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Previously produced by the Aardvark theater company, this festival of women’s theater has been taken over by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs in conjunction with Prop Thtr. Running through May 10, the festival features artists in the fields of theater, performance, poetry, dance, and music. Two programs remain, both at the Storefront Theater in the Gallery 37 Center for the Arts, 66 E. Randolph; tickets cost $12 and can be purchased by phone at 312-742-8497 or on-line at www....

There’s nothing you haven’t heard before on Lovebox (Jive Electro), the fourth album by London duo Andy Cato and Tom Findlay, aka Groove Armada. With their humongous beats, piano-led ballads, bruising bass lines, and hemmed-in squiggles, Cato and Findlay seem less interested in reinventing the wheel than in working within a tradition. The title track, which features an airy keyboard hook, surging bottom end, and stammering vocal ah-ahs, might hardly have been noticed during rave’s early-to-mid-90s heyday, but it’s a ready-made classic regardless, typifying the genre so thrillingly it transcends it....

James Tehrani’s shift at the assisted-living residence was over. He’d made it through his eight hours at the front desk–answering the telephone, making copies, greeting new residents. Now he was sitting in a bar in downtown Skokie, waiting for a cheeseburger. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tehrani was making so much money he bought tickets to The Producers, and he went house hunting in the suburbs with his wife, Robin....

Imagining Brad, Wing & Groove Theatre, and Ledge, Ledger and the Legend, Wing & Groove Theatre. This double feature offers a megadose of comfort for people needing to know there are others out there more pathetic than they. Imagining Brad depicts a quickly developing friendship between two women comparing stories about their very different marriages. As in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, the screenplay that made Peter Hedges famous, he presents a situation so freakish that it takes several minutes to grasp....

In this push-play era, when even live music is increasingly automated, you’ve got to give props to Jeremy Jacobsen, aka the one-man band Lonesome Organist. He’s the organ grinder and the monkey, wrasslin’ what seems like a zillion instruments at once–among them accordion, singing saw, tape delay, steel drum, steel pan, guitar, harmonica, marimba, toy piano, vibraphone, and (duh) organ–while twirling drumsticks and tap-dancing. His third release, Forms and Follies (Thrill Jockey), was recorded on eight tracks (fewer, for some songs), so the DIY vibe is there, but it lacks a sense of spontaneity–all the arrangements were apparently written out on paper beforehand, and you can kind of tell....

I was here one Tuesday late, and I had the bag that I carry everywhere. The person behind the desk said, “Oh, you’re going to have to check that,” and I said, “It’s just my wallet, my camera–my man purse, basically.” He thought about that and said, “OK.” So I went in and the security guard gave me a very hard look and said, “You’re going to have to check that,” and I said, “The guy at the front desk said it was fine....

In Ben Joravsky’s article about the loss of the art class at Warren Park [“Where Has All the Money Gone?,” March 16], he mentions in passing something that seems to be part of the trend to decrease programming in the parks. That is the increase in nontax revenues. Warren Park, for instance, receives rent from Carr’s Honda, across the street. Although it is true that the park supervisor focuses on kids’ programs, it is also true that they lease a large chunk of the field house to a for-profit tutoring company....

The tangled goth-industrial lineage that began in the 70s with Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire was cut short circa the rise of Nirvana. Al Jourgensen had already pillaged the best of the Front 242 “new beat” sound and shackled it to monochromatic thrash, leaving Trent Reznor to scrounge the leftovers. Psychic TV abruptly disintegrated in 1992, and that same year Skinny Puppy, the most underrated and influential of the lot, released Last Rights, a bewildering blizzard of baleful angst and a resounding postmortem on the whole movement....

By Ben Joravsky His idea wasn’t so much to upscale the store (it’s still wonderfully cluttered) as to organize it. He grouped items by activities, opened a Web site, and bought ads in the local papers. “The previous owner didn’t have shelving–everything was on the floor,” says Lee. “I price things. I group things. I’ve created aisles so you can walk around. It was going great. We’re a small, locally owned shop in the age of sports giants....

50 Cent The hip-hop press regularly hypes the real-life viciousness of whoever shoots his way to the top of the charts, but the overwhelming desire to prove that 50 Cent is the baddest rapper alive sets a new benchmark for tough-guy hysteria in the glossies. Rolling Stone and Vibe have lapped up the story, and the Source ran an article examining comments from previous interviews, looking for factual contradictions. (The Blender writer who stuck his hand in the rapper’s mouth to feel the bullet still embedded there deserves some recognition for his willingness to go the distance for a story....

Our tale of teacup tragedies begins on a heath in England … Good books are published: Hard Times, Les Miserables, Diary of a Chambermaid, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Tropic of Capricorn, Sons and Lovers, Crime and Punishment, The Golden Bowl, The House of Mirth, The Time Machine, Huckleberry Finn, Journey to the End of the Night, The Grapes of Wrath, Point Counterpoint, Death in Venice, Ulysses, The Master and Margarita, Brideshead Revisited, Kim, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Picture of Dorian Gray, To the Lighthouse, Remembrance of Things Past, Moby-Dick....

