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AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY STEPPENWOLF THEATRE COMPANY INFO 312-335-1650 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » August: Osage County is heartbreaking in its attention to emotional nuance and captivating in its gruff compassion. It’s also riotously funny. Set in a small town, it inevitably inspires comparison with such masterworks as Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Chekhov’s Three Sisters, but it never rides on the coattails of those plays....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Keyboardist Ben Paterson moved to Chicago from his native Philadelphia in 2004 and he quickly established himself as a major force in mainstream hard bop (often working with the great Von Freeman), both as a tasteful pianist and a bluesy organist, but in late 2012 he left town, jumping into the fray of the fierce New York scene. He does return to town now and again—he led his excellent organ quartet at this year’s Chicago Jazz Festival—and plays the 5 PM set at Andy’s Friday and Saturday in celebration of his fine new album, Essential Elements (MaxJazz)....

This weekly event is one of the few places in Chicago to meet a guy who’s programmed his pedal board with the almost delightful snoring of his cat or a band who build their songs around whatever disquieting wheezes they can coax out of Home Depot’s finest PVC pipes. Every Monday at 7:30 PM, Myopic Books hosts experimental musicians on its meager second-floor “stage,” where they try out their best (and weirdest) material....

Hephaestus: A Greek Mythology Circus Tale In its original 2005 Lookingglass Theatre production, Tony Hernandez and Heidi Stillman’s “Greek mythology circus tale” offered plenty of acrobatics. But this year the high ceiling at the Goodman’s Owen Theatre allowed Hernandez to take this already jaw-dropping show to new heights with an audacious indoor version of the three-tier, seven-person high-wire pyramid made tragically famous by the Flying Wallendas. Two Wallenda family members were killed and a third was paralyzed from the waist down when the pyramid collapsed during a 1962 performance of the act, devised in 1942....

The deepest hurt in Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me occurs far from the world of rock ‘n’ roll, on a living room couch, where David Bell and Sara Stewart sit talking about the death of their brother, Chris Bell. As a founding member of the Memphis guitar-pop band Big Star, Bell collaborated with fellow singer-songwriter Alex Chilton on #1 Record (1972), a dazzling combination of folk, jangle-pop, and hard rock that won ecstatic reviews in the music press but was doomed by poor distribution....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve been going on and on about the changing landscape of Chinatown—everything’s going Sichuan. What I didn’t expect was a real Sichuan restaurant to open in monochromatic Lincoln Park, serving all sorts of delights like dry chile chicken, double-cooked pork intestine, and stewed rabbit Zigong-style.* Chengdu Impression took over the space once occupied by Jia’s, which served sushi and a mishmash of pedestrian things like orange chicken, Mongolian beef, and sweet-and-sour pork....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last night, after a hard day in the fields, I was enjoying a glass of rye on the rocks while washing a big mess of rainbow chard from the north forty. I reached for the glass hidden behind the heaping bowl of verdure, took a sip, and–ptooey!–before my brain caught up with the sensation of something at once squishy, angular, and alive trapped between my tongue and lips....

Recently, I’ve written about two Chicago artists, Julia Haw and Ellen Greene, whose artwork was removed from Facebook after the site deemed their images, which featured depictions of vaginas, pornographic. A few days ago I was tagged in an open letter a woman sent to Facebook after an anatomical rendering of a vulva she’d posted was removed. The drawing was meant to serve as an educational tool for expectant mothers. Facebook called it pornography....

Mike Sula Franky Roll, Pepper & Salt Earlier this month Friend of the Food chain Rob Lopata decreed that the finest haleem in the land was to be had not on Devon but out among the strip malls and big boxes of Schaumburg at the Pakistani restaurant Pepper & Salt. Haleem, as he testified in the Trib, is the spicy, meaty grain porridge especially popular at Ramadan, though available year-round in some places....

I’ve seen bands touring in some pretty unique vehicles. I booked a show once for a band that toured in a converted ambulance, and This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb probably put a couple hundred thousand miles on a rickety-assed old camper-bus conversion with its own kitchenette. But I’ve never seen anyone pushing a ride as extremely tricked-out as this: a 2005 Ford F-550 Crew Cab Powerstroke converted into a portable stage, complete with amps, a 20,000 watt PA, a lighting rig, and (yes!...

