The Lion King, at the Cadillac Palace Theatre. Without director-designer Julie Taymor’s pageantry, this adaptation of the charming Disney cartoon would be a howling bore. Where the original was agile, the book lumbers. The music is overproduced but undercomposed, and Garth Fagan’s choreography is less interesting than the dancing on Soul Train. But the shadow puppets, the masks, the actors tricked out to look like giraffes, and the many other flashes of wizardry make everything else worth sitting through....

Josleen Wilson spent last Thursday night in her Manhattan apartment listening to Bush and Bloomberg and lesser-known cheerleaders describe the city as “festive” during the blackout. On Friday she watched her tropical fish swim to the top of the living-room aquarium, desperately seeking oxygen. At 2 PM she walked into the bedroom and shut the door. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “She was my first phone call as soon as the electricity came on,” Hritz said that Sunday....

The Story: TROTS: Why did you have testimony from a sperm bank coordinator? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Assistant state’s attorney Kevin Byrne: Well, on the initial tape, which was August the 4th of 1998, there was a mention of the sperm bank on the tape. And what April was basically saying to the undercover officer was, once her husband was killed there was a sperm bank that she could go to, have Albert’s children, and Edith Appleton, who’s Albert’s mother, would of course want grandchildren because Albert was the sole heir to her fortune....

WALFRID KUJALA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sometimes it takes the imminent retirement of a veteran performer for us to appreciate him anew. Chicago Symphony Orchestra flutist Walfrid Kujala, who’s stepping down this June, joined the CSO in 1954 as assistant principal and began doubling up on piccolo three years later. (He’s one of a handful of switch-hitters just as adept on both instruments....

As usual this year’s Country Music Festival in Grant Park offers the only consistently themed block of music programming during the Taste of Chicago. But within the broader genre the lineup is as big a hodgepodge as any in recent memory. The Petrillo Music Shell (Columbus and Jackson) headliners are pretty much all Nashville assembly-line products, with the notable exception of Loretta Lynn. There will be a few quality acts performing on the Taste Stage (at Balbo and Columbus), while Sunday’s program is being billed as an “Afternoon of ‘Old’ Country....

When Marcus Moore started Yojimbo’s Garage six years ago, he decided to do something most of his competitors didn’t: open at 8 AM. About half the bike shop’s customers are bicycle messengers, as was Moore until 1995, and the early hours make a difference to them. “I know what it’s like to work all day, have something happen to your bike, and then have to have it ready before work the next day,” says Moore....

While putting together a collection of my film pieces for an upcoming book I included an appendix listing my 1,000 favorite films and videos made between 1895 and the present–features and shorts, live action and animation, narrative and experimental. The point was to cite not the works I consider the most important historically but the ones that still provide me with the most pleasure and edification. Of course, it’s also a truism that the closer you get to the present, the likelier it is that a favorite will eventually be forgotten....

Even though all these bands fall under one metal rubric or another, it’s odd to see them on a bill together. Sweden’s Evergrey, touring behind their intricate yet sweeping fourth album, Recreation Day (Inside Out), bring a capital-R romantic, almost prayerful approach to their fast avian runs and wispy swirls of keyboard; the heavy riffs mostly serve to set off this complexity. By contrast Detroit’s morbid Black Dahlia Murder (who just played here two weeks ago) don’t allow much room for mood changes or even breathing–once their debut, Unhallowed (Metal Blade), kicks off, it doesn’t stop kicking....

Juan Munoz According to curator Neal Benezra’s essay in the excellent catalog, the 1984 Spiral Staircase was the first sculpture Munoz felt was “really his own.” A wall-mounted miniature in dark iron, it has curvy, ornate, almost witchy lines. The staircase leads to a balcony with a railing, which immediately suggests a somewhat disturbing human presence: for reasons unknown, some tiny person will climb the staircase to look down on us....

Friday 9/26 – Thursday 10/2 27 SATURDAY The first season of the reality show Starting Over, which airs weekdays at noon on Channel 5, focuses on six women–including a twice-divorced would-be stand-up comic from Niles and a depressed young widow from Orland Park–who share a place in Uptown while struggling to turn their lives around. For season two the producers are seeking a new set of women 18 or older with some issues; in particular they’re in the market for nervous brides and prospective adoptive parents....

Most upper-middle-class felons would rather not broadcast their prison records to the world. Not Ric Borelli. He’s made his time in the joint the centerpiece of his one-man show, Best Dope in Town, which opens tonight at the ImprovOlympic. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unemployed and directionless after high school, reeling from his parents’ messy divorce, Borelli drifted, trying to figure out what to do with his life....

