Have you heard the one about the timid professor and the sexpot student? At first this familiar scenario is key to director Terry Domschke’s interpretation of Eugene Ionesco’s classroom classic, and it works quite well: Katie Korby as the seductive pupil, Joseph Schuman as the mousy academic, and Sylvia Grady as his matriarchal housekeeper establish spellbinding verbal and physical harmonies. Then Domschke appears to lose conviction and this Janus Theatre production veers suddenly from modern consciousness to introduce a hackneyed image rooted in the play’s 1951 premiere–an image that lets the audience off the hook....

Last season director Julieanne Ehre transformed Ibsen’s messy The Lady From the Sea into tidy theater. Now she’s adapted Nikolay Gogol’s tidy short story “The Nose” into a tortured mess. This 1836 tale of a self-important civil servant humiliated when his nose disappears, then reappears as a high-ranking official, is a masterpiece of narrative efficiency and droll satire: Gogol’s literary poker face is unrivaled. But Ehre’s five cast members labor over every line, telegraphing the humor, obscuring the narrative, and turning Gogol’s laser-accurate caricatures into overblown distortions....

Everything here is so gosh darn nice it makes your teeth hurt: this revue, back after a three-year hiatus, is well suited to the very old and the very young and probably not many people in between. The Rockettes are the best reason to go, but their scary uniformity and monotonous choreography remind you why it’s no fun to watch machines dance–the Raggedy Ann number is refreshing if only because it’s floppy....

Friday 2 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » THE SEA, LIKE LEAD; SHARKS & SEALS Guitarists Todd Mattei and Joe Tricoli, who first played together as two of the many revolving-door members of Tim Kinsella’s bands Joan of Arc and Friend/Enemy, formed SHARKS & SEALS as an outlet for their own improvisations. Clearly they felt that the melodic fragments they came up with were fit to be saved for posterity, but most of the dozen pieces on their debut, It Used to Be Knobs and Machines and Now It’s Numbers and Light (Brilliante), sound unfinished....

Friday 26 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The paint-peeling retro punk on the Spaceshits’ beloved first album, 1997’s Winter Dance Party, is to sock-hop rock ‘n’ roll what a nitro-burning funny car is to a Nash Rambler. Now Mark Sultan–better known as Creepy back in those days, better known as BBQ in these–is fronting the MIND CONTROLS, a spanking-new three-piece with members of the Demon’s Claws and the Confusers, and their self-titled debut on Dirtnap is like that old Rambler with a bundle of solid-fuel rockets zip-tied to the roof rack....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To tag a pig, two circular plastic disks stamped with the animal’s assigned number are fitted onto an applicator, which looks like a chunky pair of pliers with a pointed tip on one side. The “male” side of the tag has a pointed protrusion on the back, perhaps a half-inch long, that fits over the pointed side of the applicator; the “female” tag has a hole to receive the male end when the cartilaginous part of the ear is placed between either side of the applicator....

Vijay Iyer has a reputation as a prescient and original pianist that’s rivaled among younger players only by Jason Moran’s–and he’s earned it for many of the same reasons. Both of them blend postfreedom harmonies, deliciously quirky phrasing, and an unteachable vision; Iyer ups the ante by drawing on his heritage, coloring his compositions and his epic solos with the spirit and occasionally the complicated rhythms (though not the actual forms and scales) of Indian ragas....

The Best Underground Fiction Volume One Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The book’s mildly effusive intro suggests that the idea emerged from a conversation in a bar, but The Best Underground Fiction actually originated in a college classroom. Scott Miles, 32, and Jeff Mikos, 29, met in 2003 while attending a workshop in Columbia College’s fiction writing department. Mikos was a systems administrator at the Board of Trade; Miles, a Detroit-area native, was working as a copywriter for an electronics catalog (“think Elaine Benes, just much much much less glamorous”) and had spent much of the previous five years working in a Seattle fish-packing warehouse....

“Comics are not prose,” writes Douglas Wolk in his new book, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean (Da Capo). “Comics are not movies. They are not a text-driven medium with added pictures; they’re not the visual equivalent of prose narrative or a static version of a film. They are their own thing: a medium with its own devices, its own innovators, its own cliches, its own genres and traps and liberties....

Frederick Wells, 34, a DJ, programmer, and design student at Columbia, says getting dressed is “a thought-out process. There’s usually a concept.” Here a gray wool hood by Berlin-based designers z.B. caused him to imagine “a postapocalyptic future–it seemed like the appropriate hood to have when I’m doing battle for gas and water.” Because he’d recently hung up a bunch of “huge black-power picks” on his bathroom walls, he was drawn to a long-sleeved comb-motif T-shirt by Anke Loh; the comb teeth echo the stripes on his own red-and-white-striped socks....

