Some musicals work only on a huge, expensive set. But Joseph Dougherty, Stephen Flaherty, and Lynn Ahrens’s 1992 show, based on the 1982 movie, creates theater the old-fashioned way: with a good story and score and interesting characters. In this tale of a fledgling TV writer, many of them are fictionalized versions of the talented crazies who helped create Sid Caesar’s seminal 50s comedy Your Show of Shows. With casting as strong as it is in David Zak’s energetic production, it doesn’t matter if your set looks like it cost $1....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shoot-’em-up action movies are often derided as adolescent-male fantasies, but how often do you see one that could be described as an adolescent-female fantasy? Such is the case of Violet & Daisy, a most adorable hitman movie that snuck through town earlier this year. It’s currently available to rent at Redbox stands, and, in my opinion, well worth $1....

Twin Cities multi-instrumentalist Paul Metzger has played thrashy, jazz-influenced rock with TVBC on and off since the late 80s, but as idiosyncratic as that band’s material can be, it pales next to the solo music Metzger’s unveiled in the past couple years. His CD Three Improvisations on Modified Banjo (Chairkickers’ Union) owes more to Indian ragas than American mountain music. He’s fitted his instrument with 21 strings–including several resonating, or sympathetic, strings–and for the album’s opening passage he uses an E-Bow to create a sound like a cross between a musical saw and a bansuri, or Indian bamboo flute....

QI am a young, straight male—but I have this obsession with male-on-male dino-dragon porn. I don’t get it. I’M SUPPOSED TO BE STRAIGHT! Am I psychotic or what? —Dino Really Are Gonna Overtake Now Let me just say this: There’s going to be a lot more to fuckbots than Levy imagines in his philosophy. While Levy foresees fuckbots that can be programmed with the voice, eye color, or “particular personality traits” that their owners/mates find sexy, I foresee a future in which every last unrealizable fetish or fantasy is suddenly within the grasp of all—well, not all....

The MacArthur Foundation’s new plan to help small arts organizations qualify for city licenses caught the attention of Live Bait Theater artistic director Sharon Evans when it was announced last month. MacArthur is making a total of $660,000 available to as many as 20 groups that need to bring their spaces up to code. “That’s great,” Evans says, “but wouldn’t it be nice if those of us who have a space and managed to get our licenses could get some help with keeping it all up?...

I don’t mind making year-end lists, and in some cases I even enjoy reading them—but anybody who bothers arguing about them is a fool. It’s impossible to hear everything released in a year, and the “consensus” picks—the albums that show up on list after list—say more about how widely available and heavily promoted a piece of music is than they do about its quality. On the day I wrote this, the ten records below stood out in my mind as the best of 2010....

M. Spencer Green/AP Photos Mayoral candidate Willie Wilson (wait, who?) If you’re a nihilist—and it’s hard not to be one around here—these are your glory days as mayoral candidates attempt to throw each other off the ballot for violating this or that absurdly onerous and arbitrarily enforced election ballot access law. The mayor’s not the only one playing the election-challenge game. But they call it racism when Mayor Rahm tries to throw Wilson off the ballot....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As part of Wordplay Week on the Bleader, we announced a contest based on an Oulipian-style exercise. If you’ve been paying attention like you should, you know that “oulipian” refers to the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (“workshop for potential literature”), a club founded in Paris in 1960 and dedicated to investigating language from a structuralist point of view. Members created texts according to conceits of their own devising: a novel without the letter “e”; a poem that’s reconstituted by systematically substituting new nouns for the originals; a book of ten sonnets in which each line appears on a separate strip of paper, allowing—according to the book’s title—for a “hundred thousand billion” possible poems....

On December 7, 2007, the Ponys played at the Primavera Club festival in Barcelona, in front of a crowd that guitarist and front man Jered Gummere and his wife, bassist Melissa Elias, figure was about 500 strong. They’d had the kind of year that most bands can only dream about. They’d taken four American tours with A-list indie bands like Spoon, Deerhunter, and the Black Lips, plus another full tour in Europe and a short jaunt to London....

Choreographer Carrie Hanson became fascinated by the concept of darkness while reading In Praise of Shadows, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s slim 1933 volume on Japanese aesthetics (one tidbit: it was once customary for elderly women to black out their teeth). The Seldoms’ program–a collaboration with the International Contemporary Ensemble, a music group based in Chicago and New York–includes Hanson’s unique new Three Shades of Dark, in which she makes ingenious use of a sunken orchestra pit representing an unseen realm....

