TOM VARNER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You can count on one hand the number of French horn players who have distinguished themselves in jazz, but Tom Varner has more to offer than extra points in a trivia contest. For starters, Varner improvises with enough flexibility, imagination, and timbral variety to make you wonder why more French hornists haven’t attempted the leap. More important, both his solos and his clever, satisfying compositions quickly overshadow the freak value of his instrument: after a minute or so, you forget that Varner and his instrument supposedly “belong” in a symphony or chamber orchestra....

As I Lay Dying Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the tune sounds different this time–and to these ears much, much better. It’s not only that William Faulkner’s twisted Mississippians and bitter, absurdist irony are about as far as you can get from the populist nobility of Steinbeck’s heroic Okies. As I Lay Dying is also a markedly better show than its predecessor–more honest, more interesting, more alive....

HUSKER DU The Living End (Warner Bros) At their creative peak, Husker Du combined infectious pop melodies with a high-speed, distorted hardcore sound, creating a wrenching, gorgeous yowl like no one had ever heard before. From one amazing album to another, this tense amalgam of opposing styles produced cathartic gems for both anarchy addicts and pop thrill seekers alike. But by the time I had my little talk with Jeanne, the trio’s formal command had become so effortless that the tension seemed finally mastered, subdued, and, perhaps, formulaic....

Back in my 20s, when I was so much older and wiser than I am now, Hamlet, with its moody, brooding hero and his dark death-obsessed soliloquies, was my favorite Shakespearean drama. But now that I’m midway through my 30s and that much closer to Hamlet’s “undiscovered country,” As You Like It is my fave–not because the play denies “the misfortune our flesh is heir to” but because it transcends it, revealing as only a comedy can that not every bad turn ends badly....

Cellist Barbara Haffner and pianist David Schrader first met in the late 70s when both joined Music of the Baroque. Soon after, they found themselves in demand as performers in impromptu chamber recitals; later, they got together with two other top-notch (and busy) local free-lancers, Sandra and Robert Morgan, and farmed a professional ensemble called the Rembrandt Chamber Players. But as a duo Haffner and Schrader have not performed publicly until now–in this week’s free noontime concert at the Cultural Center....

For Belly’s second album, King, Tanya Donelly has focused her lyrics and turbocharged her pop instincts; the result is a delectable and emotional song cycle whose dark underpinnings clash thrillingly with her cascading melodies and Glyn Johns’s dense production. In Donelly’s songs, twisted and sometimes menacing themes–with their hints of predatory lovers, familial dysfunction, and generational anomie–fall over one another; her characters, accordingly, are somewhat overstimulated, their impressions tumbling out in a multidimensional torrent (“I’m your faith / I’m your faithhealer / I’m your faithless companion”)....

The things that make Bruce Barth such a superb jazz pianist show up in the work of many of his contemporaries–his balanced attack and wide dynamic range, his ability to draw upon a treasure trove of complex harmonic theory, his inventive self-assurance as an improviser. The key to his playing lies not in his doing something radically different at the piano, but in his doing it better than 90 percent of the other young pianists....

Friday 24 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Georges Franju’s French expressionist horror classic Eyes Without a Face tells the story of a plastic surgeon who causes a car accident that terribly disfigures his daughter’s face. To rectify his error the doctor desperately attempts to rebuild her visage–with transplants from women he lures home and kills. The stark and horrific film is a meditation on the superficial nature of beauty; Facets calls it “a dangerous masterpiece that is a highly charged fusion of visceral excess and visual poetry....

JULY David “Beez” Barry, a stalwart Starlight Foundation volunteer who died playing softball last summer, will be memorialized at a 16-inch softball tourney this weekend in Evanston. To raise money for the foundation, which grants wishes to terminally ill children, 28 men’s teams and 32 coed ones will compete from 8 to 11 tonight, 8 to 5 tomorrow, and 9 to 5 Sunday in James Park, Oakton and Dodge in Evanston....

Eugene R. Klompus has been collecting cuff links since the day his adolescent eye was smitten by a pair of marcasite sparklers dancing on the sleeves of a favorite uncle. After 40 years, he owns a mind-boggling 30,000 pairs, thousands of singles, and uncounted related trappings like tie bars, money clips, and detachable collars. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Klompus can explain all this before the word “obsessive” even slips from your lips....

