The Paris-based Diblo Dibala is a virtuoso of the central African soukous guitar style pioneered in the 1970s by late Zairean guitarist Franco. Formerly a featured soloist with the great singer-bandleader Kanda Bongo Man, Dibala has carved out his own niche with a markedly tradition-conscious style that serves as a nice break from the overdriven, hard-slamming sound so common among the African pop acts that have transplanted themselves to fast-paced Paris....

GUYS AND DOLLS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yeah, yeah, I know: the daily reviewers raved after last week’s opening. Maybe the matinee the Sun-Times and Tribune writers saw was better than the fast-paced but mechanical and lifeless performance I attended that night. (Though at a $57 top ticket price, you should expect at least consistency.) But I can’t imagine that, even in top form, stolid light-opera veteran Richard Muenz would fit the role of sexy smoothie Sky Masterson, the gambler whose courtship of Salvation Army worker Sarah Brown drives the plot; nor can I conceive of a less engaging choice for the feisty Sarah than dowdy Patricia Ben Peterson, whose bell-like soprano invests the character’s lovely songs with all the thrill of a glee-club solo....

SUSAN ROTHENBERG: PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS Bucket of Water comes at the midpoint of Rothenberg’s career; this survey of her paintings and drawings from 1974 to 1992, organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, begins with the fairly large-scale horse paintings for which the artist is probably still best known. In a video accompanying the show, Rothenberg, who moved to New Mexico in 1990 after living and working in New York for 20 years, says that at first she considered the horse a neutral and quiet image to which she had no emotional attachment....

LOIS KAZ IVAN’S REVENGE: THE DIRECTOR’S CUT Introducing the first-ever improv review. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the best improv shows in quite some time is Lois Kaz on the E.T.C. stage of Second City. Witty and uncompromisingly intelligent, this long-form improv takes one simple audience suggestion and spins it out over the course of two hours without ever losing its focus or the element of surprise....

JENNIFER LARMORE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last year at age 37, roughly a decade after her debut with a regional company in France, Atlanta-born mezzo-soprano Jennifer Larmore finally took her first bows at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. On Friday, she’ll make her first local appearance, in a solo recital at the University of Chicago–a belated homecoming for this longtime Barrington resident. (She’ll be back next spring for a gig with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra....

Lyle Lovett’s latest release, I Love Everybody, isn’t really a new album; it’s a time-marking collection of older songs he wrote but never recorded. While the songs contain his usual amalgam of soul, country, rock, folk, and gospel, they are easier to think about thematically; indeed, they’re helpfully ladled onto the album in three distinct groups. The first, the tone of which is conjured up best by the album’s original title, Creeps Like Me, comprises eight twisted songwriting miniatures, each with its own devilish pathology (“Sonja,” for example, features a performer dreaming up a song to help him get a waitress into bed)....

By Ben Joravsky But Arendovich says it’s a selective enforcement–intended to send a message to anyone who dares to oppose the I-355 extension. The tollway is a $610 million pork-barrel project that could have severe economic ramifications for Chicago, and south-suburban officials seem to be willing to go to great lengths to quash opposition to the extension. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Most of us moved here for cleaner air, but this will make the air dirtier,” says Arendovich....

After 11 seasons, one looks forward to a Newberry Consort recital not so much for the playing, which often is top-notch, but for the illuminating insights into music and literature of bygone eras. For its season opener the period-instrument ensemble is presenting a gallimaufry of pieces celebrating the exploits and virtues of the Knights of the Round Table. Certainly popular and tantalizing subjects, King Arthur and his colorful pals were role models in passion, chivalry, and wisdom....

Ascetic monks may be the least likely folks to whip up a feast, but for nearly eight years the Hare Krishnas have been running a vegetarian restaurant called Govinda’s in the basement of their temple in Rogers Park. The setting is hardly monastic. A half block east of Clark Street, across from a bank and a Catholic church, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness is housed in a former Masonic lodge....

It might be tempting to dismiss Austin’s Sixteen Deluxe as just another American band held in thrall by My Bloody Valentine’s impenetrable wall of feedback, but such a premature assessment would ignore this young foursome’s stunning conflation of smartly employed noise and irresistible hooks. The band’s superb debut album, Backfeedmagnetbabe (Trance Syndicate), integrates indie-rock looseness, AM-radio pop sensibilities, and waves of color-splashed feedback into a slippery whole. When Carrie Clark sings, Sixteen Deluxe take on a particularly sunny cast....

