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BLACK COMEDY | Speaking Ring Theatre Company’s revival of Peter Shaffer’s 1965 Benny Hill-style farce is funny enough and lasts not a minute longer than the humor requires. Brindsley, a socially ambitious South Kensington artist, gives a soiree to impress a multimillionaire art collector and a man Brindsley hopes will be his father-in-law. Everything goes terribly awry when the lights go out–though the stage remains brightly lit. Without benefit of candles or flashlights, the increasingly desperate Brindsley must deal with his jealous former mistress, suddenly alcoholic landlady, and prickly gay neighbor, whose furniture Brindsley “borrowed” to upgrade his flat....

Bright Lights, Big Mess Others aren’t so lucky. Wysocki says he sometimes finds as many as 15 dead birds within a three-block stretch of alleyway. “I try to get down here on Sunday mornings once in a while, because the building maintenance crews aren’t out sweeping up the birds as early on Sunday.” Some workdays he’ll come in early just to prowl around for corpses. “People I work with say they’ve never seen dead birds on the sidewalk, but that’s because they’re never here until after the maintenance people have cleaned it up....

The 18th annual Chicago Latino Film Festival, presented by the International Latino Cultural Center of Chicago, continues Friday through Thursday, April 12 through 18. Film and video screenings will be at the Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln; Columbia College Hokin Center, 623 S. Wabash; Richard J. Daley College, 7500 S. Pulaski; Facets Cinematheque, 1517 W. Fullerton; Metzli Video Cinema, 1440 W. 18th St.; North Park Univ., 3225 W. Foster; Northwestern Univ. Annie May Swift Hall, 1905 Sheridan, Evanston; Northwestern Univ....

A Christmas Carol at the Chopin Theatre But Dickens’s revered novella wasn’t just a potboiler, nor was it the saccharine, nostalgic piece of heartwarming family entertainment that’s usually presented today on stages and screens. More than anything, Dickens was voicing his moral outrage at contemporary British society. He spent much of late 1843 lecturing on the squalid conditions of England’s poor and their lack of education in particular. In Manchester, where he was speaking on these subjects to a working-class audience, he began to imagine the allegorical figures of Want and Ignorance—the horrifying children who emerge from the robe of the Ghost of Christmas Present....

As others see us. The authors of the new book Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-first Century note that the massive public-housing developments just outside Paris often contain large concentrations of North African immigrants. “In recognition of their similarity to American ghettos, they have been called ‘Little Chicagos.’ Like concentrated poverty areas in the United States, they are associated with poverty, crime, and social disorganization. Living in a Little Chicago stigmatizes a person as a loser; employers shun such residents, and mothers even warn their daughters against going out with boys who live there....

Santiago Cucullu: Wiyya to Hell Owwa That The commonplace that artists are the last people one should consult about their work is largely untrue. Most artists have a pretty good idea of what they’re doing–but artists’ statements are often unilluminating, and sometimes hilariously pretentious. Two exhibits well worth seeing are accompanied by statements that diverge wildly from one’s experience of the work. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A press release from the Julia Friedman Gallery offers a quote from Santiago Cucullu about how his work “revolves around a historically marginal event, sometimes real and often embellished to include my own personal history....

“Part of it is straight anger and punishing people,” says Seth Killian–aka S-kill, a national champion at the video-arcade game Street Fighter II. “You’re publicly humiliating them. There are a lot of people whose lives are bereft of other socially apparent achievements. They are straight-up losers. But put in a certain context, some 14-year-old 300-pound kid is a real star–he’s the best player in four states.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

John Cassavetes’s galvanic 1968 drama about one long night in the lives of an estranged well-to-do married couple (John Marley and Lynn Carlin) and their temporary lovers (Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel) was the first of his independent features to become a hit, and it’s not hard to see why. It remains one of the only American films to take the middle class seriously, depicting the compulsive, embarrassed laughter of people facing their own sexual longing and some of the emotional devastation brought about by the so-called sexual revolution....

Over the course of the late 90s, a dozen or so mysterious artworks sprang up along the streets of West Town. The oblong sculptures–built from pieces of wood, metal, street signs, and other found material–roughly resembled doors, and had been installed on derelict storefronts and construction sites, places more often appropriated for music and movie posters. Most pieces survived a few months at best, although one, near Damen and Chicago, stayed up almost a year....

Dear Chicago Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With your permission I would like to employ Peter Margasak to write the eulogy for my deceased grandfather. I know, after reading Peter’s Post No Bills article on the closing of Lounge Ax (“The Ax Finally Falls,” December 17, 1999), that Peter would be able to look past the 80-plus years my grandfather has lived as a loving husband, a father of two very well loved daughters, grandfather to five, great-grandfather to four new babies, a friend to many in his Brooklyn neighborhood where he lived most of his life, a self-made business man, etc, and focus on the last few months of his life as his life when he could barely walk or do anything physical, his mind wandered, and he could barely use the toilet by himself....

