Rock, Pop, etc. BACK TO THE 60s AND 70s Rock On Entertainment impersonators perform tributes to Tom Jones, the Beatles, Rod Stewart, Karen Carpenter, Neil Diamond, and Elvis, with MC Ron Onesti. Sat 1/25, 8 PM, Barn Theatre, Arabian Knights Farm, 6526 Clarendon Hills, Willowbrook. 630-323-7530 or 844-458-5551. DJSHEWOLF, TERESA VASQUEZ, JUSTIN C. ROUNDS, MOIRA CUE, JONATHAN CHEN, DEREK HOFFEND, DJ MESSY STENCH and others perform at a gallery reception for “All Good Girls Go to Heaven....

Screenwriter Cesare Zavattini likely deserves as much credit as director Vittorio De Sica for such masterpieces of Italian neorealism as The Bicycle Thief (1947) and this 1952 feature about a retired civil servant (schoolteacher Carlo Battisti) who discovers that his meager pension won’t pay the rent for his room. He’s befriended by a maid in the same flat who’s pregnant but unsure of the father’s identity; apart from her the only creature he feels close to is his dog, and though he contemplates suicide, he has to find someone to care for it....

Scott Portman arrived in northern Iraq in August 1991, a few months after the end of the gulf war. He headed the International Rescue Committee’s relief program for the Kurds and other minorities inside the UN safe haven for a year, then spent two years in charge of the education, agriculture, health-care, and village-reconstruction programs of the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance. One of his first tasks was to survey the towns and villages that had been destroyed in Saddam Hussein’s campaign to depopulate rural Kurdish land in the late 80s—to find out which ones people had returned to and what they needed to get them through the coming winter....

The 22nd annual Women in the Director’s Chair International Film & Video Festival, featuring narrative, documentary, animated, and experimental works by women, runs Friday, March 14, through Sunday, March 23. Screenings are at the Women in the Director’s Chair Theater, 941 W. Lawrence; LaSalle Theatre, LaSalle Bank, 4901 W. Irving Park; Charles A. Hayes Family Investment Center, 4859 S. Wabash; and School of the Art Institute of Chicago Auditorium, Columbus Drive at Jackson....

There’s something supersize about everything this company does, as is readily apparent in the three new pieces I was able to watch on tape. Alonzo King’s wildly kinetic Following the Subtle Current Upstream, set to tabla music, both depends on and subverts his ballet training: the dancers establish their vertical axis only to violate it–shifting their hips in a wiggly jump, running, and turning–yet the axis remains, governing everything they do....

As You Like It, Chicago Shakespeare Theater. David H. Bell sets his production in imperial Russia, a choice that makes Shakespeare’s comedy darker and more beautiful than it is in most renditions. The Duke’s praise of life in the Forest of Arden illustrates his nobility, not the forest’s charm: it’s snowing, and people are sleeping on the ground. Exile here is serious, requiring the central characters to learn about themselves before they can begin to learn about each other or love....

Friday 7/5 – Thursday 7/11 6 SATURDAY Now in its tenth year, the five-day African-Caribbean International Festival of Life attracts a wide variety of roots, reggae, world beat, and gospel musicians. This weekend’s 70-act roster includes Third World, Yellowman, Karma Sutra, Shirley Bell, and Calypso Rose. Tonight’s headliners are London-born dancehall crooner Maxi Priest and reggae superman Mutabaruka; also performing today are local R & B artists Public Announcement as well as Felony, True Enuff, Swing, Big Huss, and many others....

“While [Steinmetz High School English teacher Robin] Quinn has gone somewhat soft on homework, she sees no advantage in reverting to her former ways,” writes Elizabeth Duffrin in Catalyst (March). “Colleagues who remain strict about homework don’t get better compliance; they just get higher failure rates, she says. The Board of Education has mandated 120 minutes of homework a night for freshmen and more for upperclassmen. Quinn says that while that sounds like a good policy, it’s unenforceable....

Fat is where you find it. An article by Anjali Jain of the University of Chicago and others in the May issue of Pediatrics advises doctors that low-income black and white mothers in three focus groups they ran “did not define overweight or obese in their children according to how height and weight measurements were plotted on the standard growth charts used by health professionals.” Regardless of where the kids fell on the charts, these mothers didn’t believe their children were overweight as long as “they were active and had a healthy diet and/or a good appetite....

