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Actor, writer, and composer Mark Nutter left town over a decade ago, but now he’s back with Le Comedie du Bicyclette, a musical parody that displays his gift for smart silliness. “This show is basically ‘room stuff,’” says Nutter, whose credits include writing for Saturday Night Live, 3rd Rock From the Sun, and the Chris Farley films Black Sheep and Almost Heroes. “When you’re working on a sitcom staff–‘and then the funny neighbor comes in, joke joke joke’–‘room stuff’ is what you get when you take a break from your regular writing and amuse yourself with the most disgusting and ridiculous ideas you can come up with....

Dawson Prater, the proprietor of Locust Music, devised the clever concept behind “Object,” his label’s series of free-improv records: the musicians are shown a picture of some inanimate objects and asked to “interpret” them. So far the releases have been superb, and the question of how the music relates to the items pictured on the disc’s cover encourages active listening. The cover of the CD from the Chicago duo EKG (single-reed master Kyle Bruckmann and trumpeter Ernst Karel, both of whom also contribute electronics) shows a frayed electric cord, a matchbook, and some magnets, and it’s not too hard to connect those items with the low hums, high tones, noise blasts, and sizzles on the disc....

Election? What Election? To be fair, I’ll add the February 12 story on the Hispanic Democratic Organization, active in several Latino wards, and the February 17 piece on ex-convicts such as Medrano running for the City Council. I’ll also add a nice January 27 feature by Sabrina Miller on former mayor Eugene Sawyer’s return to politics to help elect his nephew in the Third Ward. And I’ll acknowledge that the Tribune editorial page devoted a full paragraph to every aldermanic race when it published its endorsements....

On location in the country, a film director, a screenwriter, and an actor encounter a middle-aged antique dealer and a farm girl who’ve recently become engaged, and the news sets off a Pirandellian exercise in which each of the filmmakers argues how best to tell a love story amid the ruin of postwar Germany. This clever 1947 comedy, the feature debut of Rudolf Jugert, gleefully mimics various genres and such visual styles as German expressionism, Italian neorealism, and the Russian pastoralism of Alexander Dovzhenko; the differences in class and sophistication between the couple permit some pointed satire about the end of old German society and the search for a new national identity....

Scarlet Confessions: The Infamous and the Innocent, a Musical Diary “Love demands expression,” explains the nameless, genderless narrator in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body. “It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » O’Reilly and Smith last teamed up for Hello Dali: From the Sublime to the Surreal, a tribute to art and its evolving role in human expression that ran off and on for two years....

Immoral Morality, Plays Well With Others and the Synergy Therapy Theatre, at the Heartland Studio Theater. The program describes this show as “an original play by Michael Burdick.” But there’s nothing original–and damn little that’s entertaining–in Burdick’s tiresome take on the dysfunctional family. Drug addiction, alcoholism, and mother/son incest are all presented with a sniggering tone in Glenn Schudel’s staging, and the acting’s all over the map. The mother, a boardinghouse proprietress (Carol Donohue), offers her lodger–and son’s best friend–$5,000 if he’ll sleep with her daughter, Denise....

Presented by Facets Cinematheque and the Lithuanian Consulate General in Chicago, this festival of historic and contemporary Lithuanian films runs Friday through Thursday, March 14 through 20, at Facets Cinematheque, 1517 W. Fullerton. Tickets are $8, $6 for Facets members. Unless otherwise noted, films are in Lithuanian with subtitles. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Off the coast of East Prussia at the turn of the last century, two fishing boats collide in a fog, and the owner of the smaller boat is unjustly imprisoned for attempted murder....

MUSIC OF THE BAROQUE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After three decades at the helm of Music of the Baroque, conductor Thomas Wikman is stepping down. When he founded the ensemble, as a Hyde Park church choir in 1971, the Baroque repertoire was largely neglected. In the intervening years, MOB has grown into one of the most respected ensembles in the city (outclassed only by the Lyric Opera and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), not to mention its now-crowded specialty....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Donald Hinton, a graduate of the University of Kansas School of Medicine and a board-certified psychiatrist, reported last month that over the past five years he’s treated Elvis Presley for migraine headaches, among other things. Hinton said he has several items containing Presley’s DNA; an official at Elvis Presley Enterprises was unfazed, insisting that Elvis is still “in the garden [at Graceland]....

