“Snow White and the Huntsman,” the fairy tale project that begins shooting next week in the U.K. with Kristen Stewart of “Twilight” fame as the lead, has some tough hurdles to overcome. It’s competing with another “Snow White” project from Relativity Media that has already begun filming and features Julia Roberts as the evil queen. It’s also set to come out June 1, three months after Relativity’s “Snow White” movie will debut — and close to two months before a Comic-Con International audience will be back in San Diego.

What’s a studio to do?

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How about recruit fans at Comic-Con 2011 with some stills of the cast in costume, a charming British director with an impressive commercial reel and a crew of good-looking lead actors? That’s what Universal Pictures did Saturday afternoon during a panel featuring Stewart, evil queen Charlize Theron, Chris Hemsworth as the huntsman and Sam Claflin (“Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides”) as the prince.

It was one of a number of high-profile pitches from Hollywood, blatantly trying to channel the fan energy pooling in every hall, room and corridor of Comic-Con into buzz and ticket sales for new projects. Along with “Snow White and the Huntsman,” “The Amazing Spider-Man,” “Cowboys and Aliens” and “Conan the Barbarian” offered up cast members and more to eager audiences at the festival, which closed Sunday.

The fun of the “Snow White” panel came from the cast, with Theron providing most of the comic relief. Since the cast just met each other recently, moderator Dave Karger, from Entertainment Weekly magazine, conducted a series of ice-breakers, questions like “What are you like on the set? Do you like to improv?”

“I’m very well-behaved,” said Stewart, who added she is excited to wear her armor and carry a shield as a Snow White with little resemblance to the Disney princess that sings to the birds. “I take myself very seriously.”

“You’ll be fine, Kristen,” responded Theron, who compared her evil queen to a serial killer, one with a fantastic costume designed by Academy Award winner Colleen Atwood. “I’m an Oscar winner, so I take myself very seriously,” she said with a laugh.

Stewart got into the fun when asked whether she’s like her character. “I’d like to be more like her …. But I am the fairest in the land, and I have a seriously good heart,” she said. Added Hemsworth: “And she really likes apples.”

Sanders also introduced a photo of his eight dwarves — a who’s who of the British acting scene: Nick Frost, Ray Winstone, Toby Jones, Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins, Eddie Marsan, Eddie Izzard and Stephen Graham. Why there are eight dwarves? “Because there are a few great lines when one of them gets killed,” Sanders said.

One fan asked about the casting challenges Universal had with finding its huntsman, a role Hemsworth took only after a long line of actors, including Viggo Mortensen and Tom Hardy, turned it down. Said Hemsworth, fresh off his role as superhero Thor: “The teaser was impressive, the script was fantastic. I’m pretty simple. Either I like it or I don’t. This sounded like fun…. Plus, there was no one else left.”

‘Glee’s’ graduation quandry

At the “Glee” panel held Sunday, some things got murkier when co-creator and executive producer Brad Falchuk attempted to clear things up. Remember all those reports in which co-creator Ryan Murphy was quoted as saying stars Chris Colfer, Lea Michele and Cory Monteith would be graduating this season and not returning for the show’s fourth? And remember Chris Colfer commenting on it as well? Well, Falchuck is saying the exodus isn’t so.

“Just because they’re graduating, doesn’t mean they are leaving the show,” he said. “It is not our intention to let them go … they are not done with the show.”

Later, Falchuk said the executive producers had explored the option of a spin-off with with Kurt (Colfer) and Rachel (Michele) but are “leaning against doing it.”

Falchuk reiterated that the upcoming season would be less heavy on stunt casting and special episodes. But he didn’t deny that a tribute episode was a possibility.

And don’t cry a river for Mercedes (Amber Riley). She will be getting another love interest whom she will have met over the summer. He’ll drive her arc in the first half of the season.

Garfield is Spidey sensitive

After the teaser trailer for “The Amazing Spider-Man” was released this week to lukewarm reception, Sony was charged with wowing audiences at Comic-Con with its reboot of the web-slinger franchise, this time directed by Marc Webb (“(500) Days of Summer”).

The trailer played well to the packed room Friday, but it was the new Peter Parker himself, Andrew Garfield, who won fans over: He stood up in the audience in Hall H in a low-rent Spider-Man costume and delivered an emotional speech about how much he loved the character.

Gillian Welch was raised in California, the child of showbiz vets, and found her way to country and bluegrass only after a peripatetic voyage through aimless rock bands and music school. But if you listened to Welch and partner David Rawlings at the Vic Theatre Friday night, you might have been forgiven for believing you’d stepped back in time to another era. Rawlings and Welch made an unassuming pair, he in a suit and cowboy hat, she in a dress and boots, but the music they played often sounded drawn directly from the darkest and deepest wells of American folk.

There’s admittedly an element of the method actor to Welch’s tales of woe and misery, where whiskey and other addictions prove salve, sin and self-destruction in equal amounts; you could just as easily imagine Welch and Rawlings busking on skid row or sitting on a porch in rural Appalachia as headlining theaters and concert halls. Yet never did the duo’s modestly antiquated affectations overwhelm what remained in essence a contemporary performance, downright anachronistic in its austerity but self-aware and smart enough not to revel smugly in the illusion. After all, a song such as “The Way It Will Be” would have been just as at home in a ’70s coffeehouse, when some of the pair’s more modern influences were crafting their own illusions.

“Most of you probably didn’t come here to hear happy songs,” Welch half-joked midway through her set with Rawlings, her intrepid and exceedingly sympathetic collaborator, and dutifully the two offered one downer after the other, songs such as “My Morphine” or “The Way It Goes,” where levity was generally limited to a wry turn of phrase or one of Rawlings’s witty acoustic licks. But Welch and Rawlings could be playful, too, introducing “Elvis Presley Blues” as a song about one of their “favorite dead guys,” or Welch unleashing Rawlings to lead his own twisted “Sweet Tooth,” which was only nominally about sugar.

The typically languid, tragic bent of many of Welch’s compositions contrasted with a surprisingly raucous crowd that cheered on each impeccable harmony or precise daredevil guitar solo, but wielding the twin timeless themes of heartache and hardship, Welch and Rawlings regularly reduced the audience to a rapt, respectful silence with songs such as the autobiographical “Wrecking Ball” or the more enigmatic “Time (The Revelator).” But they could just as easily egg the audience on with songs such as the gospel standard “I’ll Fly Away,” and when in doubt, Welch knew she could always just release Rawlings to ramble and rock. An uncommonly good guitarist, he was like the lightning to Welch’s slow rumble of thunder, the flint to her tinder that allowed even the quietest songs in their repertoire to simmer and spark.

Ctc-arts@tribune.com

“I’m a racehorse,” yelped Wild Flag guitarist/vocalist Carrie Brownstein like an enthusiastic underdog out to beat the odds Friday at a sold-out Subterranean. “You put your money on me,” she dared. Indeed, all the smart bets were on the upstart quartet, which came across as anything but long shots in front of an adoring crowd, most of which hadn’t heard more than one or two of the band’s songs in advance of the exuberant 50-minute set. In all fairness, the ensemble, whose first album sees release in mid-September, has some history on its side.

Comprised of former Sleater-Kinney mates Brownstein and drummer Janet Weiss, ex-Helium singer/guitarist Mary Timony and ex-Minders keyboardist Rebecca Cole, Wild Flag passes for an indie supergroup—albeit the rare kind in which egos are checked at the door and the creative slate is wiped clean. Watching Wild Flag’s Chicago debut (the collective also was scheduled to perform Saturday at the Wicker Park Festival), one never got the impression that the individuals onstage claimed impressive pedigrees. A short break, necessary because of the heat, marked the only time the band took its focus off the music.