A specter haunted the Bulls this season, and the better they got the more haunted they were. It was one thing to lose the first nine games on the way to a 2-13 start. But as the team turned its season around to finish 47-35, post the third-best record in the Eastern Conference, and end six long years as losers, they summoned the ghost of Michael Jordan’s Bulls. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Few jazz musicians can make complexity accessible like guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, a vital figure in New York’s forward-looking postbop scene who’s a lot more interested in harmonic and stylistic exploration than in the sound of his own chops. On Heartcore (Verve, 2003) Rosenwinkel and coproducer Q-Tip (of A Tribe Called Quest) used studio technology to fashion a surprisingly effective jazz-pop hybrid out of lush harmonies and programmed rhythms. On his latest, Deep Song, as on his earlier albums, he puts his faith largely in the advanced interaction of his bandmates, who include pianist Brad Mehldau and saxophonist Joshua Redman....

I wouldn’t have thought it possible for a world-class new-music ensemble to use only saxophone, accordion, and double bass, but that’s exactly what Poing does. Since forming in 1999 this Norwegian trio–saxophonist Rolf-Erik Nystrom, accordionist Frode Haltli, and bassist Hakon Thelin–has played more than 40 premieres of works by some of the planet’s most progressive composers, particularly from Scandinavia, China, and Japan. Poing’s flexibility makes it attractive to young writers: the players have conservatory-honed chops and a fluency with the sort of extended technique you’d expect from improvising musicians....

Martin Short’s Broadway-bound revue should delight fans of the Canadian-born comedian, who trots out some of his popular characters (Jiminy Glick, Ed Grimley, Irving Cohen, Jackie Rogers Jr.) and displays astonishing energy with his singing, dancing, tumbling, and Peter Pan-style flying. But this trippy, free-associative “party with Marty,” which purports to relate his saga from birth to death and beyond, has much besides its star to recommend it. Short has surrounded himself with talent: MADtv’s Nicole Parker, Mary Birdsong (whose Judy Garland imitation is brilliant), fey song-and-dance man Brooks Ashmanskas, belter Capathia Jenkins, and pianist-songwriter Marc Shaiman (who wrote the show with Short, Daniel Goldfarb, Alan Zweibel, and director Scott Wittman)....

I want my sons to see this. Having grown up with tin-pot Dubya, they need to know that public figures like William O. Douglas are possible. America’s longest-serving Supreme Court justice (1939-1975), Douglas championed the First Amendment, opposed segregation, propounded a right to privacy that included the bedroom, and survived two Republican impeachment attempts. His personal style was that of a New Deal Teddy Roosevelt: a supermasculine adventurer whose wilderness tramps made him a, well, natural conservationist....

For the past month I’ve been clawing my way out from under a mountain of new food and drink books strategically published in time for the holidays, when many folks are concerned with peace on earth, what to buy, and what to eat—not necessarily in that order. I’m going to vouch for my favorites here; the rest (including half a dozen more Chicago-related titles) will be covered on our blog The Food Chain at chicagoreader....

A close friend of ours is a gay male in his 40s. About seven years ago, our friend met and briefly dated a not-too-bright, conniving guy about ten years younger. Our friend threw himself into this relationship with his new “trophy husband” and did everything he could for his new boyfriend. He financed his apartment, paid his numerous bills, wrote his papers for school, and even purchased all the boyfriend’s holiday gifts–all the while keeping everything a secret so the boyfriend could keep his big ego intact....

Columbia College’s eighth annual literary festival, hosted by its fiction writing department (and for the first time stretching its “week” to ten days, to overlap with the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference being held in Chicago), features readings, book signings, and panels with local and national writers under the theme “Story and the Sister Arts.” Events run Thursday, March 18, through Saturday, March 27, at locations in the Loop (Harold Washington Library Center, Columbia College, Chicago Cultural Center, Palmer House Hilton) and at several neighborhood venues (Cafe Penelope, Chopin Theatre, Empty Bottle, Metro)....

In the past couple of weeks I’ve had several self-congratulatory conversations with other Chicagoans about how we really appreciate summer, unlike the wimps who live in mild climes and take the sun for granted. It’s true that summer here is generally more fun than summer anywhere else I’ve been, but to be honest, sometimes it can be more boring than winter. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The winner for the week gets to wear a satin sash with geometric designs on it....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This morning the dailies reported that supporters of William “Dock” Walls have challenged the ballot petitions submitted by Mayor Daley’s campaign. Walls and his backers charge that forgeries and the names of unregistered voters were illegally included among the 24,000-plus signatures the Daley campaign submitted to the Board of Election Commissioners for the City of Chicago. “I don’t expect Daley to stay on the ballot,” Walls proclaimed to the Sun-Times....