ROY HARGROVE, 11/26-11/28, JAZZ SHOWCASE At the ripe old age of 24, trumpet whiz Roy Hargrove is set to follow a course similar to that of the original “young lion” of jazz, his part-time mentor Wynton Marsalis. Hargrove’s similarly young working quintet match him with unswerving taste and support (and fancy clothes), and like the young(er) Marsalis, they cover the terrain of complex, slightly revisionist postbop. But Hargrove is just as likely to mix workhorse standards with his originals....

The city that really hums. According to the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers–which recently opened a midwest membership office–Chicago is “the jingles capitol of the world.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Party time. According to the Management Association of Illinois, 68 percent of firms responding to its survey will have Christmas parties, but only half of them will invite employees’ spouses....

Where is the “Planet of the Arthropods”? Free-lance photographer Jim Rowan has found a planet where there are four times as many species of spiders, grasshoppers, butterflies, cicadas, and other arthropods than there are species of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish combined. Rowan’s pictures of the earth’s most successful animal phylum may be seen starting September 26 at the Chicago Academy of Sciences. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

THE LESSON I know, I know–everything these days brings to mind the clash between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. That’s why I’m reluctant even to make the comparison. But I can’t help it–I saw their conflict symbolically reenacted in The Lesson. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As they start to talk, the balance of power gradually shifts. He is pleased to discover that she knows the capital of France, the four seasons of the year, and the sum of seven plus one....

Last Sunday’s old-timers’ game at Wrigley Field took place under a freshly scrubbed bright blue sky. The old pros cavorted in the sunlight with the carefree attitude of puppies at play, so that the inevitable questions–Is that Walt “No-Neck” Williams or Carlos May in right field? What’s Bob Gibson doing at third base? Did Don Kessinger commit that error?–were, for the most part, rhetorical. We were feeling unusually charitable toward these old-timers, perhaps because the presence of Bill Buckner, Gary Matthews, and Oscar Gamble in such a game humbles any local baseball fan of a decent age who harbors delusions of immortality, but for the most part because I felt akin to the old stars, who were struggling to do something they used to do almost by rote....

Have you ever gotten your fingers stuck to a metal ice cube tray in the freezer? They won’t come loose until you run warm water over them. Similarly, I’ve heard you’re in big trouble if you put your tongue on a cold flagpole in the winter. Yet you can eat a totally frozen Popsicle without injury. What makes human flesh stick to some frozen stuff and not others? –Mike Jones, Chicago...

TOTAL ABANDON The play stems from a recent real-life horror story: a father who had brutally beaten his child opposed a hospital’s decision to take the comatose child off a life-support system–because if the boy died, the father might be charged with murder. When the story broke, I thought the maneuver was a typical lizard-lawyer ruse to delay justice and put the blame on the doctors if the boy died. An evil man wanted to evade a punishment he thoroughly deserved....

A commercial disaster when it came out in 1966, generally relegated to the lower half of double bills, and dismissed by most critics, John Ford’s magnificent last feature is surely one of his greatest films–not merely for its unsentimental distillation of Fordian themes, but for the telegraphic urgency and passion of its style, which is aided rather than handicapped by the stripped-down studio sets. The film effectively transposes the gender and settings of many of Ford’s classic westerns: it’s set in 1935, during the apocalyptic last days of a female missionary outpost in China that’s about to be invaded by Mongolian warriors (including Mike Mazurki and Woody Strode)....

AT WIT’S END Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the days before rock ‘n’ roll and the Betty Ford Clinic made celebrity drug addiction a common topic of conversation, Levant was famous for his chemical dependence. Before Lenny Bruce blurred the line between stand-up comedy and psychodrama, Levant tested the boundaries of public taste by veering eccentrically between mordant humor and morbid obsessiveness on radio and live TV shows....

Friday 15 If the sight of frozen brooks and streams brings a tear to your eye, a midwinter class on Kankakee River fishing might bring spring a little closer. Ed Mullady, publisher of Sportsman’s Letter, teaches along with river guide Matt Mullady, advising aspiring fisherfolk on the best ways to catch the slab-sided rock bass, the powerful channel catfish, and the elusive walleye. Ed Mullady says, “Many people use our river methods on other bodies of water with good success, also....

THE GANG OF FOUR With Bulle Ogier, Benoit Regent, Laurence Cote, Fejria Deliba, Bernadette Giraud, Ines de Medeiros, and Nathalie Richard. With Axel Jodorowsky, Blanca Guerra, Guy Stockwell, Thelma Tixou, Sabrina Dennison, Adan Jodorowsky, and Faviola Elenka Tapia. The formal explorations carried out from The Nun, his second feature, through Noroit (1976), his eighth, represent one of the most thrilling sustained adventures in modern cinema. Each chapter in the adventure is a self- conscious heightening of one or more of the basic pleasures of movies, each set in relief by a different process: combining elements of fiction and documentary (L’amour fou); getting the actors to invent their own characters and improvise their own lines (both versions of Out 1) or collaborate on the script (Celine and Julie Go Boating) or share the screen with improvising musicians (Noroit)....

