The Fireside’s Unlikely Allies Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Four years later there’s been no official word from the city on a change in the Fireside’s status, but the club has started spending more money on upkeep–not the behavior of people who know they’re running a doomed operation. The breathtakingly skanky bathrooms have gotten a partial makeover, some maintenance has been done on the lanes, the roof’s been repaired, and there’s a new coat of battleship gray paint on the paneling in the stage area....

TimeLine Theatre–whose motto is “yesterday’s stories, today’s topics”–couldn’t have chosen a more apt season opener than this thoughtful, suspenseful drama about Benedict Arnold. Richard Nelson’s 1996 play, receiving its local premiere, doesn’t whitewash Arnold, a Revolutionary War hero who secretly switched allegiance and tried to hand General George Washington over to the British. But Nelson illuminates Arnold and his actions, which were motivated in part by outrage at Congress’s mismanagement of the war and civilian authorities’ suppression of dissent....

The Passive Consumer I told the hawker that Rose was taking a beating. “They’re closing [the station] in September anyway,” he said. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The drivers who bring Rose’s papers to her each morning have told her other stations are also being hurt. “We’re way down,” says Jay Gandhi, who owns the kiosk at the Fullerton el. He used to get 250 copies of the Sun-Times and 350 copies of the Tribune each morning and sell nearly all of them....

“God has a monopoly on time,” director Alexander Sokurov told an interviewer shortly after completing this 1990 film, and its long takes, with little action or movement, create a sense of how time inexorably grinds everything down. A young man tries to dispose of his father’s corpse in the snowy Russian north, a story that references the spiritual emptiness of the dying Soviet state (in the obnoxious behavior of a funeral home bureaucrat) and the trap of material life (in an overhead shot of the son ransacking a wardrobe for burial funds)....

friday28 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » cEmile naoumoff Faure’s 13 nocturnes for piano span most of his life as a composer, straddling the 19th and 20th centuries. In an impressionistic current with eddies of romantic turbulence, they depart from Chopin and Schumann, heading toward Debussy and Ravel. Pianist Emile Naoumoff, here playing Nocturnes nos. 2, 6, 7, and 13, approaches them as a progression: in his hands the uneasy tenderness of the First Nocturne’s opening is a premonition of the last’s desolation....

Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor take a Monty Python-esque run at history “from BC to The OC.” Puns, sight gags, and historical revisions abound (a Helen Keller cameo, for example, at the Sistine Chapel), appealing to short attention spans and keeping the lively cast of three hopping, bopping, and pulling chickens out of their pants. The Noble Fool Theatricals space, however, defies logic. The work is played on a low stage in a narrow meeting room with rows of chairs on the same level (meaning obstructed views for many) and side entrance doors, so latecomers go bumbling through the front rows to find a (general admission) seat....

There are few things less interesting to look at than a washing machine–except maybe a dryer. But hit the standard machine with a zap of personality and you just might interest the people who go for the new Beetle and Razr phones. Designing a whimsical washer was a natural extension of childhood for Daniel, 36, and Christopher, 33, who spent their early years building things together. The only sons of a game warden and a homemaker who had studied art and had wanted to work at New York magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, the boys lived half a mile outside rural Chilton, Wisconsin, between a cornfield and an alfalfa field....

friday13 This is a release party for both Chin Up Chin Up, who headline, and Make Believe, who play second; the Oxford Collapse opens. Illusionist Ryan Williams will perform before the music. a 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, 773-276-3600 or 866-468-3401, $10. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » stefon harris quintet Stefon Harris emerged in the mid-90s as the most important new voice on jazz vibraphone, thriving in mainstream settings as a sideman and, within a few years, as a leader....

Creating a sort of “Odd Couple Live” experience, unlikely best friends Scott Woldman, a Jewish preppy English teacher, and Jim Jarvis, a beer-swilling, knife-wielding south-sider, share tales from their lives, choosing from a repertoire that includes bear-hunting adventures, a doomed eighth-grade ski trip, and the treatise “Why I Don’t Date Chicks From the North Shore.” Riveting storytelling–vivid details and nearly psychic attunement and repartee–makes the show’s wobbly structure unimportant: why bother with audience interviews and scenes that go nowhere?...