Playing with something to prove, the uninhibited quartet burned through every track on its forthcoming record with blazing energy and addictive chemistry. Timony and Brownstein traded vocal leads while Weiss and Cole often shared background duties. Wild Flag treated its guitar-driven songs as if they were swerving pinballs, with melodies pushed, tilted and bounced off girl-group harmonies and through open spaces. Clearly, the band is still in the honeymoon phase. Each tune afforded raw opportunities to interact, explore and strive for the sort of liberating freedom that usually evades veteran artists once the newness wears off.

An animated Brownstein frequently went toe-to-toe with Timony, their physical communication reacting to angular lines (“Black Tiles”), pogoing grooves (“Future Crimes”) and percussive garage-rock outbursts (“Short Version”). The duo’s contrasting vocal styles established mood and tension, producing delicious collisions of sweetness and spunk. In particular, Brownstein molded breathless deliveries into falsetto squeals, distressed screams, exasperated hiccups and giddy chants. A directive to “shake shimmy shake” on the hyper-catchy “Romance” summed up the material’s dance appeal. Movement seemed a prerequisite instead of a choice.

Similarly, Wild Flag demanded action, not idle chatter. After declaring its annoyance with the latter on “Endless Talk,” the group encored with a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden,” answering its own pleas by proving hard, rough and tough enough for whatever it desires.

ctc-arts@tribune.com

Most people wandering down a tourist promenade such as Navy Pier and seeing a little sign advertising a daytime production of “Pinocchio” probably would expect a tawdry troupe of chirpy, collegiate-level actors performing “Hi Diddle Dee Dee” and channeling the Disney version of Jiminy Cricket.

Well, in this case, that would be a lie. And as the famous little dude with the variably sized hooter surely comes to see, lies don’t make it easy to blow your nose.

In fact, Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s family summer musical is a full-on world premiere by a Broadway team (Neil Bartram and Brian Hill, who wrote “The Story of My Life”). The production values rival any adult musical in town, no one sings about strings holding them down — this show is more interested in choices that kids and puppet masters make — and the dominant emotions are anything but chirpy. And no one cares about a chatty cricket.

Bartram’s music is very much au fait with dissonance; he enjoys lingering in the minor key. The self-aware Pinocchio at one point sings lyrics that include the word “demographic.” And the splendiferous look of the show, gorgeously designed by Kevin Depinet, seems to me inspired, consciously or not, by the work of Enrico Mazzanti, who illustrated the first edition of Carlo Collodi’s novel.

And the cast? The uncompromising Heidi Kettenring, who plays the smaller role of the Cat, was a star of the Chicago “Wicked,” and the incisive Derek Hasenstab, who plays the Fox, was in Disney’s “The Lion King.” That is the caliber. Matinees only.

Whatever issues one may have with this new piece — and I’ll get to those in a moment — this is a work of real substance and invention. It is certainly aimed at a family audience, and there are beautiful wooden marionettes, designed by Meredith Miller. But real people predominate. And adults interested in new musicals are just as much the target, if not more so, than pint-sized theatergoers. In fact, this show is not, in my opinion, ideal for kids under about six.

But the slightly older kids who were there Thursday afternoon looked fascinated, proving once again that the best children’s theater is always the most sophisticated children’s theater. This is far from a typical score for a kids’ show; toe-tapping melodies are few and, if you’ll pardon the reductive analogy, the overall style is closer to Andrew Lippa or Michael John LaChiusa than Alan Menken or Stephen Schwartz. I’d re-think the lack of percussion, but still, I watched kid after kid lean into this difficult, powerful music in the most moving way.

Hill, who wrote the musical’s book, should try and make it a little easier to also lean into the story.

The show starts out with a very promising thesis. Melody Betts’ Storyteller (she’s not called the Blue Fairy, as in the Disney version) introduces us to a frustrated young chap who wants to be human rather than kindling. But he makes the mistake of taking his father’s sacrifices for granted (a common error, I find, in my house) and blows his limited resources on the wrong things. With the help of the narrator and a lovely song called “Choices,” he comes to see that these issues are complex and that self-satisfaction does not always serve you best.

“Choices” includes a melody that returns often, suggesting that Hill and Bartram see it as the theme of their little show. It is a fine theme, but the material tends to wander too far away at times, and becomes woolly rather than woody. It’s a common problem with shows based on literary characters who have many adventures, but it could be fixed if everyone just decided to focus on what they wanted to the show to say — and make us feel. We only have 70 minutes. We have to know Pinocchio better. We’re all ready to travel along and learn about his choices, but we must understand his importance in our lives.

The other missed opportunity here involves the true identity of the storyteller, a revelation that could have the place engulfed in tears (and teach a wonderful lesson about how parenting never ends), if only everybody would pause, be still, and commit to the honesty of the moment. Right now, the show blows right past.

Director Rachel Rockwell’s production features a rich staging and skilled actors (the likes of Don Forston, Ron Rains and Liz Pazik) but it also needs to find the courage of its stylistic convictions. There are moments — especially during scenes involving the overly broad and jumpy Skyler Adams, the nonetheless promising young actor in the title role — when it feels like no one quite found the nerve to commit to the subtleties of the music and the nuances of this visual world, and instead felt the pressure to make a conventionally “up” daytime kid’s show.

Banish that like a runny nose, I say. When there is this level of craft involved, kids will go along for an honest ride anywhere you want to take them.

cjones5@tribune.com

Twitter@ChrisJonesTrib

When: Through Aug 28 (daytime shows only)

Where: Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier

Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes

Tickets: $18-$25 at 312-595-5600 or chicagoshakes.com

Amy Winehouse, who was found dead Saturday at her home in London, left behind a small body of celebrated work and immeasurable unfulfilled promise. She was 27.

Authorities were investigating the cause of the British singer’s death. But, sadly, it was a surprise to virtually no one. Winehouse had been waging a very public struggle with substance abuse since her teens, and after the huge success of her 2006 breakthrough album, “Back to Black,” her erratic behavior devolved even further, effectively putting her career on hold.

• Greg Kot

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In 2008 she became the first British singer to win five Grammy Awards, including best new artist, and record and song of the year for the single “Rehab.”

That hit song was both autobiographical and prescient: “They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said, ‘No, no, no.’ ” Full of bravado and dark humor – Winehouse once said it was written in response to her first management team who insisted that she clean up while she was still a teenager – it took on a ghastly tinge as the singer’s addictions took hold of her life.

Winehouse, born in 1983 to a pharmacist mother and cab-driver father, grew up in Northern London. Her parents divorced when she was 10. She formed a hip-hop duo in her teens, but soon began writing songs on an acoustic guitar influenced by her extensive listening to her parents’ and grandmother’s collection of jazz and soul singers. She often cited Tony Bennett as her favorite singer, and developed a vocal style of a depth and tonal color beyond her years. Her debut album, “Frank,” was released in 2003, steeped in jazz and soul influences and largely written by Winehouse. It made her a star in Britain, though it was not released in the United States.

On the follow-up, she retooled her approach by hiring pop RB producer Mark Ronson and the New York soul band the Dap-Kings. Her songs reflected the influence of harmonizing ‘60s girl groups such as the Shangri-La’s and the rhythms of Motown. “Back to Black” name-dropped or referenced soul heroes such as Donny Hathaway and Billy Paul, and the production recycled and spiffed up ‘60s sounds. But Winehouse’s lyrics were packed with autobiographical tales of boozing, lusting and losing. That perspective, combined with a voice that veered between street-smart surliness and wounded yearning, established her as a major new voice in pop music.

 “Back to Black” went on to become one of the most popular albums in U.K. history, topping 3 million sales. Unlike its predecessor, it also made a huge impression overseas; it was certified double platinum (2 million sales) by the Recording Industry Association of America. Her sound also paved the way for future U.K. pop-soul singers Adele and Duffy to cross over into the American market.

