Pistols for Two Christina Calvit, in adapting three short stories from Heyer’s 1960 collection, Pistols for Two, for the stage, takes the author at her word. In the first minute of her adaptation she makes it clear that deep truths will be noticeably lacking in the ensuing 89 minutes. She plunks her three heroines–Hetty from “To Have the Honour,” Annabella from “Full Moon,” and Dorothea from “The Duel”–front and center and gives each her own novella, color-coordinated with her dress....

THE VALERIE OF NOW and SWACKO IN AMERICA, at the Performance Loft. In some ways these two solo performances are the kind that every theater festival should feature: raw, bold, and flawed. But it’s anyone’s guess what two white performers playing to an all-white house (at least on the night I attended) have to do with InterFest 2000’s attempt to address issues of racial and ethnic diversity. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Music listings are compiled by LAURA KOPEN and RENALDO MIGALDI (classical, fairs and festivals) from information available Tuesday. We advise calling ahead for confirmation. Please send listings information, in-cluding a phone number for use by the public, to Reader Music Listings, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611, or send a fax to 312-828-9926, or send E-mail to musiclistings@chicagoreader.com. A PERFECT CIRCLE, SUNNA Sold out. Next Sunday, August 27, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, 4746 N....

Negative Space With Robert Mitchum, Manny Farber’s capacity to capture a complex subject–an era, an iconographic gesture or event or detail, a multifaceted stylistic comparison–in one pithy phrase has inspired many of his disciples to swagger their way through arguments with comparable poetic generalizations, and Petit is more adept at this practice than most. Paradoxically, in spite of Farber’s macho ambition to hit descriptive bull’s-eyes with punchy prose during his 35 years as a published critic (1942-’77), his words were probably never excerpted in print ads for any movie....

Can we borrow it back when Governor George “Bet ‘Em” Ryan goes into action? According to “Arts Wire Current” (April 20), the 1997 Better Government Association report “The Tourism Industry in Chicago: It’s the Arts, Stupid” helped the Coalition of Philadelphia Neighborhood Associations defeat a measure that would have introduced slot machines, video poker, and riverboat casinos to Pennsylvania. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “By averting their glance from the anguish in America’s black communities–the incessant complaints of police harassment, racial ‘profiling’ in all institutions, the toll of the racist war on drugs, etc....

Combination Platter Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a teenager Gregorio had a vague interest in design and machines that would later develop into a love of constructivist art, but the Chicago-style jazz of Bud Freeman, Jimmy McPartland, Max Kaminsky, and Pee Wee Russell held greater sway. He picked up the clarinet at 13, found classmates to jam with, and a few years later, after becoming enamored with the cerebralism and emotional restraint of proto-cool-jazz pianist Lennie Tristano, took up the alto sax as well....

Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Peter Margasak, huh. He’s Wyman’s replacement, right? Yeah, “Post No Bills,” that’s really clever. Peter, was that your brainstorm or your editor’s? I guess it really doesn’t matter, unless of course your life is so lame that you actually rely on Critic’s Choices to give you something to do. But I do have to tell you, Peter, that your catty little swipe at Grant Tye [December 25] was so unfounded, so juvenile, so plainly mean-spirited that it renders everything else you say completely worthless....

JOY LYNN WHITE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although “Too Big for This Town,” the opener on Joy Lynn White’s third album, The Lucky Few (Little Dog/Mercury), tells the familiar tale of escaping a stifling small town, it doubles nicely as an expression of her liberation from the Nashville machine. White made a pair of better-than-average straightforward country albums for Columbia earlier this decade, neither of which managed to crack country radio, and soon after she was unceremoniously dumped by the label....

LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sibelius’s praises are sung far more often than his pieces are played. To be sure, some of his stirring but lightweight tableaux–such as the patriotic Finlandia, the mordantly sentimental Valse triste, and two or three of the tone poems based on the Finnish national epic, Kalevala–do make the rounds, and his eccentrically rhapsodic, well-proportioned Violin Concerto is popular with soloists who want in their repertoire a 20th-century work with Romantic roots....

Mother Courage and Her Children and History Lessons Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the most abused critical terms we have is “Brechtian,” and the weeklong series “Brecht and Film” offers the rare opportunity to discover what that adjective really means. As it turns out, Brechtian practice and Brechtian theory are different matters entirely, occupying opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum, and this series offers superb examples of both....

