The Open Cage Ensemble makes some good choices in its revival of Steve Martin’s thinking-man’s comedy. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Einstein’s death and the centenary of his most significant papers. And the production takes place in a bar: Martin imagines Picasso and Einstein meeting in a Paris bistro, where he contrasts their obsessions with those of various barflies. Abounding with delightful if sometimes anachronistic epiphanies about physics, art, and love, this 75-minute romp bubbles over with the optimism of its turn-of-the-century setting....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cambridge of Palms Out Sounds is probably pissed off at me right about now, because I called him at 4 in the morning simply to ask him if he thought it would be ethical of us, as a music blog, to post joints from the new Jay-Z album immediately. After ceremoniously uttering some not so affectionate words, he basically concurred with my current sentiment- that being, these leaks are fucking up my experience as a fan....

It’s the last Friday night in January at Cell Block, a leather bar on North Halsted. The club is packed with leathermen, skinheads, and enough beer bellies to fill an Oktoberfest tent. A few women dressed like tarty cheerleaders bob through the crowd, and a gaggle of straight-looking people, apparently someone’s work friends, huddle at the far end of the bar sipping drinks. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His name is Jinx Titanic, and the band’s is too....

There’s a lot of anger in Teatro Luna’s 75-minute program of monologues by four writer-performers–balanced by a lot of humor. The comedy might be bitter and black or gentle and forgiving, but even the darkest of these pieces made me laugh. The most challenging is the only one that’s not explicitly autobiographical: in To Red Stick, Tanya Saracho plays a well-educated Latina who makes a disturbing discovery about her husband. The character’s combination of privilege and hostility–she hates her children, her maid, the academics who surround her, the Boston weather–makes her pretty unsympathetic and the piece emotionally monotonous....

The tenth edition of Columbia College’s annual literary festival, presented by the school’s fiction writing department, offers readings, signings, and panels with authors and Columbia faculty and students, this year under the theme “Fighting Words: Stories of Risk and Rebellion.” Events run Sunday, March 12, through Friday, March 17, at various venues as shown below. All are free. For more info call 312-344-8559 or 312-344-7611 or see storyweek.colum.edu. MONDAY 13...

Lora Fosberg’s humorous, slightly cartoonish paintings at Linda Warren are notable for their accessibility. While she was an art major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, classes in psychology and philosophy led her to believe that “humanity is all one mind–we’re the same.” At that time she decided she wanted her art to appeal to “the guy who pumps my gas along with the professor at the university. But I’ve also always wanted to push the boundaries, surprise my viewers....

A few minutes of this clumsy, emotionally threadbare production may convince you Madison’s Nonsense Company (formerly based in San Diego) shouldn’t make theater. For three and a half hours, ten nonactors stumble through Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 classic, showing little regard for aesthetic unity or psychological credibility. But as the nonsingers in Cook County Theatre Department’s Tosca showed in 1996, engaged incompetence can crack open a chestnut. This troupe is an offshoot of the clever lefty folk duo the Prince Myshkins–Rick Burkhardt and Andy Gricevich, here directing Burkhardt’s new translation....

Friday 18 DIALS Flex Time (Latest Flame), the full-length debut from local power-pop band the Dials, bristles with stabbing guitars, lamp-shade-on-head Farfisa tickles, and petulant vocals from Rebecca Crawford (of the Puta-Pons) and Patti Gran (of the New Black). The album was recorded last year, before the tragic death of drummer Doug Meis in a traffic accident that also claimed the lives of Silkworm’s Michael Dahlquist and Crawford’s husband, the Returnables’ John Glick....

When the Smoking Gun Misfires That was wrong. Gorajczyk said no such thing to the grand jury investigating the DuPage 7–he didn’t even appear before it. The grand jury did get a secondhand account of Gorajczyk’s story from an investigator working for the special prosecutor, but earlier drafts of the Tribune’s story awkwardly blurred the story’s provenance: “Knight, Gorajczyk recalled later, told him…” Later editing that made the passage more specific also made it inaccurate....