This harmless satire, written and directed by Mike McKeown and Peter Krinke, targets the intersection of corporate greed and individual vanity that drives everything from fashion to advertising. Smarter than it is funny, it’s a little too reminiscent of Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (among other comedic precedents) for its own good. And the bits that are potentially best are diluted by technically deficient performances or–like the guitar-piano duel between hero and doppelganger–cut off prematurely, just as they’re beginning to roll....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In response to the recent death of Ingmar Bergman, the Chicago Cinema Forum has organized a Bergman marathon (Chicagoist termed it a “crash course in Bergman”) to be held at the Chopin Theatre this coming weekend. Included will be the local premiere (two screenings) of a recent three-part, three-hour documentary about Bergman made for Swedish TV and screenings of five major Bergman features: 16-millimeter prints of Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), and Persona (1966), and a DVD projection of the 188-minute version of Fanny and Alexander (1982), a Bergman miniseries that was the last thing he ever shot on film....

This high-spirited, well-intentioned new musical by writer-lyricist Sherman Yellen (The Rothschilds) chronicles the six-year period, 1919 to 1925, when Josephine Baker was evolving from an East Saint Louis panhandler dancing in front of a Piggly Wiggly to the toast of Paris. Wally Harper’s mercurial score traces that evolution, moving from high-stepping cakewalks and hard-boiled blues to the “Africanized” jazz that seemed to Parisians primitive and pure. Monique Whittington offers powerhouse performances as Josephine’s mother and as her vaudeville benefactress, carrying Steve Scott’s workmanlike staging of this creakily constructed bio-musical....

First, I’d like to compliment you on your insightful restaurant reviews. Your descriptive, punchy writing makes it enjoyable to read about the many fine eats our city has to offer. Your “How to Eat Ethnic” metareview in the “Chicago 101” issue was a good introduction to such. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » However, I was dismayed by your subtle yet brutal dis to Pittsburgh eating establishments in the aforementioned article....

When trumpeter Maurice Brown left Chicago a couple years back he was a precociously talented kid, intoxicated by his own dazzling technique but just sober enough to respect tradition. He returns as an inventive genre blender, the leader of his own hot band, and the toast of his adopted hometown, New Orleans, where his weekly sessions at Snug Harbor have become a must-see. Even Chicagoans who already knew about Brown–from Jazz Festival shots in 2001 and 2003 and a slew of guest appearances at local clubs–were surprised and impressed by his debut, Hip to Bop, which he released on his own label last year....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In October Reuters’s full-time correspondent in the online virtual world Second Life reported on a possible consequence of the booming in-game economy there: taxes. Players exchange real-world money for in-game money, which is then used to buy virtual goods and services from other players; as much as $500,000 changes hands every day, and Second Life’s GDP is estimated at a real-world $64 million....

Regenstein Center Grand Opening INFO 847-989-7313, chicagobotanic.org Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shall I fess up a bias? My family has these instructions: on the night I croak they’re to smuggle my corpse through the garden’s entrance, over its bowered bridge, and past the statue of Linnaeus to a spot beside a certain linden, where they’re to dig a deep, narrow hole, pay whatever bribes necessary if discovered, and dump me in....

Everyone knows that people who hang out near the food at a party fall into two groups: they’re either socially awkward or hungry. Last Friday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, I fell into the latter category, but I met someone who didn’t. “So, have you tried one of these yet?” he asked, holding up a chocolate cookie the size of a nickel. We were standing at the buffet table at the museum’s First Fridays event and he was groping for conversation....

Engrossing and frequently hilarious, this documentary by Don Argott peeks inside the Paul Green School of Rock Music in downtown Philadelphia, an after-school program in which kids ages 9 through 17 are grouped into bands, assigned set lists, and propelled toward live performances. Green, who founded the school in 1998 and has watched its enrollment expand to well over 100 students, curses out his young players like Buddy Rich on a bad night, but his effectiveness is evident by the end, when he chaperones a dozen-odd kids on a trip to Germany to perform at a five-day Frank Zappa festival....

Most of Robert Middaugh’s 36 small, whimsical paintings at Printworks (26 on the walls, the others viewable by request) show empty suits posed as if someone were inside. At times a hat hovers over where the head would be, and occasionally you can see hints of a person beneath the fabric–like the well-defined muscles in Strong Suit. In Emperor’s New Suit most of the “clothing” is invisible, revealing the body beneath, including a small penis: “I figured emperors are tiny,” he says....

Director-adapter Tonika Todorova and her self-conscious cast have managed to obfuscate the crystalline narrative in Philippe de Broca’s spritely antiwar fable. His 1966 cult film features Alan Bates as a British ornithologist, Charles Plumpick, mistakenly sent into a French town during World War I to defuse a massive bomb hidden there by the Germans. The only villagers who haven’t fled are the freed inhabitants of the local asylum, whose gay costumes and mad ways seem a life-affirming tonic in the face of war....