Last year the Nobel Prize committee in Stockholm once again overlooked you in the categories of medicine, physics, and literature. Clearly their judgment is faulty, and it makes me wonder about other mistakes they may have made. Aside from the subjective peace and literature (and economics?) prizes, has anyone been awarded a Nobel for work that has later turned out to be wrong? What happens to the prize (and the money)?...

Tommy Setiawan wants you to know that the egg noodles that come in a bowl of pempek telor at Rickshaw Republic are always served cold. If you, like a certain unenlightened Yelper he’s become aware of, want them warm, he will see that you get them warm. But you should be advised that on the streets of Palembang in South Sumatra where Setiawan’s wife, Elice, grew up, they are served cold, and that’s the way they serve them by default at the city’s newest and only Indonesian restaurant....

Hillary Chute, University of Chicago professor, associate editor of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus, and author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics is a superfan of: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist Modern Cartoonist is a lavish, large, full-on treatment of the work of one of the funniest, most charming men on the planet, cartoonist Dan Clowes. Clowes, sadly now a resident of California, is one of Chicago’s own....

Consulting firms are now the brains behind most museums–and the reason they’re looking as homogenous as shopping malls. Last week’s national meeting of the American Association of Museums at McCormick Place turned out to be a showcase for these firms as well as a window on some local organizations. Among them: the Adler Planetarium, which responded to the meeting’s clearly desperate theme, “Why Museums Matter,” by presenting its own identity crisis as a case study....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Should the Bible be taught as a secular course in public high schools? Not a bad idea, concludes David Van Biema, Time magazine’s senior religion writer, in a recent essay. But not such a good one either, responds professor Stanley Fish, recently of UIC, in an op-ed in the New York Times. In order to disagree with Van Biema, Fish first quotes one of his witnesses, Stephen Prothero, chair of the department of religion at Boston University....

In movies about people in the federal witness protection program (I keep thinking of My Blue Heaven and Sister Act, though I’m sure there are better examples), it’s practically inevitable that the main character gets found out by the very bad guys he’s trying to hide from. And so it goes in The Family, Luc Besson’s not-bad new comedy about a former mafioso (Robert De Niro) relocated to Normandy, France, along with his wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) and teenage kids (Dianna Agron, John D’Leo)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Black’s attorney Edward Greenspan wanted to make the point that in the newspaper world there’s nothing exceptional about old owners being paid not to compete against new owners. Onto the courtroom screen he projected a list of American towns where Black and Radler had paid noncompetes when they bought papers there. Kirksville, for instance. Craig and Carol Kilmer weren’t names likely to strike fear into the hearts of big-timers like Black and Radler....

Rites of Uncovering, Arbouretum’s second full-length (and Thrill Jockey debut), is a heady, ambitious effort, weaving reverbed alt-folk balladry with muscular, minimalist blues gestures to create a thick, pensive mood. Now touring as a four-piece, the group is loosely constructed around Baltimore singer-songwriter-guitarist Dave Heumann, a veteran of Will Oldham’s and Cass McCombs’s bands and currently with the Anomoanon (whose producer and occasional member Paul Oldham recorded some tracks here); after original drummer David Bergander, also of Celebration, left midway through recording Rites, Lungfish’s Mitchell Feldstein played the remaining sessions....

The second you step into the apartment of Stevie Baka and Emily Knies, you become aware of the presence of some serious collectors. In just ten months, the couple has transformed their two-bedroom Ukrainian Village two-flat from a blank slate into a home where your eyes can’t help but wander midconversation. Nestled among the shelves are collections of everything from taxidermy to old art supplies to childhood memorabilia. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Two of the loveliest photographs in “China Revisited” are by Gao Yuan, who places nude Chinese women before striking landscapes—a hazy, industrial-apocalyptic construction scene, an ocean beneath roiling clouds. The women recline before the camera as if posing for a portrait. But their bodies are turned away from the viewer, the better to expose the ornate tattoos on their backs. In other pieces by Gao, who divides her time between New York and Beijing, women are posed in front of moody cityscapes, holding babies up to the camera....