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though Daniel Barenboim was born in Argentina, it’s a bit of a stretch to call him an Argentinean: his family left Buenos Aires for Israel in 1951, when he was nine, and for much of his career he’s staked his reputation on music from Europe and North America. But lately he’s broadened his repertoire, both as a pianist and as conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, to include works from Latin countries like Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico; the tango craze of the 1990s no doubt made this an easy step for him to take, and in fact he released a trio recording of tangos in 1996, Mi Buenos Aires querido (Teldec), which he’s since followed with others....

Like a growing number of younger classical players, pianist Christopher O’Riley comfortably straddles the fence between his metier and the pop realm. Trained at a conservatory, he has the requisite concertos and sonatas in his repertoire–namely works by late Romantics (Busoni, Tchaikovsky), modern Russians (Scriabin, Stravinsky, Prokofiev), and Americans (Gershwin). At Ravinia, where I first heard him live, he’s been relegated to reviving warhorses (Tchaikovsky’s First, Gershwin’s concerto) and stoking the tango craze (duo piano arrangements of Piazzolla’s tunes)....

Califone’s Tim Rutili and Ben Massarella played a major role in ushering guitarist Eric Johnson into the local rock scene. They recruited the Naperville-bred musician for the touring version of their group in 2000, and a year later their label, Perishable Records, released Echolocation, the debut album from his rootsy pop band the Fruit Bats. But by the time that disc came out, in September 2001, Johnson had split with Califone to concentrate on his own music....

Dan Morris stood in his basement and took inventory: he had the big Betacam, the Hi-8 camera, the DV camera, the still camera, and the Domke vest with camera pockets. Duct tape, gaffer’s tape, four cases of Beta. Three backpacks, three pairs of pants, three T-shirts. And eight pairs of socks–at least as essential as tape for his second trip to Alaska to film the Iditarod. A lot of stuff for one man to carry to the airport, but he’d done it before....

On their last few albums the Jayhawks have tried, with varying degrees of success, to wriggle out of the stylistic confines of alt-country. On 1997’s Sound of Lies, the group’s first album following the departure of cofounder Mark Olson, they relegated their trademark twang to the margins in favor of a richly textured rock sound. Smile, released in 2000, was more adventurous, but its rhythm loops and purposeless jamming proved a dead end....

An art exhibit that avoids making an obvious statement is typically either very bad–some artists don’t know how to use their materials to say anything–or, as in the case of John Fraser’s 23 sculptures and collages at Roy Boyd, almost unaccountably good. Our natural instinct is to impose our own worldview on everything we see, but Fraser’s work, arising from what he calls his “meditative practice,” is about holding back and letting his materials speak for themselves....

CHECK ENGINE Check Engine (Southern) Chicago’s music scene is rife with musicians doing double and triple duty; nearly every recording I’m reviewing in this week’s column is by some kind of alter ego or side project. That includes Check Engine, which features vocalist and saxophonist Steve Sostak and guitarist Chris Daly of Sweep the Leg Johnny, along with ex-Lynx bassist Paul Patrick Joyce, guitarist Joe Cannon, and drummer Brian Wnukowski. They seem to be trying to move away from Sweep’s abrasive math rock into more melodic pop–Big Star meets Drive Like Jehu, as their publicist puts it–but that’s not the feel I came away with....

Czech filmmaker Frantisek Vlacil (1926-’99) may have been eclipsed in the West by his countrymen Milos Forman and Jiri Menzel, but his body of work from the 60s and 70s has earned him a solid reputation at home: Marketa Lazarova (1966), which kicks off a weeklong Vlacil retrospective at Facets Cinematheque, was recently voted the greatest Czech film of all time in a national critics’ poll. Adapted from an experimental novel by Vladislav Vancura, it concerns the feud between two pagan clans that have fallen under the dominion of Christian German overlords in the 13th century....

Dear Peter: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago is a great music town, as witnessed by the incredible talent we have performing in our “bar scene.” National public acclaim is not the only criteria for a “high-quality” act. Hundreds of talented groups perform in Chicago bars; some make it to national visibility, but most do not. Are groups such as Nicholas Tremulus, Michael McDermott, Cathy Richardson, the Insiders, and countless other current and past local stars second-rate simply because they didn’t crack the national market on a mass scale?...