I was astonished by how tastemakers turned on Wilco after the release of Sky Blue Sky (Nonesuch) last spring. The band abandoned the meticulous “experimental” production approach ushered in by Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and went for a more straightforward sound–at least on the surface. On his first studio effort with the group, guitarist Nels Cline—the album’s not-so-secret weapon–brilliantly subverts 70s-style rock solos with weird harmonies and counterintuitive patterns and demonstrates a melodic sensibility most rock guitarists could only dream of....

You’d think that having three different directors would make for confusion beyond what Shakespeare had in mind: Sabrina Lloyd stages the court scenes, Don Johnson directs the fairies, and Devin Brain rules over the rude mechanicals. But GroundUp Theatre’s choice of a Mardi Gras theme and New Orleans setting creates a giddy milieu that easily encompasses accents from Elvis to Yosemite Sam, fashions from goth to Tammy Faye, and characterizations from a nerdy teenage Bottom to a cheerful voodoo-mambo Puck....

After surviving a potentially lethal tumble from a stage in 1979, soul legend Al Green turned almost exclusively to gospel music. Much of his recorded output since has suffered from weak material and mediocre arrangements, but Green’s otherworldly voice has never lost any of its transcendent power, even if his creamy falsetto has dropped slightly over time. In 1995 he briefly returned to the secular realm with Your Heart’s in Good Hands, but the change of subject matter didn’t alter the essential pattern: this time Green’s improvisational prowess let him sing his way past a lackluster set of contemporary R & B songs....

Clove Productions revives a concept originated by the defunct Great Beast Theater. This 70-minute variety show with a rotating repertory of performers has an amateur-hour feel–both its downfall and saving grace. On opening night the level of talent varied wildly, and poor acoustics and no amplification hampered a few acts. But some of the missteps were charming: J.T. Newman’s bra landed in the light rigging, enhancing her dippy-stripper persona, and singer Maxi-Madelynn Wood dealt courageously with a skipping CD, bonding with the audience as she snatched victory from the jaws of defeat....

You’d never guess at a glance that the wood-paneled office in Barry Phipps’s Goose Island recording studio houses a record label. It’s only the size of a modest bedroom, with two desks taking up the bulk of the floor space, and it’s tidy–there aren’t unopened boxes of CDs stacked everywhere. This room isn’t just the headquarters but also the printing press, manufacturing plant, and distribution center for Phipps’s Tight Ship label: album art is designed and printed here, CDs burned and shrink-wrapped, orders filled and shipped....

There’s a bleakness in the Berkshires, and Chris Pureka, a folk chanteuse based in Northampton, Massachusetts, is consumed by it. In her vision of New England, small-town intimacy and small-minded provincialism go hand in hand, and the road that takes you from a dying mill town may deposit you, a hundred miles later, in an even more forsaken hollow. On Pureka’s first full-length, the self-released Driving North, both her story lines and her choked soprano vocals–think Stevie Nicks singing Leonard Cohen–invoke that regional claustrophobia with an intensity that verges on painful....

In the last few years bluegrass veteran Del McCoury has found an enthusiastic new audience among the citizens of the jam-band nation. I’m not surprised: with prog-grass bands like Leftover Salmon and the String Cheese Incident proliferating like so many weeds, those listeners have got to be hungry for a musician who knows that hot-shit playing is meaningless without solid songwriting and terrific singing. McCoury’s embraced his recent success on his own terms–onstage his band still wears crisp suits, sings and plays unamplified, and harmonizes around a mike or two....

Seeing a play in Chicago can be easier and cheaper than going to the movies. Most theaters offer student rates, low-price or free previews and industry nights, and/or discounted rush tickets. Weeknights are usually cheaper than weekends (and seats are easier to get). Some theaters have a regular “pay what you can” policy; others offer free seats to volunteer ushers. Even high-priced commercial shows like Wicked and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee have day-of-show lotteries for bargain seats....

In the eyes of journalists, authors, and academics plagiarism is a sin. It’s no big deal in a courtroom, where judges swipe language all the time. On December 29, when immigration judge Elizabeth Hacker of Detroit ordered Ibrahim Parlak deported, originality wasn’t her concern. Huge unattributed chunks of her 59-page opinion–one of them 15 pages long–were lifted almost verbatim from the Department of Homeland Security’s pretrial brief. The DHS lawyers had no reason to complain....

Charles Sheeler: Across Media The Art Institute’s superb exhibit of works by Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) reveals that he was a far more expressive artist than most have thought. This painter, photographer, filmmaker, and textile designer is best known for precisionist paintings of American industrial landscapes, which some critics of his time dismissed as “tinted photographs”; one writer called them “septic” and “bloodless.” This show originated at the National Gallery in Washington, where it was curated by Charles Brock, but Sarah E....

