Brazilian singer Maria Rita became a star in her homeland with her self-titled 2004 debut, and her rise to fame was undoubtedly helped by her distinguished bloodline: her father, Cesar Camargo Mariano, is an acclaimed pop and jazz pianist and arranger, and her mother, Elis Regina, was one of Brazil’s greatest modern vocalists. (She died of a drug overdose in 1982, when Rita was four.) Much like her mom, Rita brings a jazz flavor to MPB (musica popular brasileira), and she shares her mother’s warm, nimble phrasing and willingness to work with unknown songwriters....

Here’s my problem. I got fired from my job at the beginning of the summer and, long story short, ended up escorting to pay the bills. Being a call boy in New York turned out to be not nearly as bad as I expected. In fact, it was fun. I was safe (used condoms, worked through a Web listing, always let someone know where I was), the work was easy, I met fascinating people and made a lot of money....

The big story in movies last year was plunging attendance: down 6.2 percent from 2005. Everyone had a theory about why, and among the proposed culprits were DVDs, crying children, on-screen advertisements, and patrons yakking on cell phones. My own guess was that people had wised up to all the slick advertising and puffy reviews, had grown tired of organizing their evenings around a two-hour block of corporatized cheese. But according to an online study cited last month in the New York Times, the real reason is more prosaic: ticket prices have risen about 5 percent since 2003, and people think they’re too expensive....

Phil Karlson’s noirish 1955 docudrama about organized crime is authentically seedy, shot in Alabama with adept use of many locals and an unusual candor about racist violence. Phenix City lawyer Albert Patterson (John McIntire) vows to clean up the corrupt gambling town as state attorney general, but he’s assassinated before he can take office, leaving his son (Richard Kiley) to pursue a local mobster (Edward Andrews, who makes a wonderful villain)....

Since Alexander Litvinenko’s death there’s been a lot of talk about polonium-210, the radioactive material that killed him. This brought to light another issue seldom discussed in the media–that tobacco contains high levels of the stuff, due to chemical fertilizers. In 1990 Surgeon General C. Everett Koop went on record stating that radiation from tobacco was responsible for approximately 90 percent of tobacco-related cancers. So I ask you, Cecil: what’s the straight dope on this?...

“The river is on its hands and knees” is the sort of devastatingly effective image 28-year-old William Elliott Whitmore can growl out of his ancient-sounding throat as routinely as he breathes. Acoustic blues and mountain ballads are his building blocks, and from those common raw materials he constructs keening memorials and bleak epiphanies. His forthcoming third full-length, Song of the Blackbird (Southern), sounds completely of a piece with its predecessors: earthy, rich, and unblinkingly committed to staring into the abyss....

Paul McComas, a writer, performance artist, and musician, recruited the students in his advanced fiction-writing workshop from a noncredit beginning course he teaches at Northwestern University’s student union. The group of nine includes NU students and writers from Chicago and the northern suburbs who range in age from their 20s to their 40s. Last year they picked a theme for a short-story anthology-first-person narratives-wrote and workshopped a couple of tales each, got a $500 grant to publish them, and put out First Person Imperfect, a collection now available from iUniverse....

Theatre-Hikes’ lightweight production of Shakespeare’s comedy is most memorable for its set: the Morton Arboretum. The audience hikes through woods and fields between scenes, sitting on the ground or in their own portable chairs to watch; there’s a low-impact version circling a lake, but it’s not quite as stroller- or wheelchair-friendly as the company says. Adapter-director Rob Wachholtz has done some judicious cutting, mostly of the more cryptic passages, so this production focuses almost entirely on the love story between the cross-dressing Rosalind and her banished Orlando....

Despite the vaguely leftist connotations of their name, London’s Bloc Party sound much less Gang of Four-damaged than some of their stateside counterparts. Substituting terse quasi-anthemic pop hooks for angular clutter, they caught the attention of critics while opening for Franz Ferdinand on a UK tour in 2003; that led to a string of singles, collected on a self-titled EP last year, that wouldn’t sound out of place next to 90s Too Pure agitpop acts like Moonshake and Long Fin Killie....

Lanford Wilson’s 1998 play dramatizes the same conservative mind-set Thomas Frank explored in What’s the Matter With Kansas? The residents of Dublin, Missouri, would rather gather in their fundamentalist church and gossip about the Hollywood outsider who’s directing their community-theater production of Saint Joan than figure out the truth behind the death of the local cheese-factory patriarch. The passionate exception is the show’s star, apple-cheeked Ruth (a beguiling Krista Forster). Presented here by a uniformly strong ensemble in Brad Akin’s sharp staging, Wilson’s script delineates the culture clash between local government and international conglomerates, the obsession with sexual rather than corporate morality, and the threat posed by groupthink religionistas bent on integrating church and state....

