bank parking lot, Clark & Summerdale. 312-201-9740, ext. 307 or 312-559-1212. EDO G., SOULS OF MISCHIEF, AKBAR, KREATORS, B-MOVIE FIENDZ, LYRISIS, ACUPUNCTURE, MOBB LIFE, AZTEC All-ages show. Fri 6/15, 7 PM, Congress Theater, 2135 N....

Reading about Sean Flynn, the hotshot photojournalist in Michael Herr’s Vietnam book Dispatches, I understood how much danger a person faces in that line of work; this 2001 profile of James Nachtwey, five-time winner of the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his war photography, asks how much human suffering one person can witness. Learning his craft in the 70s, Nachtwey was inspired by the social conscience behind the news photography of Vietnam and the civil rights struggle, and the film comes alive whenever his haunting black-and-white photos–of genocide in Kosovo, poverty in Jakarta, lynching in Ramallah, and famine in Rwanda–fill the frame....

Ambivalence has never been a trait identified with hip-hop, and listening to Akrobatik you can sometimes see why: an artist who takes time to stake out the middle ground can frustrate a listener who’s waiting for a wallop of personality. But more often than not on his debut full-length, Balance (Coup D’Etat), this Boston MC reaps the dramatic potential that comes with being of two minds. He kicks off the album conversationally (“I’m glad you bought this disc right here, my debut LP....

The Mexico City quartet Cafe Tacuba has stayed vital for 14 years now by forever changing their focus. When they first started, the band mixed traditional Mexican folk tropes with punkish energy and the charged, high-pitched vocals of front man Ruben Albarran. They soon broadened their sound to include clever injections of ska, alt-rock, lounge pop, industrial noise, and straight-up norteno, and on their 1994 classic, Re, all those elements coalesced to convey the sound of a band making sense of its own cultural identity while embracing the world at large....

I periodically get letters from readers complaining that I write too much about movies they’ve never heard of, some of which come from countries they know little about. A good many examples of these kinds of films are playing over the next couple of weeks at the 37th Chicago International Film Festival. I’m as eager as anyone to find and punish the terrorists–even if the U.S. helped to empower them as it has our other favorite foreign devils, such as Noriega and Saddam....

Expertly shot and edited, the best of these 16 films and videos create provocative feelings of displacement, their labyrinthine forms mirroring the confusions of our age. In The Shortest Distance (2001), Brandon Doherty envisions Chicago as a vertiginous maze, intercutting the straight lines of buildings and phone wires overhead. Steve Reinke’s Amsterdam Camera Vacation (2001) is bluntly self-abnegating: disconnected images are accompanied by a voice-over from Reinke, who leaps from subject to subject as if close to a nervous breakdown (“Whenever I see a dog I want to kill it…....