Bruce Conner In addition to drawings, engravings, and assemblages, Bruce Conner makes films. His 1958 A Movie is a witty compendium of found footage of disasters–a torpedo exploding, a bridge collapsing–while his 1977 Take the 5:10 to Dreamland strikes a more delicate note with unrelated, quiet images that recall the collages and boxes of Joseph Cornell. But unlike Cornell’s art, Conner’s collaged films focus on the physicality of the image: there’s a graphic intensity to Crossroads (1976), a 35-minute collection of footage of a 1946 atomic bomb test that begins to seem a study in shapes....

Broadway singers generally aren’t very credible jazz-pop vocalists; Jack Donahue is an exception. This handsome University of Virginia alumnus and teacher, whose extensive theatrical credits include the Goodman’s brilliant Floyd Collins and The Ballad of Little Jo at Steppenwolf, has a light, airy, plaintive tenor a la Gino Vannelli or Stevie Wonder. It’s an expressive instrument that, guided by Donahue’s sensitive interpretive skills, is well suited to elegant readings of tunes by the likes of Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Jimmy Webb, and Mary Chapin Carpenter as well as Floyd Collins composer Adam Guettel....

JASON MORAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These days the big jazz labels don’t have much faith in their younger artists. Rather than trusting their music to speak for itself, they frequently press the musicians into artificial conceptual settings–like Charlie Hunter recording Bob Marley tunes or Roy Hargrove suffocating his playing with syrupy strings–that more often than not inhibit the music-making process. But last year’s New Directions, on which next-generation Blue Note bandleaders Greg Osby, Mark Shim, Stefon Harris, and Jason Moran were directed to revisit postbop classics from the label’s vaults, escaped a similar fate....

Singer-guitarist Jon Dee Graham first made his mark on the Texas music scene in the 70s with Austin punks the Skunks. In ’84 he hooked up with the True Believers, a roots-noir outfit that helped pave the way for the alt-country movement and showcased Graham’s gift for vividly drawn vignettes from the dark side of the arroyo. He released his first CD under his own name, the widely acclaimed Escape From Monster Island, on the Freedom label in ’96, and he’s been on his own ever since....

I’ve been coming here for eight years, and I like that everybody looks out for you if you have too much to drink. It’s nothing like what I experienced when I bartended in New Orleans for about a year. I was working one night when all of a sudden this guy–he was a 250-pound hillbilly type, imagine your worst nightmare–didn’t want to pay $3 for a beer. He was just awful....

I was moseying down the street when I noticed this bracelet in the window of this leather store near Broadway and Belmont. It was this very manly, thick wrist-wear type thing, and I dig that so I decided to go in. This burly, bearded man was sitting behind the counter with a contented scowl on his face–not a mean guy by any means, but certainly he looked like he’d been working hard....

Sketch-comedy group Old Man McGinty started life in the Bay Area a couple years ago, then several members relocated to Chicago and New York. Now they’re reuniting for two performances at Chicago SketchFest (and one late-night gig Thursday, January 9, at ImprovOlympic, where former McGintyites Meridith Crosley and Ryan Gowland have been performing regularly for several months). Sean Owens, one of the funniest drag performers in the Bay Area–and Lord knows that’s saying a lot–joins them (mostly sans female accoutrements) as well as Crosley’s husband, Christopher Kuckenbaker, fresh from his performance as addled academic Bartleboom in an adaptation of Alessandro Barrico’s novel Ocean Sea presented here....

“I’m interested in the idea that Illinois was all Indian land less than 200 years ago,” says cinematographer Ines Sommer, who moved here from Germany in 1986 to study film at the School of the Art Institute. “Americans are aware of whose land they’re settled on, but it seems like a little bit of a blind spot. People talk more about slavery and other injustices, but then they have these warrior figures of Indians all over the city....

Love & Sin: A Solo Experience at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, through July 7 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The women in “Love” have all been on the Chicago scene for about 15 years, and their experience is apparent. The pieces feel as though they’ve been distilled to their essence, and the performers barely have to raise their voices to keep an audience rapt....

The Curious Theatre Branch’s ambitious yearly showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest. Over the years it’s mushroomed from a neighborhood happening to an event of citywide significance–especially now that it’s been taken under the wing of the Department of Cultural Affairs as part of a laudable effort to bring an off-off-Loop sensibility to Chicago’s downtown theater district. Love Pollution: A Tekno-Popera...

The Bears weren’t the only Chicago team to show dramatic and unexpected improvement this fall. The Blackhawks did also, even though they, like the Bears, made no major additions during the off-season. They had, however, hired a new coach, the businesslike (and English-speaking) Brian Sutter, and his more organized approach to the game produced instant results. Playing focused, purposeful hockey, the Hawks got off to an impressive 12-4-3 start before embarking on their annual early road trip to allow the circus to take up residence in the United Center....