Her 2007 tour was a different story, hobbled by cancellations and erratic performances. She was a distinctive presence with her beehive hairdo, slinky cocktail dresses and heavily tattooed frame, guzzling drinks on stage and sometimes speaking and singing in slurred tones. At other concerts, she would appear subdued, even nervous. She would insist to interviewers that she sang better and more confidently when she had a few drinks.

She was able to pull it together, however, for what would be the most triumphant musical night of her career, at the 2008 Grammy Awards. She performed at the nationally televised ceremony live via satellite from London, playing her bad-girl image to the hilt as she sang “You Know I’m No Good” and “Rehab.” Her performance, which included a shout out to her then-jailed husband Blake Fielder-Civil, was designed to affirm that her six nominations and five awards were no fluke, and made her case persuasively. It also fostered hope that she had turned her life around; despite the protestations of “Rehab,” she had indeed just checked out of a rehab clinic, and was said to be working on a follow-up album.

Winehouse was unable to finish the album, and performed sporadically in subsequent years. A 12-date tour of Europe last June was cut short when she appeared on stage drunk and incoherent. In announcing the tour’s cancellation, a Winehouse spokesman said, “Everyone involved wishes to do everything they can to help her return to her best and she will be given as long as it takes for this to happen.”

In dying at age 27, she joins a long list of rock and soul performers who died at the same age, including Kurt Cobain, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, many of whom had a history of substance abuse. Like them, she leaves behind the tragic imponderable of what might have been.

greg@gregkot.com

Paul McCartney isn’t one to undermine his fans’ expectations. With tickets as pricey as $250 plus service fees for his concerts July 31 and Aug. 1 at Wrigley Field, he is certain to deliver plenty of vintage Beatles and Wings-era hits.

McCartney in stadium-pleasing mode remains formidable, a brilliant musician with an excellent band anchored by drummer Abe Laboriel. But he’s also a rare ‘60s icon: one who still is making vital albums.

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One of the frustrating aspects of the modern, over-priced stadium show is that it often precludes risk-taking by veteran performers. In many cases, there’s a good reason for that: Their recent material is drab if not embarrassing. McCartney’s a different story, however. Those who wrote him off in the ‘80s and ‘90s need to take another look. Those who loved the bold experimentation of his Beatles work have some catching up to do.

With McCartney set to hit town for his first shows here since 2005, it’s time to bust some long-standing myths about him and examine the relatively underappreciated corners of his music, including some of the stuff he won’t play at Wrigley.

Myth No. 1: John was the edgy one

John Lennon was the edgy rocker, McCartney the lightweight balladeer. That’s bunk.

Sure, Lennon battered down the doors of perception in Beatles songs such as “Strawberry Fields,” “I Am the Walrus” and “Rain,” and confronted reality with jarring directness in solo tracks such as “Cold Turkey,” “Mother” and “God.” But he also wrote some gloriously sentimental tunes about how “love is all you need,” and later, once he left the Beatles, allowed himself to get positively mushy about his newfound domesticity.

McCartney was more likely to dispense group hugs – rare was the ‘60s rocker who  empathized with the older generation in songs such as “She’s Leaving Home.” His very English tributes to dancehall music (“When I’m 64”) or his sheepdog (“Martha My Dear”) are about as un-rock ‘n’ roll as you can get. But McCartney balanced these moments with more than his share of experimentation, daring and, yes, Lennon-like intensity.

“Helter Skelter,” in many ways a forerunner of heavy metal, was McCartney unhinged – the throat-shredding vocal, the distortion-saturated attack, the clenched-teeth tension in the studio relieved only by drummer Ringo Starr blurting “I got blisters on me fingers!” as the song crashes to a close.

McCartney helped invent progressive rock, too, by conceptualizing and then stitching together (along with producer George Martin) the song fragments that make up Side 2 of the 1969 masterpiece “Abbey Road.”

The gonzo guitar solo in George Harrison’s “Taxman”? McCartney.

That ferocious soul shouter on “I’m Down” – the screams, the demented laugh, the increasingly hysterical outro? McCartney again, giving Little Richard and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins their due. 

But above all, McCartney was a studio-as-instrument chemist of the first order. It was McCartney who gave Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” its mind-blowing atmosphere by creating and altering sound-effect tape loops at his home. He was the Beatle paying closest attention to the experimental fringe of classical and electronic music at the time, lapping up Stockhausen and Cage alongside the Shirelles and Motown as influences. One of the finest examples of McCartney’s ability to bend space, time and minds, the 14-minute collage “Carnival of Light,” remains locked in the Beatles vaults.

After the Beatles broke up, the amiable gentleman of pastoral leisure could still get downright weird amid bouts of schmaltz and indifference; his solo work shows far greater range than Lennon’s, from the whimsical yet dazzling inscrutability of “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” to his ahead-of-their-time electronic albums as the Fireman with the producer Youth.

Myth No. 2: Paul’s just the bass player

Sure, and Mozart was just a hack piano player from Salzburg. The bass may be an unsung instrument, but it’s the bedrock of rock ‘n’ roll and soul. What’s more, McCartney reinvented its role in the Beatles, not just laying down a foundation for the song but often playing a strong counterpoint to the lead vocal. One of the reasons the Beatles’ songs sound so rich is the depth of composition, the melodic and harmonic layers – and McCartney’s ability to straddle rhythm and melody on bass was critical.

His flair was already apparent on the band’s earliest hits; on “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (1964), the bass is on equal footing with the guitars, and it’s like a song in itself on “Michelle” (1965). By the time of “Paperback Writer” (1966), McCartney is the lead instrumentalist, ushering in each verse like Britain’s answer to Motown’s James Jamerson. He’s nearly in subterranean funk territory with the deep tones of “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” (1967) and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” (1968), and stomps likeGodzilla through “Rain” (1966) and “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” (1968).

His knack for adapting his approach to whatever the song and the times demanded was key to the Beatles’ wide-ranging catalog, and it’s evident in his post-Beatles recordings as well. Denigrate “Silly Love Songs” (1976) all you want, but that bass line will pull you on the dancefloor everytime. He’s a soul-man extraordinaire on the slow-burn “Let Me Roll It” (1973) and a machine-gunning rocker on “Soily” (1976). He navigates “Lonely Road” (2001) with a thrilling authority; listen closely and you can hear his amplifier buzzing.

Myth No. 3: His music’s gone downhill ever since Wings broke up

After some strong albums with his band Wings in the ‘70s, McCartney put things on cruise control during much of the ‘80s and ‘90s. In that sense, his career followed the arch of many ‘60s greats whose music nose-dived, never to regain its potency. But McCartney rediscovered his mojo in recent years, joining a handful of artists – Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Paul Simon and Neil Young come immediately to mind – whose late-career work blows past nostalgia.

On “Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard” (2005), McCartney revisited the one-man-band approach he took on his 1970 solo debut and its 1980 follow-up, “McCartney II,” and trumped them both. It’s an album of small, intimate chamber-pop songs, with McCartney playing everything from drums to a flugelhorn. McCartney probably hasn’t heard the word “no” much the last few decades, but in this case producer Nigel Godrich deserves credit for not letting the bassist slide. Cool details abound: piano and strings melting into a dream-like bridge on “Fine Line”; the way two recurring notes on a toy glockenspiel become a beacon on “Riding to Vanity Fair”; the acoustic reverie “Jenny Wren,” with its wordless vocal and mournful duduk melody.

“Memory Almost Full” (2007) is even better, an unusually personal album by McCartney standards. He touches on mortality and his recent divorce without melodrama, and “Nod Your Head” and “Only Mama Knows” rock as hard as anything he’s done. In “The End of the End,” he imagines his own wake, and manages to pull it off with grace, humility and humor.

His third Fireman collaboration with Youth, “Electric Arguments” (2008), is the best of all, an accomplished combination of melody and experimental mirth.

