The Red Krayola Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thompson’s first collaborative reinvention occurred during the mid-70s, when he worked with a trans-Atlantic conceptual-art collective called Art & Language. They made several films and videos and one album, Corrected Slogans, which introduced history and left-leaning politics into Thompson’s music. In 1979, while based in London, he worked with Cleveland’s “avant-garage” rock band Pere Ubu on the Red Krayola’s record Soldier Talk....

Succeeding as much for what it hides in its music as for what it shows, this San Francisco trio has quietly made a pair of the most intriguing records I’ve heard in the last few years. Recorded in a huge warehouse in the rough area of their city known as Tenderloin, Swell’s music reflects its surroundings: big, raw, spacious, and unadorned. It builds upward from sturdy, insistent rhythms–drummer Sean Kirkpatrick’s loose-limbed wallop, bassist Monte Vallier filling in some of the cracks....

Why do humans not have blue or green hair? Insects have these hues, birds are so plumaged, and even the mandrill baboon has blue pigmentation on the face. We humans have blue or green eyes, so the ability to produce the colors in question is present. So why, oh why, must we resort to artificial means to achieve blue or green hair? And I don’t mean the sort of “blue rinse” fashionable for ladies of a certain age....

This Bud’s From Mick In last Sunday’s Sun-Times Mick Jagger tried to talk his way around the fact that he’s now a poster boy for a beer company. “I never really did an ad for Budweiser,” he claimed. When interviewer Jim DeRogatis reminded him that the Stones appear in a televised Budweiser commercial, Jagger said, “If they use our videos in their tour sponsorship, that’s fine. But I never did an ad for them saying, ‘Bud is great....

Those Drifting Theatergoers: Will the Bible Get Them Back? Following almost nine months of relentless hype, the Live Entertainment Corporation of Canada opens its cleverly updated revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat Sunday at the Chicago Theatre. With its lavish production values and surprisingly witty biblical story line, the show may just enjoy the long run its producers are banking on. Slick musicals are nothing new to Loop theaters, but none in recent memory has catered to families as shrewdly as this one, with its melodic score, amusing scene design, locally cast chorus of 50 children, and flashy finale with light show and up-to-the-minute dance music and costumes....

The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me If contemporary gay playwrights are to be believed, every gay man’s coming-out story is the same: innocently gender-confused childhood, heart-stopping stolen kiss in high school, parental reprimand and disapproval, escape to a liberal urban mecca, indulgence in residual self-loathing acted out in numerous sexual escapades, sober confrontation with the Plague, and finally pride, acceptance, a raised fist, a “Silence=Death” T-shirt, and inclusion in “the tribe....

American Ballet Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few classical ballet companies can hold a candle to American Ballet Theatre’s stable of principal dancers. Not only is their ballet technique outstanding, they’re renowned for creating an onstage magic that lingers well after the curtain goes down. In recent years ABT has charmed Chicago audiences with superb performances of Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake, and mixed repertoires....

DRESSING ROOM DIVAS Carr’s Halsted Street Cabaret Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Check your egos at the door, Quincy Jones reportedly told the famous singers on his record “We Are the World.” Playwrights Sal Emmino and Dane Hall refrain from making such an impossible demand on the characters in their hilarious, raunchy camp comedy Dressing Room Divas. Rather, their celebrity heroines–Bette Midler, Elizabeth Taylor, Julie Andrews, Meryl Streep, and Joan Collins–flaunt their egos as widely and wildly as possible....

N.W.A Greatest Hits (Ruthless) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Commercially speaking, they couldn’t be more wrong. With its fantasies of casual murder, woman-bashing, chronic substance abuse, and lawlessness, gangsta rap is an affront to the core values of society, and in that, it’s pure rock ‘n’ roll. Gangsta rap, like rock, became popular because it seemed dangerous (and like rock, it became less dangerous as it became more familiar)....

It’s hard to imagine a good idea getting more royally screwed up than the plan to redevelop the Hi-Way Theater, a project that should have been finished in 1992. The whole comedy of errors–the explanation for the latest blunder defies logic–reveals gross ineptitude on the part of city officials and their lawyers, suggesting that the Daley administration is incapable of completing a relatively straightforward neighborhood development project. But for reasons that have never been explained, the city never told the county it planned to bid on the property....

