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Conlon Nancarrow, one of the most fascinating and least hidebound of contemporary composers, took up writing for the player piano early in his career because he felt mere mortals could not master the odd, dauntingly intricate textures and rhythms of his music. So it was a measure of his confidence in Ursula Oppens that this 76-year-old reclusive expatriate–who’s lived in Mexico City since 1940–composed 2 Canons for Ursula. When the piece premiered in New York City two seasons ago, reviewers marveled at her precision and the breathtaking, effortless way her fingers glided up and down the keyboard....

Monday October 24 Little Vera A last minute replacement for We Think the World of You, this new American comedy directed by and starring Peter Wang is set in New York in the near future and features a multiethnic cast. (Music Box, 8:00) Liberty Street Blues Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A feature-length French Canadian documentary by Andre Gladu about the roots and history of New Orleans jazz....

Some of the most dynamic performers in Chicago remain well-kept secrets of their south- and west-side home turfs; this revue will give many north-siders a taste of what they’ve been missing. Mary Lane, the best-known of these artists, delivers traditional blues and contemporary pop with equal enthusiasm and skill; in contrast, the hard-biting soul of Ava Green will provide a funkier, but no less authentic, version of the same musical tradition....

A middle-class Irish couple living in London with their two young sons are at the center of Les Blair’s fresh, lively, and utterly convincing comedy-drama about contemporary urban life. He’s a town planner (The Crying Game’s Stephen Rea) and she’s a housewife who works part-time at a bookstore (Waterland’s Sinead Cusack). The film carries no script credit and was essentially generated by the actors in collaboration with Blair. As a consequence, the minimal plot, involving such matters as a refurbished bathroom and the couple’s friends and coworkers, rambles a bit, but the focus is almost entirely on character, especially the lead couple and their marriage, and the film’s surface glitters with moments of actorly and behavioral truth....

NEW MUSIC CONSORT Yet if we look beyond the official histories, as advocacy groups such as American Women Composers (AWC) have, we see that a surprisingly large number of women have made genuine (albeit minor) contributions. Among the notables are Fanny Mendelssohn (sister of Felix) and Clara Schumann (wife of Robert), both of whom, in accordance with Victorian conventions, composed in the shadow of a man. And there must have been more women in earlier ages like the medieval abbess and mystic Hildegarde, whose prodigious output is just being rediscovered (local organist and scholar Frank Ferko is one champion)....

The dominant color of a cranberry bed in midsummer is pale pink. The recumbent vines are spangled with tiny flowers, each with four petal-like lobes, tinged with pink, that arch back from a protruding stamen. By September, about a third of these flowers will produce the familiar bright red berries. About 150 growers produce all those berries. Many of them inherited their cranberry marshes from parents and grandparents, and many mailboxes on the roads around Babcock, where Ocean Spray has a receiving station for harvested berries, carry names that have been associated with cranberry growing since the 1870s....

CAVALCADES IN LEARNING Chris Sullivan is one of the most skilled performers I’ve ever seen, exploring a richly imagined universe of grotesque characters in a wholly idiosyncratic and disarmingly sincere performance style. Sullivan simply tells stories–or more accurately, tells stories about himself telling stories–but the anecdotes that he creates are packed with a psychological resonance, giving his seemingly inconsequential work unexpected profundity. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The onstage Sullivan, then, is an impostor of himself....

DEDO Modigliani’s life provides ample raw material not only for drama but for melodrama–even soap opera. Born into a Jewish family in Livorno, Italy, he was so sickly as a boy that he had to give up school. He took up painting instead, and moved to Paris when he was 22. There he befriended some of the major artists of that period, including Picasso. (Many years later, the last word from the dying Picasso was “Dedo”–Modigliani’s nickname....

Director choreographer Brian Macdonald’s staging of Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore delights in, and reconciles, two sometimes opposing theatrical styles: the whimsicality of English operetta and the athleticism of American musical comedy. Forget the stodgy old stand-there-and-sing-prettily way of doing G&S; Macdonald’s Canadian touring production of this 110-year-old masterpiece features a fast-moving chorus of jolly jack-tars who maintain a rich and able-bodied singing tone in Arthur Sullivan’s frothy score while bounding about Susan Benson’s semiabstract, picture-postcard set (inspired by the work of British cartoonist Rowland Emmett)....

