Snobs sometimes call a showman “crowd-pleasing” in order to praise with faint damnation, but in the case of Norman Cook (aka Fatboy Slim) the adjective is simply a statement of fact: if you are in the crowd the British DJ’s spinning for, he’ll please you. But on his latest album, Palookaville (Astralwerks/Skint), he’s so eager to make his message of good times accessible to everybody that his preferred source material is sometimes overly familiar....

Sunday night’s wake for Defiant Theatre had all the trappings. The guests wore black, the bar was open, and the buffet was pot luck. There were tears and toasts. There was also quite a bit of gunfire. Multiple stage pistols loaded with blanks were on hand, and every time a company member wanted to make a toast, he or she just fired a shot in the air to get the room’s attention....

Proudly displaying her palm, Kim Crutcher says she has her great-grandmother’s hands–the hands that made the best caramel frosting she’s ever tasted. The recipe is written down, but Crutcher is the only member of her family who can replicate the taste. “I inherited a recipe with my hands,” she says. She tells of her bedridden great-grandmother, paralyzed by a stroke, yelling out instructions to her in the kitchen regarding the specifics of timing and measurements....

Guidance Leaves the Path Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfortunately an inadequate sound system hampered the show; feedback so decimated the delicate, pretty voice of Sophie Bancroft that she gave up after one song, although she did try again later in the set. And since the group’s two keyboardists chose not to situate themselves onstage, the only visual focus was a twitchy video collage worthy of a sophomore film student....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In August, the LifeGem corporation, based in Elk Grove Village, announced that it can turn carbon collected from a loved one’s cremated ashes into a high-quality diamond. A DePaul University chemistry professor has agreed that the company’s method sounds plausible: the carbon is purified and converted to graphite in a vacuum induction furnace at about 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit, and then the graphite is subjected to further intense heat and pressure until it crystallizes....

Fifty years ago Chicago’s smart set could hardly avoid saloon singer Audrey Morris. Only in her 20s, she was a fixture at many of the city’s premier venues: the Copa, the Sands, the Streamline, the Churchill, Mr. Kelly’s. Providing her own spare, sophisticated piano accompaniment, she sang wry, world-weary ballads into the wee hours, bucking the current taste for bawdy chanteuses and cultivating a repertoire of obscure, understated material. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

At Oak Park-River Forest High School, Julius is a poetry stud. When the Poetry Slam Club threw its annual competition his junior year, he took the stage just ahead of guest judge and performer Reg E. Gaines, and after he won, girls and even some guys told him he was as good as Reg. While the reporter works with Julius on his essay he also helps a girl in the class write about a friend who died of a heroin overdose the previous summer....

STACEY EARLE, CHRIS MILLS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first thing you’re likely to notice when you listen to Stacey Earle is her backwoods-babychild persona: she has a little-girl voice with a thick-as-cotton Texas accent, and she favors folky arrangements laced with willowy mandolin, crisp acoustic guitar, and the occasional whine of a lap steel. But as she proves on her latest CD, Dancin’ With Them That Brung Me (Gearle), she also possesses the sort of worldliness you can hear in Dolly Parton’s best work: though it’s easy to think of the folk-ballad tradition, with its straightforward spiritual and secular yearning, as mutually exclusive with the mannered bathos of the countrypolitan style, Earle makes it clear that the two are really parts of the same continuum....

Your recent column on Marshall McLuhan was terrific, and it led me to wonder about another darling of the 60s, in the field of psychology: Whatever became of B.F. Skinner? I recall all the fun we had torturing rats in “Skinner boxes” and thinking that we were all just messes of “operant conditioning.” Like your previous questioner about McLuhan, I haven’t followed the field since, so how is Skinner regarded today?...

The Terrible Tragedy of Peter Pan, House Theatre of Chicago, at Viaduct Theater. Playwright James M. Barrie developed the myth of Peter Pan, the “wonderful boy” who wouldn’t grow up, from games and stories about fairies, pirates, and Indians he invented for four-year-old George Llewellyn Davies and his brothers. So the wonderful sense of play permeating this revisionist reworking of the tale is appropriate as well as engaging. In the best tradition of off-off-Loop theater, director Nathan Allen’s low-budget production celebrates the joy of make-believe with inventive visual effects, simple magic tricks, puppetry, and elaborate combat and dance sequences (including a hilarious lip-synched version of “Chain of Fools” by Wendy, Tinker Bell, and Tiger Lily)....

