According to Michaud, Lukaba has been looking for space for three or four years and was quick to respond when they learned that the TBC building, which hadn't been listed on the commercial market, was available. "The details are still being ironed out. . . . We're hoping to keep as much of the TBC staff as we can." An official announcement will be released tomorrow, she said.

Jones's March 15 report, which implied that Lukaba Productions, which has produced the Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival at TBC for years, was the likely purchaser, was followed this afternoon by a report that while Lukaba would take over management of the building, the purchaser was an unidentified "separate investment group."

Minnelli is no stranger to the Chicago Theatre. In the 1980s she appeared there with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., in a "Rat Pack revival" concert dubbed The Ultimate Event. In 2000, she was scheduled to perform here in a revue of songs from films directed by her father, Vincente Minnelli, but had to cancel for health reasons.

Before their 6:30 PM performance tomorrow at the Harris Theater (205 E. Randolph), Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago will host a free reception featuring company dancers and the associate board of directors. Guests will enjoy free wine, a live performance by singer-songwriter Kevin Mileski, and the chance to purchase half-price tickets to that night's show, Ovations — a showcase of their greatest hits. Tickets can be purchased at the door, at 312-334-7777, or online— use promo code AB01 to get the discount.

Maybe he's right. In the 19th century and all the centuries before, theater was intense, immediate, and non-negotiably real. But in 2010, it seems, it must be virtual, processed, and networkable—so much second-hand sensation. Like the proverbial tree in the forest that doesn't fall unless someone hears it, a show isn't real until it's been blogged.

What a clever way to get a paying crowd to hype your production while ignoring it at the same time.

The theater is where we go to find the illusions that tell the truth. It can't be reduced to an art form twice removed from its vibrant actuality. It's the ultimate real deal—in your face and of the moment. Diluting it with a bored or boring twitter does the art no favors.

Born in Decatur and raised in Santa Monica, Martin became one of the leading actresses of her generation, consistently working to within four years of her death. Martin attended UCLA and studied at the Max Reinhardt School and Actors’ Lab. After moving to New York City with first husband, screen composer Robert Emmett Dolan, she became a first-year member of the Actors’ Studio.

Two memorials services are planned for Mihopoulos this weekend: Fri 3/5, 5 PM, recital hall, Northeastern Illinois University, 5500 N. Saint Louis (a concert to benefit Haiti will follow), and Sat 3/6, 1 PM, Newberry Library, 60 West Walton. For information e-mail honoring1effie@gmail.com.

All proceeds from Theori Media's Fri 2/26 performance of Wendell J. Tucker's "sociological musical" I Still Love H.E.R. (atributetohiphop) will benefit Haiti relief work undertaken by Wyclef Jean's Yele Haiti. Described by Laura Molzahn as an "unguided tour of hip-hop music and dance," the show runs through 3/27 at the Chicago Center for Performing Arts (777 N. Green). Tickets are $20-$25 and can be purchased here; Friday's show time is 8 PM.

And another well-known Chicago theater presence will be making his Michigan Shakespeare Festival directing debut this summer. Actor-director-playwright Kevin Theis will stage The Comedy of Errors.

Logan, a Northwestern University alum, began his playwriting career in Chicago in the mid-1980s, when the now-defunct Stormfield Theatre presented Never the Sinner, his drama about the Leopold-Loeb murder case. (It was revived last summer by Project 891 Theatre Company.)

Sondheim, who turns 80 on March 22, will be interviewed by director Gary Griffin, whose credits range from The Color Purple on Broadway to superb local stagings of Sondheim's A Little Night Music and Pacific Overtures at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. (Griffin's production of Noel Coward's Private Lives is now onstage at CST.) Ebersole, a Winnetka native who won Tony Awards for her performances in 42nd Street and Grey Gardens, will present an evening of Broadway songs and standards with pianist John Oddo.

Sondheim: Thu 3/4, 7: 30 PM, $35-$65, Ebersole: Thu 3/25, 7:30 PM, $45-$75, Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph, 312-334-7777. harristheaterchicago.org.

Among the plays included in the book is Ten Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith, by Yussef El Guindi, which received its world premiere from Chicago's Silk Road Theatre Project in 2005. The play stirred controversy among Muslim-Americans here with its portrayal of a disintegrating family dealing with dwindling religious faith, homosexuality, and arranged marriage.

Also included: Between Our Lips by Nathalie Handal, 9 Parts of Desire by Heather Raffo, Desert Sunrise by Misha Shulman, Browntown by Sam Younis, The Black Eyed by Betty Shamieh, and Call Me Mehdi by Torange Yeghiazarian.

The paperback costs $19.95. More information at 212-609-5900 and tcg.org.

• Courtesy Second City
• From left: Eugene Troobnick, Barbara Harris, Alan Arkin, Paul Sand, William Mathieu, Mina Kolb, Severn Darden, and Andrew Duncan

For me, the 50th-anniversary reunion show at Second City on Saturday was epitomized by a single sketch—an oldie but goodie called Phono Pal, from the Old Town comedy theater's fifth revue. Created in 1961 by Paul Sand and Eugene Troobnick, it depicts a shy loner (Sand) playing a record by a motivational speaker (Troobnick, from offstage). As he listens to the voice on the scratchy LP, the loner starts to converse and bond with it. At last weekend's show, Sand—a brilliant, quirky actor with a special knack for conveying a paradoxically comic melancholy—sat on a caneback chair and pantomimed playing a record on a turntable, just as he had done 48 years ago. But since Troobnick died in 2003, his lines were spoken by another Second City alum, a member of the troupe in the mid-1990s: Stephen Colbert, one of today's most accomplished inheritors and purveyors of Second City's tradition of satire. That was Saturday's show in a nutshell: a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration among artists of different generations, coming together to celebrate Second City's unique contribution.