Rhys Chatham’s Essentialist | Empty Bottle, 9/20 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chatham certainly didn’t form Essentialist to prove he could still cut it in that macho sound world where insane volume levels are the preferred method of cockfighting–his credibility on that front is already permanently assured. He has a background as a classical pianist, studied with La Monte Young, and in the 70s curated experimental-music programs at the Kitchen in New York, but all along he’s been the most rock ‘n’ roll guy in the downtown avant pantheon–more so than John Cale, never mind Glenn Branca....

It’s hard to believe, but in 1964 Murray Schisgal’s mildly cynical romantic comedy, about neurotic New Yorkers tangled in a sick love triangle, attracted the talents of Alan Arkin, Anne Jackson, Eli Wallach, and director Mike Nichols. The play ran for more than two years on Broadway, and Nichols won a Tony for his efforts, but today one wonders why any self-respecting troupe would choose to revive this glorified sketch. The protagonists–a hysterical male, his womanizing friend, and the castrating female they both love–feel like comedy stereotypes....

Guitarist John Greenfield started his latest band, Illinois First!, after picking up a 1986 grade school textbook called Discovering Illinois at a yard sale last fall. The lyrics for “Nauvoo (City of Joseph)” are culled from what he found inside: “Our town of 15,000 was bigger than Chicago / Made of bricks and mortar, plaster and paint / But the gentiles hated and / Feared us / And threatened our very lives / They accused us of polygamy– / Having multiple wives....

This “convergence of Chicago artists,” presented by Performing Arts Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, runs weekends through April 18. The avant-garde showcase features presentations by some of the city’s most adventurous artists working in the disciplines of theater, performance, circus arts, storytelling, dance, music, video, and sound and installation art. Participants include Plasticene, Local Infinities, A Red Orchid Theatre, Sheldon B. Smith, 500 Clown, Mathew Wilson, Lucky Pierre, Goat Island, David Kodeski, Mad Shak Dance Company, Connor Kalista, the Walkabout Theater Company, Carol Genetti, the Bumblinni Brothers, and the Curious Theatre Branch....

This old-fashioned circus supplies a lot of bang for the buck. Animals from dogs to tigers and elephants. Beautiful girls in skimpy costumes. Daredevil athletes and trainers. Clowns willing to play the fool so we don’t have to. The lead funnyman is Bello Nock, the handsome ringmaster’s pesky doppelganger. Notable for his hair, which is gelled into amazing proportions, Nock is also an acrobat who braves the Whirling Vortex of Vertigo....

Cecil’s latest column on global warming [April 7] is far from “Straight Dope.” The connection between burning fossil fuels and global warming is the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And atmospheric CO2 has been measured directly for decades. The measurements have gone up. Cecil raises the point that the burning of fossil fuels is a small fraction of the flow of CO2; true, but the question is whether it leads to an important increase....

There’s a fine line between being selfish and smug and playing someone who’s selfish and smug–and Bob Kulhan crosses it many times in this sometimes hilarious, sometimes just plain awful comedy show. As its writer and director and the star of most of the sketches, he proves again and again the truth of the Martin Short/Jiminy Glick Theorem: you can’t continue to get laughs just doing the same bit. In Kulhan’s case it’s impersonating his conceited, no-talent showbiz alter ego, Shecky, who acts as emcee and appears in some of the most abysmal sketches, including one in which he plays a ventriloquist with a severely burned, severely depressed dummy....

Winesburg, Ohio When the book appeared in 1919, however, its champions and detractors alike spoke passionately of its frankness, roughness, and unrelenting search for the “wart on the face of humanity.” Part of its boldness lay in Anderson’s experimental plotlessness and startlingly direct prose, as he boiled down the cadences of American vernacular to simple declarative sentences. But what made Anderson truly iconoclastic to his contemporaries were his unflinching depictions of emotional torment, most commonly fueled by debilitating sexual repression....

Jason Pierce’s Spiritualized remains the most populist and successful band to emerge from the breakdown of Spacemen 3. But Spectrum and E.A.R., the major projects from Pete Kember (aka Sonic Boom), have a certain timeless density to their sound(s) that’s helped them age considerably better. Holed up in his lab in Rugby, UK, the mad scientist of minimalist richness hasn’t extensively toured the States in some five years, but his late-90s shows at the Empty Bottle and elsewhere were pulsing, surging revelations....

This late, rarely performed Tennessee Williams play has been compared to Beckett and Pinter–and I’d add Sartre. But it inverts the claustrophobic gravity of these writers’ minimalist scenarios, which, however blank, possess a concrete, crushing reality. The existential terror of The Two-Character Play is defined by lightness, to use Kundera’s term: insubstantiality, transparence, oblivion. Dissociative-disorder duo Clare and Felice have none of the dingy, dour majesty of Didi and Gogo; instead they flounder delicately, describing chaotic arabesques, desperately pretending to be....