The rawboned joy of Sonny Sharrock’s guitar stands almost alone in modern music: most jazz players don’t find room for Sharrock’s galvanic, reverberated tonal energy, while most rockers can’t approach either the creativity or the complexity of his melodic sense. By the early 70s, Sharrock’s slashing, sometimes anarchic forays had made him a sort of demigod among guitar fanatics, who heard him with Pharoah Sanders and Don Cherry and thought that perhaps Hendrix was playing jazz gigs under an assumed name....

GODFLESH 12/9, ARAGON BALLROOM Residing somewhere between early Black Sabbath and Cop- and Filth-era Swans is Selfless (Earache/Columbia), the fourth album by England’s Godflesh. Guitarist-vocalist Justin Broadrick and bassist Ben Christian Green inject ominous textures beneath their leaden chug-and-grind grooves: gray soundscapes, rumbling, feedback-drenched harmonics, funereal dirges, and quasi-chanted vocals seep through the cracks of the duo’s otherwise impenetrable din, a veritable sonic flaying device. They open for goth-metal comedians Type O Negative and GNC Antichrist poster boy Danzig....

Unquestioned Integrity: By Carol Burbank Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The testimony is verbatim but Hunt has carefully edited it to show the conflicts and alliances enacted during the hearings: this carefully staged dose of reality creates a tension that fiction rarely achieves. Placing Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Senate committee (represented by one actor) onstage forces us to reenact our own voyeurism from the peanut galleries of our living rooms in 1991....

WOZZECK The difference in Wozzeck is the relentless, grinding, downbeat subject. The opera is about evil–without a single redeeming strain of nobility. It’s the petty evil of Mime, without the grandeur of Alberich. None of the characters is tragic; they are only pathetic. I suppose one is meant to empathize with the suffering of the title character, but ignore the composer’s sympathetic dramatic picture of this downtrodden soldier and you have a commonplace tabloid story....

THE CHILDREN’S HOUR Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour is one of those 30s-style socially conscious melodramas in which essentially likable people smash up against an intolerant society and are destroyed. In this case the likable people are Karen Wright and Martha Dobie, the headmistresses of the Wright-Dobie School. Their crime: being accused by one of their less stable students of being lesbian lovers. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fifty-nine years later Hellman’s play remains remarkably powerful, in large part because it’s so well constructed....

Sir Colenso Ridgeon has a health-care crisis. The physician, newly knighted for his experimental tuberculosis therapy, is faced with two terminal consumption cases that need his care; but the demands of his research (and the social politicking that goes along with it) allow him time to treat only one. Which patient should he save? A decent but mediocre fellow doctor, or a brilliant young artist whose amoral life-style offends Ridgeon–and whose wife Ridgeon is infatuated with?...

THE MERRY WIDOW Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most of the productions I’ve seen of this quintessential Viennese operetta–including Light Opera Works’ previous stab at it, in 1984–have been too broad in their comic strokes and too condescending in their handling of the codes of conduct of a bygone era. The premise may be antiromantic (a wealthy widow being wooed for her fortune in fin de siecle Paris) and the leading man (a prince who accepts an indecent proposal to save his duchy from financial ruin) vaguely unsavory, but Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow is in the end about true love triumphing over sinister motives and mixed signals....

What does Alice B. Toklas have to do with Alice B. Toklas brownies, anyway? –Judy Prisoc, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It all started when Alice signed a contract with Harper’s to write a cookbook in 1952. She was a pretty fair cook, but what Harper’s really hoped to get (and what by and large it got) was tales of her life with Gertrude Stein, who’d died in 1946....

When wrapping your baking spud in aluminum foil, should you wrap shiny side in or shiny side out? I could swear I was taught in school that shiny side in will help it retain heat better, making it cook faster. However, I know a guy who says that you should always keep the shiny side away from your food, the reason being that the shiny side is shiny because it’s treated with a dangerous chemical, and you don’t want the chemical getting into your edibles....

UPSY-DAISY! Orlin, a South African artist known in her native country for her choreography, has been performing her remarkably visual work in Chicago for the last year. In the context of our town’s text-oriented performance community, Orlin immediately stands out: not a word is spoken during her show. But her athletic, richly layered work speaks in an intuitive, familiar language. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The version of Upsy-Daisy!...

