Wisdom Bridge Unmoored Again After surviving two seasons without a home, Wisdom Bridge Theatre was expected to settle down later this year at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, a $16 million entertainment complex now under construction in Skokie. But the theater’s precarious existence has now prompted the arts center to look elsewhere for a new tenant. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Once a premier off-Loop company, Wisdom Bridge has been an itinerant troupe since shutting down its Howard Street location more than 18 months ago....

Friday 5 While any serious film student has seen the two-hour version of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, it originally premiered in 1916 as a highly experimental four-hour-and-ten-minute epic that simultaneously told stories in four different times and places: ancient Babylon, the Middle East at the time of Christ, among the Huguenots in 17th-century France, and a (then) contemporary working-class American neighborhood. For more than nine years Peter Williamson, a film conservator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, worked on rebuilding the film from a newly discovered print; his reconstruction makes its Chicago debut tonight at 7 and tomorrow afternoon at 2 at the University of Chicago’s Max Palevsky Cinema, 1212 E....

Jack the Dog Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The gulf between rigorously scripted academic composition–the type of music known in British circles as “new complexity”–and open improvisation sometimes seems hopelessly unbridgeable. In the new music establishment there’s a general contempt for free music, while players who see themselves as improvisers often use the word “academic” as a handy way of describing anything stiff and lifeless....

MARILYN CRISPELL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the last few years the dearth of available recordings by pianist Marilyn Crispell has been rectified, mostly by the Leo and Music & Arts labels. Not only has the deluge of releases, recorded in a variety of settings, made Crispell’s work easier to find, it’s also showcased her versatility. Her status as one of jazz’s most important post-Cecil Taylor keyboardists has been secure for years, and few avant-gardists can match her impressive lyrical romanticism....

Fans of international theater are sure to be delighted by Klown: Prick Us and We’ll Burst, the American premiere by the German satirical theater troupe Die Hanswurste (literally translated “the blood sausages”). The show, which opens this weekend at the Chicago Actors Ensemble, is a retrospective of the troupe’s best work from the last ten years, which they refer to as “clown performance art.” It would seem that Chicago has been bestowed with a great honor, to be the first American city to host one of Europe’s finest theater groups....

You’re born naked– everything else is drag.” This old saying has become a mantra in the last few years as commentators rush to explain the 90s drag craze. But even if this adage has been repeated too many times, it’s still insightful. All clothes are “unnatural,” yet we’re not just naked at birth–we’re also illiterate, so everything we say or write is a kind of drag too. Perhaps most Hollywood autobiographies have been written by women because as outsiders in the entertainment industry they’ve faced extreme situations that have demanded equally extreme survival tactics....

Sonny Rollins Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a fitting tribute to its cover subject in early January, the Village Voice called tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, 65, “the last jazz immortal.” A contemporary of John Coltrane, Rollins was frequently pitted against him by critics and fans, but both the sounds and careers of the two tenor greats–especially following Rollins’s much-publicized two-year hiatus beginning in 1959–were on vastly different tracks than the one that brought them together for 1956’s classic meeting, Tenor Madness....

THAT DOG 4/9, SCHUBAS That Dog’s eponymous debut co-opts the poignant but discordant folk-rock pioneered more than a decade ago by England’s Raincoats (whose recent reissues–three long-out-of-print early-80s Rough Trade albums, on DGC–demonstrate the market value of Kurt Cobain’s admiration). That Dog chirp up the sound (their most Raincoats-like element is the ragged violin of Petra Haden) with sweet three-part harmonies and less personal, less troublesome subject matter (“Westside Angst” playfully bemoans the º·¶ area code’s splintering of their LA home)....

A number of positive developments have transpired in South Africa since this superb work of musical theater finished its world-premiere run here last spring; among them is the conviction of a white security guard for the 1991 homicide of Headman Shabalala, lead singer of the black South African singing group Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Dedicated to Shabalala’s memory and based on the true case of his cousin, The Song of Jacob Zulu tells the story of a black youth accused of a senseless act of terrorism that claimed black and white lives alike....

Day or night, there is something about the first glimpse of a ballpark’s lighting standards, something to do with the promise of green grass tucked into the urban sprawl beneath them, like an oasis under a pocket of palm trees. The odd thing is, this cheerful association is so strong for a baseball fan it is even noticeable as one approaches Philip Elfstrom Stadium at the Kane County Events Center in Geneva, where the lights rise against a backdrop of flat farm fields and a mountainous landfill....