Picture of a Tricky Picker “My name is George Goehl and I’m calling from Chicago,” he said. “Is this Jimmy Martin?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I kept pressing him to get a real commitment, to let me spend a year of his life with him, asking him for some clarity about our plans,” says Goehl. “Finally he said, ‘Boy, I don’t know what in the hell this clarity is you keep talking about....

Prufrock, Rhinoceros Theater Festival, at No Exit Cafe. Still measuring out his life with coffee spoons and daring to eat a peach, T.S. Eliot’s passive survivor finds himself in colorful company in Cavan P.M. Hallman’s 50-minute fantasia. Rearranging if not deconstructing the sardonic “love song” (we actually hear what the women who come and go say about Michelangelo), Hallman plays Prufrock as a feckless quester obsessed with taking because he has nothing to give....

Films and videos by John Smith Smith deconstructs a universal symbol of beauty in the single-take video The Kiss (1999, made in collaboration with Ian Bourn). A particularly beautiful lily seems to grow before our eyes, gradually changing shape; what sounds like breathing on the sound track gives it an almost human presence. Suddenly the sound and movement stop as a glass plate, invisible until now, cracks—and it seems we’ve been watching, in Smith’s words, “the forced development of a hothouse flower....

Renfield, WNEP Theater. This late-night Halloween offering is less a full-fledged production than a classroom exercise. Conceived and directed by Jonathan Pitts, it sets out to expand upon the story of Bram Stoker’s Dracula from the viewpoint of Renfield, the spider-chomping lunatic who assists the bloodthirsty count’s invasion of England. At its best the show is genuinely eerie, designed in nightmarish black and white by Pitts. Spooky tableaux (some employing puppets) depict the vampire enslaving the madman through a series of gruesome blood rituals before finally, inevitably killing him....

Rolling on the River Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s the nature of annual reports to be out of date by the time they’re issued. The one the Chicago Architecture Foundation is expecting back from the printer this month–for the year that ended in December 2002–reflects the double whammy of 9/11 and the stock market drop. Just two months before the World Trade Center attacks, CAF had opened a major expansion of its quarters on South Michigan Avenue, adding about 50 percent to the size of its gift shop and a separate visitor’s center and gallery to the space it had occupied for a decade....

By Michael Miner Artner assailed perfidy. “Today through Sunday, on the annual winter fund-raising drive, you again will hear employees trade on that history and promise its continuance. Don’t believe them.” But this was not the Tribune picking on a fellow institution. It was simply one critic with deep feelings putting them out there at the risk of looking silly–no small risk for someone proud of a radio that could tune in only one station....

In the fourth quarter of the Bears’ NFC semifinal against Philadelphia, I wrote in my notebook, “Which will prevail, the Eagles’ intensity or the Bears’ composure?” Composure was the signature of this year’s Bears, enabling them to pull off come-from-behind overtime victories over the San Francisco 49ers and the Cleveland Browns. But in the end it brought them nothing more than a little dignity in defeat. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The appeal of soccer is still, for the most part, lost on me. I appreciate the concept of a sport in which little actually happens, thus serving to make the few genuinely exciting moments even more so; that phenomenon describes some of the better ambient music and more listenable dance singles, not to mention much of the work of Henry James and Marcel Proust and even, one could argue, Moby-Dick. As the father of two young daughters, I have to endorse any sport in which girls are taught to kick instead of grab....

THE BRONX 9/26, BOTTOM LOUNGE The hype about this LA band–that they were being “stalked by major labels” after only two shows–was already being parroted in Rolling Stone last winter, and they’re already signed to Island/Def Jam. But in August they released their previously recorded full-length, The Bronx, on their own White Drugs label (distributed by New Jersey indie Ferret Music), and though G n’ R vet Gilby Clarke did produce it, they stuck to punk’s three-takes-and-you’re-out rule....

Still in the Dark New York Times columnist Bob Herbert was reading a report called “Emergency Responders: Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Unprepared” when the lights went out last week, and now he’s writing that Americans simply refuse to pay attention to warnings. There are always plenty of warnings, but should we let them alarm us? We’ve read that our harbors can be easily penetrated, that the safety of air travel is an illusion....

Improvisers have never been particularly prudish–in fact, improvisatory games tend to dissolve inhibitions. And in recent years, as audiences’ general knowledge has shrunk (at one show, a reference to Ernest Hemingway was greeted with the stunned silence usually reserved for quips about high-energy physics), jokes about sex and bodily functions have become a quick, easy way to get everyone’s attention. Improvisers often have to battle the urge to “go blue,” as they say in the business, and sometimes censor themselves too strictly....