It’s the first Fireman album with vocals, and McCartney role-plays to the hilt: a mischievous elf, a growling blues patriarch, even a hint of Bono-esque bombast. “Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight” blows open the album like the son of “Helter Skelter,” and ends with McCartney barking like a dog. No, this is not your cuddly ‘60s icon coasting gracefully on his past accomplishments.

greg@gregkot.com

Since American media sexualizes almost everything except sex, Hollywood romantic comedies about two people making hey-hey without any big plans for any big future rarely come easily, or operate from a spirit of carnal delight. The strain of being hip and loose, yet mindful of the conventional, even Puritanical rom-com imperatives, is too much to handle. Leave complicated sexual lives to the French, many Americans mutter, even as they secretly envy the easy Gallic flirtation, not to mention their attention to detail when it comes to a salad.

This year, “No Strings Attached” presented Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher — a real actress co-starring with a chalk outline of a leading man — as two halves of a sustained casual fling inching toward love and a substantive relationship. Now, showcasing the hyperactively entertaining pair of Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis, we have the more interesting and energetic “Friends With Benefits.” We’re running out of titles for romantic comedies based on this premise. “We’re Just Blanking” may be the last one left.

• Michael Phillips

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“No relationship. No emotions. Just sex!” So says the hotshot website art director played by Timberlake, recruited from his California gig for a New York City job as GQ magazine’s design head. (The film takes place in a strange, distant time before the recession, when people flew on airplanes with tickets paid for by prospective employers.) The woman he’s pitching, an executive headhunter played by Kunis, says she’s up for it.

The newbie and his savvy Manhattan sponsor fall into a fast friendship. They fit. He’s “emotionally unavailable,” still smarting over his mother leaving his now-Alzheimer’s-addled father, played with his usual, light-fingered skill by Richard Jenkins; she’s “emotionally damaged” (in a perky, edgy way), the daughter of a boozy free spirit perpetually between relational engagements, played by Patricia Clarkson. Why not throw in some intercourse?

Clarkson appeared in the ensemble of director Will Gluck’s previous film, “Easy A,” which starred Emma Stone and percolated very nicely, from the writing to Gluck’s brisk direction. “Friends With Benefits” is coarser. (Sensitive souls recovering from the grungier bits in “Horrible Bosses” might want to wait a week or two.) But it zips along. The script by Gluck, Keith Merryman and David A. Newman has a serrated edge, and neither of the leading roles begs for audience sympathy. Gluck’s feature deals every which way with children of divorce and/or single parents, looking for love. They’re trying to chart a course toward something more authentic than the drippy scenes we’re shown from a fake romantic comedy (wonderfully acted by Jason Segel and Rashida Jones) watched, at different points in “Friends With Benefits,” by Jamie and Dylan. I enjoy both Timberlake and Kunis; just this side of manic, they seem right together.

Like so much we see and hear in R-rated rom-coms these days, the movie’s raunch has its pushy side. So does the editing by Tia Nolan, which chops up simple and often very funny bits of dialogue into bits better left alone to breathe visually. These things matter, because they affect how we relate to the people on screen. Still, enough goes right to compensate for what doesn’t quite. You can probably guess the ending. Then again, I doubt Hollywood will ever make a movie about casual sex that turns serious where you can’t guess the ending.

mjphillips@tribune.com

‘Friends With Benefits’ — 3 stars

MPAA rating: R (for sexual content and language)

Cast: Justin Timberlake (Dylan); Mila Kunis (Jamie); Patricia Clarkson (Lorna); Jenna Elfman (Annie); Richard Jenkins (Mr. Harper); Bryan Greenberg (Parker); Woody Harrelson (Tommy)

Credits: Directed by Will Gluck; written by Keith Merryman, David A. Newman and Gluck; produced by Gluck, Martin Shafer, Liz Glotzer, Jerry Zucker and Janet Zucker. A Screen Gems release. Running time: 1:44.

The 2009 Broadway revival of “West Side Story” was the last such revival to be directed by its author, Arthur Laurents, who died earlier this year. And while a classic title like this will always be open for re-creation and re-interpretation, and while the legendary Jerome Robbins choreography will be forever available for each successive generation of dancers, there is nonetheless the sense that this particular production represents a hard line on the asphalt.

The composer, Leonard Bernstein, is dead. And while one hopes the lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, is very much around for more revivals, one doesn’t know. “West Side” probably won’t be back on Broadway for a long time.

The 2009 revival has closed in New York. This tour — which features Laurents’ direction, re-created by his longtime associate David Saint — dances on for a little while longer, including for these four summer weeks in Chicago. So I think it’s fair to say that this is your last chance to take an impressionable young person to the theater and say, “Look, this is ‘West Side Story’ as I remember it,” and as it was intended to be realized by those who were there when the masterpiece was forged.

And what a masterpiece! Who could listen to the aching melody of “Somewhere” or “Maria” or “Tonight” and not feel a jolt in the heart?

Had this tour been sent out with some neophyte cast and rumpled backdrops, or with a couple of pre-programmed synthesizers, I think I might have burned down the theater. Well, I would at least have tried to issue a dire warning to ticket-buyers. Happily, that’s not the case. This is a first-class tour with a full-strength ensemble and a decent, 20-piece orchestra in the pit. It makes up the best touring version of this show I’ve seen and, overall, I think the cast works much better than on Broadway in 2009. One thing is for certain: You absolutely believe that Kyle Harris’ Tony and Ali Ewoldt’s Maria love each other from the burning depths of their young souls. That was not the case in New York.

As Tonys go, Harris tends to the nerdier. He comes off, most assuredly, as a tortured lover, not an effective fighter. But for all its Jets, Sharks, stabbings and rumbling, “West Side Story” is about love. So that works, especially since Harris has a sweet voice that never requires him to stop acting in order to emerge loud and poignant.

Throughout the piece, Harris’ Tony seems to be searching for his voice — his identity as part of a duo — and thus the core, gang-versus-girl conflict in this young man is especially clear. Ewoldt, whose sound is crystal clear and vibrato-heavy, takes a while to settle into the sensuality of the role. Maria has to basically live the seven ages of women in 21/2 hours, and the journey spits out plenty of those who have tried. Not Ewoldt. She just gets better and stronger as she goes. And in the final moment, when Maria is suddenly, prematurely, as old as the New York boroughs, she is deeply moving. Laurents changed the staging of the last moments quite a bit, and he made it most powerful.

One of the original conceits of this revival (Laurents wanted to put more focus on the dramatic acting) was that the Sharks would speak Spanish among themselves, as 1950s immigrant kids fromPuerto Rico would have done. (Maria, after all, says she only has been in the U.S. for a month.) I thought that was a terrific idea, and a good way to equalize a show that, in the style of the time, stacked the deck on one side. But like the profanity in “Billy Elliot” (which was similarly realistic of its milieu), the Spanish was progressively dialed back after it met audience resistance in New York and beyond. I wish there were still more there, as the resultant compromise has meant that it’s hard to track the logic of when the Sharks do and don’t speak in their native tongue. Laurents and Saint should have held out. But then, this is a business as well as an art.

There have been flashier Anitas than Michelle Aravena, who could dial it up a notch even though I had great respect for the honesty of her acting. Joseph Simeone and German Santiago are also strong as, respectively, Riff and Bernardo. And as Lt. Schrank, Christopher Patrick Mullen offers a suitably cynical piece of work.

The physical production is cut back a fair bit — Doc’s place appears to have lost its walls. Compromises are everywhere on the road these days. But James Youmans’ design retains the essence of its grandeur. And with Joey McKneely guiding them through the incomparable Robbins blueprints, a killer ensemble dances with the palpable pride and commitment of actors who understand that they must be worthy of a sacred American work.

cjones5@tribune.com

Twitter@ChrisJonesTrib

When: Through Aug. 14

Where: Cadillac Palace Theatre, 151 W. Randolph St.

Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes

Tickets: $32-$95 at 800-775-2000 and broadwayinchicago.com

Everything good about “Captain America: The First Avenger,” which certainly is the most stylish comics-derived entertainment of the year, sets director Joe Johnston’s film in direct opposition to the attention-span-destroying likes of “Transformers 3.” It’s paced and designed for people who won’t shrivel up and die if two or three characters take 45 seconds between combat sequences to have a conversation about world domination, or a dame.

This is the fifth film in the interconnected Marvel comics universe, wherein the whole gang — Captain America, Iron Man, the Hulk and Thor, plus their superpowers — will come together to form a boy band next May in “The Avengers.” So what makes “Captain America” more than just a pro forma origin story?

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For one thing the movie takes its mythology seriously without choking on it. Director Johnston knows and loves the story’s period; he made “The Rocketeer” (another engaging adventure, more of a cult title than a popular success). Johnston brings to “Captain America” a similar zest for retro detail, in the service of an early 1940s story dealing in Nazis and World War II but also in blue-ray ray guns, and a true-blue, shield-brandishing symbol of the American fighting spirit, informed by the sort of humility that you do not find in anything directed by Michael “Transformers” Bay. It’s speculation, of course, but I suspect Bay would explode like the Nazi at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” were he to receive orders to sit still for two hours and watch “Captain America.” What’s this? A prologue that takes a minute or two to establish a mood of eerie atmosphere? Sound levels suited to inhabitants of this planet, not some other, louder planet? Gaaaaaaaahhh!!!

Marvel introduced the title character in early ’41, with legendary cover art depicting a square-jawed American socking Adolf Hitler square in the jaw. Creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby offered a wish-fulfillment fantasy for 98-pound weaklings everywhere. Asthmatic young Steve Rogers, played by Chris Evans first in digitally enhanced “puny” mode and then in bulked-up personal trainer mode, comes straight out of Brooklyn and wants to join the fight (this is 1942). His lion-hearted determination in the face of 4-F status buys him a ticket into a secret government program overseen by Stanley Tucci’s kindly Dr. Erskine, who pumps the kid from Brooklyn full of the same blue serum being used, nefariously, by Hitler’s maddest scientist (Hugo Weaving, shrewd and scary) extracted from the unholy Tesseract of Odin, or something.

Weaving’s antagonist morphs into the terror known as Red Skull as Rogers becomes the beefed-up Captain America, leader of a multiethnic commando unit out to save the world and get Rogers home from the war safely so he can make good on his planned date at the Stork Club with agent Carter, played by British actress Hayley Atwell. She looks swell behind a machine gun in her smudge-free lipstick and Andrews Sister hair.

A relaxed air of confidence and, though I hesitate to use the word, charm informs Johnston’s film. Tommy Lee Jones could play the role of the tough colonel in his sleep, and once or twice he does seem to have been caught napping just before the cameras rolled, but his line readings (like Tucci’s) have a way of tweaking the innate ridiculousness of the material while reminding folks of the fun to be had with such ridiculousness.

I’m not sure Evans was an ideal choice for Rogers. Like Ryan Reynolds, the headliner in an earlier summer title, “The Green Lantern,” he’s a pretty good actor and the right physical type (not hard to find in Hollywood) but a movie or two shy of really coming into his own as a dominant leading man or action hero. In other words, Evans doesn’t yet have what Dominic Cooper has, in spades, in the supporting role of engineer and inventor Howard Stark, father of Tony (the Robert Downey Jr. role in the “Iron Man” sub-franchise). The x-factor is wit. Downey has it; even Chris Hemsworth had it in the title role in “Thor.” Still, Evans has a modest ace in the hole, which is his sincerity, and the rest of the movie has wit enough to compensate.

I hope “Captain America” finds an audience, which seems a strange thing to say about a big-budget Marvel spectacular in 3-D. (The 3-D’s fine; nothing special, nothing crucial.) Johnston’s brand of storytelling and pacing distinguish his efforts from the run of the mill. The action sequences recall everything from Carol Reed’s “Night Train to Munich,” in scenes involving derring-do in the Alps, to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent,” as in the climactic air battle pitting America Himself against the Red Skull high over the Atlantic. Largely in the artfulness of its period recreations, blending digital effects and design with old-school art direction, “Captain America” doesn’t reinvent the genre so much as simply embrace the time and place that gave birth to the ordinary man turned super-soldier, equipped with a shield made of Vibranium. Now there’s a name for a fictional alloy! For various reasons, including that Vibranium shield, my 10-year-old son pronounced this one of his “favorite movies, ever.”

mjphillips@tribune.com

‘Captain America: First Avenger’ — 3 1/2 stars

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action)

Cast: Chris Evans (Steve Rogers/Capt. America); Tommy Lee Jones (Col. Phillips); Hugo Weaving (Johann Schmidt/Red Skull); Hayley Atwell (Peggy Carter); Dominic Cooper (Howard Stark); Sebastian Stan (Bucky); Toby Jones (Arnim Zola); Neal McDonough (Dum Dum Dugan)

Credits: Directed by Joe Johnston; written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely; produced by Kevin Feige. A Paramount Pictures release. Running time: 2:04.

When it comes to outlaw country, there was a time when Steve Earle was the new bad boy on the block. At the Vic Theatre on Tuesday night, it was clear that Earle is now becoming something of a gray eminence; still deeply informed by country music, but also an artist who has long transcended any strict genre category.

Earle is only 56, but a palpable feel that he is entering a new phase of his life hung over the proceedings. It’s not that he’s completely traded away his wild and woolly side. Earle can still rock with the best of them, and brought substantial punch and heft to such classic barnburners as “Guitar Town” and “Copperhead Road.” But the air itself seemed changed around him on stage. The atmosphere felt heavier, the songs more circumspect, all the stakes weightier.

This is more a subtle shift for Earle rather than a tectonic one, given that he’s always been a heavyweight as a singer, songwriter and larger-than-life persona. Earle has many artistic irons in the fire. Besides a role in the TV show “Treme,” he has a new novel out, as well as an album of the same name, “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.” The latter is a stand-out song cycle, shaped by the death of his father three years ago. This intensely focused contemplation of mortality seems to have deepened a man who ran deep from the start.

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Earle was backed by the Dukes (and Duchesses), a nuanced five-piece outfit that included his wife, singer-songwriter Allison Moorer and the inventive guitarist Chris Masterson. Earle and band listed toward an old-time sound on some of his new songs, using such trad-country instruments as banjo, fiddle and mandolin. But woven through some of these tunes were arresting streaks of hip, mournful modernity: Moorer’s ghostly keyboard work; Masterson’s dark, throbbing drone notes and tense, controlled shards of feedback.

The new songs seemed drenched in sepia tone, as if they had been written in another age. “Molly-O,” with its portentous, Celtic-tinged drumming, already felt burnished by time. The songs were built on simple-yet-beautiful melodies and Earle, always an astute songwriter, invested many of them with a sense of melancholy.

The early Earle classic, “My Old Friend the Blues,” seemed to shift from its original incarnation as a 3 a.m. lament to loneliness into a powerful meditation on aloneness itself. Similarly, the Earle standard “I Ain’t Ever Satisfied,” though still ringing with vigor, has now segued from a young man’s shout of brio into an older man’s solid conviction.

Moorer added delicate harmonies throughout, sang a couple numbers on her own and dueted with her husband on several tunes, including the new “Heaven or Hell.” She brought a powerful, aching tone to all of it.

Chicago has always been a fan stronghold for Earle. The packed house greeted him with familial warmth, and tied a bow on it by giving him a well-earned standing ovation at the close of this outstanding show.

Ctc-arts@tribune.com

Twitter @ChiTribEnt

What do Sarah Palin, the Federal Election Commission, the United Farm Workers of America, Wikipedia, U.S. Speedskating, pop singer Rebecca Black and Northwestern University have in common?

