BoHo Theatre delivers an earnest, likable rendition of this 1963 musical version of N. Richard Nash’s 1954 romantic comedy The Rainmaker, which BoHo produced six years ago. Enhanced with a score by lyricist Tom Jones and composer Harvey Schmidt—it was the songwriters’ follow-up to their 1960 off-Broadway hit The Fantasticks—the story focuses on Lizzie Curry, the daughter of a rancher whose cattle are dropping dead during a drought in the Depression-era southwest....

Four West Loop galleries that all shared the same building on Washington Avenue—Document, PLHK, Volume, and Western Exhibitions—recently moved into a new venue in West Town, a large second-floor space on Chicago Avenue just west of Ashland. But the migration wasn’t acrimonious. “Our lease was up at the old space, and our landlords bought a building over on Chicago Avenue,” Western Exhibitions gallery owner Scott Speh says. “They said, ‘Why don’t we move you guys over here?...

Scott Olson/Getty Images The Webb report says the Chicago Tribune didn’t pick up some police files. Buried in the recent report by special prosecutor Dan Webb, “The Death of David Koschman,” is this tantalizing suggestion: that the Sun-Times campaign to fix responsibility for Koschman’s death in 2004 and find out why Chicago police were so unwilling to might have been a Tribune campaign instead. Koschman had been knocked unconscious when he was punched by R....

Deanna Isaacs George Lucas talks museums with Charlie Rose at Chicago Ideas Week George Lucas was the third and final speaker at the last session of Chicago Ideas Week’s “Edison Talks” event at the Cadillac Palace Theatre on Friday. The event had a pep-fest vibe, with spotlights strafing the audience and the volume turned way up on the Blue Man house band. Lucas: I’ve collected art ever since college, starting with comic art and moving up to illustrative art, and I realized there was no showcase for this work....

Michael Gebert Gracie’s Cafe program participant Peter with manager Mike Ellert The restaurant industry has always been an open door into the workforce for people with legal trouble in their pasts. Show up, do the dishes, and you’ve established a first foothold in the working world, no other questions asked. That’s the reason Saint Leonard’s Ministries, a 60-year-old residential program for recently released prisoners on the Near West Side, has long included food-service training among its programs for helping the formerly incarcerated learn the skills to make it in the world of work....

Mitsuko Uchida If you’re sick of hearing about South by Southwest I recommend checking out a flyer lo-fi pop musician Jimmy Whispers made for his headlining show at the Hideout on Friday; he’s calling the show the “Mid by Midwest Interactive Festival,” and Whispers’s artwork pokes fun at the rampant corporate #branding taking over SXSW. I also recommend checking out the show, which, in addition to Whispers, features Yawn, Roommate, Thin Hymns, and special guests Sharkula and Chris Condren....

Pat Metheny Unity Group If you’ve got access to a friend’s ex-girlfriend’s father’s coworker’s HBO Go account, chances are high that you spent the weekend binge-watching True Detective and could stand to spend an evening or two away from the glow of one screen or another. Fortunately there are plenty of concerts to see during the next few days. It took me quite some time to get hooked on pop-punk outfit the Wonder Years, but they recently got me with their even-handed approach to making songs about the suburbs: “The Wonder Years’ sublime ‘We Could Die Like This’ is one of many high points on last year’s The Greatest Generation (Hopeless), the group’s fourth full-length; it’s about the way certain trinkets, memories, and sensory triggers (such as the smell of Coppertone) can make you nostalgic for a place that’s no longer home....

I Am Furious Yellow Yesterday I noted the upcoming screenings of Brillante Mendoza’s Thy Womb, rare opportunities (in Chicago, anyway) to catch up with one of the most controversial Filipino directors working today. Incidentally this weekend also brings a revival of a film by one of the most controversial Filipino directors of the 1970s and ’80s, Kidlat Tahimik. I Am Furious Yellow (1994) will screen from 16-millimeter at the Drake Hotel on Friday at 6 PM and Sunday at 4 PM as part of the Prak-sis New Media Art Festival, a three-day conference about artistic responses to the legacy of Cold War-era social upheaval in southeast Asia....

For a comedian who essentially exists in character, Judah Friedlander has had a decently varied film career—we’re already quite aware of his TV role as Frank Rossitano on 30 Rock. He was a coal-mining brother of a male model in Zoolander. For a brief, wonderful moment he appeared as Molly Shannon’s sport-coat-wearing jerk ex-husband Ronald von Kleinenstein in Wet Hot American Summer. And, in his first real star turn, he played genuine nerd and gourmet jelly-bean lover Toby Radloff opposite Paul Giamatti’s Harvey Pekar in American Splendor....

Empire of Evil It feels like it’s been just days since the last George Kuchar screening, but lo and behold, the revivals keep coming. Tomorrow at 7 PM Flat Space Chicago will screen Empire of Evil (2011), one of the underground legend’s final movies and the last one he made with students at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught for many years. On a related note, Kuchar also appears in Big Joy, a documentary profile of fellow experimental filmmaker and SFAI professor James Broughton, which begins a weeklong run at Facets Multimedia tomorrow....

