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The acting is raw and unglued, the guest-star appearances of aging 60s icons (Arlo Guthrie, Timothy Leary, David Carradine) are self-conscious and arch, and the sprawling episodic construction is underlined by conceptions that are sentimental to a fault. But this odd little road movie–a first feature written and directed by Abbe Wool, who cowrote Sid & Nancy–still got to me, mainly because of its sincerity and its relative novelty in trying to locate the dregs of American counterculture in various portentous and philosophical roadside encounters....

RENO ONCE REMOVED Now pacing back and forth, Reno speaks to us about the fact that the English language is skewed toward a male perspective. Take the words “wo-man” and “per-son,” she says. This particular brand of feminism seems a bit standard, however, and the capacity audience is not quite there with her yet. She paces, looking almost searchingly at each face as she tries to bring the crowd around to her universe....

When husband and wife clarinetist Richard Stoltzman and violinist Lucy Chapman Stoltzman performed on a Chamber Music Chicago program of frivolous Keith Jarrett chamber music in 1987 (that turned out to be largely an ego trip for Jarrett), an otherwise unbearable evening was made tolerable by the couple’s musical sensitivity. The extraordinary team has been asked back, this time to perform with gifted pianist Richard Goode material worthy of each of their talents....

“You am reading the words of a five-foot-tall woman who never learned to pack a pistol,” writes Amy Feldman in Chicago Enterprise (May 1988). “If I were the CEO of a high-tech company looking for rental space in which to prosper, I’d probably set my sights on the genteel tree-lined streets of Evanston, where Northwestern University and a local team of economic development impresarios eagerly woo small firms to join Northwestern University/Evanston Research Park....

THE LAND OF THE DRAGON But why are the princesses all beautiful? Why are the young princes all handsome and strong? There’s no justice there, but fairy tales never even bother to argue that beauty is the outward sign of virtue–why would they? We wouldn’t believe them if they did. It’s simply a fact that youth and beauty are rewarded in the world of fantasy; age and ugliness are punished (by the oven, the ax, the sudden fall through a pit straight to hell)....

Walt Hriniak stands with his elbows on the frame of the batting cage, his hands pressed to the sides of his face, and with squinty eyes, his hat pulled low, watches Sammy Sosa hit. An ancient yellow fielder’s glove is rolled and stuck in his back pocket, the way an absentminded professor might treat a stack of graded exams. He rises, moves a couple steps to his right, and squats, looking at the swing from a different angle....

It has been said that to qualify as the subject of a William Ferris Chorale tribute a composer must be: (1) British or American, (2) marking a major anniversary, (3) a possessor of impressive credentials and prestigious awards, (4) recognized for his vocal and liturgical music, and (5) the cultivator of an accessible, preferably tonal, idiom. Dominick Argento is all of the above: (1) born in Pennsylvania of Italian immigrant parents, it’s the (2) 60th birthday of this (3) Peabody graduate, student of Henry Cowell and Howard Hanson, winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize; (4) composer of 11 operas who once proclaimed that “the voice is our representation of humanity;” and (5) neoromantic adept at discreetly incorporating serialism into an essentially lyrical vocabulary....

WOMEN AND WALLACE In the very next scene, his mother kills herself with a kitchen knife. This leaves Wallace, six years old at the time, confused and set up for a pretty messed-up life. We know he’s troubled because he tells us. Besides, he drinks a mix of Pepto-Bismol and seltzer like water, breaks drinking glasses to get his father’s attention, and goes to a shrink. He also has bad dreams and writes angst-filled poems with such titles as “Broken Glasses,” “My Mother’s Turtlenecks,” and “Tyrannosaurus Rex....

BLIND HEARTS It almost seems that Johnson is writing a response to David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago, a play ripe for further exploration. Like Mamet, Johnson gives us a man and a woman who are romantically involved and another man and woman who remain on the sidelines for the most part. Virginia (Peggy Dunne) and Roy (Robert W. Barnett) spend the play maneuvering cautiously into marriage, while Virginia’s sister, Beverly (Diane Carr), and Roy’s best friend, Larry (Mark Wohlgenant), give lots of well-meaning but impractical advice....

So far the early signs point to a more progressive, more eclectic era for the CSO under Solti successor Daniel Barenboim. This week on a different CSO program, Pierre Boulez (represented by a key work, Notations) is being accorded due recognition as one of the seminal figures of 20th-century music. And this program premieres a pair of CSO commissions. Ellen Taafe Zwillich’s Concerto for Bass Trombone, Strings, Timpani, and Cymbals, as the unwieldy title suggests, is a showpiece for the trombone: it was tailored specifically to CSO player Charles Vernon....

