Mark Weyermuller didn’t drive a Red Cross ambulance in Italy during World War I, hang out in Paris during the 1920s, shoot big game in Africa, or write novels in Europe, Florida, and Cuba. But Weyermuller does have one thing in common with Ernest Hemingway: he lives in the brownstone at 1239 N. Dearborn, where the writer once lived on the fourth floor with Hadley Richardson, his first wife. The apartment was so cramped and shabby looking that Hadley supposedly avoided it as much as possible....

This unforgettable two-part Canadian TV docudrama (1992) deals forcefully though not exploitatively with a very delicate subject–the sexual abuse and sadistic treatment of boys at a Catholic orphanage in Newfoundland by some of the religious brothers assigned to take care of them. Suggested by real-life events (and consequently held back from public broadcast while a related investigation was under way), the two 95-minute features are sensitively directed by John N. Smith and cogently written by Smith, Des Walsh, and Sam Grana....

**** WOODSTOCK (Masterpiece) Directed by Michael Wadleigh With Richie Havens, Country Joe and the Fish, Joe Cocker, Sha Na Na, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, Ten Years After, Santana, Sly and the Family Stone, Janis Joplin, the Who, John Sebastian, Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix. Astonishingly, some normally sensible colleagues of mine claim to prefer Gimme Shelter–a piece of glib pessimism and dishonest reporting whose ideological agenda continues to appeal to those distrustful of Woodstock’s relatively utopian approach....

The state of Veracruz, on Mexico’s swampy gulf coast, was for hundreds of years the prime port of entry for gold-seeking Spaniards who hacked their way through the lowlands while littering the land not only with blood but also with such little pieces of their musical culture as guitars, two-stringed violins, and harps, all of which were adopted and adapted by indigenous musicians. Even today the harp features prominently in Veracruz’s traditional music, which gets a particularly glorious treatment from Tlen-Huicani, a folkloric ensemble based at the University of Veracruz at Jalapa....

WOYZECK This kind of emblematic staging runs throughout director Warren Leming’s Woyzeck, which begins with a procession in silhouette led by a sword-wielding figure. Both the characters of Woyzeck (Charles Richards) and his wife Marie (Melissa Landis) appear at times with shadowy doubles (Jim Blanchette and Melissa Schubeck) who duplicate their gestures behind them. Employing a variety of Kabuki-like conventions, from black-hooded figures to percussive accompaniments to exaggerated vocal inflections, Leming has attempted to distill Georg Buchner’s unfinished masterpiece into a kind of mythic essence....

Black Star Line The trouble with Charles Smith’s stunningly ambitious but somewhat too scholarly biography and Tazewell Thompson’s exceedingly well acted Goodman Theatre staging is that Garvey emerges not as rich and complex but as contradictory: it’s impossible to get a handle on him. Smith writes in his program notes, “The more research I did, the more I began to understand that there was no absolute truth to which I could adhere…....

** THE ACCOMPANIST (Worth seeing) Directed by Claude Miller Written by Miller and Luc Beraud Alternately, one can view The Accompanist as the latest of the disparate films by Claude Miller, its director and cowriter. Miller started out promisingly as an assistant to some key French filmmakers during the 60s, including Robert Bresson (Au Hasard Balthazar), Jacques Demy (Les Demoiselles de Rochefort), and Jean-Luc Godard (Weekend). He then served as production manager or production supervisor on Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her and La Chinoise and no less than seven Francois Truffaut features, from Stolen Kisses to The Story of Adele H....

Jack Schnedler Hits the Road Abandoning a long life under the volcano, Jack Schnedler is shifting his operations to someplace safe and friendly. He’s resigned as travel editor of the Sun-Times to become an assistant managing editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the paper that emerged from Little Rock’s brutal newspaper wars of the 1980s. He called his friend Griffin Smith Jr., a former travel writer who’s now executive editor of the Democrat-Gazette....

By now Evanston-based Light Opera Works has earned a well-deserved reputation as the city’s prime purveyor of summer-weight schmaltz. Not just any operettas though–the discerning taste of its knowledgeable artistic director, Philip Kraus, leans toward those that are witty, musical, and half forgotten. Franz Lehar’s The Count of Luxembourg fits the bill. The operetta, while not nearly as famous and durable as his The Merry Widow, was a transatlantic hit in Vienna and on Broadway when it was first produced about 80 years ago....