The Colbert Bump.

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Some know its influence, some crave its generosity. But each has seen its power.

For instance, U.S. Speedskating craved the Bump. A week before the start of its 2009 World Cup season, Paul Brabants, director of the team, received a call from a producer with “The Colbert Report,” the satirical Comedy Central news show hosted by the mock-egomaniacal Stephen Colbert. Word had reached the Colbert camp of the team’s troubles, which, to Brabants, seemed insurmountable: The World Cup was starting, the Winter Olympics were just around the corner and the team was facing a massive financial shortfall.

Dutch bank DSB had gone under, and with it the $300,000 sponsorship the bank had pledged to the team. So “The Colbert Report” offered to step in, raise the necessary money — and become the official sponsor of U.S. Speedskating. “To be honest, I didn’t think about it that long,” Brabants said. “I don’t want to say there were no reservations. It is a comedy show; we didn’t know how this would be perceived. But right out of the blue, Colbert proposed rallying Colbert Nation to our cause — and that is not a gift you turn down.”

Demographically speaking, it’s a dream audience: “The Colbert Report” has a nightly viewership of 1.5 million, and with “The Daily Show,” its companion fake newscast, beats both Leno and Letterman in the coveted 18-to-34-year-old viewing segment. Then there’s its knack for altruism: Our conservative estimate of how much “The Colbert Report” has raised for various charities since 2005, largely through modest viewer donations, is $3.5 million.

Simply defined, though, the Colbert Bump is a megaphone of influence, shouted by a comedian with a keen ethical compass who plays a blowhard with no ethical compass and hopes the audience gets the difference.

It began as a kind of joke — in the sense that Colbert, the host, would bluster on about the “bump” his show gave anyone or anything appearing on it. However, the Bump has become anything but a joke — in the sense that the political, philanthropic and social ramifications of Colbert and his sway over his audience have grown remarkable, touching on a dizzying range of subjects both silly and serious. “I love my brother, but I probably wouldn’t have driven out here if it wasn’t for (Colbert) being here,” Sam Engstrom, of Washington, D.C., said last month at Northwestern University, where Colbert, an alum, delivered the commencement speech.

In the spring, Colbert and Jimmy Fallon promised to perform Black’s infamous hit, “Friday,” if the Colbert Nation raised at least $26,000 for the charity Donors Choose. Done. In June, Colbert asked the FEC if he could create an organization to solicit funds for campaign advertising. “All I’m trying to do is affect the 2012 election,” he told Trevor Potter, a former FEC chairman (now Colbert’s lawyer), during an episode of the show. “It’s not like I’m trying to install iTunes.” Done.

When Colbert broke his wrist in 2007 and began selling $5 yellow, rubber “Wriststrong” bracelets (in recognition of “wrist violence”), proceeds went to the Yellow Ribbon Fund, which assists injured service members. The show raised $171,000 in a few months — and through eBay auctions of props from the set and additional sources (including proceeds from “AmeriCone Dream,” the Colbert-branded flavor of Ben Jerry’s ice cream) since has brought the total to $350,000 for the organization. As Mark Robbins, the director of Yellow Ribbon, said: “People don’t realize (Colbert) is like a conduit to money for charities. He’s raised our visibility beyond anything we had expected. Now I get random checks from people — ‘Here’s $10 in honor of Stephen’s birthday.’ No kidding.”

Indeed, a few days after Colbert asked viewers to donate to U.S. Speedskating, the show raised $202,000 through its website; soon after, its logo was stitched onto the team’s uniforms. By January, it had raised $300,000.

“That one man can have so much influence over an audience is fascinating,” said Katherine Reutter, the Champaign-born speedskater who went on to win two medals at the 2010 Winter Olympics. She said that the Colbert Nation “is not really supporting speedskating anymore, but the boost he gave us helped us create Speedskater Nation (a website to solicit donations). None of us even knew Stephen. You wouldn’t necessarily expect that he’s out to do good in this world. But I felt that. When you go on the show, they give you a basket backstage and inside is a $100 gift card to the charity of your choice. That’s real decency.”

The Bump, however, is not solely warm and fuzzy. In fact, though it has been a good summer for the Bump, the Bump is not necessarily something you want. A few weeks ago, after Colbert mocked “Terry the Fracosaurus,” the hard hat-wearing, pro-drilling dinosaur mascot of Canada-based natural gas provider Talisman Energy, the character disappeared from the company’s website. And in June, after Sarah Palin supporters reportedly altered a Wikipedia page for Paul Revere to reflect her widely quoted remarks about the Revolutionary War figure, Colbert asked his viewers to change Wikipedia’s entry for “bell” to also reflect her comments. A minute later, it read: “Used by Paul Revere to warn the British that hey, you’re not going to succeed in taking our guns.”

On the political side, there are the many implications of the Colbert SuperPAC, the organization that the FEC approved and Colbert plans to use to promote or oppose political candidates during the 2012 presidential election. Its specific implications are debatable, though that’s probably Colbert’s intention.

Potter, who steered Colbert through the FEC process, said: “Stephen’s PAC is a teaching moment. People are learning what the loopholes are, and that’s a good thing for a democracy. The FEC is obscure and terrifically important, and anyone who can get the country to focus on campaign finance reform is doing a public service. Remember, he just wanted to ask a question: Why can’t I have a PAC?” According to Robert Weissman, president of the Washington group Public Citizen — which opposed the comedian’s FEC endeavor on the grounds that he was opening a barn door to rampant media-based election financing — Colbert is making a point about the 2010 Supreme Court ruling that allowed unlimited corporate funding of political campaigns.

“Which was an absurd decision,” Weissman said, “but Colbert just happened to take his joke about it all the way to a decision, which has consequences. My guess is he’s making it up as he goes along. His first obligation is wondering if something is funny, not if it’s going to change the way the FEC operates. And that’s not minor.”

Regardless of what his PAC means, however, the line between Colbert the satirist and Colbert the advocate has grown increasingly thin, said Sophia McClennen, a professor of comparative literature at Penn State who has a book about Colbert’s influence, “America According To Colbert,” coming this fall. “Someone with a massive fan base who can get them to do whatever they want is not what anyone wants to see in a healthy democracy. But I think he has a knack for choosing causes that are meaningful and causes that are silly, and, more importantly, he has the faith in the audience to understand the difference — and the larger lesson.

“I think his playing a right-wing blowhard character, balancing it with a reality — that’s not new,” she added. “But Colbert is offering us a new definition of what it means to be a public intellectual, which is about amusing ourselves to activism.”

Dick Gregory, the legendary political activist and comedian who got started in the early ’60s in Chicago, couldn’t agree more: “He works for this generation because he know its cadences, its lingo. If I wanted young people to read the Bible, I’d want a rap group to deliver it, then kids would know it better than preachers. Colbert gets this, but I wonder if he knows how powerful he is, that (he and Jon Stewart) are in position to determine policy! I think I first realized that when they did that rally.”

Back when Apple was just another piece of fruit, back when a laptop was where you dandled an infant and a byte was a mosquito’s idea of a hostess gift, along came the Selectric.

It was sleek. It was cool. It was revolutionary.

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“It wasn’t fussy-looking. It was elegant,” says Derry Noyes. “It wasn’t like a machine at all. It was like …” She pauses, searching for a worthy simile. “It was like a beautiful piece of sculpture.”

Fifty years ago this month, an electric typewriter called the Selectric was introduced by IBM. To celebrate the birth of a device that changed not only business practices but also our ideas of how utilitarian objects can double as eye candy, the United States Postal Service has released a new stamp featuring the Selectric.

And in a bit of symmetry that befits a natty gadget such as the Selectric, the woman who designed the stamp — the aforementioned Derry Noyes — is the daughter of the man who gave the Selectric its captivating contours: Eliot Noyes (1910-1977), celebrated American architect and industrial designer.

