Huddersfield Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unexpectedly, Huddersfield’s vitality does not spring from overt political engagement–it’s a male coming-of-age domestic drama like Mike Leigh’s Ecstasy or Eric Bogosian’s SubUrbia. The crisis for the protagonist, Rasha, isn’t NATO bombings or ethnic cleansing, it’s turning 30. Serbian critic Ana Vujanovic points out that, like many of his contemporaries, Sajtinac excludes “every trace of metaphysics, utopia, historical necessity, or positive criticism....

In his letter to the editor [January 27] Victor Cassidy begins with a critique of the Reader, questioning the professionalism of its reporters. He states, and I quote, “I wonder–does the Chicago Reader have a clip file? Do your reporters ever consult it before they go out on interviews? A few years ago you reported Kimler was leaving for Los Angeles because Chicago was such a horrible place for artists. He denounced everyone in sight, stormed off, and returned 18 months later with his tail between his legs....

Jason Robert Brown’s song cycle, which details the rise and fall of a relationship, was last performed here less than three months ago by La Costa Theatre Company. Josh Solomon’s One Theatre Company staging features a full orchestration (as in Northlight’s 2001 debut), and Andrew Weir and Diane Mair deliver ardent performances, his songs recounting their five-year affair from the start, hers chronicling it backward. But the staging is out of balance: an overwhelming six-person orchestra forces the singers to nearly scream, obscuring the lyrics....

Friday5 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » RUPAYAN This group of musicians and dancers from India’s Rajasthan region hasn’t released any records, but its concept alone–a mixture of traditions from the area’s Langa and Manganiyar castes–is reason enough to recommend it. The two peoples were court performers centuries ago, playing a spare, deeply soulful music in which chanted call-and-response vocals undulate over richly droning strings....

Salome “Of course, I plagiarize,” Oscar Wilde once told Max Beerbohm. “It is the privilege of the appreciative.” In Salome the master of drawing-room comedy borrowed freely from a variety of sources, including the Gospels of Matthew and Mark and Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1889 play La Princesse Maleine. The play that resulted is perhaps the most idiosyncratic and least understood of Wilde’s works—and one of the least produced. (More people have probably seen or heard Richard Strauss’s opera or seen Aubrey Beardsley’s famous woodcuts for the play’s 1894 published edition....

“I’m almost tempted to say that making me popular is a resistance against taking me serious,” says Slavoj Zizek in this entertaining 2005 portrait of the Slovene cultural theorist and “academic rock star.” It’s a characteristic utterance, and his charisma is such that the meaning registers despite the faulty grammar. Whether he’s ruminating in his Ljubljana flat, speaking at the University of Buenos Aires, fleeing autograph hounds, running for president of Slovenia (in 1990), defining ideology, or staging his own mock suicide, his frenetic and lucid manner is neatly captured by the jazzy style of director Astra Taylor....

Derek Webster became an artist on a sleepless night in 1978. Lying awake with a headache, trying to think of a way to keep the family poodle out of his garden, he had a vision of a unique fence. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I got up that moment,” he recalls. “And I went in the backyard and I said ‘Oh, I got it now....

Even in its censored 70-minute version, Baby Face (1933) has long been celebrated as one of the Depression era’s raciest movies, and this recently discovered uncut version, with six minutes of extra footage, is even more explicit and sordid. Sexy, steely Barbara Stanwyck is a small-town prostitute initially pimped by her bootlegger father; with her only friend (Theresa Harris), a black woman who eventually becomes her maid, she moves to the city, and armed with nihilist sayings by Nietzsche, starts screwing her way up the corporate ladder (though she rebuffs John Wayne, seen in an early bit part)....

Even though the banjo originated in Africa, there aren’t many contemporary African-American musicians taking cues from the black string bands whose work is preserved on old 78s and recent compilations like Old Hat’s splendid Folks, He Sure Do Pull Some Blow! But the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a trio from North Carolina ranging in age from 25 to 30, have stepped in to fill the breach, demonstrating in workshops, onstage, and in classrooms what they’ve learned from octogenarian fiddler Joe Thompson....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Devendra Banhart has been the face of the so-called freak-folk scene since its inception about four or five years ago. He’s forever championing forgotten singers (Linda Perhacs, Karen Dalton, Vashti Bunyan) as well as new voices (Jana Hunter, Matteah Baim, Vetiver) and acting the fool with his food-trapping beard and silly face make-up. He’s either completely fearless or completely narcissistic, and either way it’s impressive....