Over the past few years the Green Mill has emerged as a vital alternative venue, a place for local musicians to try out their latest ideas or just to jam together. Its jazz-lounge acoustics may not be ideal, but its relaxed, freewheeling ambience certainly encourages a lot of improvistion and experimentation–and fun. This chamber concert, curated by composer and new-music advocate Frank Abbinanti, is a typical of the Green Mill’s democratic credo: an up-and-coming, without regard to ideological allegiances....

Overpass is the bristling phoenix rising from the ashes of Slovenly, a five- and sometimes six-headed outfit from the San Francisco area that peppered the 80s with a series of bracing, prickly releases as distinctive as anything alternative rock was producing. Lacking the ultracool, junked-out, Lower East Side caterwaul of Sonic Youth and the inebriate indifference of the Replacements, Slovenly toiled in brilliant obscurity, concocting a memorable rock alloy that fused dissonance, pop hooks, free-jazz sputtering, musique concrete, and vocalist Steve Anderson’s portentous (some would say pretentious) existentialist Sprechgesang....

Hey, Faggot: I don’t want to seek professional help, mainly because I can’t afford it. Also, I met her boyfriend (new one) and I’m stunned that after going out with a guy like me she’s now dating a rather ho-hum gent with no fashion sense and bad hair. Not that I’m jealous–yeah, sure! What should I do? Not do? Help! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But while this relationship may have been “going very well” as far as you were concerned, good ol’ Lucy obviously didn’t feel the same way–otherwise she wouldn’t have dumped your well-groomed, well-dressed ass, would she?...

Scarlot Harlot says she came to town to participate in an antipornography conference at the University of Chicago. Now she’s protesting it. At lunchtime, on the first full day of the weekend meeting, she is parading on the sunny plaza in front of the law school in full view of the audience gathered inside for a panel discussion on “Freedom of Expression.” She is fortyish and fleshy, done up like a clown in a dress made of an American flag and a bright red feather boa and hat....

By Harold Henderson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My lawyer told the judge he had a passionate feeling that I had been wrongly charged, but he hadn’t formulated an argument or looked up any precedents. Student Lawyer (May) quotes local psychotherapist Benjamin Sells, author of The Soul of the Law: “Depression and various psychological disturbances are very high in law students — much higher than in the general population....

On the morning of April 3, though I didn’t know it at the time, the little red roses of voice mail were blooming madly on the telephones of 26-year-old women around the country. I arrived at my office that morning to find the message indicator on my own phone already aglow–a vague and early greeting from my friend Ellen, a reporter at the Newark Star-Ledger. “Kiki,” she said bemusedly, “Katy Dick is quoted on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal....

Penny’s Noodle Shop may be the most annoying restaurant in town, luring the famished with a reputation for quick, tasty, cheap dishes, then repelling them with an hour-long wait under the el. So when the new Penny’s showed up on Diversey–and hadn’t yet strung up a sign–we hoped we could finally sneak a taste, sans wait. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (Thai Spring Roll) – Someone ordered one of these, perhaps out of a sense a obligation....

This Bulls’ season has been much more of an odyssey than were the last two campaigns. For the most part they were smooth sailing, aside from some turbulence during last year’s playoffs, of course. This season, though, the Bulls have worked their way through a series of tasks and tests. At times, the 82-game season has seemed just too long; at times it has seemed so demanding that it is nothing if not fair....

Why is there an expiration date on sour cream? –Al Malmberg, Colorado Springs, Colorado Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But that’s not how it works. (Surely you suspected this.) It’s true they start with light cream or the equivalent. Having pasteurized it, which kills most of the microorganisms that make raw milk go sour, they then dump in a special bacterial culture that produces lactic acid....

** MY PRIVATE WAR The filmmakers, Harriet Eder and Thomas Kufus, found six soldiers in the German Wehrmacht who fought on the eastern front and took home movies to record “where one had been,” as one of them blithely puts it. The amateur footage is intercut with present-day interviews with each of the six discussing his “war movies.” The soldiers narrate their own footage, and we are encouraged to see the war through their eyes, which is troubling because most of them seem to be unreconstructed Nazis....

In recent years more and more musicians have opted to straitjacket themselves into ever-narrowing niches. Rock bands now specialize in noise pop, slacker rock, techno, or any number of other pigeonholes; likewise jazz artists, once among the most eclectic musicians in the world, often restrict their expression to the confines of swing, postbop, free jazz, or some other offshoot. The industry abets this trend because it simplifies the goal of making music a marketable commodity targeted at a specific audience, and the public seems to relish the notion of music as life-style accoutrement....