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WILLIAM WARFIELD WITH BENJAMIN MATTHEWS AND ROBERT SIMS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The avowed purpose of this concert of African-American spirituals, held at the Second Presbyterian Church in the South Loop, is to raise funds for the restoration of the church’s 14 Tiffany stained glass windows. But the presenters must also be hoping that the lineup for “Three Generations”–baritone William Warfield, bass-baritone Benjamin Matthews, and baritone Robert Sims–will become a sort of supergroup, a la the Three Tenors....

The School for Scandal Of course, London was a theater town: some 12,000 of its 750,000 inhabitants attended each week. Meanwhile, back in puritanical America, theater was not only morally suspect but prohibited by a resolution of the First Continental Congress. Although the British staged several of Sheridan’s plays for their own amusement during the revolutionary period (a curious choice given the playwright’s procolonialist stance), it wasn’t until 1786 that a professional American troupe presented The School for Scandal in New York....

TASTE STAGE A fitting choice to kick off the tribute to western swing pioneer Bob Wills. Langford & the Cosmonauts recorded one of the more lively and entertaining homages to the maestro a couple years ago–The Pine Valley Cosmonauts Salute the Majesty of Bob Wills (Bloodshot)–with a vast and swell array of guest singers, including Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Robbie Fulks, Alejandro Escovedo, Edith Frost, Sally Timms, and Kelly Hogan, who went on to release an acclaimed recording of her own with the band this year....

Come Like Shadows… Dexter Bullard is a contrarian. While almost everyone else in Chicago has been busy coddling viewers with safer and safer shows–revivals of the classics, productions by the same old playwrights (Shepard, Albee, McNally, Shanley), and toothless new plays that are a lot like the old ones–Bullard and his physical theater company, Plasticene, have been putting together relentlessly original, aggressively nonlinear pieces. Come Like Shadows… is the latest from this four-year-old troupe, a roughly hour-long work for seven performers that defies description: it tells no story, develops no characters, and contains no long dialogues (the only monologue is blurted out in a half-incoherent babble)....

Julien (Ewen Bremner), who’s distracted by obsessive thoughts and driven to compulsive behavior, is surrounded by a semisatiric pathogenic family: filmmaker Werner Herzog dominates as a tough-loving father figure; pregnant sister Pearl (Chloe Sevigny) places phone calls to Julien from within the house, soothing him by pretending to be their dead mother; brother Chris (Evan Neumann) wrestles with Julien, competing for paternal praise and abuse. After certifying that it was made in accordance with the rules of Dogma 95, this movie, shot on digital video apparently without added light, moves on to self-contained yet expansive sequences that include nearly abstract images of a pirouetting ice-skater and tight, loving shots of Sevigny as it integrates linear narrative, free narrative, and nonnarrative....

KIM RICHEY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If Bitter Sweet (Mercury), the recent sophomore album by Kim Richey, is any indication, Nashville may be ever so subtly changing its tune. Already successful as a writer (her songs have been hits for George Ducas, Trisha Yearwood, and Radney Foster), Richey debuted as a singer in 1995. But as impressive as her writing and singing were, Kim Richey suffered at times from the usual buffed edges and excess sugar of commercial country production....

By Gregory Michie Mara took the form and glanced at it. At the top of the page, in capital letters, it read “Zero-Tolerance Agreement.” I don’t think I’d ever heard the phrase “zero tolerance” when I began teaching in the Chicago Public Schools in the fall of 1990. That was before Paducah, before Jonesboro, before Littleton. But even before school shootings became a regular item on front pages and nightly newscasts, the idea that schools were dealing with a frightening new breed of violent, amoral youth was beginning to take hold....

By Cara Jepsen Jerome Johnson runs the Garfield Farm Museum, which occupies 280 acres of the Garfield’s original claim and boasts nine original buildings, a collection of artifacts, and over 2,000 documents. He admits that the 1840s were not the greatest time to be alive. In those days, Johnson says, people believed that night air and bathing made them sick, and fleas were rampant–which made it difficult to sleep in the summer....

Your column used to be full of questions from total freaks–people fucking their dogs, screwing their moms, or eating their poo–but now it’s all normal letters from normal people with normal problems. They ask boring questions, you give realistic (and therefore boring) advice, and while letter writers’ problems may be solved, your readers are not entertained! Where are all the creepy letters from freaky dog fuckers? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

By Martha Bayne This should have been my first red flag. I’ve since learned that my friend Andrea was one of the rejected amazons. Now, Andrea is a rad woman, an accomplished artist, and a fox to boot, but buttless she is not. When I asked her about this later she said it was pretty hilarious watching all those zaftig Cinderellas trying to squeeze into the shorts in order to be part of a performance about empowerment....

