Blood Dolphin and Kind Sirs, a pair of two-person improv groups, perform music and relationship based improv scenes. $6-$12
Mark Chrisler's eight vignettes look at how people express themselves when dealing with loss. The characters—including Auguste Rodin; Laszlo Toth, who vandalized Michelangelo's Pieta in 1972; and an elderly woman suffering from a painful rectal condition—narrate their experiences almost compulsively, for better and worse. This Found Objects Theatre Group production is rough—actually, a little more than rough—around the edges, and the constant talk gets tiresome. But the writing and thoughtful blocking help save the show from its conceit. Two highlights: Brian Nemtusak as a bitter ex, using figurine horses to reenact the whodunit at the center of his failed relationship, and the show's framing device, in which Carl (a charming H.B. Ward) participates in a panel on loss with an older, more sorrowful version of himself (Chris Bower). Part of Rhinofest. –Asher Klein $12-$15 or pay what you can
Performing at the Chicago Human Rhythm Project's tap festival are Bam!, the Afro-Haitian Tamboula Ethnic Dance Company, and more. $15-$25
Carrie Hanson of the Seldoms creates a four-ring circus in This Is Not a Dance Concert, satirizing audiences and performers but giving both a little love, too. The new, hour-long piece consists of four separate segments of dance and often very funny text (cobbled together from Yelp reviews, the casting call for Spider-Man, dancers' own stories, and other sources), which are performed simultaneously at four locations in the Harris Theater—two lobbies, the seating area of the auditorium, and backstage. Maria Pinto's harlequin-like costumes are sexy patchworks of sequins, fake fur, chiffon, and leather, and musicians at each site play Tim Daisy's score live. Divided into four groups of about 50 people each, audience members are guided from station to station until they've completed the full circuit. Then they're rounded up to join the ensemble onstage for a coda that draws everybody into a tight, warm, slightly somber circle. —Laura Molzahn $20-$100
The last show the National Theatre of Scotland brought to Chicago was Black Watch, a based-on-fact account of an elite British army unit deployed to Iraq in 2004. With a cast of 11 men, that show was so big and physical—so full of marching and fighting, dancing and dying—that they performed it at the Broadway Armory, in a space you could use for equestrian training.
This time around the NTS (working again under the auspices of Chicago Shakespeare Theater's great World Stages program) has sent us a piece small enough to slide into the Hideout in Wicker Park.
Long Gone Lonesome "could not be more different" from Black Watch, says Scottish writer and musician Duncan McLean. "This is me and my band." Normally that four-piece band, Lone Star Swing, plays western swing music. But here they're offering their portrait of Thomas Fraser, a Shetland fisherman who died in 1978. "Bizarrely," says McLean, who wrote the show, Fraser "became obsessed with country music and the blues—Jimmy Rodgers, Big Bill Broonzy, Hank Snow. I say 'bizarrely' because there was no one else within 500 miles listening to this kind of stuff."
Fraser learned guitar and taped himself on a reel-to-reel machine. But intense shyness prevented him taking it any further than that. His grandson, Karl Simpson, discovered the tapes nearly a quarter-century later and started releasing them on CD. As a result, the world is becoming aware of a man McLean calls "the most significant British country music performer there's ever been." —Tony Adler
$25-$35
Nova Scotia's Mermaid Theatre presents three short plays based on the books of Eric Carle. $10.50-$15.50
Ian Belknap performs solo. Part of Rhinofest. $12-$15, or pay what you can
Riki Lindhome and Kate Micucci. $25
$25.00 plus two-drink minimum
A topical sketch show by Butch LaRue. $15
Chicago Improv hosts stand-up comic Charlie Murphy, the writer and actor formerly known as "Eddie Murphy's brother," whose most recent DVD is Charlie Murphy: I Will Not Apologize. —Joey Jachowski and Sam Worley
$32Four clowns partake in the many elements of a theatrical tragedy, from the emotional to the absurd. $6-$12
Three women dance to a DJ in this excavation of house music. $12-$15
Kohl Miner performs a series of monologues about life and men. Part of Rhinofest. $12-$15, or pay what you can