THE MAYOR OF ZALAMEA Dolphinback Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pedro Calderon de la Barca was not quite a contemporary of Shakespeare (who died in 1616, when Calderon would have been a youth), but the plays of both reflect the secular intellectualism and humanitarianism of the Renaissance. Spain being Spain, however, the dominant theme in many of Calderon’s plays is honor and its maintenance....

Written on the eve of World War I yet only now receiving its U.S. premiere, philosopher Rudolf Steiner’s “mystery drama” is not for the casual playgoer. But those whose taste for metaphysical epic theater has been whetted by shows like Angels in America might find Steiner’s work illuminating, whatever they think of notions like karma and reincarnation. The last of four plays by the Austrian-born founder of the Anthroposophical Society, The Soul’s Awakening is a five-hour meditation on humanity’s quest for a higher consciousness lost over millennia of social evolution; its characters visit past lives in order to understand their present existence, dramatizing the trials people must undergo as they wrestle with their destinies....

I read that former Pennsylvania governor Robert Casey had never heard of Mumia Abu-Jamal, despite the thousands of letters and petitions for Abu-Jamal’s release that were sent to his office. Now that the new governor, Tom Ridge, has signed Abu-Jamal’s death warrant for August 17, I suspect he also has no idea who Mumia is. Who pulls the governor’s strings? Is this state murder of a liberal reporter a further COINTELPRO operation, or is some hateful petty bureaucrat to blame?...

Sometimes an artist’s hardship is an audience’s gain: in a smart piece of economizing, Chicago choreographers Winifred Haun and Paula Frasz have teamed up for a joint concert. Though they’re both talented, both modern dancers, both capable of fine abstract and narrative dances, in other ways they couldn’t be more different. Haun strikes a high, almost glassy note in her choreography, especially her new work for this program, Remake, an abstract dance for four women to music by Anton Webern....

Dear sir or madam: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The reviews of Nixon in Chicago’s major dailies read less like intelligent essays than packaged press releases. Rosenbaum correctly points out that Stone’s pretentious visuals are, once again, the cinematic equivalent of smoke and mirrors; they provide the illusion of ideas. When it comes to film technique, Stone is an undeniable pro; when it comes to art, however, he is a professional hack....

By Neil Tesser He’s from Chicago… Leave it to Eddie Harris to write his own eulogy. But if it didn’t surprise us, Harris’s death still came as a shock: sick as he had been, most of us figured he would beat it anyway. He had devoted himself to therapies both conventional and experimental. He had adopted a new nutritional regimen. He had sounded much stronger than expected when he appeared at the Jazz Showcase this past spring, and mostly, he was Eddie Harris, too ornery to die–which accounts for some of the shock....

Chicago Symphony Orchestra Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the great underdiscussed, underacknowledged factors in music performance is repertoire fatigue–the weariness and boredom engendered by doing the same work over and over. Keeping something fresh is a big enough problem for singers during relatively short runs at the opera, where a dozen performances are considered a lot and choristers in Carmen are ready to kick their wigs into the Chicago River by the halfway mark....

Billy Bragg But a lot’s happened in his world and ours since 1991, when he released the more complex Don’t Try This at Home, the last album before fatherhood and the new William Bloke. For starters, as he grinned to his audience last week, the caprice of political correctness has slapped a new multiculti label on his trademark cockney brogue: he now speaks in “estuary English.” He crowed over his new son Jack and Jack’s mom, Juliet....

FRIDAY 29 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My friend J.T. moved to Los Angeles after college, saying she didn’t want to live in a city as racist and segregated as Chicago. After the LA riots she packed her bags and moved to Raleigh. Most people didn’t have that option. Lisanne Skyler’s unblinking documentary No Loans Today looks at postriot South Central LA through the eyes of its residents, including gang members, concerned parents, and the owners of small businesses....

I must address the recent article in the November 22 issue of the Reader titled “Reform or Rehash?” by Ben Joravsky. The article focused on the Chicago Public Schools’ recent reform efforts, including its plans to expand preschool programs. The story contained a number of inaccuracies, and I’d like to set the record straight. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With this expansion of our program, we will be able to serve another 5,100 three- and four-year-olds, bringing the total number of children in preschool programs to 17,100....