Revisiting its inaugural 1986 show, Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co. remounts these early, characteristically trippy Sam Shepard one-acts in handsomely designed, well-acted, but uneven productions. For the first half of 4-H Club, a 1964 curiosity about three emotionally paralyzed men stuck in a tiny kitchen, director Hans Fleischmann expertly orchestrates the text’s contrapuntal rhythms while his cast renders Shepard’s hallucinatory images in fine detail. But about halfway through the actors lose focus and the script’s nonlinear oddities become random....

Artistic director Jim Vincent looked to 16th-century neoclassical architect Andrea Palladio, known for his sense of order and harmony, for his new piece, Palladio, the first he’s created for the company since 2002. Playing off tight, precise, baroque-sounding music by contemporary composer Karl Jenkins, the choreography and movement style are exceptionally free, even explosive. The effect is electric, especially in conjunction with the unusual stage effects. Musical and emotionally suggestive, especially in the middle section of duets, Palladio combines formal beauty with a moving sense of transience....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As I’ve mentioned before, rock music’s having a real hard time right now. Rock’s fallen well behind country in terms of pop chart representation, and the little of it that’s on there does a bad job of representing the big, electric guitar-driven sound that essentially defines the form. By far the biggest “rock” band of the year is Imagine Dragons, which is basically the EDM version of Coldplay, and rock radio and Billboard‘s rock genre charts have been dominated by white rap, twee folk, and postmodern chanteuses like Lana Del Rey and Lorde who may have a lot of positive qualities but don’t exactly “rock....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although he released only six albums under his own name during a career that spanned as many decades, he was a crucial presence on the city’s bop scene. (Sadly, only his excellent 1959 album, Serenata, on Delmark, is currently in print.) He was a product of Du Sable High School, under the leadership of the legendary Captain Walter Dyett, and he got his first serious professional experience as a member of Andy Kirk’s orchestra in the early 40s....

In a 1985 review of a National Gallery of Art exhibit on ancestral British country houses, the critic Robert Hughes wrote, “The agenda of the show is plain, and who could object to it? It is a fund raiser, aimed at drumming up more American support for that collectively unique, financially insecure, historically indispensable phenomenon, the Stately Home.” The director of the gallery at the time was J. Carter Brown III, the American aristocrat who’s the subject of Capital Culture, an elaborate and rewarding new book by Neil Harris, a historian at the University of Chicago....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I remembered Dillenburg. I first wrote about Dillenburg—brought him to the attention of Chicago, I’d like to think—the following March, when Dillenburg was a young Turk who’d just launched a movement he called the National Association for the Advancement of Time (NAFTAT). He aspired to stamp out the 60s, and by 1989 it was hard to argue that it was still too soon....

At 23, River North Dance Chicago is entering institutional middle age. But it’s still robust—and getting a shot in the arm from two premieres on its fall program, created by choreographers new to the company. One of those artists is Adam Barruch, who showed off his twisted Broadway side at the 2011 Chicago Dancing Festival, with a Sweeney Todd-inspired solo called The Worst Pies in London. Here, he delivers a piece for 11 dancers, I Close My Eyes Until the End....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The long-promised bottles from Virtue Cider, the Michigan-based cidery founded and run by former Goose Island brewmaster Greg Hall, are now available at local bars and restaurants. The company has started with Sidra de Nava, a Spanish-style cider that they released this summer, and the recently released Percheron, a farm cider aged for six months in French oak barrels with brettanomyces, a wild yeast....

The left is in love with false conscious­ness. Ever since Karl Marx called religion an opiate, progressives have been pulling on their muckraking boots, breaking out the bullhorns, and shouting “Wake up!” at the supposedly somnolent masses. While the paranoid right tends to see its enemies as corrupt conspirators, the left prefers to assume its opponents are merely dim bulbs, just one well-argued monograph away from enlightenment. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Tranceptor: Book Two: Iron Gauge, Part One Patrick Conlon and Michael Manning (Amerotica) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s nothing sedate about Patrick Conlon and Michael Manning’s Tranceptor comic book series, the second, long-delayed volume of which was finally released last month, a full nine years after the first. Despite the hiatus, Tranceptor: Book Two: Iron Gauge, Part One picks up right where the original left off, following the adventures of the titular (in various ways) Tranceptors, a kind of priesthood of dominatrices who ride through a postapocalyptic landscape in chariots pulled by buxom leather-clad horse-girls and/or well-hung leather-clad horse-boys....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A little over a year ago, I interviewed artist Hebru Brantley. At the time, Brantley spoke about life as a street artist, Chicago pride, and his solo show at Zhou B. Art Center, “Afro Futurism: (Impossible View).” Since our conversation last March, Brantley’s career has taken flight. Last summer, he designed the 20th anniversary flyer for Lollapalooza, exhibited work at Art Basel, and made 110 pieces for his October show, “Yesterday’s Losers....