Exit Stage Business: Producer Payne Goes South Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the city’s most active commercial producing groups is about to lose a principal partner. The Payne-Leavitt Group is expected shortly to announce that cofounder Wes Payne is leaving–amicably, say sources–to take a non-theater-related job in New Orleans, where Payne’s wife’s relatives live. Fox Associates, the Saint Louis-based group that successfully produced Prelude to a Kiss and Lend Me a Tenor with Payne-Leavitt, will reportedly join with Michael Leavitt to continue producing in the Chicago market....

To reveal her name would be to violate a trust: her aura of privacy is singular among her very few assets and comforts, and she guards it with the silent passion of withdrawal. That she is my godmother and aunt will suffice to identify her for the purpose at hand. And although she is very much alive, my describing her from this moment on by use of the past tense is deliberate, appropriate, and painful: the woman as I once knew her no longer exists....

A huge hit in its lavish 1941 Broadway premiere, Lady in the Dark was, for its time, a ground-breaking exploration of a mature career woman’s competing needs for personal and professional satisfaction–as well as a virtuosic vehicle for the inimitable Gertrude Lawrence and a showcase for up-and-coming comic Danny Kaye. The collaborative effort of three giant talents–composer Kurt Weill, lyricist Ira Gershwin, and playwright Moss Hart–Lady tells the story of a fashion-magazine editor who wrestles with emotional distress on a psychiatrist’s couch, her dreams coming to life in elaborate musical fantasy sequences that incorporate the sounds of American jazz, French and Viennese operetta, the German cabaret, and the American circus....

At the turn of the century, when Chicago was a developing powerhouse, Geneva Lake was the playground of the city’s rich and famous. Between 1870 and the Great Depression, Chicago’s merchant and manufacturing aristocracy entertained itself by constructing summer palaces, each one grander than the next, around this lovely spring-fed lake 75 miles northwest of the city. One real estate baron purchased the Buddhist temple that had been Ceylon’s exhibition hall at the World’s Fair of 1893, shipped it in pieces to Geneva, reconstructed it, and moved in....

The leaflet is stark and hard to ignore–a big white-on-black stop sign, a motto in large type (“Stop! Think! Organize! Prevail!”), and an opening paragraph sure to rivet its Kendall County audience: On the national level and in national publications like Audubon Activist, Buzzworm, and Outside, it’s easy to see this confrontation as black and white: earth rapers versus earth savers. Locally it’s not that simple. As fate–or perhaps just midwestern cautiousness–would have it, the groups confronting each other in Chicago and the suburbs are relatively moderate representatives of their respective sides....

In 1893, Chicago set itself before the world as the city of the future. The World’s Columbian Exposition, as it opened in the summer of that year in Jackson Park, offered a boldly ambitious vision of the urban past and of its future; as historian James Gilbert writes in his new Perfect Cities: Chicago’s Utopias of 1893, “the builders immodestly proposed to sum up all of human progress in their monuments and displays and their ecumenical conferences on the state of human knowledge....

INTERNATIONAL THEATRE FESTIVAL The Croatian Faust So it was last week, when those of us in the opening-night audience for Theater an der Ruhr’s production of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera discovered to our horror that Kurt Weill’s songs, sung in their original German, were not being translated over our handy “simultaneous translation” headphones. To make matters worse, when the show was being translated, the single translator was a woman who spoke in the sort of droning voice we all remember from language lab and who made no attempt to act out her lines....

AFGHAN WHIGS, 12/3, METRO Greg Dulli’s unsavory portraits of men with insatiable libidos have the critics slobbering. On a few tunes from the Afghan Whigs’ new album, Gentlemen, the narrator cops to his rotten attitude toward women, but more often it’s presented uncritically and without excuses–on “Be Sweet” he sings “I got a dick for a brain / And my brain is gonna sell my ass to you.” I suppose you could argue that some criticism of this mentality is inherent in the mere depiction of it, but this sort of “commentary” doesn’t curb or condemn what boils down to loutish behavior....

For me, tenor saxist Stanley Turrentine’s strength has always lain in his ability to fuse the rigors of hard-bop with the sweet yearnings of 60s soul music. This union finds voice in the falsetto yelps that punctuate his bright, hard tone and in his remarkably smooth and facile improvisations, and you can hear it on his late-50s records with Max Roach, on his Blue Note dates of the 60s, and even on his pop successes with strings (and later, dance rhythm) in the 70s....