Sideshow Theatre Company presents the world premiere of J. Nicole Brooks’s transcendent new play that takes the amazing and horrifying true story of Henrietta Lacks as its launch point but goes far beyond the stars and back. Lacks—the African-American woman from Baltimore whose seemingly immortal and ever-multiplying cancerous tumors were used by medical scientists to study untold maladies—was an unknown historical figure until Rebecca Skloot’s bestselling 2010 book. But Brooks’s play isn’t a biography and Lacks’s tale is only one of many stories that inform her heartfelt examination of race, medicine, and basic humanity in America....

Borealis is everything we’ve come to expect a House Theatre of Chicago show to be: Good-hearted, winsome, fantastical, funny, clever, sweetly indignant, charmingly messy, and just dark enough before the dawn. It adopts the crowd-pleasing idioms established by shows like the ensemble’s annual Nutcracker and carried through in last winter’s Hatfield & McCoy, which somehow managed to be delightful despite all the carnage it chronicled. But Borealis‘s energetic House-yness may be its biggest problem....

The Block Beat multimedia series is a collaboration with The TRiiBE that roots Chicago musicians in places and neighborhoods that matter to them. Herbert Wright III, better known as rapper G Herbo, didn’t ask to be born to the ghetto. No child ever does. Only someone looking in from the outside would try to glamorize that life—someone who doesn’t walk around wearing a target that won’t come off. Raised in the east-side hood known as “Terror Town,” Wright remembers being about eight years old the first time he saw someone killed in front of him....

Local label Maximum Pelt takes over the Empty Bottle on Mon 11/10 to throw a record-release show for three of its bands. Label head Magic Ian headlines with his genre-melting three-piece Ego (formerly Massive Ego), and we’re hoping they’ll play the blazing B side off their new single, “Can’t Shut It Off” b/w “Sunlight.” Openers Foul Tip and Gossip Wolf faves Lil Tits celebrate a split seven-inch; Foul Tip’s minimal postpunk stomper “Madness” (the A side) complements the blistering dirt rock of Lil Tits’ two B-side numbers, “New Digs” and “5 Finger Grind....

Gertrude Stein was a genius. A genius. A genius. A genius. Although generally (and rather condescendingly) remembered for investing in modernist art, she in fact helped invent the thing—doing as much as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, or spare-voiced Ernest Hemingway to subvert the sacred conventions of English prosody. In the manner of Matisse and Cezanne, Stein flattened out the literary canvas to draw our attention to its raw constituent elements: words, sounds, rhythms....

The Harvard Sailing Team hit it big on YouTube when YouTube was first hitting it big. The New York-based sketch group—which is unrelated to the university or sailing, as the troupe’s fine print reads—began uploading short, simple sketches to the Internet in 2007 and was among the first to realize the site’s comedic potential. Videos like “Boys Will /be Girls” and “Hipster Thanksgiving” went viral, and the team’s nine members (Jen Curran, Clayton Early, Faryn Einhorn, Katie Larsen, Adam Lustick, Billy Scafuri, Chris Smith, Rebecca Delgado Smith, and Sara Taylor) have since hit “that guy from that thing” level in Hollywood, while continuing to produce satirical videos with improving production values....

Few working bands embrace their southern heritage as proudly as Georgia’s Drive-By Truckers, which makes their decision to wade right through the country’s political divide all the more stunning. The group intentionally dropped its strong new album American Band (ATO) at the end of September, just as the presidential election neared the height of its fractious run, and aside from the record’s meaty guitar chords, raw soul, and raucous attack there’s nothing to please the supporters of our new president....

Chosen Family (Lame-O Records), the new record from Philadelphia trio Thin Lips, opens with an snippet from a conversation in which vocalist Chrissy Tashjian lays out her understanding of queerness, saying, “Queer to me means boundary pushing and love and community and relationship.” Fittingly, on this album the band reach beyond the rambunctious indie punk of their debut, Riff Hard. They put a lot of thought into the slow simmer of “It’s Hard to Tell the Difference When You’re Afraid of Literally Everything” or the bass-forward “I Know That I’m the Asshole,” and their use of synths and slide guitar expands their sound without compromising their core of catchy tunes and crunchy riffs....

Mike Sula Pho dac biet, L.D. Pho In terms of its commercial offerings, Lawrence Avenue west of Western in Lincoln Square looks kinda Balkan, its smoky bars and dingy coffee shops crowded with an older population of domino-slapping Greeks, supplanted by more recent arrivals from the former Yugoslavia. You wouldn’t think of it as a Vietnamese neighborhood just because you can buy the city’s best banh mi at Nhu Lan Bakery....

To the neighborhood that was once the midwest’s bookmaking and printing capital, this weekend’s 30th Printers Row Lit Fest brings more than 200 authors, hundreds of booksellers, and more than 150,000 literature enthusiasts. The fest kicks off with a panel featuring Chicago fiction writer Stuart Dybek (who will be given the Harold Washington Literary Award), fest founder Bette Cerf Hill, and Mary Davis Fournier of the American Library Association (6/7, 10 AM)....