Vera Klement’s paintings say a lot about her. Step in front of one, and you’ll see how enraptured she is with the act of painting–each stroke seems to writhe on the canvas. As a teacher, Klement saw the art of painting go out of fashion, come back, and go out again. Toward the end of her time at the U. of C., she says, she felt the pressure of being “a painter among people who no longer believed in painting....

PETER KOWALD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A right-hand man of blustery Teutonic reed titan Peter Brštzmann in the 60s and 70s, bassist Peter Kowald long ago set out to broaden his horizons. The 1991 CD Duos (FMP) collects some of the fruits of that journey: pieces from the three vinyl LPs, Europa, America, and Japan, on which Kowald smoothly crossed geographical, stylistic, and generational borders with the help of demonic screamer Diamanda Galas, Japanese samisen avant-gardist Michihiro Sato, alto saxophonist Julius Hemphill, drummer Andrew Cyrille, cellist Tom Cora, and a slew of European heavies like Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, and Irene Schweizer....

An irreverent imperial guard in the Forbidden City (Jackie Chan) has a crush on the princess. When she’s kidnapped, he tags along with the rescue party that’s bound for Nevada to pay her ransom. In the desert he matches wits with an outlaw whose luck–good and bad–rivals his own (Owen Wilson) and becomes a grudging audience for the cowboy, who can’t shut up. It’s an inspired pairing. Wilson is electric as he seduces Chan into a partnership in this self-consciously crafted western, whose cleverness is only part of what makes it so funny....

By Ben Joravsky Hamilton’s approach emphasized informality and spontaneity, with teachers and students exchanging wisecracks between songs. After each session the students (beginners and advanced alike) gathered in a common room for a sing-along. The clumsiest, all-thumbs neophyte could feel like Pete Seeger, if only because his scratching was absorbed into the more melodic sounds of the group. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At first the school operated out of Stracke’s office in an old bank building at 333 W....

EXPO OF THE EXTREME 5/21 & 22, THE VIC I’ve got certain reservations about the Expo of the Extreme, the public-extravaganza wing of the local extreme free-speech venture Michael Hunt Publishing (get it? get it?). I mean, to epater les bourgeois with body piercings, metal, and porn stars is so 1989. But the nation’s reaction to the recent sexcapades in the White House has persuaded me that there is still enough rampant puritanism out there that such things still serve a purpose....

What’s the deal with Satan and goats? In some pictures Satan has a goatee, horns, and hooves like a goat’s. I don’t read the Bible much, but is there a part where it says goats are evil or something like that? I’d like to know. –Jimmy Anderson, Arkansas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t know what it is with goats. You get my goat....

Bailiwick Repertory’s 12th annual showcase of projects by emerging directors features evenings of short plays on double or triple bills. The scripts run the gamut from established classical and contemporary selections to avant-garde rarities and untested original material. Each play will be performed twice over the course of the festival; an open postshow critique by local directors of each production’s first performance will allow the directors to incorporate comments from the discussion into the play’s subsequent performance....

CASSIUS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The press release that accompanied my copy of Cassius’s new album, 1999 (Astralwerks), says it’s “the album these Parisians have always threatened to make”–which is too bad, since it’s less ambitious and far more blatantly retro than their best work. On their own early singles for Mo’ Wax (as La Funk Mob) as well as on the tracks they’ve produced for Daft Punk, Air, and French rapper MC Solaar, the duo of Boombass and Philippe Zdar have fused hip-hop, acid jazz, house, and disco with greater panache and sounder logic than almost anyone else in their cluttered international field....

Discord at Unity Temple The church currently needs about a million dollars’ worth of work, most urgently a new central air and heating system to control moisture. But in more than two decades the board had managed to raise only $750,000, and most of it had already gone into the building. Black needed to figure out how to raise the landmark’s profile among prospective philanthropists, and in Wright’s own writings he found a partial answer: the architect had designed Unity Temple to serve not only as a house of worship but also as a venue for secular events like lectures and concerts....

The music for the Nutcracker was ordered up like a custom-made suit by the legendary 19th-century ballet master Petipa, says Sergey Kozadayev of Westmont’s Salt Creek Ballet. The order was taken by the great Russian composer Tchaikovsky, and it was very precise. Not only “a Spanish dance, a Chinese dance,” but something like “two bars for trumpet calls, two bars for cannon shooting, and then wounded mice start to scream, then they are going to attack–sixteen bars!...