The “worst enemies in the struggle against real anti-Semitism are the philo-Semites,” writes DePaul University political science professor Norman Finkelstein in Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, scheduled to hit bookstores on August 29. “Alongside Israel, they are the main fomenters of anti-Semitism in the world today. Coddling them is not the answer. They need to be stopped.” Philo-Semites, he says, are American Jewish elites who use the Holocaust and the charge of anti-Semitism to silence any criticism of Israel or themselves, and at the top of the list he puts Harvard professor and author Alan Dershowitz....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For a fixed price of $29.95 diners get a multicourse meal that reflects Brazil’s ethnic and culinary diversity: baba ghanoush served with pita, three varieties of pasta, unlimited servings of chicken, beef, and lamb cooked on a grill imported from Brazil, and a number of sides, among them a green salad and fresh vegetables. I was pretty impressed by the quality of all (and thankful that they didn’t pile on the portions), but oddly, in a place so meat-centric, what I flipped for were the starches....

I’d love the sauteed shrimp, but God won’t let me. The fundamentalists who go on about Leviticus 18:22 (“You shall not lie with a man as with a woman: that is an abomination”) don’t seem to have read Leviticus 11:9, which says, “Of creatures that live in water…all that have neither fins nor scales, whether in salt or fresh water…you shall regard as vermin….You shall not eat their flesh.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A richer version of Terkel’s take was described by the journalist Brent Staples in his memoir Parallel Time, which is excerpted as “Mr. Bellow’s Planet” in the outstanding anthology Literary Journalism. Staples–a former Reader contributor and Sun-Times reporter–was, like Bellow, once a young, gifted intellectual at the University of Chicago, but Staples was a black grad student in Hyde Park, a neighborhood with a long and unpleasant history of racial tension....

The Reader’s Web site now permits comments on stories. Visit chicagoreader.com to join the fray. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Has DeLuca’s criticism of teams “standing by their stained man” extended to the Cubs and Sammy Sosa? What about the Giants and Barry Bonds? Calling this “typical Cardinals fashion” seems a bit misleading. It’s been the typical fashion of every Major League team faced with this problem, not just the rival of one of our hometown franchises....

I know you’re not supposed to touch the art in galleries, but during the opening at Wendy Cooper last Friday night I couldn’t help myself. Standing in front of an electric high chair that was, believe it or not, plugged into the wall, I just had to see if it worked. I touched a metal ring inside the headpiece with one hand and a U-shaped contact at the left ankle with the other and winced, waiting for the zap....

Since the mid-90s, Jean Grae–daughter of jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim and singer Sathima Bea Benjamin–has been a preeminent underground MC, working in groups like Natural Resource (as What? What?) and doing cameos for everyone from the Herbaliser to Mr. Len to local MC Diverse. But since she released her debut album, Attack of the Attacking Things, in 2002, she’s made it clear that she wants a wider audience, and despite her killer skills it hasn’t happened....

Not Guilty Isn’t the Same as Innocent No one believes any longer that the innocent have nothing to fear from the death penalty. A contrary idea now seems like the audacious one–that some of the prisoners set free actually committed the crimes they were convicted of. “Of the six people ‘exonerated,’” Marquis went on, “two–Sonia Jacobs, played by Susan Sarandon, and Kerry Cook, played by Aidan Quinn, are both factually and legally GUILTY....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Starting with the first paragraph (arguably the piece’s best moment), Jessica Hopper renders in flawless fashion the peculiarly postprandial esprit de corps of a youth culture which has itself been consumed by its own appetites for consumption. Two moments in film spell the rout of civilization as we know it: the first is in Deliverance, when Ned Beatty reduces the miraculous impromptu duel between the lad with the banjo and Beatty’s friend (Ronny Cox) playing guitar to a prompting to “give [the lad] a couple bucks....

Mathias Schauwecker The powerful figures in Mathias Schauwecker’s large paintings on paper at the Zhou B. Art Center disconcertingly blur the line between man and beast. They’re also humorous, as in Lazy as a… and Brave as a…, where the human figures look froglike. Schauwecker says that some viewers have said the creature with its back to us in Stubborn as a… resembles a gorilla. Croak Like a… depicts a gorilla but gives it the stature and grandeur usually reserved for portraits of people....

The narrator is a middle-aged bachelor whose mother languishes in an elder-care facility, so perhaps it’s not surprising he more or less adopts the fiercely independent old homeless woman living in a van parked in his garden. British writer Alan Bennett, who adapted the script in 1999 from his own 1989 autobiographical account, attempts to solve the mystery of Miss Shepherd’s past, and their relationship gives him a forum to weigh the merits of going gentle into that good night against liberty-or-death vagrancy....