ARCHITECTURE
`WEST-EAST’
Albuquerque-based architect Antoine Predock, whose completed projects include a baseball park for the San Diego Padres and a federal courthouse in El Paso, Texas, speaks Wednesday at 6 p.m. at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Rubloff Auditorium. His talk is titled “West-East”; $15; 312-443-7300 or email: [email protected].
JAPANESE HOME DESIGN
Azby Brown, head of the Future Design Institute in Tokyo, speaks on “The Way We Live Now: Evolution and Revolution in Japanese Home Design” at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Field Museum, 1400 S. Lake Shore Drive. The lecture, in the museum’s Marae Gallery, is free with museum admission; 312-922-9410.
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— Blair Kamin
ART
`RUTH DUCKWORTH, MODERNIST SCULPTOR’
90 works in a career-long retrospective for the 85-year old ceramist based in Chicago; opens Saturday; Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St.; free; 312-744-6630.
— Alan G. Artner
CLASSICAL
BACH WEEK FESTIVAL
The annual feast of Baroque instrumental and vocal music begins at 7:30 p.m. Friday with J.S. Bach’s Cantata No. 190 (“Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied”) and works by Fasch, Handel and Dowland. Organist Richard Webster conducts soloists, chorus and orchestra, and there’s a post-concert recital by guitarist Fareed Haque. The festival runs through May 8 at the Music Institute of Chicago’s Nichols Hall, 1490 Chicago Ave., Evanston; $40-$20 students; 847-236-0452.
WILLIAM FERRIS CHORALE
The renowned English conductor and organist Simon Preston will direct a three-choir festival — 100 voices in all, including the Ferris Chorale, First St. Paul’s Lutheran Church choir and Our Lady of Mt. Carmel choir. The program includes Joseph Jongen’s Mass, as well as works by Bach, Palestrina, Victoria, Stravinsky and others. 8 p.m. Friday, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church, 690 W. Belmont Ave.; and 8 p.m. Saturday, Rockefeller Chapel, University of Chicago, 5850 S. Woodlawn Ave.; $20-$30; 773-325-2000.
— John von Rhein
DANCE
THE JOFFREY BALLET
A program of classics by artistic director Gerald Arpino, including “Viva Vivaldi,” “Round of Angels,” “Confetti” and “The Clowns,” Wednesday through May 8 at the Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress Pkwy.; $15-$100; 312-902-1500.
— Sid Smith
JAZZ
BILL CHARLAP
The mainstream pianist has been the beneficiary of glowing critical praise in recent years; Tuesday through May 1 at the Jazz Showcase, 59 W. Grand Ave.; $20-$25; 312-670-2473.
DUSHUN MOSLEY
The veteran Chicago percussionist and member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians leads The Vizitors; 9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the Velvet Lounge, 2128 1/2 S. Indiana Ave.; $8-$15; 312-791-9050.
— Howard Reich
MOVIES
POLLACK INTREPRETS
“The Interpreter,” Sydney Pollack’s new political thriller, shot largely in and around New York’s UN headquarters, is a polished, exciting treat, with beyond-duty’s-call work by stars Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn as a UN interpreter who may have stumbled on an assassination plot and the tormented federal agent protecting her. A full-throttle suspense film that’s also an affecting psychological piece; in wide release.
— Michael Wilmington
THEATER
`LES MISERABLES’
The barricades. The turntable, spinning ’round like the salad bowl at Don Roth’s Blackhawk. The power ballads. The saints. The sinners. Of all the international musical blockbusters, the one adapted and directed by John Caird and Trevor Nunn holds up best. The current touring edition makes a hearty and swaggering case for this material. This is the sixth time “Les Miz” has brought Jean Valjean, his stalker Inspector Javert and the whole gang of sufferers and French Insurrectionists to Chicago; closes tonight at the Cadillac Palace Theatre, 151 W. Randolph St.; $27-$80; 312-902-1400.
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`SWING!’
A gasser, and a case of a savvy regional production making a musical revue look better than it did in the original Broadway edition. The show’s nothing more than a plotless song-and-dance paean to the swing era, defined here as the late 1920s to the mid-1940s, packed with standards (“Stompin’ at the Savoy,” “G.I. Jive”). The conception may be on the vanilla side, but the execution — thanks to director/co-choreographer Marc Robin and a cast dominated by dancer-alums from the “Swing!” original — is murder. Murder, you hear me? Murder. It’s reet, petite and gone; closes tonight at Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire, 10 Marriott Drive, Lincolnshire; $44.63; 847-634-0200.
— Michael Phillips
`HUMBLE BOY’
Without the Remy Bumppo Theatre Company — an artistic asset if ever this town had one — Charlotte Jones’ “Humble Boy” is precisely the kind of decent, quiet, complex and thoughtful show that Chicagoans would never get to see. Set in a midsummer English garden and riffing with melancholy merriment on “Hamlet,” the dysfunctional family, the class system and the joys of astrophysics, this is the kind of contemporary life-as-it-is-lived play that opens at London’s National Theatre with regularity. The piece lands somewhere in the soft middle ground between the warm social comedy of Alan Ayckbourn and the tarter aesthetic tricks of Tom Stoppard. James Bohnen’s superbly cast production is both funny and emotionally resonant; closes tonight at the Victory Gardens Theatre, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.; $30-35; 773-871-3000.
`TAKE ME OUT’
Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out,” getting a solid first Chicago production from director Eric Rosen and the About Face Theatre, is as welcome as Opening Day to a Wrigleyville panhandler. A well-deserved hit on Broadway, this is a savvy and enjoyable play about baseball that manages to be funny and accessible without stooping to the sports-fan parodies of the beer-gut crowd in “Bleacher Bums.” “Take Me Out” deals with the fallout when a macho and seemingly invincible baseball star (played in Chicago by the intense Derrick Nelson) announces that he is gay, and then thinks he can just get on with playing the game. In fact, his revelation changes everything. The best thing about “Take Me Out” is that it deals not with the obvious issues on the surface of sports (money, fans, rivalry, steroids) but with such deeper notions as power, ideology, and the oft-ignored truth that winners in sports are separated from losers mainly by dumb luck; through May 1 at Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St.; $25-$45; 312-335-1650.
— Chris Jones