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NASTY LITTLE STORIES–TEN YEARS WORTH THIEF AND ARTICULATE HERO Clocking in at almost two hours, Nasty Little Stories features seven pieces from Rago’s repertoire, from 1980 to the present. Most have been revised or updated, ostensibly benefiting from her artistic maturity. Yet the works that seemed less complete, less polished, were the most recent: “My Weight Loss Center” and “Millions.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Generally Rago tells stories about ordinary creatures, usually heterosexual women, often suburban, whose seemingly comfortable lives betray a certain sadness and angst....

Ray Anderson doesn’t mess around. Along with his contemporary George Lewis, Anderson has built upon the styles of such pioneering jazz trombonists as Jimmy Knepper and Albert Mangelsdorff to literally remake the instrument, from something growling and klutzy to something fleet but nonetheless ferocious. What’s more, he’s got himself one great band, with the mesmerizing Pheeroan Ak Laff on drums, and Mark Dresser’s fluid bass lines wrapping up the loose ends; neither of these two is as well known as he should be, and both can leave the unsuspecting listener agog in admiring consternation....

THE BODY Each installation is based on one of the five bodily senses. Fortunately, a small, well-produced catalog (available at each site) tells which sense is matched with which work–otherwise, this aspect of meaning might slip by unnoticed. For instance, a tent has been pitched in an antechamber at the Second Presbyterian Church (1936 S. Michigan). Because the bell tower is directly above, this installation is associated with hearing. However, nothing about the tent or the room it occupies supports this association, and since the bell is usually silent, most visitors would probably not make the connection....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nor is family violence isolated among some small segment of society. It affects women of all racial, economic, religious and social groups. The FBI estimates that a woman is beaten every 18 seconds in this country. One half of all married women will be beaten at least once by their husbands. Every day 11 women are killed by their male partners and abuse is the leading cause of injury to women as well....

NEW FILMS BY STAN BRAKHAGE The films of this period portray a highly subjective world seen through Brakhage’s eyes or, just as often, a world that seems to have been created by Brakhage’s eyes. If external objects, including his wife and children, often seem to be revolving around the camera like planets around some mythic sun, this was a necessary, albeit in some ways tragic, consequence of the particular nature of Brakhage’s immensely valuable quest....

Suzanne Vega’s new album, Days of Open Hand, her strongest yet, is her own distinctive take on something pop songwriters of greater and lesser (mostly lesser) gifts than hers have been playing with ever since Bob Dylan turned away from linear story telling in 1964. While Dylan and his heirs (from John Lennon and Lou Reed on down to hordes of recent indie songwriters) tapped the subconscious in a free flow of words snatched from the deeps of the brain, Vega’s approach is more like that of a 1920s surrealist painter....

He was a “winner of 1989” and a “face to watch in the 1990s.” He’s one of the “Democratic Party’s rising stars,” the man “with the mysterious magic touch.” “He is now the precinct captain,” says a Democratic regular. The Sun-Times’s Steve Neal admires his ability to frame issues and calls him “the kingmaker.” Axelrod & Associates now boasts eight employees: seven (including Axelrod) work in an industrial-chic office on North Franklin that feels curiously unfinished, and one works in Washington....

As is often the case with a great film, Christopher Maclaine’s rarely seen The End (1953) can be described in several apparently contradictory ways. A raw, oddball, technically crude document of early beatnik San Francisco, it is also a brilliant, disturbing, suicide film. A series of characters appears, most on the last days of their lives, in a haunting cri de coeur that envisions individual suicide as inextricably linked to the threatened grand suicide of civilization, the Bomb....

DEAD AGAIN With Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Derek Jacobi, Andy Garcia, Hanna Schygulla, Robin Williams, Campbell Scott, and Wayne Knight. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why bother about whether Dead Again is English or not? I think it matters, finally, because the line that’s drawn between art and entertainment in this country is different from the one drawn in England. In this country any distinction–specious or otherwise–that may have existed between art and trash up through the 50s was torn asunder in the 60s by the combined forces of movie auteurism, artistically self-conscious rock, and camp taste (among other influences), followed by the Mixmaster blends and confusions of postmodernism in the 70s and 80s....

THE PLUCKY & SPUNKY SHOW I saw Moore’s show when he came to Club Lower Links in October. The evening was long, strange, and very trippy–picture a student pageant at the Jimi Hendrix Memorial School for the Disabled, circa 1971. I found myself squirming almost as soon as I walked in. There was Moore, facing us from his wheelchair, howling and gesticulating to music–his torso straining up against his seat belt; his hands wild; his tongue lolling out of his mouth; and Sonny & Cher on the box, singing what else but “Laugh at Me....

