Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film, about a wiretapper enduring a personal crisis, appears an unlikely candidate for transfer to the stage. The tight montage and brilliant sound design in particular would seem difficult to re-create in a live production. Yet Pyewacket does a great job of finding stage equivalents for Coppola’s cinematic effects. Adapter Kate Harris and director Kenneth Lee play scenes over and over, just as Coppola reruns footage again and again to indicate his protagonist’s growing obsession with one of his surveillance subjects....

In 2004, when Wal-Mart proposed opening stores in Chicago, the City Council encountered a new–and to many of its members, an unsettling–phenomenon: debate. Some aldermen argued that the big-box retailer offered wages that were too low. Others argued that it brought jobs and shopping options to neighborhoods desperately in need of both. Everyone claimed to be fighting for the rights of the poor. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dave Vite, president of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, argued against any minimum-wage requirement....

Major plot points in some recent movies have involved the evacuation of a town due to its being intentionally flooded by a new dam. Has this ever happened in real life? Are there submerged towns scattered about this great land containing untold riches, ripe for harvest? –Mattyj, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And yes, this is long-standing practice in the U.S. too, if that’s the great land you mean....

I’m getting mixed signals on a story about the great Native American leader Geronimo. According to various references, his bones were stolen from his grave in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he was a prisoner until his death. Some accounts claim they now reside in the famous Tomb at Yale’s Skull and Bones Society. One version of the story has the president’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, being the man who took them. Any definitive answer on this?...

Writer, actor, and director Shawn Reddy seeks to explode the idea that you can understand history by memorizing a collection of immutable facts: his eccentric plays based on historical research find the fault lines that indicate tectonic shifts in how we interpret the past. In My Name Is Mudd, which focused on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, he considered theories about the conspiracies that might have been involved in the murder of our 16th president, and in the process mocked plays that pretend to reconstruct personalities and events....

Spare in language and rich in ideas, Caryl Churchill’s 2002 one-act marks her continuing evolution from sprawling examinations of sexual and class politics like Top Girls and Cloud Nine to less overtly political but absolutely chilling portraits of the tangled impulses underlying relationships. Human cloning is the engine driving the play’s plot, but Churchill’s double- and triple-edged script covers parental neglect, urban paranoia, and the entirely human but inevitably monstrous desire to erase the past....

Channeling Rod Serling, narrator Mike Rogalski introduces this unsatisfying evening of four original one-acts with a steely gaze and in mellifluous yet ominous tones. Supposedly selected to provoke terror, the most these scripts do is gross us out, as when the woman in W. Bryan Thompson’s play goes to disturbing lengths to be one with her husband. Even there the actors overplay Thompson’s repetitive script, nonsensically directed by Sabrina Lloyd. The one-acts by Paul Barile, Raymond Benson and Doug Redenius, and Kendall Gray are similarly weak and also feature overwrought, artificial performances, though each is staged by a different director....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I went to Nance Klehm’s pickling workshop last Sunday and came home with a briny mason jar stuffed to the brim with kimchi. It burbled away in a cupboard, next to the coffee cups, for five days, and when it was done it was tart and tangy and very garlicky, just like I like it–though a little more ginger wouldn’t have hurt....

Garrick Ohlsson, a student of Claudio Arrau, entered the Juilliard School at 13, and in 1970, at 22, he became the first American to win the prestigious International Chopin Competition in Warsaw. He’s probably best known for his Chopin–he’s recorded the complete works–but last year in Switzerland he performed all 32 Beethoven sonatas, a monumental feat he’s repeating this summer at Ravinia and Tanglewood. The five CDs of Beethoven sonatas he’s recorded show an incredible technique and a sound that can be enormous yet sensitive in quieter moments....

The night was dead like only a freezing Monday in February after a few consecutive days of relative warmth can be. There was no traffic, no honking; the usual meathead crawl had slowed to a trickle. Even those girls in sparkly, floaty tops had their coats on for once. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It seemed like the only patch of life in the city was this one little party in the back of a taco stand....

