Eleffant Foot Co.’s hour-long Mezza Verita (“Half Truth”) is like a cross between a Fellini film and an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Masha Core and Sandro Gvardioshvili create dozens of characters in the course of a meandering story about itinerant actors who happen upon a castle. At least I think that’s what it was about–the largely improvised phantasmagoric scenes change swiftly and unexpectedly. Core’s most memorable character is an elderly professor fond of tapping his nose; Gvardioshvili plays his daughter, a googly-eyed little girl who seems to have the brain of a mosquito....

The Pixies played five nights at the Aragon last fall, Gang of Four played two at Metro last week . . . and this weekend the PAGANS play one show in the cozy confines of the Empty Bottle. The last time they reunited, in the late 80s, these Cleveland punk pioneers drew bigger crowds than they ever had during their original run, but so far only the garage-rock subculture has enshrined them alongside fellow Clevelanders like Pere Ubu, the Dead Boys, and the Electric Eels....

Craig Wright used to write for Six Feet Under, and it shows. Like the HBO series, his play combines self-entranced characters with self-impressed narrative gimmicks to create a perfect storm of self-regard. Only, where the TV show was satisfied to watch itself explore the navels of a few Californians, Recent Tragic Events has bigger fish to trivialize. Using pretentious pseudo-Pirandellian devices, Wright shows us 9/11 through the eyes of four young urbanites (and a sock puppet) to whom the catastrophe they call “the thing” is merely a backdrop for personal traumas and undergraduate philosophizing....

If the Chicago region’s most important transportation planning body, which decides how to spend roughly $3 billion annually in federal and state money, were going to change the definition of the metropolitan area by bringing in a new suburban county, effectively robbing Cook County of precious transportation dollars, you’d think that everybody on the Cook County Board would, at the very least, have heard of the change. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Laughing through your tears performs minor miracles in the Saturday-morning haven of six Louisiana ladies. Robert Harling’s play, set in a hair salon, is more intimate than his 1989 screenplay, which mistakenly introduced the ladies’ idiot men, but it’s still handicapped by a final scene in which one woman’s grief morphs into an irrelevant physical gag. Easy Street Players’ warmhearted revival captures the characters’ sisterly solidarity, and Justin Amellio’s staging is less vulgar and more gracious than other productions I’ve seen....

Japanese director Takashi Miike, best known for gruesome and sadistic shockers like Audition and Ichi the Killer, makes a left turn into family entertainment with this colorful and wildly imaginative fantasy (2005) inspired by Japanese folklore (as rendered by the venerable manga artist Shigeru Mizuki). A timid little boy from a broken home is drafted to save humanity from an evil mistress and her horrific army of giant, rattletrap robots; coming to his aid is a crazy assortment of forest goblins, or yokai, including a humanoid turtle, an armless creature whose blue head inflates like a balloon, a woman with an infinitely elastic neck, and a one-eyed parasol with a huge, lolling tongue....

Artist Jimmy Baker and his wife, architect Jil Baker, reflect on Iraq in “True Diplomacy,” now at Western Exhibitions, relying for many of their images and objects on the proposed immense U.S. Embassy complex in Baghdad. Jimmy Baker strikes an ominous note in his statement, writing that the fortress symbolizes the developed world: “a sterile modernist utopia.” A series of dark prints of fortified vistas, “Vision of Progress” combines digital renderings and screen printing and is finished with a seemingly bulletproof coat of sparkling resin....

Appointed principal cellist of the Cleveland Orchestra at 20, Lynn Harrell has since become one of a handful of upper-echelon soloists. His extensive discography includes a terrific recording on London/Decca of the Dvorak Cello Concerto, a lush, romantic masterpiece from a genre that’s surprisingly small. Nearly all the great composers wrote at least one concerto for the violin, but many thought the cello was better suited to chamber music. Even Dvorak didn’t like it much–he thought its high notes too nasal, its bottom too growling....

The seventh annual European Union Film Festival continues Friday through Thursday, March 19 through 25, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Tickets are $9, $5 for Film Center members; for more information call 312-846-2800. All films will be screened in 35-millimeter, and films marked with an * are highly recommended. Presence Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hoping for one last score, a world-weary criminal (Yannis Angelakas) enlists three women–a hooker, a drunk, and a hostile ex-lover–to defraud a violent drug gang in this sluggish 2002 Greek noir by Nikos Nikolaidis....

The combination of Jon Langford and the Museum of Contemporary Art calls up some fond memories for me–I’ll never forget the Mekons’ 1997 MCA presentation of Pussy, King of the Pirates, which was one of Kathy Acker’s final performances. This time around Langford’s staging an autobiographical multimedia piece, The Executioner’s Last Songs, which is partly inspired by the trio of anti-death penalty albums of the same name he’s released with the Pine Valley Cosmonauts....

