Singer-songwriter Ana Egge isn’t quite 30 years old, but her husky voice has the worldliness of a musician twice her age, and most of the songs on her fourth album, Out Past the Lights (Grace/ParkinSong), sound like the musings of a battle-scarred survivor. Her delicate acoustic arpeggios, boxy chord progressions, and ebullient pop-folk leads could easily have emanated from a late-60s coffeehouse, and her music owes a clear debt to Joni Mitchell and Janis Ian....

With a brawl in the opening scene, John Cranko’s dynamic Romeo and Juliet throws you into the thick of Shakespeare’s famous family feud. The Joffrey’s opulent staging, complete with coppery Renaissance costumes and chiaroscuro lighting, whirls through the ballet’s three acts before running up against an unavoidable hitch: for the last 20-odd minutes, one or the other title character is dead, and the dead can’t dance. The company is crisp and polished; as Romeo and Juliet, Maia Wilkins and Willy Shives deliver expressive, lyrical performances....

The late, celebrated painter Oscar Feldman may be the figure that gives Kate Christensen’s latest novel, The Great Man, its name, but it’s the women behind him who give the book its power. As two rival biographers compete to lay claim to “the real Oscar”–who has the insatiable appetite for love and life that’s a cliche of artistic excess–Christensen unfolds his life story through those who knew him best: his wife Abigail, his boho mistress Teddy, Teddy’s best friend Lila, and his gruff, cynical older sister Maxine, an abstract painter and lesbian and possibly the only woman in New York immune to his charms....

Bluesman Lucky Peterson began his career early–his first single, “1-2-3-4,” came out in 1971, when he was six–and since then he’s exultantly leapt between styles, genres, and attitudes while retaining his attachment to the blues. On his 2003 album, Black Midnight Sun (Dreyfus), which features collaborations with Bill Laswell and P-Funk drummer Jerome “Bigfoot” Brailey, Peterson’s ebullience sometimes crosses the line into buffoonery: on “She’s a Burglar” he bellows “She’s a burg-uh-lah!...

Mass Shivers’ full-length debut, Ecstatic Eyes Glow Glossy (due August 21 on Sickroom), is awfully, awfully good. This Chicago trio (which becomes a quartet with a second drummer at local shows) captures the spirit of the best out-rock of the 70s: Can’s free-form tribal-Teutonic drums, Beefheart’s stomping junkyard riffs and unhinged harmonic imagination, Faust’s cerebral jams, Eno’s expansive pop palette. In less capable hands, this kind of ambition often results in little more than a self-conscious statement about the band members’ LP collections, but Mass Shivers skirt that pitfall with their discipline and devotion to detail....

Though Rena Leinberger had never made a video, she had a strange thought while lying in bed in late 2003. She’d been diagnosed with mono, had had a migraine that lasted two weeks, and was sleeping 16 hours a day. Suddenly she flashed on the idea of making a potato video. “This is kind of nutty,” she thought. She didn’t do it–in fact she was too sick to make any art....

Custom House Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I wanted to like Custom House, Shawn McClain’s third big splash (after Green Zebra and Spring) in the city’s ever deepening puddle of international culinary credibility. But try as I might, I can’t believe this rarefied steak house completes any sort of holy trinity. There’s a lot to want to like: artful-sounding sides and mains, predominantly meat and fish, created by the semicelebrated (but not always present) chef-owner; a sleek, relaxing space in a neighborhood associated with some of the city’s first modern fine-dining restaurants (and first hookers); and a mostly efficient and accommodating (if not terribly knowledgeable) staff....

The Bears stopped at Soldier Field last week on their way from training camp in Bourbonnais to San Francisco to open the preseason against the 49ers. This midsummer practice session in the home stadium has become an annual event known as Family Night, and last week found it developing a playful, unprepossessing mood all its own. The field just to the south of the stadium was filled with inflated slides and obstacle courses for kids, as well as a stage where a pedestrian band served as a diversion for the adults....

Depends who you ask. Catalyst Chicago’s interview with Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan: “Our goal is to become the best school system in America . . . not 10 years from now, but literally in the next two years, we have a chance to do that.” Catalyst interview with a Carver Military Academy English […] From the people who brought you the BP lake pollution fiasco. “A $1 million study intended to help figure out how to lower the level of mercury in the Grand Calumet River is still not complete, at least three years after the state’s original deadline,” reports Gitte Laasby of northwest Indiana’s Post-Tribune....

