For those hoping to catch up on their theatergoing during the holiday fortnight, Reader critics offer their recommendations on shows running into the new year. Check listings for addresses, phone numbers, schedules, and prices, including special New Year’s Eve packages. British playwright Terry Johnson’s Hysteria, running at Steppenwolf Theatre under the direction of John Malkovich, examines Sigmund Freud’s troublesome legacy by making the psychoanalyst the harried hero of one of his own dreams–a bizarre hallucination in which Freud’s dying days are disrupted by, among others, the surrealist painter Salvador Dali and the disturbed daughter of one of Freud’s former patients....

By Ben Joravsky A few months back Weiss decided to buy the building, tear it down, and build a five-story complex with retail on the first floor and condo units above. The retail spaces would rent for at least three times the current prices and the condos would range from about $150,000 to $350,000. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’ve done eight or nine properties on the north side–my name’s out on the street,” says Weiss....

Rope By Albert Williams Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First produced in 1929, Rope marked the playwriting debut of English novelist Patrick Hamilton. In The Light That Failed, Hamilton’s biographer and brother Bruce Hamilton notes that the play was inspired by the 1924 Leopold-Loeb case (though Bailiwick Repertory’s publicity asserts that it was based on a British murder); certainly the central characters recall the University of Chicago students whose “thrill killing” of a Hyde Park neighbor boy shocked the nation (and inspired the films Compulsion and Swoon)....

Do You Believe in Magic? The fair–which included tarot reading, channeling, and general predicting–was a first for Fallen Angel’s owners, Mandi and Eric Lynn. The 250 flyers they mailed out in advance didn’t exactly draw a standing-room-only crowd, but plenty of people did show up. Some wanted an update on their future. Others browsed among the clothes, which bore brand names such as Fetish, Eternal Love, and Lip Service. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

By Neal Pollack “I don’t know,” he said. “I hope someone has reserved a table. Because there are fireworks it might be kind of crowded.” Thax met Ralph Syverson through their mutual friends Brett and Rennie Sparks, who play music together as the Handsome Family. Syverson makes his own marionettes and performs with them around town; his most recent gig was a marionette version of the first scene from Barbarella. He’s never published a book before, but he says he’s starting an imprint called MOC, which stands for Mail Order Catalog....

Eyes Wide Shut Rating **** Masterpiece Directed by Stanley Kubrick Written by Kubrick and Frederic Raphael With Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack, Marie Richardson, Madison Eginton, Todd Field, Julienne Davis, Vinessa Shaw, Rade Sherbedgia, Leelee Sobieski, and Abigail Good. Called away by the death of a patient, Bill is haunted by images of Alice having sex with the officer, and his night and the following day and night turn into a string of adventures consisting of sexual temptations or provocations that come his way with and without his complicity–all of which prove abortive....

It’s a long climb to the rehearsal room where Michael Pisaro is scheduled to play his new composition, Pi–four flights up in the second-oldest building on the Northwestern University campus. There’s no elevator to this space from another century, a high-ceilinged octagon with half-moon windows and stenciled walls, dominated by a shiny black baby grand. At six o’clock, just 14 people are scattered in the rows of chairs facing the piano, waiting for Pisaro to begin his five-minute performance....

JUNE OF 44 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » June of 44 edged away from its abrasive indie-rock roots on last year’s impressive Four Great Points, subtly employing electronics and strings, turning down the volume, and occasionally breaking free of ye olde four-four, but on the recent Anahata (released, like all the band’s work, by Quarterstick), the quartet has convincingly taken the leap. I still wouldn’t call the music anything but rock, but guitarist Jeff Mueller and company have managed to find new wrinkles in the threadbare fabric....

These superb films share a poetry of small differences, a vision in which a tiny scratch can have as much beauty as the sea. In Moilsome Toilsome, Stan Brakhage characteristically transforms foam on water into almost pure white light; when he intercuts a blank image with just a hint of blue gray, it’s surprisingly powerful. Twilight Psalm II: Walking Distance comes closest to the spectacular; Phil Solomon makes faces and figures (some from commercial TV) seem like three-dimensional images of molten metal, at once monumental and utterly pliable....

Made in Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » THE BELLS The Ultimate Seaside Companion (HitIt!). Local Scotsman Chris Connelly trades the stiff industrial-disco clatter of his days with Ministry and the Revolting Cocks for the cathartic balladry of tragic legends like Nick Drake and Tim Buckley–though he sounds like no one so much as Hunky Dory-era David Bowie. While there’s a laid-back beauty to the album as a whole, after 50 minutes it’s numbingly apparent that as a songwriter Connelly lacks the range of any of those forebears....