DARK FRUIT Eric Leonardson and Ensemble Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Black & Gay: a Psycho-Sex Study” is in the form of a lecture with slides of pie charts, strange graphs, and photographs lifted from gay erotic magazines; it’s based on an actual book from the 1960s of the same title. Freeman, dressed in a lab coat and holding a collapsible pointer, describes gay black careers–“hairdresser, interior decorator, ballet dancer”–as well as the percentage of African Americans within the gay culture, the percentage of African American gays who prefer white lovers, the percentage of white gay men who prefer African American lovers, and on and on....

I was handicapped from the start. Familiar jolts of pain shot through my cramped hands as they remembered years spent pecking away at keyboards. Mia, at age 14, was the perfect height for the machine. Though she couldn’t type her own name too quickly, being a Nintendo expert she was accustomed to the video-game style of the exhibit. The hall of fame serves mainly as a showcase for those leaders of the business world canonized each year by Fortune magazine’s “Hall of Fame” issue....

Ten years ago the Antichrist came to Chicago. Rupert Murdoch took over the Sun-Times in January 1984, made it hideous overnight, and sold it two years later. Which may come as news to a few fastidious readers who flung down the paper when Murdoch arrived and never picked it up again. We still meet people who think he still owns it. But for all the reporters and editors–especially the young, single, mobile ones–who marched out with their honor perched conspicuously atop their boxes, the Sun-Times was not gutted....

A CONCEIVED NOTION Such attention to detail is refreshing, and it keeps Dennis’s script alive and kicking despite its risky subject. A Conceived Notion deals with the concept of grace–a terribly heady theological idea difficult, perhaps impossible, to translate into theater. But Dennis manages a lot just through trying, and her script is supported by genuine theatrical talent and directed well by Warren Davis. The result is an entertaining, intellectually engaging argument....

Matthew Sweet, Matthew Sweet’s career should put that platitude to rest. Sweet began recording in the early 80s working out of Athens, Georgia, with the obscure bands Oh-OK and Buzz of Delight. He launched his solo career in 1986 with the release of Inside, a somewhat catchy but one-dimensional stab at synth pop. That was followed by the languid and equally middling Earth in 1989. Both records demonstrated Sweet’s ability to pen a decent hook, but there was more cuteness and coyness than potency to the music....

Though it may not reach the level of sublimity of his three last features, Luis Bunuel’s long unavailable 1967 masterpiece, rereleased with the help of Martin Scorsese, remains a seminal work and incidentally serves to clarify the great director’s relationship with Hitchcock. Like Hitchcock, Bunuel was a prude with a strong religious background and a highly developed sense of the kinky and the transgressive, and what he does here with Catherine Deneuve, whom he used again memorably in Tristana, parallels Hitchcock’s encounters with Tippi Hedren, another cool blond, in The Birds and Marnie....

Beckett’s short plays may be less frequently performed than his longer, better known works, but these curt, astringent little morsels (maybe a minute long, maybe 15 minutes) have a simplicity and purity that make them in some ways more satisfying: Beckett, who spent his career paring down his language and simplifying his vision, manages to say a great deal in very little time, and with a minimum of props and dialogue....

Students of Sanford Roth trek to his studio, apartment 2A in a loft building on the near west side, to learn how to paint and draw. Roth’s bent is to start his followers on exercises. In teaching abstract painting, he may have his students put down a color wash first, later encouraging them to add scribbles and a grid. Then he lets them loose. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Faggot With a Gun In recent years the quantity of semiautobiographical coming-out/coming-of-age stories on Chicago stages has rivaled the number of stars in the Milky Way. If you’ve seen even a quarter of them, you may be convinced that gay men talk about little but themselves–their confused upbringings, their intolerant families, their adolescent sexual escapades, and their ultimate discovery of gay pride. And when it comes to solo gay performers, the autobiographical impulse seems even stronger, as inexorable as a black hole....

DEATHWATCH Set in a prison cell, Deathwatch focuses on neophyte thugs Maurice and Lefranc, who endlessly vie for the attention of their much admired and imitated cellmate, Green Eyes, a full-fledged murderer. Critics have prattled on about whether it’s Lefranc or Green Eyes who’s elevated to sainthood by committing murder or about the parallels between Deathwatch and Victor Turner’s theory of the liminal and the liminoid; but back here on Planet Earth, the play provides little for a cast or audience to sink their teeth into....