HENRY & JUNE With Fred Ward, Uma Thurman, Maria de Medeiros, Richard E. Grant, Kevin Spacey, and Jean-Philippe Ecoffey. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story begins around the time that Nin (Maria de Madeiros)–married to a devoted and supportive banker named Hugo (Richard E. Grant), whom she lives with outside Paris–meets Miller (Fred Ward), who is sharing a tiny flat with their friend Osborn (Kevin Spacey) in Paris....

MUSIC FROM A LOCKED ROOM Set–as you might’ve guessed–in a wealthy English couple’s in-town flat, and unfolding–as you might’ve known–during the course of a small black-tie dinner party, Music From a Locked Room signals its imitative intentions right from the top of the first act, as a blandly servile butler ushers the cheerfully dissolute Blaire Ford-Whyte into the drawing room, where he’s greeted by the charming-but-vague Clinton Champion. Blaire and Clinton noodle a little Gershwin on the piano, exchange some banter about “breeding,” and generally comport themselves like refugees from some lost but sneakingly familiar Noel Coward comedy....

The Marxist critic Walter Benjamin once suggested that the era of mass communications would democratize culture by destroying the aura of unique works of art–as culture is mass-produced, so it is also made common, and therefore rendered more accessible to a wider public. With the benefit of decades of TV to learn from, Andy Warhol knew better: “Fame is when you market your aura,” he once said, in a comment that illustrates the continuing reification involved in mass communications....

It’s not exactly a new story–local musician heads to Europe, gains recognition, returns home to thunderous applause–but that’s OK, because it’s not exactly drummer Rick Hollander’s story either. He is sort of local (born in Detroit), and he has spent a good deal of time in Europe gaining experience and reputation as a respected sideman. In fact, Europe was the birthplace of his quartet, which is making its Chicago debut this week....

Violinist Nigel Kennedy’s unorthodox appearance (punk hair and high-tops) and irreverent approach to the classical literature (outrageous tempi, unexpected phrasing) have cemented his reputation as the reigning enfant terrible of concert music; this program, presented by Chamber Music Chicago, certainly won’t dent his image. Kennedy will conduct the 34-piece Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons; each movement, though, will be followed by a jazz improvisation based upon it, performed by Kennedy and three others–two of whom are members of the orchestra....

THE MARRIAGE OF BETTE AND BOO Apple Tree Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The babies belong to Bette and Boo (Kathy Santen and Sean Grennan), who have little success producing live children after their first, a boy named Matt, is born. Bette is obsessed with having a large brood, all of whom she will name after the characters from A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh series....

THE KASHUBIAN TAPES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The evidence, despite the fragmented way in which it’s presented, is compelling. The protagonist–whose name Reinemann picks each night during the prologue by opening the phone book at random (it was “Robert North” the night I went)–gets on the evidence-gathering trail as an OSHA inspector investigating a south-side manufacturer of tank parts. He finds some rather odd firing practices: one man was fired for refusing to authorize shoddy equipment, another immediately after maiming his hand in a press....

At first, I thought the shot was no more astounding than, oh, a dozen or so other astounding shots Michael Jordan has pulled off in his seven seasons in Chicago. On seeing the replay, I granted that, no, this one was right up there–top three or five. Of course, Jordan does this sort of thing so regularly that there is no real ranking of his greatest shots; one sees one and, after one begins breathing again, one says, “Yes, that’s one of the great ones, right up there....

DEBORAH BUTTERFIELD The myth endures. One of my favorite local examples is the mural in the McDonald’s at the corner of Chicago and State that depicts Jane Byrne, Harold Washington, and other broad-shouldered power brokers on horseback, leaping out through a dramatic rendering of the Chicago skyline into the pedestrian world of burgers and fries. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A recently published catalog documenting Butterfield’s career carries a photograph of the smiling artist nose-to-nose with two equine friends....

November’s closing in on Thanksgiving, and a happy chunk of Chicago’s theater community is gathered round a big table at the Guest Quarters Suite Hotel on Delaware Place east of Michigan Avenue. Here are Eric Simonson from Steppenwolf Theatre, Russell Vandenbroucke from Northlight, Larry Sloan from Remains, and Steve Scott from the Goodman. The Next Theatre’s Harriet Spizziri is present; so are Richard Fire from the Organic, Mark Richard and Kelly Nespor from City Lit, and Christine Dunford–a real trouper, hobbling in on crutches–from Lookingglass....