In the early 1950s, Ika Hugel-Marshall lived in a small town in Bavaria with her mother, stepfather, and younger stepsister. Her family was white, and she assumed she was too, just as they all spoke German and lived in the same house. All the townspeople were white–the postman, the children she played with, the neighbors who invited her in for juice, the baker who sold her hot rolls–as was her beloved grandmother, her mother’s mother, who lived nearby....

By Michael Miner Main needed to avoid sounding naive about this background, and I don’t think he succeeded. He wrote, “Dignan said he continues to consider Burge a friend, saying he was subjected to a ‘kangaroo court’ by the Police Board that recommended his dismissal.” Burge was hardly railroaded. A series of lawyers for cop killer Andrew Wilson, who claimed he’d been tortured at Burge’s hands, fought an uphill battle for 11 years until 1993, when the city finally threw Burge off the force....

The Cider House Rules Dr. Wilbur Larch, the cantankerous obstetrician-orphanage director at the heart of John Irving’s 1985 novel The Cider House Rules, would probably approve. But to describe either the novel or Peter Parnell’s sweeping 1996 two-part stage adaptation as being about abortion is to obscure the work’s larger moral framework. (The truncated 1999 film version, also written by Irving, does make abortion central, sacrificing a great deal of nuance and narrative....

MICHAEL FRANTI & SPEARHEAD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A decade ago it would’ve been hard to imagine San Francisco rapper-singer-activist Michael Franti creating a melodic, richly arranged tour de force like Stay Human (Six Degrees), the brand-new third album from his R & B collective, Spearhead. In the early 90s, as half of the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, he was hobbled by the band’s minimalist beats and his own unwieldy combination of literate agitprop and rap–not even his forceful baritone could smooth out the clunky rhetoric in his lyrics, and in the end, anarchist booksellers might’ve been the only ones who adopted lines like “Exxon and on and on and on” and “Hypocrisy is the greatest luxury” as hip-hop quotables....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In January a Montana district judge handling the case of attempted-murder suspect Tessa Haley ruled that Miranda rights apply to all of a suspect’s multiple personalities. As “Martha,” Haley called 911 to say she’d stabbed her roommate, but when police arrived she denied knowledge of the call (or of anyone named Martha). After being arrested and advised of her rights, she requested that an attorney be present before further questioning; before one could be provided, however, she turned back into Martha and confessed again....

In 2001, Benjamin Gibbard of the Seattle indie-rock band Death Cab for Cutie collaborated with Jimmy Tamborello, aka glitch-popper Dntel, on “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan,” a track on Dntel’s album Life Is Full of Possibilities. Combining Gibbard’s plaintive vocals with Tamborello’s static, pings, and tinny beats, the song became a hit in both indie and IDM circles; a remix by German microhouse producer Superpitcher, all opiated synth drone and ghost bells, was an underground dance smash....

This ambitious showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest. Now it’s produced by the Curious Theatre Branch; in addition to the Curious folks, participating artists this year include John Starrs, Julie Caffey, Michael K. Meyers, Michael Martin, and many other ensembles and soloists. Taking its name from surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real big), the 13th annual Rhino Fest runs August 30-October 13....

There are intelligent choreographers, and then there are choreographers who think too much. Sara Shelton Mann is both: she has a wonderful feeling for movement, which she’s clearly imparted to her daredevil dancers, but clutters up Feast of Souls–the piece being performed here–with New Age messages. The first offering of three in Columbia College’s “Into the West” series, featuring groups from the Bay Area, this hour-long work is both obvious and obscure....

I can’t remember a time when cartoons–hand-drawn visual jokes, narratives, commentaries–weren’t a huge part of my cultural environment. I’ve been swimming in them since I was little. We all have, through film and TV, comic books, and of course the funny papers. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Strangest of all, though, is the notion that there’s some kind of triumph in the fine-artsification of comics, that a white-wall exhibition somehow validates them....

The Branson Family Comedy Christian Cavalcade, Noble Fool Theater Company. Having benefited from the city’s largesse in securing a high-profile renovated space downtown, the least the Noble Fool and its tenants can do is provide a few laughs. But that’s apparently beyond Harvey Finklestein’s Institute of Whimsical, Fantastical, and Marvelous Puppet Masterage. To call this witless show featuring sock puppets “sophomoric” slanders sophomores everywhere. Finklestein (auteur of Sock Puppet Showgirls, something of a cult hit last year) has managed to miss the huge target of the Christian right in this pastiche of song parodies, scatological jokes, and predictably “transgressive” story lines: the daughter of a devout evangelical family sleeps around, the son is gay, the grandmother hates Jews, the grandfather is incontinent....