Leaning back from the table, ever-present Rothman smoldering away, Christopher Hitchens turned from globalpolitik to what was really on his mind: why the nickname “Spanker” goes so well with most British surnames, and what the sexiest word in the English language might be. “The most exciting word in the language?” wondered the apostate ideologue rhetorically, tugging at his drink. “It’s preemptive. Yes, preemptive. In fact, I’m getting excited by it right now....

Music is hardly an exact science–sometimes things go wrong. Say, for instance, that you’re trying to start a hippie blues band, but then you do some fucked-up amount of acid and all of a sudden you’re in Black Sabbath. Or maybe you and your friends start out trying to play Crypt-style garage stomp, but you end up getting possessed by the spirit of Lemmy-era Hawkwind and your band turns into a monster of freaked-out rock mayhem....

Last month Northfield-based Kraft Foods Inc. sold off Post, one of the country’s oldest cereal brands, for $2.6 billion. The deal was just the latest in the processed food behemoth’s complicated history of mergers, acquisitions, spin-offs, and sell-offs. Shuffling properties in the pursuit of profit is of course nothing new among corporations, but the sale prompted me to take a good look at The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Cheese, an enormous coffee-table history of the 104-year-old company....

Pelt follows musical mavericks like Harry Partch and Henry Flynt in combining Eastern influences and North American folk sounds to make visceral, challenging art music. They didn’t start out in that direction: the band’s earliest singles were middling indie rock derivative of Sonic Youth. But by the time they recorded their first album, Brown Cyclopaedia (VHF), ten years ago, Mike Gangloff, Jack Rose, and Pat Best had channeled their energies into breaking down the boundaries between noisy rock and free noise....

You wrote this two weeks ago: “Hello, straight people? . . . Most of you seem content to rubberneck while gay people have the shit kicked out of us, and while that’s maddening, I suppose it’s understandable: it’s not your fight. But what explains your passivity when your own rights are being attacked?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We live in a time when privacy is under attack, and sexual privacy is a prime target,” Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union, told me to tell you....

Dessa Rose Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For her novel, Williams drew on the story of a female slave in Kentucky who in 1829 was sentenced to be hanged for leading an uprising on a coffle, a chain gang of slaves headed to market, but was spared until she could deliver her baby–a valuable asset, of course. Williams imagines that this woman escaped and met a white woman who turned her North Carolina farm into a sanctuary for runaway slaves in 1830, after her husband left her....

Roads of Kiarostami This year Onion City’s opening-night program reflects this tendency even more: it includes a video by cult horror director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Peter Tscherkassky’s radical reworking of footage from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in 35-millimeter and ‘Scope, Andy Warhol’s two 1966 “screen tests” with Bob Dylan, and best of all Abbas Kiarostami’s half-hour Roads of Kiarostami. This video starts out as a straightforward and unassuming introduction to a selection of his black-and-white landscape photographs, but it turns into something poetic and frighteningly up-to-date that speaks to a much broader constituency....

Swampy but Smooth Catfish Haven has released a pair of engaging EPs in the past three years, but its first full-length, the brand-new Tell Me, outstrips those samplers by a mile. Propelled by George Hunter’s beaten-dog wail and crackling acoustic guitar, the local trio have imagined a compelling indie-rock-folk-soul hybrid, and live they play with an intensity that hints at their hardcore roots. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

friday11 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » HAL RAMMEL To celebrate the tenth birthday of his Penumbra label, this Wisconsin instrument inventor and improviser has released three characteristically indescribable seven-inch singles on which he plays one of his most ingenious creations–an amplified painter’s palette fitted with wooden dowels of different lengths and thicknesses. He plucks or bows the dowels and abstracts the result with electronics, creating otherwordly music–gurgles, whistles, ringing bell-like undulations–with an internal logic that gives it a surprisingly soothing flow....

Detroit singer Thornetta Davis began her career in the 80s singing in cover bands and blues groups. In 1991 she became a backup vocalist for MC5-influenced rockers Big Chief, and the band used her keening wail to good advantage on three albums before breaking up in the mid-90s. Their power chords and spiky metal-infused funk also propelled her through her debut, Sunday Morning Music (Sub Pop, 1996), a harrowing album full of desire and outrage....