The Rozhdestvenskys are fast emerging as Russia’s most prominent musical family. The father, Gennady, son of a well-known Moscovite maestro and singer, joined the Bolshoi Theatre as conductor in 1953 at age 22 and oversaw a number of important premieres. A skilled practitioner of politics and the recipient of the Lenin prize, he became, in the 80s, the first Soviet to hold a top post with an orchestra in the West....

The surprising thing about Roland Joffe’s movie about the building of the first atomic bomb is that, for all its unevenness as filmmaking–with a fragmented story line, unconvincing period dialogue, and a soupy Ennio Morricone score that would be more appropriate in a Sergio Leone epic–it still comes across as an unusually intelligent and provocative treatment of its subject. Concentrating on the power relationship between General Leslie R. Groves (Paul Newman in a carefully crafted performance) and J....

FIRST IS SUPPER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So when a man as naturally funny as Shelley Berman attempts, in the words of the National Jewish Theater’s press release, “a drama about the trials of a Jewish immigrant [family] . . . on Chicago’s West Side in 1919,” there is reason to worry that yet another comedian is going to turn out yet another stillborn “serious” work....

LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » D.H. Lawrence originally planned to name his last major novel “Tenderness”; he also considered “John Thomas and Lady Jane,” the playful terms his characters use to describe their sex organs. Both titles would have been appropriate; that’s what makes Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as the book was finally called, so lastingly remarkable. Even in our explicit age, the connection Lawrence makes between emotional tenderness and earthy eroticism is unusual....

The career of Otis Rush has been on of the most varied and emotionally wrenching in all of modern blues. Rush’s early sides for Cobra (“Double Trouble,” “All Your Love”) had a tormented intensity that recalled the poetic writhings of Robert Johnson; his later output was somewhat less exciting, but at his best (“So Many Roads, So Many Trains”), his quavering vocals and red-hot leads still combined to create an emotionalism–laced with a gripping psychic terror–that few others have been able to approximate....

RANCHO OBSCURO Rancho Obscuro is not a play. The plot is so rambling and incoherent as to be virtually nonexistent. If there was an overall statement being made, I failed to grasp it. The only thing this production has going for it, aside from the occasionally witty lines, are those characterizations. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And those characterizations are delightful. Though the actors have varied amounts of skill, all of the characters are wonderfully bizarre and quite finely tuned....

World War II–probably no war in history conjures up such familiar images for us. We know just how the soldiers looked, the weapons–and of course the great historical figures: demonic Hitler, swaggering Mussolini, portly bulldog Churchill, stone-faced Stalin, Roosevelt with cigarette holder, and the anonymous, caricatured “treacherous Jap.” The combat movies of the time have spawned an endless series of successors, while military historians and buffs have analyzed and depicted the war’s every aspect, until each campaign’s become a well-rehearsed platitude and bloody gore’s reduced to banality....

I don’t think there is any such thing as pure pop. What matters is what feeds you. Like the way listening to Meet the Beatles thrills a spiritual/physical nerve ending, like breathing pure oxygen. Which is odd and sad, given the fact that the London music scene that sealed us up in this bell jar actually spawned the last flailing lunge at making popular music mean something. The Sex Pistols and the punk bands that followed them over the top were the last to speak rock ‘n’ roll’s great “‘No!...

Vocalist Sharon Clark hails from the blues-drenched community of East Saint Louis, where she began singing professionally in the early 70s. She was eventually noticed by legendary saxman Oliver Sain, who hired her as lead vocalist in his Saint Louis Kings of Rhythm. Clark’s current style reflects both the passion of her gospel background and the jumping exuberance associated with Sain. Her voice is a unique combination of sweetness and gutteral soul; like Koko Taylor, she can compensate for shopworn or trite material by pouring on the emotional heat, but she’s also capable of nuances and subtleties Taylor can’t approach....

THE ARTIFICIAL JUNGLE I went to see The Artificial Jungle in 1986 at the Ridiculous Theatrical Company in New York–it was the 29th play Charles Ludlam had written for his company, formed nearly 20 years earlier. As usual, Ludlam played the lead. And as usual, the cast included a man playing a woman. Ethyl Eichelberger, a strapping six-footer, played the mother of a nerdy pet-store owner (Ludlam). When she discovered how her son had been murdered, she expressed her rage by jumping straight up into the air, doing a back flip, and landing squarely on her feet....