By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Evans had grown up in Kansas City, Missouri, where her parents ran a photography studio. They gave her a little box camera when she was young, but she was more interested in drawing. She remembers a junior high art teacher who took the class outside to do watercolors. “She showed us how light was a part of the subject and how working with watercolor you could leave the paper white and the whiteness of it could show light....

By Ben Joravsky Such arguments hardly placate the residents. They say the city has failed even to acknowledge the dangers of having four to six feet of sewage in their basements. They say neither Mayor Daley nor Governor Edgar toured the flooded area, and over a month passed between the storm and the official request for federal relief, which came only after angry home owners marched on City Hall and the State of Illinois Building....

By Ted Kleine Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My best find to date is a genuine “Nixon/Agnew” bumper sticker that’s now on display in my living room. I bought it from Chicago’s king of political kitsch, Russell Riberto, who sells campaign curios out of his Southwest Barber Shop at 2404 W. 111th Street. Sit down for a trim and you face a shelf holding busts of Abe Lincoln, Will Rogers, Pericles, Dante, and Vladimir Lenin....

By Dave Hoekstra On the afternoon of May 10, Thunder was planting mums in the front yard of the couple’s modest blue-and-white bungalow in south Milwaukee when a car driven by a 74-year-old man jumped the curb. “I heard a screech and looked up,” Thunder said. “In slow motion I saw this car coming at me. I don’t remember being hit.” The vehicle severed her left leg between the knee and ankle and pinned her to the ground....

Three for One: Monologues for the New Millennium; or Just Get Over It “Three for One” begins promptly at eight. But just before Thomas-Herrera enters, he announces from backstage that it’s 9:08 PM–he’s even put a clock upstage, its hands frozen at that precise moment, as if to ensure our appreciation of his fashionable tardiness. As we quickly discover, however, his lateness marks him not as a sophisticate but as a parvenu....

The Last Survivor Eleanor Reissa’s semiautobiographical three-shmatte weepie The Last Survivor, receiving its world premiere at Northlight Theatre in J.R. Sullivan’s fine production, bears more than a passing resemblance to a photo album. Leaping forward and backward in time, Reissa’s defiantly nonlinear drama picks out key moments in nearly 50 years of family history, telling the story of one man’s struggle to start over after the Holocaust. But instead of the traditional collection of grinning moments of contentment, Reissa presents mostly tragedies great and small....

BAD LIVERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bad Livers singer-banjoist-guitarist Danny Barnes and tuba player-upright bassist Mark Rubin must have been a pair of those smart, weird kids you sometimes find in small southern towns listening to punk records and wisecracking–the ones voted Most Likely to Move to the Big City in the usual indie-rock parable. But these kids stayed around Austin, Texas, and honed their traditional chops, filing Bill Monroe right next to the Minutemen in their record collections and writing classic songs skewed by postpunk wit....

Friday 4/14 – Thursday 4/20 Tonight filmmakers Luis A. Recoder and Bruce McClure promise to “light up some 3,850 feet of film” during their performance, Beyond the Circle of Confusion. They won’t burn it exactly, but will manipulate it by interrupting the projector’s beam with things like cloth and mesh and by “bi-packing”–threading two copies of the same film into the projector to create ghost images. Chicago Filmmakers brings the pair, who live on opposite coasts, to Chicago to show several new films, including their recent collaboration Superimcumbant, McClure’s Indeterminate Focus and Heterogene, and work from Recoder’s Available Light series....

Friday 4/18 – Thursday 4/24 Last week I found my 18-year-old nephew researching a paper for school, surfing the Net for info on censorship. “Back in my day,” I heard myself saying, “we had to use reference books and the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature.” Then I began to wonder if the tomes of yore are going the way of the vinyl record. I’m not the only one; today the Harold Washington Library Center’s special collections curator John Chalmers will join Sharon Hogan, librarian at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Paul Elitzik of the Lakeview Press, and antiquarian book dealer Terry Tanner to discuss The Future of the Book in Light of the New Information Technology....

CHARLES WILSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Charles Wilson’s CD It’s Sweet on the Backstreet (Ecko) has been making inroads on contemporary blues-radio playlists since it came out in 1995; if not enough listeners are familiar with him, it may be because the cultural and commercial barriers that separate African-American blues audiences from their white counterparts remain as entrenched as ever. Wilson is equally conversant in 12-bar blues, deep soul, and urban pop; he sings with a gospel-drenched urgency; and he prefers his arrangements heavy on the horns, with string-bending guitar leads shaking their way through the mix....