Players Workshop’s Children’s Theatre, at the Athenaeum Theatre. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We can ridicule A Christmas Carol, we can revile it, we can shun it, but we cannot deny its fundamental truth. In this Players Workshop’s Children’s Theatre variation on Charles Dickens’s classic fable, Ms. Ebeneza Scrooge is a retail-store tycoon, Annie Scrooge is the daughter of Ebeneza’s war-casualty brother, Roberta Cratchet is the management assistant whom Ebeneza “terminates” on Christmas Eve, and little Tina Cratchet is the invalid child who will not get the operation she needs now that her mother no longer has medical insurance....

Ed Petersen returns, and not a moment too soon. Never at a loss for great tenor men, Chicago has nonetheless missed this virtuoso in the 16 months since he moved to New Orleans. Yes, we’ve had his second release (The Haint on Delmark). But it’s no replacement for his intense and genial presence. On tenor, his main instrument, Petersen’s fat and malleable tone pushes the music forward, and his skilled articulation makes him seem to be gobbling up the chords faster than his pianists can dish them out....

Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was pleasantly surprised upon finding that the Reader had taken the time to review a hip-hop concert [Rock Etc., August 25]. However, my surprise quickly turned to disgust when it became apparent that the writer sent to cover the concert knew nothing about hip-hop. Whoever thinks that the Pharcyde revolutionized hip-hop subject matter has absolutely no knowledge of the history or evolution of the music....

A DELICATE BALANCE Although winning the Pulitzer is often evidence of incomparably stunning dramatic craft, it also often implies a certain predictable, mainstream accessibility, an ability to find the delicate balance between an original dramatic voice and standardized theatrical conventions. Say what you will about the misanthropic vulgarity of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woof (notably, it was not awarded the Pulitzer, which ignited an explosion of controversy in the theater community), at least it was brutally frank in its exposure of the miserable lives led by the privileged classes of American society....

JERRY DOUGLAS & PETER ROWAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nashville session players don’t get much respect outside country music’s inner circle. Jerry Douglas, master of the Weissenborn (a hollow-necked slide guitar) and dobro, for example, has lent his talents to over 1,000 recordings–odds are that if you have a handful of contemporary country records, he’s on at least one of them–yet he’s not as well-known as dozens of mediocre singers with only a record or two to their names....

By Ben Joravsky “I made it back in 1992, and it’s one of my favorite pieces in my personal collection,” she says. “It’s essentially a found object, but what’s so complicated was pinning the eggs together so they wouldn’t fall apart. It’s taking something natural and putting it in a man-made construction. And it’s humorous. Think about it: what if you racked up with eggs?” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Other festivals run one weekend, maybe two or three; this one, hosted by the Pilsen area’s Blue Rider Theatre, runs three months–through December 17, with shows Fridays-Saturdays at 8 PM and Sundays at 7 PM, as well as children’s matinees on selected Saturdays and Sundays at 3 PM. Most evenings feature two or more artists, with intermissions between each act. Aiming to mix theater, performance art, dance, poetry, and music, the fest has scheduled 80 artists in 40 nights, by such groups and individuals as Theater Oobleck, Redmoon Theater, Donna Blue Lachman, Carmela Rago, Jeff Abell, MASS, Bob Eisen, the Chicago Moving Company, and many more....

“Sound of Music was one of those love-to-hate movies for me,” says Maile Flanagan, explaining why she decided to create a one-woman parody of the Rodgers and Hammerstein schmaltz classic. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Flanagan’s version all the musical’s “weird psychosexual subtext” is brought to the surface: the nuns are all lesbians, Captain von Trapp is a sadist, Liesl is a bisexual slut, and Maria has the spaced-out quality of someone in major denial....

Mamma Roma Who can predict the changes in intellectual fashion over 20 years? In 1975, when the controversial Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was brutally murdered by a 17-year-old boy in a Roman suburb, he was no more in vogue than he had been throughout his stormy career. If any openly gay writer-director was an international star in the mid-70s, it was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who at that point was spinning out as many as three or four features a year; he died in 1982 after an orgy of cocaine abuse....

I didn’t like some of the films and videos on this program, part of the Gerber/Hart Library’s gay and lesbian film series, but there are a number of strong ones, and the show as a whole is impressively diverse. We see teenage lesbians, elderly lesbians, African-American lesbians, a gay/hetero triangle, and anonymous male sex–almost every piece in a different style. Two that feature performance artists are especially powerful. In Suzie Silver’s A Spy (Hester Reeve Does the Doors), Hester Reeve lip-synchs Jim Morrison’s voice while done up as a bearded but bare-breasted Jesus–is this what’s meant by a gender fuck?...