Tommy Muniz stars in this lovely film from Puerto Rico about a recently retired, lonely widower whose life is rejuvenated when he unexpectedly falls in love with an enigmatic younger woman (Gladys Rodriguez) he meets during one of his strolls in a local park. The woman agrees to see him on the condition that he not inquire about her past or her personal life. Curious and unable to deal with the strain that this anonymity imposes on their growing relationship, Santiago hires a private investigator, who uncovers some unsettling truths about the woman’s past....

A SUMMER REMEMBERED The December Stagebill quotes Steve Eich calling A Summer Remembered “a sweet, nostalgic story.” As Steppenwolf’s managing director Eich may want to promote the show as a warm and fuzzy holiday diversion; happily, as director of the play Eich will have none of this. He knows, and his staging shows, that there’s precious little sweetness in Charles Nolte’s flawed but frequently compelling drama about a family, and a world, at a painful turning point....

AT THE REUNION At the Reunion follows the recipe to the letter: upon entering the Stephen A. Douglas Memorial Dining Room for the Carrollton College reunion of the class of ’73, we are directed to the registration table to pick up name tags and souvenir booklets. The booklet explains that the preponderance of the number 17 in the life of the school’s founder led to the custom of celebrating reunions every 17 years....

Before he became the master of oratorios, Handel was a purveyor of the Italianate opera. He wrote dozens, many of them tailored to the peculiarly voluptuous voices of the celebrated castrati of his day. Tolomeo, a flop when Handel produced it himself in 1728, doesn’t quite belong in the company of Orlando and other masterpieces, but it ought to be thought of as more than a footnote to an illustrious career....

For two months last summer Annette McClinton and some of her six children lived out of a car because a south-side housing complex had denied them housing. The operators of the housing complex, Antioch Haven Homes, say they denied housing to McClinton because even their biggest three-bedroom apartments are too small for a family of seven. But McClinton said it was discrimination and took her case to the city. The adjudication process was created as part of a controversial overhaul of the Commission on Human Relations conceived by Commissioner Clarence Wood at Mayor Daley’s urging....

For more than a year now Wicker Park’s HotHouse has turned into a freewheeling hotbed of avant-garde music making every second Sunday of the month. “Face the Music,” a series organized by local composer and clarinetist Gene Coleman, is intended to be a democratic forum for all the diverse trends and aesthetic bents in the contemporary music scene. In a typical offering, such as this one, works from established trailblazers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen jostle for attention alongside pieces by audio-art mavens like Lou Mallozzi and newcomers like Northwestern’s Jeff Kowalkowski....

Joe Segal makes an unlikely Santa, but he’s brought the city a Christmas present in the form of tenor saxist Johnny Griffin. The Little Giant is home for the holiday, and not a moment too soon–his several galvanic performances from last summer’s jazz fest are just now beginning to fade from memory. At the age of 60, Griffin is a marvel: he still plays with the stops-out sound, the brash swagger at even slow tempos, and the spendthrift recklessness of ideas that mark the Chicago tenor tradition, and he hasn’t lost a step on himself....

BRICKS ARE HEAVY In its ecstasy over the next big thing, the music press may be pulling its punches in a misguided attempt to level the playing field: L7 may have something, but it just doesn’t live up to the hype. The grungy glow just can’t obscure the band’s flaws. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » L7 resists ghettoization as part of the “foxcore” movement, the current crop of female-led bands whose postpunk music is characterized by angry feminist content....

It’s interesting that Lou Donaldson is the son of a minister, because there’s definitely a preaching quality about his alto saxophone soloing. Donaldson came up during the bop era and, perhaps inevitably for an altoist of his generation, he began as a Charlie Parker-styled lyricist. By the late 1950s, though, a new, dramatic sense of phrasing and phrase spacing entered his music, a way of playing that sounded much like Gene Ammons’ tenor concept transferred to the alto; he even recorded an “Exactly Like You” with startling resemblances to Ammons’ hit version–six months before Ammons....

Lead Story Jill Bangle of Los Angeles sued her veterinarian for $1,500 in expenses and additional surgery in September after he removed too much skin while performing a face-lift on her Shar-Pei. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hugh Craig Jr., angry that he scratched his car on a high curb in a Wendy’s restaurant parking lot, sued the Wendy’s chain in June in Indianapolis, and decided to throw in all the legal claims he could think of, including false advertising (because the hamburgers contain no ham)....