T.S. Eliot’s seldom produced 1950 Tony winner delivers a bracingly intelligent combination of Noel Coward-like repartee, philosophical paradoxes, and deep-dish ponderings on identity, the pitfalls of marriage, and the possibility of change. In the manner of Frank Capra, the story revolves around three semicelestial “guardians” who help three failing souls find salvation in either resignation (“making the best of a bad lot”) or transcendence through martyrdom. Jennifer Shook’s revival for Caffeine Theatre is perfectly tuned, persuasive even when Eliot’s aphoristic dialogue isn’t....

Parsing the Conrad Black indictment . . . Number of the 60 pages in the indictment that contain references to the audit committee: 36. Humiliating detail: About a third of the assets sold to CanWest were owned by Hollinger Canadian Newspapers, a limited partnership controlled by Hollinger International. Yet according to the indictment, the entire $51.8 million in noncompete payments was paid to the executives out of Hollinger International’s share of the proceeds and none out of Hollinger Canadian Newspapers’ share....

Although she’s begun to make a name for herself on the southern blues and soul circuit, Saint Louis’s Uvee Hayes remains virtually unknown here. At a time when stentorian bellowing has become the norm for aspiring blues mamas, Hayes takes a subtler approach, laying her vocals into, not over, the accompaniment and forcing the listener to sit up and pay heed. On her cover of Betty Everett’s “There’ll Come a Time” (the title track of her latest CD on the Mission Park label), her soft-edged, somewhat nasal soprano fuses innocence with wounded bluesiness in a way that recalls Esther Phillips in her prime....

The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice | Greil Marcus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s a familiar story line–that the promise of our country has never been fulfilled; that America’s founding documents now stand, hundreds of years later, as little more than grim reminders of our failings. But Marcus’s book, a speculative examination of prophecy in the work of several American artists, is also a promise unfulfilled....

Huck Finn said, “It’s lovely to live on a raft.” It ain’t so bad on a kayak or a canoe, either–not to live on one but to float on one through the city. I’m not talking about kayaking downtown, though I understand the appeal: to paddle the same waters as Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable and look up at the canyons of skyscrapers that have grown up around the Chicago River....

Alderman Bernard Stone didn’t need to use a gavel to call the Committee on Buildings meeting to order on December 7–Alderman Ray Suarez, the only other member of the 14-person committee who’d shown up, was sitting right next to him. The meeting was scheduled for 10 AM, but at 10:08 no one else had arrived, and Stone announced to the 30 or so people in the audience that the meeting was getting started....

The booklet that comes with Juana Molina’s new album, Son (Domino), is packed with photos of embroidery and tapestries by her great-aunt. Delicate and handmade they’re the perfect embodiment of the intimate music, which the Argentinean singer recorded almost exclusively on her own. As on her previous records, Molina’s gentle coo glides across stark acoustic guitar and woozy analog synth, but a closer listen reveals the details that make Son her most assured and beautiful release to date....

In blog time Stephen Colbert’s speech at the April 29 White House correspondents dinner is ancient history, though its glory will live forever. By mainstream-media standards Colbert spoke just the other day, but nothing he said was worth reporting. In the days that followed, the Sun-Times, like the Tribune, printed not another word on Colbert–though Sun-Times Washington reporter Lynn Sweet acknowledged him online. When she asserted in her blog that Colbert had disappointed her–“Given the potential material, I expected better”–bloggers’ condemnation rained down....

Short Eyes Short Eyes won two Obies, six Tony nominations, and the New York Drama Critics Circle award for best American play of 1973-’74. Thirty years later, it’s just kind of nauseatingly quaint. What middle school kid doesn’t know that a weak or effeminate prisoner faces the prospect of gang rape unless he becomes a stronger man’s bitch? Or that child molesters are despised and considered good as dead in the prison social structure?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I made a serious omission when I wrote the guide to music in Chicago in the Reader’s Chicago 101 issue a couple of weeks back. The Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington) is one the city’s real gems as a venue for music–as well as for visual art, dance, film, and just about every other medium. There are free concerts there every day, usually by acclaimed local performers representing a host of genres, and the space also presents higher-profile gigs several times each month that focus on jazz, experimental, and international music....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It should come as no surprise that Rhino Records is responsible for several of the items I’ll feature in this space—year in and year out they produce some of the finest retrospectives of all sorts of music. Occasionally their efforts are a bit too obvious, but that’s certainly not the case with Rockin’ Bones: 1950s Punk & Rockabilly, a terrific four-disc collection of raw rock ‘n’ roll made between 1954-69 with a deliberate emphasis on juvenile delinquency, sex, and general bad behavior, all of it delivered with the stripped-down urgency of titular punk....