The Unwilling Witness Guerrero’s been skulking around Cook County traffic courts for more than six months now. As investigative journalism goes, the Sun-Times’s “Why Is He Driving?” series has been cheap and easy, but it’s produced devastating results. Every Monday it yielded a new scofflaw who’d taken a beating in court and then driven off without a license; always there was a photo of the brazen perp back in his car....

Film maven John Waters asked a heretical question: “Why does Dorothy want to get back to Kansas? It’s so colorless.” You might feel the same about Chicago after seeing this rainbow-glorious revival of John Kane’s reverently hip adaptation of the beloved MGM movie musical. Marc Robin’s ingenious staging builds on Dominic Missimi’s 1998 production for Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire. Friends of Dorothy can expect much of the film’s dialogue plus plenty of groaner puns, a hip allusion to The Lion King, a tortured joke on the monotony of the Winkies’ marching dirge, and the witch’s sardonic dismissal of Dorothy’s “boundless optimism....

Music listings are compiled by ROCK, POP, ETC. BLIND MAN’S BLUFF Fri 2/22, 8 PM, Lutkin Hall, Northwestern University, 700 University, Evanston. 630-724-9789. DJ SOLE, SOMBIONX & LINDSAY, MICHAEL PATRICK, SALVO BETA and others perfom at the Undershorts Film Fest 5. Fri 3/1, 7 PM, Congress Theater, 2135 N. Milwaukee. 312-272-2211. FRUIT Thu 2/28, 8:30 PM, Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, Northwestern University, 1977 South Campus Dr., Evanston. 847-467-4000. JON LANGFORD, JON RICE & PATTY BRENNAN Free concert....

Shifting Landscapes Shifting Landscapes purports to be an exploration through music, dance, and puppetry of “water through all its manifestations and phase transitions.” The first act, “Until Noon,” portrays relatively still water–a glacier, waterfall, and stream–while the second act presents water in more violent forms, including hurricanes and high tides. Artistic director Wendy Clinard’s concept may be a bit precious, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t work–though one can’t help but notice that what does work has very little to do with this description....

Whose Line Is It Anyway? This is an old-fashioned Watergate-style scandal about unscrupulous nincompoops in high places. Every editor confounded by how to play the lies and distortions peddled to justify a war in Iraq that might have been a good idea regardless can go to town on this one. Q: Wasn’t that the case where Abdon Pallasch and another Sun-Times reporter were writing a book about an FBI informant who ratted out a Real IRA leader?...

Chrissie Hynde fairly glowered at the strip malls and interstates of Akron in “My City Was Gone,” but Leah Archibald looks back on her own dying rust-belt burg, Buffalo, with far more conflicted feelings. On Wide Right (Poptop), the debut full-length from her band of the same name, Archibald cruises one more time past the lawn ornaments in “Mary on the Half Shell” and downs a can of Genesee in “Firemen’s Fair,” seeing all the details she’d have overlooked or at the very least cared less about had she stuck around....

Shakespeare’s verse becomes indistinguishable prattle as the performers in this Theater o’ th’ Absurd adaptation race through the Bard’s poetry like schoolchildren desperate to get to the end of a speech. The rapid-fire delivery might usually be considered a problem, but here it’s welcome. Despite the occasional random reference to contemporary life in Humboldt Park, added by adapter-director Django R. Baker, this awkward staging is over in an intermissionless 100 minutes....

Absolution, Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Oddly, Robert William Sherwood’s “neo-noir psychological thriller” features little in the way of thrills or psychology. Former high school chums David, Gordon, and Peter committed a horrendous crime in their youth and swore one another to secrecy. Now one of them insists they confess to the authorities. For the first 30 minutes, everyone expounds at length on most everything, even when the other characters onstage already know what’s being explained....

ARTHUR WILLIAMS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Harpist Arthur Williams is a blues minimalist. He can evoke a wide range of colors and textures using a limited array of runs, riffs, and melodies with subtle variations in timing and tone–and like his mentor Rice Miller, he can make a silence almost percussive, punctuating his squalls and trills with long periods of emptiness that throw the intensity of his tone and the fierceness of his attack into stark relief....

By the time most jazz singers hit their 70s, they’re forced to cope with a diminished range and failing lung power. But in the last few years Bob Dorough, now 78, has been singing as well as ever–maybe because he didn’t have much of an instrument to begin with. His small voice seems to crack and hoarsen under the strain of merely reciting a lyric, as he grabs a breath every few syllables–and yet somehow he manages to nail every note, and squeeze it in on time....