He’s the man who convinced corporations such as IBM, Westinghouse and Mobil that design isn’t just a frivolous afterthought but a key component in business. He understood that devices do more than make our lives easier; they make us feel. They don’t simply serve us; they move us too.

Fans of “Mad Men,” the cable series set in an advertising firm in the early 1960s, can skip the pitch. They know how the presence of Selectrics on desks is part of the show’s retro ambience, its moody mooring in a specific time and place.

Skinny ties, hi-fi’s — and Selectrics. They’re design-infused time machines, rocketing the audience back to a half-century ago.

Derry Noyes, who joined the postal service’s design staff in 1981, recalls the day she found out that a Selectric stamp was in the works. “I obviously put my hand up to say, ‘Oh, oh, pick me!’ It was just one of those perfect storms. You were in the right place and the right moment to work on the perfect project.”

She remembers, as a 9-year-old kid, hanging out in her father’s office in New Canaan, Conn., as he and his colleagues worked on the design of a newfangled typewriter. Instead of individual keys on a curved bar that jumped forward and struck the paper, one by one, and that could become tangled if you typed too energetically, the Selectric featured a round ball that turned as you typed.

In the first version, the Selectric’s shell had round edges. A second version came along a decade later, featuring square edges. Attentive “Mad Men” viewers who know their typewriter history have pointed out on blogs that the series mostly uses the second kind — which weren’t available during the time in which the series is set. (For that matter, even the initial Selectrics weren’t on the market in 1960.) The show’s makers have explained that they liked the look of the second-generation Selectrics and they more were readily available.

Derry Noyes says she’s never watched “Mad Men” but understands why the series would go for Selectrics to set the mood of the 1960s. Efficient, reliable and attractive, they became the iconic office machines of that period and beyond, quickly capturing three-fourths of the market.

And typewriters themselves, even in an era dominated by word processors, never really went away. In 2006, author Larry McMurtry thanked his Hermes 3000 typewriter when he received a Golden Globe award for co-writing the screenplay for “Brokeback Mountain.” Other writers have come out of the technological closet, too, and announced that they prefer low-tech typewriters to fancy PCs.

Yet the click and the hum of a Selectric on the job are sounds that still belong to the 1960s, an era that seems so far away and yet so close as well, separated from the present by just the flick of a remote — and the creativity of a set designer. The bridge between then and now is often an object — a telephone, a cocktail shaker, a cigarette holder, a typewriter.

“Normally, we take these things for granted,” Derry Noyes muses. “We don’t think that a fork and a knife and a spoon are designed, that there are people behind these things.”

And in the case of a Selectric, the design is so instantly communicative that its shape and style still haunt our cultural consciousness. A single glimpse — on a desk or on a stamp — is all it takes: It’s 1961, and time for somebody to take a letter.

jikeller@tribune.com

Twitter @litkell

Summer weather can be unbearable. For some, deathly so.

Beyond inevitable heat exhaustion and stroke, there are murders. And while there is no statistical line connecting our sweltering summer temperatures with an increase in homicides, many Chicagoans can provide anecdotal evidence.

Artist Krista Wortendyke is fixated on it.

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On July 1, Wortendyke, 32, began installing her interpretation of Chicago’s so-called “killing season,” the summer months during which homicide rates tend to be higher than any other time of year. Splayed on the blank-canvas facade of The Violet Hour, the popular cocktail lounge on a heavily trodden block of North Damen Avenue, “Killing Season: Chicago 2010″ reads like a bar graph of violence. Against a caution-orange backdrop, the chronology of the heat of summer months (June, July, August) run left to right, with one column for each date. Stacked photographs reflect the number of last summer’s homicides per day, and document each crime scene. On view through Aug. 15, the resulting mixed-media mural is a startling fixture in the heart of heavily gentrified Wicker Park.

Wortendyke, who studied photography at Columbia College, says “Killing Season” is related to her work examining the role of war and violence in our lives.

“I’ve always been interested in war, (in terms of ) how we make the connection to it if we’ve never experienced it firsthand,” Wortendyke said this week, revisiting the installation. “Even the way we experience (the Iraq) war now, there is no physical connection. It’s all through the media, which can be skewed.”

By comparison, Wortendyke said local violence struck a chord in May 2010 when around the corner from her Ukrainian Village apartment, a man shot and killed his two adult sons, then himself. Within days, former Metra CEO Phil Pagano committed suicide, a murder-suicide shut down Old Navy in the Loop and a shoot-out on the Dan Ryan Expressway left one man dead — all within hours.

“It was this crazy day,” Wortendyke said, “and I remember people saying, ‘It’s not even summer yet. Just wait.’”

The artist’s response was to document the summer’s homicides with her camera. Beginning July 1, 2010, Wortendyke followed the violence — based on breaking news and (Chicago Tribune publication) RedEye’s Homicide Map — with the intent to photograph scenes at the same time of day or night that their crimes occurred. But reality set in. Keeping up with all of the homicides (168 by summer’s end) became all-consuming for Wortendyke, who makes her living teaching and working the door at bars.

Instead she visited crime scenes in the morning, sometimes grouping them geographically, accompanied by off-duty police officers. Her photographs are shot with a full depth of field, and everything in focus. In them, there are no people. Just sidewalks, buildings, alleys, yards.

“I wanted them to be very formal,” Wortendyke said. “I wanted them to be objective, and at a distance. I didn’t want my style to interfere.”

The resulting color-printed images are photojournalism-style documentations of addresses and alleys, free of crime-scene tape or any evidence of violence. Xeroxed and pasted onto the facade, some pictures are stacked on top of one another, indicating more than one homicide at the same location on the same day; or side by side, suggesting retaliations over two days. Other columns are eerily empty.

There’s little rhyme or reason to the pattern, even in the minds of those whose job is to keep track of such things.

RedEye’s Tracy Swartz, who reports weekly on local homicides and feeds the paper’s Homicide Map, said that in the 21/2 years she’s been on the beat, there has never been a week devoid of killing.

“Sometimes you think, because it’s winter, you won’t get many homicides,” Swartz said of the so-called off months, “but then you do. I expected to hear of some (Sunday), but we didn’t learn of any.”

Two days later, she confirmed that there was indeed a homicide reported Sunday, when the heat index broke 100 degrees.

For Wortendyke, it’s important that the project is installed in a neighborhood more or less devoid of homicides. It was shown in an indoors iteration a few months back in a Rogers Park gallery. But out in public, in Wicker Park, she said, is ideal.

“It’s a receptive audience,” Wortendyke said of the site. “Stuff like that doesn’t happen here, but it’s a reminder, like, ‘Hey, this is happening around you.’”

The Violet Hour partner TerryAlexander said that facade installations have been part of its business plan since it opened in 2007, partly to play up the mystery of the windowless, speak-easy style lounge. He said there is no one direct focus to its curation; some installations have been promotional, others are tongue-in-cheek.

Wortendyke’s installation,Alexander said, is one of the more somber pieces to date.

“Krista is using the facade as a way to express something a lot more serious,” he said. “The reaction we’ve seen (so far) is people walking by and stopping and really looking at it. When they see it, it really makes them stop — and hopefully some people will think about it.”

“Killing Season: Chicago 2010,” through Aug. 15 at The Violet Hour, 1520 N. Damen Ave.; 773-252-1500.

lviera@tribune.com

Twitter @LaurenViera

The 2009 Broadway revival of “West Side Story” was the last such revival to be directed by its author, Arthur Laurents, who died earlier this year. And while a classic title like this will always be open for re-creation and re-interpretation, and while the legendary Jerome Robbins choreography will be forever available for each successive generation of dancers, there is nonetheless the sense that this particular production represents a hard line on the asphalt.