Resident Evil: Apocalypse With Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Oded Fehr, and Mike Epps Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m not claiming that poverty is a virtue in and of itself: low budgets certainly didn’t prevent Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Dead series from blowing chunks, and the last time I saw the original Dawn of the Dead (it was remade by Zack Snyder this year) I was both stunned and bummed at how crummy the makeup and effects looked....

More than most people I know, Jenny Magnus embodies the Walt Whitman line “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Using as props just a cumbersome futon in What Abandon Meant and just a bag of rice in Cant, she investigates self-sufficiency, trust, self-sacrifice, and love in its many forms: sexual, filial, maternal. Though she looks like your next-door neighbor, she’s able to take on the personas of many people and make them come to life: a goofy teenager, a self-absorbed father, a self-righteous lactation consultant who epitomizes niceness....

This gospel-infused family musical is part Disney’s The Princess Diaries, part anachronistic comedy, and part religious service, following the young Queen of Sheba as she grows up, comes to terms with being queen, and is wooed (though not won) by King Solomon, who converts her to Judaism. As directed and written by Peter L. Chatman and performed by the Youth Theatre Division of Chicago Theatre Company, the show is uneven, too long, and dully acted....

Sol de Mexico Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On July 14 a lightning rod sprang up on the culinary chat site LTHForum.com. “After a psychically draining day (no, week, no, month, no, . . . year) I picked up Himself . . . and suggested we stop for supper before heading home,” the poster wrote. In the window of a storefront on Cicero near Belmont she’d seen a hand-painted sign advertising “tortillas hecho a mano,” handmade tortillas....

In Bocca al Lupo (Tent Show), the third full-length from Indiana’s MURDER BY DEATH, isn’t a concept album like 2003’s Who Will Survive, and What Will Be Left of Them?, which is about Satan exacting his revenge on the small desert town where he got shot in a bar fight. But the theme’s pretty much the same–ordinary life darkened by some spooky evil–and their macabre prairie songs are still built on jangly Americana and theatrical murder ballads, with a touch of the Gypsy jitters....

The lights go dark in the cafeteria at Jones College Prep in the South Loop. As Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” blares over the sound system a line of black-clad students, right arms raised and fists clenched, begins marching from each corner toward the stripe of red carpet that divides the room. “That’s what I love about this,” says a member of the school’s African American Club, the sponsor of the night’s event....

Chris Birnie was a Cub Scout for only one year, when he was in second grade, but he vividly remembers his less-than-stellar performance in the pinewood derby. The derby has been a scouting tradition since a southern California troop organized the first one in 1953: boys construct cars from kits containing a seven-inch-long block of wood, four nails, and four wheels, then race them down four-lane tracks. “Mine kind of stopped halfway down the track, and it looked bad,” says Birnie, 34....

Most Filipino restaurants serve food the way mom used to–with a casual disregard for presentation, set on the table in still-steaming pots and platters. So what better place to begin exploring the cuisine than in a Filipino home? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » LTHer Sharon Bautista recently hosted a group of folks from LTHForum up in Evanston for a spread of Filipino faves. One of the tastiest foods I’ve ever had–that’s right, ever–is the lechon kawali she served, lush nuggets of pork belly first boiled and then fried and traditionally served with a liver sauce....

A determined surreality characterizes the Breakneck Speed Theatre Company’s suite of four one-acts, conceived and directed by Patrick O’Brien. Ominous, dreamlike figures persist onstage after their scenes have ended, like retinal afterimages. Scenes with well-established rhythms blow rods just as they’re approaching the finish line. Dialogue falls into recurring loops, and even the most striking eruptions of the bizarre are played like everyday occurrences. Only the last bit, a masterful mash-up that maps Dangerous Liaisons onto Fast Times at Ridgemont High, is what I’d call flat-out ha-ha....

A couple of weeks ago German director Wim Wenders was at Reckless Records’ Wicker Park store, shooting footage for a documentary on music scenes around the world, and between takes he decided to do a little record shopping. One of his purchases was a new box set of CDs by Chris Connelly, who happens to be the store’s manager. “He actually bought the box first, and then recognized my face from it,” says Connelly....