The Lucky Ones Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jenny Magnus’s artistry has grown increasingly simple in the last few years. Like other Curious Theatre Branch writers and performers, she’s been stripping her work down to the basics–but never in the same way twice. Her 1998 The Strange was a quiet, enigmatic drama about a woman who stumbles drunk into the bedroom of a young girl, where they face their demons over the course of three inexplicable late-night meetings....

Rock, Pop, etc. CAN-KY-REE Free concert. Fri 7/26, 12:15 PM, Randolph Cafe, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. 312-744-6630. SHAWN COLVIN, BRUCE COCKBURN, ALICE PEACOCK 18 & over show. Thu 7/25, 7 PM, Skyline Stage, Navy Pier, 600 E. Grand. 312-595-7437 or 312-559-1212. JULIA FORDHAM Free in-store performance. Tue 7/23, 12:30 PM, Borders Books & Music, 150 N. State. 312-606-0750. JEFF & JANIS Free concert. Sun 7/28, 3 PM, Skokie Public Library, 5215 Oakton, Skokie....

The more things change, the more they stay the same: this sprawling 2002 documentary by Indian video maker Anand Patwardhan, about the nascent antinuclear movement in India and Pakistan, kept reminding me of 70s documentaries on the U.S.-Soviet arms race, the toxic legacy of bomb-test fallout, and the environmental risks of nuclear power plants. Indian and Pakistani activists unite in chanting “Hindu bomb–shame, shame! Muslim bomb–shame, shame!” Testimony from survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is followed by American historians interpreting the controversy over displaying the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in the mid-90s....

Matching wine to cuisines it isn’t traditionally drunk with–Caribbean, Latin American, Asian, etc–is the focus of this periodic feature, in which we pick a BYO restaurant, sample a few dishes, and recommend some wines. Nok thawt kra-thiam phrik thai (deep-fried quail in garlic-and-pepper sauce) 1 $6.95 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sticky Rice Thai has everything you’ll find at your corner Thai joint–pot stickers, shu mai, curry dishes, pad thai–but it also has an extensive menu (ask for the English translation) of hard-to-find northern Thai dishes like khaw muu yang (grilled pork neck), luuk chin ping (grilled and fried meatballs), and khanom jiin naam ngiaw (pork and cubed-pork-blood curry with vermicelli, fermented beans, and dried flowers)....

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Festival Theatre. The “midsummer” and “night” parts are just right in this open-air Oak Park production, which teems with fireflies that might pass for otherworldly creatures. It’s the “dream” side, the product of Shakespeare’s poetry, that’s deficient in this slapdash remount. Rather than resolve the comedy’s divergent worlds of manipulative fairies, mismatched lovers, rough mechanicals, and silver-tongued heroes, directors Peter Toran and Dale Calandra put them further asunder....

Bill O’Donnell constructs tiny iconic houses, then photographs them in artificial suburban, industrial, or rural settings–evoking the indistinct, poignant images of the homes of our dreams and memories. The 20 black-and-white selenium-toned gelatin prints on exhibit at the Cultural Center all use dramatically selective planes of focus. In Home: Rain (2002) sharply focused raindrops appear to wet the glass covering the print, while the blurry little house in the background seems off on a distant horizon....

The sassy young waitress at Father & Son Pizza in Jefferson Park distributes the dinner menus and soon returns to take drink orders. Katie, who’s blond, statuesque, and wears a floral print dress with a lace collar, asks for decaf. “That’ll be decaf–for Betty White,” jokes the waitress, reminded of the old sitcom star. Robin, Lynne, and Carole laugh heartily. Each is the other’s best friend. “There’s tremendous worth in their bond,” says Barbra McCoy Getz, a social worker who has been seeing Robin clinically....

Eric LaRue Seven years later it seems the entire off-Loop theater world is watching. This year Neveu has had three plays produced by three different companies—a feat I can’t recall any other local playwright achieving—and a fourth is scheduled at another theater next spring. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unlike most successful playwrights in town, Neveu doesn’t make things easy for the audience. You won’t find life-affirming lessons or sops to current “right thinking” in his unsparing takes on middle-class America....

Blood Wedding Early-20th-century Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca could hardly be more out of step with our time. He loved strong feelings, action, the expression of primal urges. His plays are filled with people who yearn, who hate, who smolder for years and then suddenly ignite, who love with an intensity that overwhelms them. When he does turn his attention to repressed feelings–as in his last play, The House of Bernarda Alba, about marriageable women locked in the house by their disturbed mother–Lorca’s heart is clearly not with the characters who submit to their mother’s whim but with those who rebel against their imprisonment....