God’s Trombones, Bryn Mawr Theatre. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Several cast replacements and the absence of a key cast member because of an automobile accident made for a rather tentative production of God’s Trombones, adapted for the stage from the poetry suite by James Weldon Johnson. But even with the glitches in this evening of verse and music there were touches of inspiration....

After years of being infatuated with Yeats’s poetry, local songwriter and storyteller Joseph Daniel Sobol has finally compiled a theatrical cycle of songs and spoken pieces set to the Irish master’s verses and essays. Titled In the Deep Heart’s Core: A Mystic Cabaret and intended to be performed cabaret style, the work features 19 of Yeats’s poems that Sobol regards as particularly folksy, mystical, and moving. For each he’s come up with an appropriate musical accompaniment, from ballad to jazz riff to Dowland-like lute song....

This hour-long 1995 Danish documentary by Krzysztof Wierzbicki, made shortly before Krzysztof Kieslowski’s untimely death, feels incomplete when it comes to fleshing out every important stage of writer-director Kieslowski’s career with clips, but as an extended interview giving us some notion of why he retired and what his state of mind was like in his last days it’s priceless. Kieslowski’s mordant wit is trained on a good many subjects, including the behavior of Americans, and we learn that the script he was working on when he died was for a project he had no intention of directing....

Michael Cullen’s Next Stage Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Cullen and his former theater partners Sheila Henaghan and Howard Platt shut down their theatrical production company in 1992, Carlucci suggested Cullen take some time off from show business and come to work for him to learn the restaurant trade. Cullen says he was ready to take a break from producing theater anyway because it had become nearly impossible to turn a profit....

Rumble in the Bronx Broken Arrow Many people who’ve seen Saturday Night Fever probably remember the poster of a bare-chested Sylvester Stallone as Rocky in the bedroom of Tony (John Travolta), the king of Brooklyn disco. But how many recall the poster of a bare-chested Bruce Lee as well? In the nearly two decades since Saturday Night Fever was released, the dream of wedding Hong Kong action pyrotechnics with Hollywood production values to conquer the American mainstream has surfaced periodically, but until recently the results have seemed halfhearted at best....

MONKEY DANCING at Red Bones Theatre Organic Theater Company Greenhouse, Lab Theater Gay liberation was a distinctly American–indeed, New York phenomenon at first; so it’s interesting that the most provocative play I saw in a weekend of gay-pride theatergoing is from England. Monkey Dancing, the opening entry in Bailiwick Repertory’s Pride Performance Series, was written by London fringe artist Claire Dowie as a showcase for her own high-energy performance style; it serves as a fine vehicle for others in this superbly acted Chicago premiere....

“Alot of my taste for theater came from seeing concerts of Genesis and Jethro Tull,” says Robert Lepage, the Quebec writer, director, performer, and designer who at 35 is artistic director of Canada’s national theater and was recently named a knight of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres, one of Canada’s highest artistic honors. His taste for spectacle is evident to anyone who saw his Dragon’s Trilogy at the last International Theatre Festival or who caught Peter Gabriel’s recent tour, for which Lepage designed the set and lights....

Lead Story In a Saint Louis courtroom on October 19 accused rapist Anthony Minor had his spirits temporarily lifted when the victim, who was on the witness stand, confidently assured her attorney that her assailant was in the courtroom but then mistakenly pointed to a stranger seated close to the jury box. (Minor wasn’t helped by the mistake, since he’d already admitted to having sex with her, though he said it was consensual....

Motorhome lives less in a loft than in an environment. Outside a van covered in painted yellow daisies sits patiently. Inside, in a converted bank building in west Lakeview, two band members live with a couple of friends in a cozy and cluttered warren of rooms. Paintings by guitarist Josiah Mazzaschi and bassist Kristen Thiele are arrayed in the hallways: the rest of the available wall space is covered with painted flowers and trees....

Edgemode Neither was the dancing. We comprehend dance, I think, in a different way than we do a story or an essay. In a difficult dance one part of the brain struggles to find the narrative and the meaning while another tries to process the emotion in the dancing; ideally all these perceptions merge as one watches the performance to create a satisfying whole. In choreography as difficult as Mordine’s these tasks are hard enough in themselves, and to do them all at once is often out of the question....