After the extravagance of last year’s New Year’s Eve, many restaurants are toning things down, opting for a la carte menus and reservations throughout the night in lieu of elaborate prix fixe meals with set seatings. Several will still offer live entertainment and party favors while others will close for the night. Accordingly, our listings for the evening are not comprehensive; restaurants not listed below probably fall into one of the above categories....

Trixie By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alan Rudolph’s previous feature, Breakfast of Champions (1999), probably his best since Choose Me (1984), is an abrasive, angry, formally imaginative, and generally faithful adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s book of the same name. It has a lot going for it, including Bruce Willis, who helped finance it, as a blustering car dealer, one of his best performances to date; Barbara Hershey as his pill-popping wife; Nick Nolte as his sales manager and best friend, who guiltily harbors a fetish for lingerie; and Albert Finney as Vonnegut’s dark doppelganger, itinerant hack SF writer Kilgore Trout....

Maria Callas Callas Edition (EMI Classics) I have to be honest–I’m bored to death by any story about an opera diva throwing tantrums. (I like them even less than stories about imperious conductors incinerating hapless musicians with their laserlike glares.) So most of the Callas mystique leaves me indifferent. The tumultuous love affairs, the wild arguments at rehearsals, the melodramatic collapses in mid-aria before horrified audiences, and so on and on–I have a suspicion that it was all much more fun when Callas was the only diva pulling these stunts....

DON CABALLERO 11/27, LOUNGE AX Reports of this high-density band’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Perhaps it was roused from its short but much-boohooed slumber by the tedious din of all the god-awfully serious instrumental lurch-wank bands that seethed up in its absence. At any rate, this year’s What Burns Never Returns (Touch and Go) takes all the little boys by the hand and shows ’em how it’s done: move in fast and fearless, state your (instrumental) case with violent highs and inaudible lows, and get the fuck out....

Stomp Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The real hook for Stomp isn’t percussion–as hot a ticket as that might be these days, and as well as the eight Stompites do it. The real hook is the tension between everyday noisemaking and genuine virtuosity. We all make noise, whether it’s tapping away at our keyboards, banging around in the kitchen, or hitting our teeth with a pen....

I have received a question pertaining to the Beatles from a friend. I have no idea what the answer is. What do all four Beatles hold on the cover of the Beatles ’65 album? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have the album right here. You forget how big these things were–12 inches by 12. (To be precise, 125/16 by 125/16.) Perfect for examining for hidden meanings while listening to the album on headphones....

SEPTEMBER 21 This California-based group, formed in 1973, takes some liberties with the rigorously choreographed, highly acrobatic art of taiko drumming. As practiced by Japanese groups like Kodo, taiko is pulverizing stuff, the elaborate rhythms hammered out on the huge barrel drums with militaristic precision. San Jose Taiko, which is predominantly female, incorporates non-Japanese rhythms from hip-hop to Brazilian, wears colorful matching outfits, and smiles a lot (the Kodo guys favor strained scowls)....

BETA BAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These four Scots, now based in London, have been darlings of the British music weeklies for the last few years. Generally that’s reason enough to dismiss a band outright, but I’m slightly charmed by their audacity. They’re frequently compared to Beck, but they sorely lack his precision: on both The Three E.P.’s, a compilation of the band’s earlier, out-of-print recordings, and the new Beta Band (Astralwerks) they mix Kinks-like hooks, haphazard breakbeats, electronic squelches and twitters, psychedelic guitar jams, British music-hall takeoffs, mediocre rapping, and just about anything else you can think of, and they do it with such abandon that on the first few listens I felt like I was panning for gold in the ocean....

Dear Sirs: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is a footbridge, not a car bridge. Imagine the uproar (and I probably would have joined in) if it were to carry automobile traffic. In a car, it’s easy to drive a few blocks to cross the river. On foot or bicycle it can require a lot more effort and time to cross the river, if the only alternative you had was traffic bridges....

I wanted to put on my black velvet shirt, the snuggly one that has the collar that lies just right, which I love, and which looks good on me, and which goes well with anything on any occasion, with the possible exception of Easter Sunday, which it was. I couldn’t wear black, especially not black velvet, on Easter, even if it was 28 degrees outside with some ungodly wind-chill factor....