For some reason that I can’t quite figure out, the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming block is offering a compilation of rarities from indie rocker faves like the Rapture, Broken Social Scene, TV on the Radio, and Les Savy Fav. I guess they’re just doing it because they can. At first I felt a little Pepsi Blue about blogging it, but the download page actually has less advertising than most sites....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Goat Lord Juan Zaragoza recommends a place for birria, it should be taken as an order, which is why I did something I’ve never done before: drove right past Birrieria Zaragoza without stopping, then ordered a bowl and a couple tacos eight blocks south at Taqueria y Birrieria Morelia. As the name implies, owner Gustavo Hernandez hails from Michoacan (where Morelia is the capital), and he makes the more common stewed goat in consomme (unlike the roasted birria tatemada at BZ), as well as a regional by-product made with the innards known as montalayo, a sort of haggis built from the stomach lining stuffed with minced intestines, liver, and kidneys, similar to the Jaliciense machito—just gutsier....

Take two feuding movie queens, a producer desperate to reunite them, a sassy African-American maid, and a pec-flexing black Chippendale dancer. Toss in a barrage of unfunny jokes and creaky showbiz anecdotes, a couple of maudlin confessions, and a tray of hashish brownies. You’ve got Legends!, James Kirkwood’s 1986 comedy–notoriously awful in its original production, now inexplicably revived as a Broadway-bound vehicle for a jowly Joan Collins and mannequin-stiff Linda Evans....

As directed by Michael Colucci, this production constitutes a kind of masterpiece of almost goodness. A chef d’oeuvre of near misses. There are loads of smart choices taken one step too far, rafts of potentially delicious moments marred by clumsy or amateurish execution. The worst problem, though, is a clutch of wan performances. Based on the much adapted 18th-century epistolary novel, Christopher Hampton’s shrewd play chronicles the process by which a couple of French aristocrats sink from mere hedonism to a spiritual depravity that destroys them as well as their victim/lovers....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hull House has long played a vital role in Chicago theater, combining professional artistic endeavor with community initiatives designed to nurture new talent and foster awareness of the arts at the grassroots level. Now the 121-year-old social service agency is teaming up with Pegasus Players, a nonprofit, non-Equity company once cited by the Jeff Committee for “extraordinary success in serving Chicago’s disenfranchised, bringing the arts to the young, the elderly, the disabled, and the disenfranchised....

This year’s Record Store Day includes two impressive pop-up shops open only for the day. First, the Metro store (3730 N. Clark) hosts a Hot Jams pop-up shop from noon till 8 PM, which will sell back stock from defunct south-side dance-music retailer Hot Jams. Charlie Glitch of Ghetto Division is curating $5, $10, and $15 bins of records from Atlantic, Motown, Cajual, Relief, Underground Construction, and other labels; Metro is also offering deals of its own, including a split seven-inch of the Alkaline Trio/Smoking Popes gig from New Year’s 2006....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » True thing: a guy exclaiming loudly into his cell phone, in French, at La Boulangerie Bakery and Cafe the other night. “He must be a company plant,” I said to my companion, who told me a minute later that the French guy had proceeded to the counter and asked, of the fairly obviously non-French customer-service agents, “Parlez-vous Francais?” No, they didn’t, but the guy’s determination that he was someplace more essentially Gallic than Belmont Avenue was forgivable....

Top-flight turntablist and producer Rjd2 made his name as a hip-hop sampler virtuoso a la DJ Shadow, so it’s no surprise he’s taking heat from press and fans alike for moving from Def Jux to XL and from beats to pop on his latest, The Third Hand. And honestly, he’s not doing himself any favors by trying to explain the new sound: “You know how guys break down once a year, and tell their friends that they love them, but they do it hella manly like?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » CLUES: Described as “an advisor to the President-elect, was interested in the Senate seat if it became vacant, and was likely to be supported by the President-elect.” Blagojevich was considering her–the candidate is identified as a female–if Obama would name him secretary of Health and Human Services in return. GUESS: Valerie Jarrett CLUES: Not many. Only referred to once in the complaint: “ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that the ‘trick ....

Snout-to-tail cooking is the name of the game at The Purple Pig, a convivial take on an Italian enoteca from Scott Harris (Mia Francesca), Jimmy Bannos Sr. (Heaven on Seven), and chef Jimmy Bannos Jr., who honed his skills at Mario Batali’s New York restaurants. While there was no actual snout, sow’s ear became the proverbial silk purse in crunchy-chewy fried strips with crispy kale, marinated cherry peppers, and a fried egg to mix in, all served in a cute wine-colored pig bowl....