Frank Robinson says that when he was 18 and serving in the navy, he already knew what he wanted to do with his life: he wanted to be a writer, “preferably a science fiction writer. Have an office with broken-down furniture, a couch with broken springs, and drink lots of beer and cheap whiskey.” Since then he’s gone to journalism school, had a three-year stint as the Playboy Adviser, and written a novel, a mystery, and several thrillers (one of which, The Glass Inferno, was the source for The Towering Inferno), but he’s still an authority on the pulp magazines where he got his start and learned that “good writing will seldom sell a bad story, but a good story will frequently sell bad writing....

Chug Chug, Choo Choo, Ka-Ching! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Szostek was in the box when he started thinking outside of it. Evanston’s old concrete and brick Main Street Metra station has been his office for the last three years in his regular gig as executive director of the Custer’s Last Stand street fair, a job he fell into 21 years ago. Back then Szostek, who’s also an actor and college drama teacher, was a freelance clown who’d performed at the annual event for several years....

The Neo-Futurists have always done reflexive work. One of the joys of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind is its loose structure, which allows cast members to comment at almost any time on what’s happening. But the troupe has never been as deep into self-analysis as it was last fall, when Greg Allen staged his hilarious, infinitely regressive take on Sigmund Freud’s seminal “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious....

America is supposed to be a place where anybody who wants to can move up the economic ladder through his or her own efforts. People generally believe that having poor parents isn’t much of a handicap. But is this assumption true? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1992 Gary Solon of the University of Michigan and David Zimmerman of Williams College began the demolition job when they published separate studies in the American Economic Review....

Fifty or so fluffy white balls of smoke spiked with lightning bolts mark the sites of shootings and bombings in A Map of Chicago’s Gangland From Authentic Sources, a 1931 novelty item published for tourists that appears, along with 76 other maps, in the exhibit “Cartographic Treasures of the Newberry Library.” “Designed to Inculcate the Most Important Principles of Piety and Virtue in Young Persons and Graphically Portray the Evils and Sin of Large Cities,” the colorfully sarcastic map covers an area from Waveland to 69th Street and from Lake Michigan inland to “Capone Territory” in Cicero....

This self-styled “convergence of Chicago artists,” running through April 26, is presented by Performing Arts Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Boasting Chicago first lady Maggie Daley as honorary chair, the avant-garde festival features more than 100 multidisciplinary presentations. All shows take place at the Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport; the sprawling arts complex is a hive of activity, with simultaneous performances and installations in its four studio theaters as well as lounges, hallways, stairwells, and other spaces....

PAMELA KNOWLES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Set the words of a Pulitzer-winning poet to strong, lovely jazz melodies, place them in the mouth of a conservatory-trained actress and singer with a handsome, malleable voice–and you could still go wrong. Plenty of similar undertakings, even by artists with similarly exalted credentials, have already failed: when it comes to combining poetry and jazz, getting the right people does not guarantee the right results....

I don’t know how I didn’t hear of these local drama kings sooner: in a little more than two years they’ve opened for Interpol, !!!, David Thomas & Two Pale Boys, and Gravy Train!!!!, and now they’re headlining the Bottle on a Friday night. They’ve got the tense, careening go-go guitar and nasal, pissed-off vocals of PiL plus the histrionic creepiness of Nervous Gender, and they’re glammy in a way that’s halfway between Bryan Ferry and T....

Redmoon Theater’s annual show has always been long on whimsy and spectacle–puppets, wild costumes, people on stilts, etc–and short on story. This year’s production, about a kingdom where the giant who lifts and lowers the sun every day gets sick, ushering in winter, starts off strong and establishes a satisfying mythic resonance. It’s packed with interesting characters (the gentle giant, a potbellied king, an alienated punk princess) and lots of delightful and inventive visuals, including a wonderful contraption that raises a huge paper sun....

In the living room of his Rogers Park apartment, Syed Mujahid Jilani unbuckles the safety belt from his eight-year-old daughter’s waist and loosens the Velcro straps that hold her legs in place. Gathering her in his arms, he supports her head and neck with his upper arm as he lifts her out of the wheelchair, cradling her limp body like a newborn baby. He lays his child gently on a pillow and turns to kneel beside his wife, Abida....