FROST/NIXON sss Directed by Ron Howard Written by Peter Morgan, from his play With Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Kevin Bacon, Oliver Platt, Sam Rockwell, Matthew Macfadyen, Rebecca Hall, and Toby Jones Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But when drawing lessons from this punchy political entertainment, we may have more to learn from David Frost. When the venerable British broadcaster granted Morgan the rights to his story, he magnanimously relinquished any editorial control—just as Nixon had with the original interviews—and the result is less flattering to Frost than his own published accounts, I Gave Them a Sword (1978) and Frost/Nixon (2007)....

Mike Sula ShackBurger, Shake Shack It’s been open since November, but you’ll still find a line at the River North outpost of New York restaurant mogul Danny Meyer’s burger chain. OK, the lines aren’t the Biblical-length ones you’ll see on spring afternoons in Madison Square Park, the ones that make New Yorkers look like hordes of starving refugees, but we midwesterners sure seem to like our new Shake Shack. Unlike the overrated Umami Burger, Shake Shack makes more than just a nominal attempt at fitting in, serving Vienna Beef hot dogs, a Publican Quality Meats pork sausage, and incorporating ingredients from Vosges, Glazed and Infused, and Bang Bang Pie Shop for its concretes....

All Smiles, Sea Wolf, Bronze WHEN Sat 5/19, 10 PM WHERE Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western PRICE $10 INFO 773-276-3600 or 866-468-3401 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Meeting up at a tourist trap was my idea. Fairchild, 33, moved to Chicago just this past August, after his girlfriend, Natasha Wheat, was accepted into the School of the Art Institute. I thought he might like to see some sights, especially since he’s kept his head down for most of his time here....

When you play the first YouTube video that comes up in a search for the Arcade Fire’s “My Body Is a Cage,” the opening syllables of Win Butler’s reverbed vocals are accompanied only by blackness. A moment later the drums and organ kick in and the screen lights up with a desert scene—the climactic shoot-out from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, with Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson staring each other down across a dusty courtyard....

Can you imagine the founding fathers making war against England without maligning King George III in the process? Or Barack and Hillary volunteers refusing to talk trash about their opponents? And when neighborhood groups get up in arms, do you suppose moderation is the watchword? Democracy is rude. Members of the chamber, Okon wrote, “only care about how much money and power they have. Perhaps Mr. Jaeger also personally wrote them each a check… who knows for sure....

The latest Chicago stage production to head for New York hasn’t exactly been high profile at home. Though it’s had three runs here over the last two years, Theater Oobleck’s The Strangerer apparently flew under the radar of the lead critics at the local mainstream papers. Playwright Mickle Maher says the dailies’ big guns never made it to the show, which leaves it nicely positioned as an “underground” hit. That’s always sexy....

If you’re not adept at Pinyin, one of the fun things you can do at Tony Hu’s Lao You Ju is spend a few minutes dreaming about what “Healthy Stuffed Corn Bons” could be. I asked a few times, but I never got a clear answer, and the kitchen in the back of this hallucinogenically overdecorated lounge was never able to produce them anyway. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

And any body can spit water too! At the end of the opening titles for this Bollywood crowd-pleaser—which is being advertised as the first Indian dance film made in 3-D—Remo D’Souza takes a single credit for direction and choreography, and in that order. That’s a commendably modest gesture, as well as an honest one: ABCD (Any Body Can Dance) 3-D, currently playing at the River East 21, is only D’Souza’s second film as director, but he’s choreographed nearly 100 movies and he’s a fixture on Indian TV as a judge on dance-competition shows....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whether Rod Blagojevich’s crude attempts at dealmaking crossed the line into an impeachable offense or wire fraud will presumably be determined in the coming months, but available evidence suggests that he put a lot of thought, if you will, into who would take Barack Obama’s place in the Senate. It’s no coincidence that, once the feds helped him narrow his choices, he offered the gig to Danny Davis and then Roland Burris—two veteran black politicians who, despite the occasional expression of self-regard or deference to leaders of religious cults, have stayed clear of political sleaze....