THREE WAYS HOME Each character’s story has a hole you could drive a Mack truck through. It’s both a compliment to and a criticism of Kurtti that her characters are more intriguing in what they conceal than in what they reveal. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Frankie’s suicide remains a mystery. On one level, it’s just a plot device illustrating Dawn’s courageous survivorship. But Leelai Demoz gives such an electric, well-tuned, imaginative characterization that even a playwright can’t dispatch Frankie so easily....

WHAT THE BUTLER SAW Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » However, Orton has more on his mind than merely repeating the same old farce formulas: the near meetings, the mistaken identity, the done-wrong spouses out for blood. He uses the conventions of traditional sex farce to mock conventional (and very hypocritical) British middle-class heterosexual attitudes about sex, creating a mad world in which some outrageous sexual indiscretions are allowed without fear of retribution (Mrs....

It’s not easy to squeeze into an elevator at the Daley Center during the 9 AM rush hour. Having finally emerged on the 15th floor, I have to wait again: a machine is going by. A man and a woman are maneuvering a large conveyor belt slowly and carefully toward Judge Warren Wolfson’s courtroom. Six feet high, nine feet long, and gunmetal gray, it’s being rolled down the hall balanced on two wheeled sawhorses....

WHEN WILL THE RATS COME TO CHEW THROUGH YOUR ANUS? I won’t detail much of the story, as the play relies on constant surprises and plot twists. Willard (Maher), still as asocial and creepy as in his films, has become a cyborg technician, living in a huge house of his own design programmed to rearrange itself “at whim.” Everything in the house is imbued with artificial intelligence, so that Willard need only say “Lock!...

BLUE DENIM In this naive play written in and about an innocent time, the characters are all standard-issue 50s family: a caring but emotionally inept father, a sweet but passive mother, a girl next door (both literally and figuratively), and so on. The play begins and ends around the Bartley dinner table. We immediately discover that the teenaged son, Arthur, is in turmoil: subtly, he runs from the table. The family dog has been put to sleep without his knowledge or consent....

Also known as Paris Does Strange Things, Jean Renoir’s period sequel to his equally colorful French Cancan argues for a vision of the past as luminous sensory remembrance. It’s a stylized souvenir of impressionist 1880s Paris–of the Boulanger coup and bourgeois comicality–as well as a parodistic gloss on Rules of the Game profundity, as if the Marxian rule of tragedy repeating as farce applied to personal filmography as well as to ordinary history....

On the eve of the upcoming Leverkusener festival in Germany, which will feature a 20-year retrospective of his work, percussionist Kahil El-Zabar tunes up tonight with the most durable of his performing units, the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble. Still fresh after all these years, this surprisingly versatile trio comprises two horns and El-Zabar, whose contributions range from cyclonic traps drumming to bounding conga fines to butterfly’s-breath ostinatos on an amplified sanza (African thumb piano)....

RIVERVIEW: A MELODRAMA WITH MUSIC Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seemingly incongruous in a family fun park, this vicious game in fact epitomized Riverview, whose rides and games all exploited visceral sensation for profit. A visit to Riverview was an experience dotted with exhilarating highs and crashing lows, the natural result of frequent short spurts of stimulation. That’s the feeling that Goodman Theatre’s Riverview: A Melodrama With Music seeks to evoke....

Many children of survivors share a grave concern that the memory of the Holocaust will be wiped out–and so history will be doomed to repeat itself. A new book by New York Times reporter Judith Miller suggests that in some of the very countries where atrocities occurred, the memory has already been so wrapped in myth that it might as well be forgotten, and in others the terrible truth cannot be forgotten because it has never really been faced....

Even though he’s reached stardom with his soulless, cut-rate version of Ol’ Blue Eyes–one New York observer nailed the point by referring to him as “Frank Synopsis”–Harry Connick started out as a pianist; playing in solo and trio formats, he showed a certain minor promise by unexpectedly merging his appreciation for Thelonious Monk with musical elements of his native New Orleans. His first two albums, as well as his unheralded Chicago debut (a one-night showcase at George’s about three years ago), found him in these formats; and while he was hardly the best 20-year-old pianist in jazz history, it was worth wondering where his style might head as it matured....