Inner Life, Curious Theatre Branch, at the Lunar Cabaret and Full Moon Cafe. The imaginative, deliciously smart work of Wisconsin writer Angela Woodward comes to life in Curious Theatre’s adaptations of her stories for a series called Inner Life. The first in the series is “Mr. Distar,” which Beau O’Reilly claims to have carried around in his book bag for 3 years because he liked it so much. It depicts a provocative encounter between two former college friends, one a professor completely lost in the ivory tower of her theories and the other a near-homeless woman broken down by a system that filled her teaching position with a robot....

Dubbed “the king of Canto-pop” for his sensitive and at times flamboyant mastery of Cantonese rock ballads, Jacky Cheung is indisputably east Asia’s most popular vocalist. His 28th and latest CD, Kiss Me Goodbye, sold more than 3.5 million copies, including 500,000 in his native Hong Kong (whose population is about 6 million). On tour last year he wowed SRO audiences in China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and North America with his supple, limpid voice–an unusual attribute for a singing idol in HK, where a pretty face and a hip attitude can go a long way....

Like many who’ve been poor at some point in their lives, Karl Marx spent a lot of time thinking about money. He didn’t just think about it of course; he philosophized. In much of his writing money took on almost mystical properties: It reduced the richness and complexity of human labor to an abstraction, helping to disguise the very nature of capitalist oppressions. It gave men powers they couldn’t have had without it, allowing stupid men to buy talent, ugly men to win the hearts (or at least the bodies) of beautiful women, cowards to buy bravery....

Canus Lunis Balloonis A lot of great plays and memorable productions have come out of this testosteronic tradition. But a lot of weak scripts and just plain awful shows have been given a pass over the years just because their strong Chicago-style dialogue or the cast’s deep-dish acting fooled critics and audiences into thinking they were watching something substantial. Which brings us to A Red Orchid Theatre’s Canus Lunis Balloonis, an all-male show that leans heavily on guy-play traditions to give the first act the appearance of depth and to try to cover up the enormously flawed second act....

BARBARA CRANE: STICKS AND STONES Number three displays a long branch stretching horizontally across four images. There’s some repetition–a kind of overlap effect; the area just to the left of each frame line is printed again just to its right. Aside from jarring the eye, this repetition reminds the viewer of the artificiality of photography and the arbitrariness of framing: instead of the continuity of nature, we experience the repetition made possible by photo reproduction....

Not long ago, Amy was precisely the kind of welfare mother people love to hate. She received Aid to Families With Dependent Children for the better part of a decade and had two children while on the dole. She entered job-training programs and dropped out repeatedly. She went to nursing school and flunked out. To many she was a lost cause, trained to be dependent on the liberal welfare state....

Red Red Meat’s evolution from bombastic, overwrought noise merchants (a sound carried over from their previous incarnation, Friends of Betty) to hazed but focused blues-touched rockers is a classic story of a band finding their niche by falling into it. On their 1990 debut single, “Hot Nikketty Trunk Monkey,” grimy, craggy guitar churned over a faint melody, but buried on the flip were “Molly’s on the Rag,” a frantic shuffle with a reckless slide-guitar frenzy, and the Rolling Stones-ish swagger of “X-Diamond Cutter Blues,” both foreshadowing the band’s nascent bluesy streak....

RUBBER DOLLY Rubber Dolly, being given its U.S. premiere by M.P.D. Productions, doesn’t try to excuse Fern’s actions, but neither does it make her out to be a monster. Flashbacks and monologues based on Fern’s and her sister Marie’s memories paint a thorough portrait of a likable but stunted woman. From the opening monologue we see Fern’s love for life. Recalling a time in her childhood when her mother taunted her cruelly, Fern quickly gets past the pain to lovingly recall enchanted childhood times–taking dolls on camping trips and meeting her best friend on a train....

In 1988 the small magazine Albert French had been publishing folded, and he suddenly found himself with a lot of time on his hands. Over the next three years, he says, he left his apartment only to buy cigarettes and food. “I woke up 46 years old and jobless. My life was completely destroyed. I slept a lot. Jumped every time the phone rang.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Story One. About a year and a half ago I received delayed notice that my book discussion group had selected a lesser-known novel by Graham Greene, Monsignor Quixote. Time was running short; the group was meeting in a week. Luckily, I thought, I worked in the Loop. I ought to be able to locate the book quickly during lunch hour, or maybe after work....