Only time will tell if the career of LA hip-hop producer Danger Mouse, aka Brian Burton, will outlast the buzz surrounding The Grey Album, his audacious mash-up of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ White Album. Burton didn’t bother getting clearance for the Beatles samples, but neither did he make commercial use of them: he pressed 3,000 copies of his underground opus just to give them away to journalists, hip-hop aficionados, and friends....

Love-Lies-Bleeding Indeed, you may find your eyes closing against your will. With nothing crucial to feed on despite highly competent acting and beautiful stage pictures, the optic orb all too easily opts out. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The measured pace of Amy Morton’s distanced, deliberate Steppenwolf production tends to exacerbate DeLillo’s shortcomings, making his story that much less interesting for being slower and defeating his rare attempts at humor....

One of the most striking elements of Maxim Vengerov’s 2004 recital was his choice of pianist, the fiery, technically brilliant Fazil Say. At times he was too much–too much volume, too much physical motion–but he displayed intelligence, musicality, a vast tonal palette, a willingness to take risks, and the rare ability to get big, rich sounds from the keyboard. In his recording of Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata he brings an exhilarating energy to the opening (even if it’s a little too fast in places) and warmth and elegance to the adagio and the gloriously delicate theme of the last movement’s rondo....

Lots of America’s best stand-up comics wield acoustic guitars, and Ed Hamell is as much comedian as musician: the 51-year-old upstate New Yorker and avowed Bill Hicks fan performs solo onstage, spouting an unadulterated rush of one-liners, rants, tunes, and stories. He fills out his sound on record, though, and for his new album, Songs for Parents Who Enjoy Drugs (Righteous Babe), producer and label boss Ani DiFranco brings the weird, adding murkily filtered vocals here, atonal electronic string distractions there, and general atmosphere to Hamell’s low-life vignettes, which are always deft and never exploitative....

Paul Rudnick’s 1993 tragicomedy, now happily dated in its depiction of the early years of AIDS, centers on the title character’s sudden attack of abstinence: With a virus on the loose, sex is no fun, even (or especially) if it’s safe. Exasperating Jeffrey is the last gay man in New York to sense that a would-be lover, HIV+ Steve, is as good for him as air or water. The play, presented by Hubris Productions, takes too long to reach its obvious outcome, as does Scott Shallenbarger’s ingratiating–and earsplitting–staging....

When the first issue of Bitch magazine was published in 1996, founders Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler were fresh out of college and Paris Hilton was still in middle school. The magazine’s mission–to call out the casual sexism of pop culture by running its products through the wringer of feminist theory–then seemed a vital part of a larger cultural conversation about language, representation, and the future of feminism in a postfeminist world....

You know that old saw about how comedians are all awkward and quiet once you get them offstage? Well, Fred Armisen is all awkward onstage too. In the past seven years, in shorts for HBO and on Saturday Night Live, he’s made his mark by creating uncomfortable situations: a priest cusses into a cell phone on a busy corner, a man in a motorized wheelchair does the excuse-me dance with shoppers in a food court, a Native American comedian tells impenetrable jokes to a New York audience....

It’s been a solid decade since she’s released a new album, and her Web site has been hyping the same not-actually-out-yet LP for almost two years–but with any luck MC Lyte’s recent flurry of touring points to a bona fide comeback. She’s kept herself busy with UPN cameos, soundtrack work, and voice-overs, but her talents are probably still better suited to dropping something serious in the studio. The best song on her MySpace page, the Premier–produced “Wonder Years,” is supposedly a cut from the album-to-be; per usual, it positions her as competing with other female MCs, even though (as the song itself suggests) she’s more like “the female G Rap” than she is the Foxy Brown of 1988....

Harry Allen plays a velvety tenor in thrall to Stan Getz, and Chicago native Randy Sandke harks back even further for his coal-furnace trumpet style, to the music of Armstrong and Beiderbecke. Given their strong roots in the swing tradition, you might assume it’s Retro Week at the Jazz Showcase, but Sandke and Allen each bring a much wider range of interests to their own work. With his bright, blistering tone, Sandke has few peers when it comes to duplicating the sound and style of the pioneers of jazz trumpet: on The Re-Discovered Louis and Bix (Nagel Heyer, 2000) his version of “Weather Bird” recaptures much of the excitement Armstrong must have created with his 1928 original....

Qawwali, the soulful Sufi devotional music of Pakistan and India, no longer enjoys the mainstream attention it did before its greatest practitioner, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, died in 1997. There are still loads of fine qawwali artists working today, but none has been able to match Nusrat’s outsize talent and personality; he almost single-handedly popularized pure qawwali in the West but was also willing to experiment, collaborating with the likes of Massive Attack and Bally Sagoo....