Headed by tap dancer Tamango, formerly Herbin Van Cayseele, this troupe of nine dancers and musicians from around the globe seems to feature the same degree of talent–and ego–as the artist formerly formerly known as Prince. Decked out in a pair of wide-legged furry pants in the evening-length Caravane, Tamango first appears shirtless in a swallow-tailed coat, then without the coat but wearing an African mask that gives him the appearance of an icon or god; video projections on his face and body likewise send him into an otherworldly place....

The following is an adaptation of Albert Williams’s keynote speech to the annual conference of the American Theatre Critics Association, given June 13 at the Goodman Theatre. I can’t define the “role of the critic.” No one can, though many will try. Everyone has an opinion about that role, and those opinions often clash. Well, there can be no drama without conflict–why should drama criticism be any different? I think each critic defines his or her role by the way we each do our jobs....

Partners Jim Horan (Blue Plate, Rhapsody) and Matthew O’Malley (Chicago Firehouse, Tiny Lounge) won the food service contract for the long-awaited 24.5-acre Millennium Park, at the northwest corner of Grant Park between Randolph and Monroe. The prize includes multiple kiosks in the summer, a grab ‘n’ go sandwich-and-salad shop, and PARK GRILL, a 300-seat restaurant. The enormous space has views of the McCormick-Tribune ice rink and Michigan Avenue; every seat is a good one....

Leaving behind their family-style Chinese carryout joint, Mandarin Garden, in Evanston, the Lin family–Chen Shing, his wife, Hui Chu, and their son Jun–opened the pan-Asian GREEN GINGER in Wicker Park this September. “It gives my dad a chance to cook the upscale traditional Chinese food he was trained to cook in China,” says Jun, who designed the new restaurant’s interior, painting the dining room olive green, covering the back wall with overlapping scales of gold wallpaper (“It looks like ginger to me,” he says), designing the steel-and-wood furniture, and placing lucky bamboo around the space....

A COZY EVENING WITH (GEORGE) BERNARD SHAW, OR THE TRICK OF GBS, Pendulum Theatre Company, at the Athenaeum Theatre. Two hours with this mandarin intellect could hardly be called cozy. Concentrated, yes. Performer-creator Charles G. Likar means to show us the “trick” of how GBS constructed an iconoclastic, even diabolical public image around a mild-voiced vegetarian dreamer who preferred discussing socialism to having sex. Sedately hosting us in his country house in 1933, Likar’s genial genius shares his views on Oscar Wilde, Hitler, and almost every play he ever wrote, with extra attention to the backstage shenanigans on the opening night of Pygmalion....

Academics have long been prone to misapply the adjective “Brechtian” to B movies and sterile avant-garde exercises alike, but Travis Wilkerson’s experimental documentary about the 1917 murder of Frank Little, a radical union organizer who fought Montana mining interests, is a film that genuinely merits the term, even if it’s not a drama in the conventional sense. Working on what he terms a “microbudget,” Wilkerson turns necessity into virtue: in lieu of escapist reenactments and period-costumed crowd scenes, he uses stark Montana vistas, combined with titles and narration, to argue that the depredations of capitalism lie behind every ruined landscape....

I am Annetta Allen. I was born in Greenville, Mississippi, in January 1948. My mother became very ill with epilepsy after I was born, so my father took over raising my brother and three sisters. My mother’s sister-in-law Willette raised me. In 1957 we moved to Sycamore, Illinois, to live with her brother. Sycamore was a mostly white town. A white family lived on one side of our house and a white family lived on the other....

Lou Reed Some will protest that there never was such a time–that Reed has been a man of letters all along. The case for Reed the Highbrow invariably begins with mention of poet Delmore Schwartz, a pickled beat that Reed knew as a student at Syracuse University who’s often referred to as his “mentor.” But literary reputations are not usually won through personal acquaintance with writers, and even if the objection is waived, the Delmore hookup still doesn’t cut much ice, given that Schwartz is remembered today almost exclusively for his connection to the young Lou Reed....

The inaugural Chicago International Doc Film Festival, featuring documentary films and videos, runs Friday, March 21, through Sunday, March 30. Screenings are at the Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln; Facets Cinematheque, 1517 W. Fullerton; Northwestern Univ. Block Museum of Art, 40 Arts Circle Dr., Evanston; Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee; and Univ. of Chicago Doc Films, 1212 E. 59th St. Tickets are $8, $7 for seniors and students; passes for 10 screenings are $65; for more information call 773-486-9612....

Csardas! The Tango of the East Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The pilfering of “ethnic” forms by “high” artists is not a recent phenomenon. Many dance aficionados know the csardas from its genteel, watered-down manifestations in such ballets as Coppelia and Swan Lake. But this folk dance–whose music was also appropriated in the mid-19th century by composers like Brahms and Liszt–has its own, more authentic history too....