How does a person get listed in the Social Register? Obviously genetics must be a factor, along with piles of money. But many people with both appear to be excluded, while others lacking one or the other are listed. Who decides anyway? And why does such a silly institution continue in the first place? –Fania, Washington, D.C. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They leave you out again, kid?...

When you hear the word “supergroup” you probably think of aging rock stars, flabby, ego-bloated performances, and exorbitant ticket prices. If so, you should probably check out Tortoise, a kind of indie-rock supergroup whose intriguing music incorporates subtlety, understatement, and unassuming sophistication. Dan Bitney, John Herndon, John McEntire, Doug McCombs, Bundy K. Brown, and Brad Wood–whose resumes include stints with Eleventh Dream Day, Shrimp Boat, Bastro, Tar Babies, Poster Children, Gastr del Sol, and Precious Wax Drippings–rely on tightly woven ensemble playing rather than spotlighted solo flights; their eponymous debut LP on Thrill Jockey is made up of ten rather quiet instrumentals whose beauty emerges slowly and gradually....

WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS? Summer Night Theatre Ensemble Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Directed by Dorothy Milne, this is a pleasant, gently funny hour and a half, but it could do with some trimming and, oddly, a little more self-consciousness. Abdoo has a warm, natural presence onstage and strikes up an instant rapport with the audience; but at times her show is too much like being trapped in a bar with a loquacious if entertaining girlfriend....

A FLOWER IN AUTUMN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After the youthful Tom Monacell dies in an automobile accident, the position of family paragon falls to his younger brother, Anthony. A senior in college majoring in English and a writer of good–if academic–verse, Anthony has always held his older brother in awe and is unprepared for the attention his mother suddenly gives to him and his future....

The Nutcracker Nuts & Bolts: A Jazzy In the last half century The Nutcracker–originally a story by E.T.A. Hoffmann and later a ballet by Petipa and Ivanov to a glorious score by Tchaikovsky–has proved to be more dance project than classical ballet. And it’s a project many have taken on, perhaps because of the dream that frames it or the fantasy parade that ends it. But in any case, like Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, The Nutcracker has been mercilessly trashed by regional companies everywhere (the Annapolis Ballet Theater has a drag queen for the Mouse King)....

At least 25 percent of Illinois AFDC families must be working during the year beginning October 1 in order for the state to get its full share of the new welfare block grants, reports Pete Sherman in the downstate Illinois Times (September 12-18). (Twenty-three percent are already working, which says something about the entry-level jobs out there.) Illinois Department of Public Aid deputy director Joseph Antolin: “Even though this is the federal government’s best thinking to date on welfare, it’s going to be a nightmare to figure this stuff out....

Six-year-old Stevie is a loner who’s obsessed with a sitcom star in Todd Haynes’s hauntingly mordant deconstruction of 1950s television and family life, which trenchantly depicts both in terms of hierarchical power relations and unexpected transformations. Alienated from other kids, who tease him for his femininity, and by his cold father, who watches sports on television, Stevie’s infatuation with Dottie is, for him, liberating. In close-ups of his head against the TV screen he seems lost in the Dottie show, while filling a sketchbook with drawings of her....

This 1995 film is the only feature by Hal Hartley that has the same degree of formal playfulness as his overlooked short films–perhaps because it was made as if it were three separate shorts, all recounting the same story but set in different cities (New York, Berlin, and Tokyo) and told mainly in different languages, with certain differences regarding gender, race, ethnicity, and milieu. Though it lacks some of the behavioral charms of Hartley’s Trust and The Unbelievable Truth and even announces its own likelihood to fail as an experiment in the second episode, this is in some ways my favorite Hartley picture–not only because it takes the most risks, but also because it gives the mind more to do in the process....

Writers’ Marketing As well as this system works, especially when it comes to driving freelance writers into public relations, there’s always room for improvement. Jill Sherer and Kathryn Taylor have opened that room. You’ll find it at 401 N. Franklin, a start-up space five floors up. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Kathryn and I are freelance writers. We’ve been out there. We know what it’s like to live that lifestyle,” Sherer says....

JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR DREAMCOAT Make that the former epitome: it’s been knocked off its pedestal by Osmond’s latest effort. As the star of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Old Testament-inspired musical, Osmond has found the perfect vehicle: cheerful, glossy, fast-paced, and empty. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Designer Mark Thompson has created an impressive and flexible set, including a huge pharaonic visage with negroid features and bright blue eyes that shoots out giant corncobs like a slot machine....