HOUSE OF LARGE SIZES 2/25, THURSTON’S This trio from Cedar Falls, Iowa, has been slogging away at the club circuit since 1987, honing both its skills and its fairly nondescript hard rock. While the just-released My Ass-Kickin’ Life (Red Decibel/Columbia), its third album, certainly marks some kind of zenith–tighter playing, snappier production, moderate tunefulness–these three remain likable champs of mediocrity, continually improving at nothing in particular. If you’re feeling kind of silly and only want to rock out HOLS will certainly get the job done, but then so would thousands of other bands....

Premiere month is the most depressing part of the TV year. The new shows are inevitably such a dismal flock of malformed freaks, of mutants and abominations blinking feebly in the brief glare of public exposure before they meet their merciful doom, that I start to feel like a health inspector on the island of Doctor Moreau. But this current crop worries me more than usual. I’m starting to get the feeling that instead of a brief parade of weirdness before the tedium sets back in again, what we’ve gotten from TV this past month is only a foretaste of a deeper, blacker mood of horror and contempt....

“Four hundred houses they’ve took down since the first of the year!” says Bill Lavicka, a structural engineer who’s rehabbed dozens of old buildings on the near west side. “The city of Chicago is creating more vacant lots than the Chicago Fire. You can’t keep tearing buildings down. There’s gonna be nothing left in this city–it’s turning into a prairie!” In a lot next to the condos Lavicka has built a shrine to all the old buildings Chicago has lost in the last century....

Pianist Vijay Iyer, the son of immigrants from southern India, takes his heritage quite seriously; that he has managed to honor it while creating vital and thought-provoking jazz suggests that we should take him seriously in turn. In his liner notes for his debut album, Memorophilia (Asian Improv Records), Iyer stresses two themes: his affinity, as a person of color, to the African-American musical tradition, and the impact of karnatak, the classical music of southern India–specifically its complex yet soulful rhythms....

Father Paul Quay suspects that some live people are being declared dead these days, and he doesn’t like it. For a decade and a half the Loyola University philosophy professor–along with such colleagues as Ohio neonatologist Paul Byrne and Chicago neurosurgeon Richard Nilges of Swedish Covenant Hospital–has been trying to debunk the widely accepted notion of “brain death.” These days mainstream medical ethicists are debating proposals to broaden the definition of brain death even further, so that more people can be declared dead sooner, making more organs available....

If you’re a First Amendment absolutist, or even a moderate who had a normal childhood, you’ll view with concern the forces of repression arrayed against the lowly comic book. In 1986 Friendly Frank’s, a comics store in Lansing, Illinois, is busted for selling Weirdo, Bizarre Sex, and other titles. The CBLDF is founded to aid the defense. Eventually the store manager is acquitted. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Four years after the California Board of Equalization sank its teeth into Mavrides’s shank he’s still struggling to pry himself free....

FRED ANDERSON (OKKA DISK) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When he hit the scene in the early 60s, Anderson’s restless, probing creativity led him to forge long-running associations with musicians who would later form the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). An Anderson-led group consisting of saxophonist Joseph Jarman–best known for his work with the Art Ensemble of Chicago–trumpeter Billy Brimfield, the late bassist Curtis Clark, and New Orleans drummer Arthur Reed was ostensibly the first AACM group....

Those who yoke themselves to the deep power of the ponderous, once-thought-to-be-ungainly baritone saxophone–which David Schumacher handles as if it weighed no more than a pocket trumpet–fall into two camps. There’s the Gerry Mulligan school, which emphasizes the feathery quality of the instrument’s upper registers, and then there’s the school that jumps right into the pure forcefulness of the bari’s remarkable sound–a school that for many years has included just about everyone else....

Despite their sweet songs and sweeter sounds, the Jayhawks may be the hard-liners of alternative country. Where cohorts like Wilco and the Bottle Rockets gain their cred by drawing from punk and hard rock, respectively, the Jayhawks go their own way. They feel their fondness for tense, burnished harmonies and old-fashioned touches of swelling strings don’t need credibility. As a result, their new Tomorrow the Green Grass is a gracious stunner, presenting a true modern country sound that has little to do with that nominal genre....

Verdi’s La traviata is arguably the most achingly romantic opera ever written, a rapturous paean to pure love and a delirious farewell to the empty glitter of the Parisian demimonde. At the center of the tragedy is Violetta, a frail courtesan hoping for Mr. Right to come along. Known as “la dame aux camelias”–the title of the younger Dumas’ book on which the opera is based–she indicates her availability by wearing camellias....