At this point in their lives, you’d think multi-instrumentalist songbirds Kate and Anna McGarrigle would be able to line up a simple distribution deal without too much trouble: They’ve been hit songwriters (the Linda Ronstadt title track “Heart Like a Wheel” is Anna’s), musicians’ musicians, and objects of cult veneration since the mid-70s. Kate’s son, Rufus Wainwright, has grown up to be a big pop star. Their eighth album, The McGarrigle Hour (Hannibal, 1998), an extended-family-assisted salmagundi of folk tunes, Victorian parlor songs, and highlights from their own songbook, was a critical favorite, a solid seller, and a thing of great beauty....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Christine Tatum, president of the Society of Professional Journalists, one of the dozens of media groups advocating for the legislation, thinks this year might be different–and not simply because Democrats now control both houses of Congress. After all, the act’s most ardent supporter in the House is Mike Pence, and in the Senate it’s Richard Lugar, both Indiana Republicans....

Adapted by Mary Zimmerman from Marcel Proust’s own writings and from the memoirs of his housekeeper, this one-woman show feels like a dramatized book report. It may be proof that Zimmerman, deprived of a young, athletic, gorgeously clad and choreographed ensemble, cannot maintain the dramatic tension needed to keep an audience awake for 90 minutes. Or, since Eric Rosen directs for About Face Theatre, it might prove that only Zimmerman can release the magic in her words....

Gemini (Blujazz), the new album from local saxophonist Nick Bisesi, is exactly what you’d expect given his background: eclectic, rhythmically intense, and sweating blues and funk. Bisesi studied in the 80s with early Chicago avant-gardist Joe Daley and later with Dave Liebman, a Coltrane adept, soprano-sax maven, and alumnus of Miles Davis’s electric band. Since returning to Chicago from New York a couple years back, he’s recorded with Angel Melendez & the 911 Mambo Orchestra and the newly reorganized Urban Knights with Ramsey Lewis and Bobby Broom....

They’re closing this place to make way for the el expansion. It’s sad–this was my hangout for a long time. Once I was sitting at the end of the bar when one of the late-shift bartenders came in with a really attractive blond. She sat down next to me and we started chatting. She explained that she was in from California for a wedding and that she’d grown up in Evanston....

Bill Lederer’s darkly humorous new play for the Atlas Theater Company focuses on a dying comatose patient (Guy Massey, struggling for dignity in a difficult role). As his interior monologue makes clear, Joe Gill is no blank-brained Terri Schiavo: he can sense the surrounding world–full of thieves, opportunists, and betrayers–but can’t strike back. Unfortunately it’s hard to connect the pathetic accident that’s caused his daily humiliations, like falling out of bed and wanting to pull out his life support, with any dramatic purpose....

When A TASTE OF HEAVEN owner Dan McCauley learned a couple years ago that his landlord planned to convert the Ravenswood building that housed his cafe and bakery into condominiums, he started looking for a new space. He found one–nearly twice as large as the old location–and last month he moved his equipment, staff, and furniture to Andersonville. “I heard just last week that he changed his mind and a new restaurant will go into the space,” says McCauley....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “One key economic fact that the nanny-state conservatives understand very well, and that confuses many progressives, is that one person’s income is a cost to another person. Nanny-state conservatives clearly recognize that when they make the wages of auto workers and nannies lower, they make themselves richer, because the goods and services produced by autoworkers and nannies will cost less....

Dear editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It is noted that the Chicago Marathon has a history dating back to 1977. Also noted that Chicago has a history of motor sports, years before Daytona, Florida, and Indianapolis, Indiana. org/pages/2380.html. Throughout the next 111 years there would be motorsports events in Chicago at venues like the Elgin National Road Race (held annually during the years 1910-’15 and 1919-’20), Speedway Park in Maywood (the Loyola University Medical Center now occupies the site), Santa Fe Speedway in Willow Springs, Raceway Park in Blue Island, Waukegan Speedway, Rockford Speedway, O’Hare Stadium in Schiller Park, Soldier Field (yes, in Chicago), and Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet....

By the time she was ten years old, Alice Bradley had seen up close two dead bodies lashed to posts on a trail in the Belgian Congo. She’d lain awake in a tent listening to the screams of a man being killed and slept with the formaldehyde-soaked remains of a young gorilla beneath her cot. She’d accompanied her parents on three excursions to Africa and been described in the New York Times as the “First White Child Ever Seen by the Pigmy Tribes....