Bassist and guitarist Jimmy Lee Robinson is one of those artists who never made the big time but solidified a legendary reputation in live performance and recording sessions for small local labels. Robinson got his start in Chicago in the late 40s, scuffling on Maxwell Street. Early associations with the likes of Eddie Taylor and Freddie King allowed him entry into the rough-and-tumble Chicago blues circuit and he eventually became associated with Vee Jay Records, contributing his solid bass to some of that label’s most important sessions, including some by Jimmy Reed....

LARGO DESOLATO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The new internationalism is making our illusions difficult to maintain, however. Like it or not, we now know that South African housewives watch movies on their VCRs, and that Neil Simon is one of the most popular American playwrights in the Soviet Union. What has always been obvious to those who have lived or traveled extensively overseas will become more and more apparent stateside as well–that not all artists respond in the same way to the same environmental factors, and that not all literature created under a state of censorship has a hidden antiestablishment message....

In the mid 60s, when Elektra Records was looking to break into the newly lucrative rock music scene, it pinned its hopes on two LA-based outfits: the Doors and Love. Love, led by the gifted, acid-gobbling Arthur Lee, was considered the more talented of the two, but “Light My Fire” made the Doors stars while Love was relegated to cult-fave status. Still, it was Love that pursued the more musically adventurous path under the guidance of the reclusive, idiosyncratic Lee....

I have noticed that people who were loved or felt they were loved seemed to lead fuller, happier lives. All of my own work in theater and film has been concerned with varying themes of this love. Change continues as the woman comes forward, attempting sociability. But, in the end, normal feelings of affection are too difficult to return to. The woman has been permanently disabled by the long discontinuance of feelings of love....

Mojo Nixon has the rough personal presence of a friendly but not-quite-housebroken German shepherd–he means well but tends to make a mess, and he’ll bite your leg if angered. His musical shtick is to take half-remembered (or -received) roots-rock moves and set ’em to key components of his personal etiological analysis of society, which has in the past produced such gems as “We Gotta Have More Soul!” “Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child” and “She’s Vibrator Dependent....

Ensemble d’Accord was founded six years ago in an Oak Park living room. Pianist Mary Ann Krupa Stickler says, “We were originally a trio–flute, oboe, and piano–of women who’d gone to American Conservatory together. Two of us were married and had very small children, and we were not playing anymore because children take up too much time. The oboist was doing symphonic work and missed doing the small stuff. We got together just to play, just to remind ourselves that we were still musicians, just to keep up our skills....

NIGHTSIDE To be fair, Reed doesn’t just want to depict the dead-of-night tedium of a police beat; he aims to prove that in Journalism as much as in Greek tragedy, what goes around comes around. But to do that he’s concocted characters every bit as obvious as the lesson they teach and as black and white, literally, as their conflicts. The odd-couple news hounds are Leonard Cauley, a cocky, eager-beaver black reporter from South Shore who’s fresh out of J school and free-lancing for the Daily Herald....

HELEN CHADWICK Chadwick’s literal approach establishes an immediate dialogue with the viewer. As I looked at the first Meat Abstract, I couldn’t help thinking that a reconsideration of vegetarianism might be in order. In this first piece, several yellow gelatinous balls with fine red veins are scattered about on a soft pale orange cloth. A vertical seam of heavy thread runs up the cloth several inches from the right edge of the image–the stitches look like sutures....

PETER ASPELL In Ancient Landscape With Boli, the dominant overlayer of mauve simultaneously subdues and accentuates the bright blue hand at the left edge of the composition. The mauve overlayer has a similar effect on the red orange outline of the central crudely etched female shape and the pottery, brooms, and abstract markings that surround her. The picture is completed by several masklike floating faces and a pair of elongated pipes extending outward from the female’s head....

The guy behind the counter was Puerto Rican and looked like Fabian. The security guard was black. His shirt was open to reveal an undershirt and a Star of David. Two Indian kids were haggling over who would pay the lion’s share of the cost of a pack of Now & Later candy. A white guy with a tank top and a “you toucha the shirt, I breaka the face” attitude had his arm around a girl with big blond hair and a black Madonna belly-button shirt....

Shirt Tale “I made an appointment with the Cook County neurologist on April 29th,” Mike Bradley was saying. “Do you know when my appointment is? August 25th! And until then I take 48 aspirin a day.” The other T-shirt, which hung above the door where no one could miss it, really set him off. There was Mike Tyson inside a rectangle and the legend “Tyson was framed.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....