The composer, Leonard Bernstein, is dead. And while one hopes the lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, is very much around for more revivals, one doesn’t know. “West Side” probably won’t be back on Broadway for a long time.

• Chris Jones

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The 2009 revival has closed in New York. This tour — which features Laurents’ direction, re-created by his longtime associate David Saint — dances on for a little while longer, including for these four summer weeks in Chicago. So I think it’s fair to say that this is your last chance to take an impressionable young person to the theater and say, “Look, this is ‘West Side Story’ as I remember it,” and as it was intended to be realized by those who were there when the masterpiece was forged.

And what a masterpiece! Who could listen to the aching melody of “Somewhere” or “Maria” or “Tonight” and not feel a jolt in the heart?

Had this tour been sent out with some neophyte cast and rumpled backdrops, or with a couple of pre-programmed synthesizers, I think I might have burned down the theater. Well, I would at least have tried to issue a dire warning to ticket-buyers. Happily, that’s not the case. This is a first-class tour with a full-strength ensemble and a decent, 20-piece orchestra in the pit. It makes up the best touring version of this show I’ve seen and, overall, I think the cast works much better than on Broadway in 2009. One thing is for certain: You absolutely believe that Kyle Harris’ Tony and Ali Ewoldt’s Maria love each other from the burning depths of their young souls. That was not the case in New York.

As Tonys go, Harris tends to the nerdier. He comes off, most assuredly, as a tortured lover, not an effective fighter. But for all its Jets, Sharks, stabbings and rumbling, “West Side Story” is about love. So that works, especially since Harris has a sweet voice that never requires him to stop acting in order to emerge loud and poignant.

Throughout the piece, Harris’ Tony seems to be searching for his voice — his identity as part of a duo — and thus the core, gang-versus-girl conflict in this young man is especially clear. Ewoldt, whose sound is crystal clear and vibrato-heavy, takes a while to settle into the sensuality of the role. Maria has to basically live the seven ages of women in 21/2 hours, and the journey spits out plenty of those who have tried. Not Ewoldt. She just gets better and stronger as she goes. And in the final moment, when Maria is suddenly, prematurely, as old as the New York boroughs, she is deeply moving. Laurents changed the staging of the last moments quite a bit, and he made it most powerful.

One of the original conceits of this revival (Laurents wanted to put more focus on the dramatic acting) was that the Sharks would speak Spanish among themselves, as 1950s immigrant kids fromPuerto Rico would have done. (Maria, after all, says she only has been in the U.S. for a month.) I thought that was a terrific idea, and a good way to equalize a show that, in the style of the time, stacked the deck on one side. But like the profanity in “Billy Elliot” (which was similarly realistic of its milieu), the Spanish was progressively dialed back after it met audience resistance in New York and beyond. I wish there were still more there, as the resultant compromise has meant that it’s hard to track the logic of when the Sharks do and don’t speak in their native tongue. Laurents and Saint should have held out. But then, this is a business as well as an art.

There have been flashier Anitas than Michelle Aravena, who could dial it up a notch even though I had great respect for the honesty of her acting. Joseph Simeone and German Santiago are also strong as, respectively, Riff and Bernardo. And as Lt. Schrank, Christopher Patrick Mullen offers a suitably cynical piece of work.

The physical production is cut back a fair bit — Doc’s place appears to have lost its walls. Compromises are everywhere on the road these days. But James Youmans’ design retains the essence of its grandeur. And with Joey McKneely guiding them through the incomparable Robbins blueprints, a killer ensemble dances with the palpable pride and commitment of actors who understand that they must be worthy of a sacred American work.

cjones5@tribune.com

Twitter@ChrisJonesTrib

When: Through Aug. 14

Where: Cadillac Palace Theatre, 151 W. Randolph St.

Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes

Tickets: $32-$95 at 800-775-2000 and broadwayinchicago.com

Carrie Brownstein is rolling on the stage while simultaneously trying to play her guitar and break it. The normally reserved Mary Timony is right there with her, grinning while playing her guitar behind her back. Rebecca Cole keeps the keyboard bass line pumping while pogoing. And Janet Weiss, behind the drums, is rolling and tumbling with her sticks while doing her best not to crack up. She knows she’s got the best seat in the house for what would prove to be Wild Flag’s eighth and final show at the South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas, last March.

 “We were still figuring out what this band was going to be when we did those shows (in Austin),” Weiss says. “We just took it over the top. The state of music, people seemed lulled in a way, so what kind of tools did we have to address that? It just sort of exploded. I can see the whole scene behind the drums, my bandmates jumping around the stage, no inhibitions. I was just as excited as the audience watching that. It’s not planned, but we sort of fed off each other. You put yourself out there, let yourself be that exposed, and we realized, ‘That’s our job!’ To go out on the ledge, and just let go.”

• Greg Kot

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Wild Flag is the most exciting new rock band I’ve seen this year, though it’s really not “new”: all the band members have impressive resumes that stretch back 20 years. Weiss and Brownstein were two-thirds of the great indie-rock band Sleater-Kinney. Timony fronted the masterly atmospheric Helium and myriad other projects, and Cole was a mainstay in the Minders. Their paths had crossed over the years, with Brownstein and Timony collaborating on an EP in ’99, and Weiss and Cole recently playing together in the Shadow Mortons. Then they convened again to create the soundtrack for a 2010 feminist-art documentary, “Women Art Revolution.”

The collaboration went so well that Timony began flying out from her home in Washington, D.C., every few months to join Weiss, Brownstein and Cole in Portland to work on new music.

“Nobody said, ‘It’s a band,’ at first,” Timony says. “But everyone was pretty serious about it from the start. It was fun, collaborative, everybody bringing in ideas, not just a songwriter telling everyone what to play.”

All the band members were actively involved in other bands except Brownstein, who hadn’t played much music since Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006. Instead she had poured her energies into working as a blogger at NPR Music, and now stars in a cable-TV comedy-hit, “Portlandia,” with another former musician, Fred Armisen.

“After Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006 I had very little desire to play music,” Brownstein wrote on her Monitor Mix blog last October. “It took well over three years before picking up a guitar meant anything to me other than an exercise.”

The Portland rehearsal-room sessions opened a musical door for all involved and a group sound and identity began to take a shape: a roaming, energetic blend of rocking guitars and girl-group harmonies, expansive arrangements and assertive, frequently joyous lyrics.

“With Carrie, every record we ever made together we wanted to push some boundaries, push new emotional space, and this was no different,” Weiss says. “In a way that was easier this time because we had two new people in the mix who we’ve always wanted to play with. With Rebecca, we’re able to sing together. It was a dream of mine to have someone in a band to sing harmonies with me. Mary is just so mysterious – a lot of what I love about music is how it makes you fantasize, daydream, imagine better things. She sort of represents that in the band. She’s the magical creature.”

After the South by Southwest shows, the band recorded its self-titled debut album, which will be released by Merge Records in September. It’s pretty terrific, a mix of sharp melodies, gauzy harmonies and ferocious guitar workouts.

“There is something liberating about the music we make,” Timony says. “There’s a lot of joy in it. It’s weird, because when you get to my age (she was born in 1970), you can seem ‘old’ in the rock world. It’s a hard life in some ways, hard to make money doing it, and there are a lot people doing it who have to stop. So I feel super lucky to be in this band. I think we all do.”

greg@gregkot.com

Wild Flag: 10:30 p.m. Friday at Subterranean, 2011 W. North Av., $15 (sold out), ticketweb.com; and 9 p.m. Saturday at the Wicker Park Festival, Milwaukee Avenue between North Avenue and Wood Street, $5 donation; wickerparkbucktown.com.

What do Sarah Palin, the Federal Election Commission, the United Farm Workers of America, Wikipedia, U.S. Speedskating, pop singer Rebecca Black and Northwestern University have in common?

The Colbert Bump.

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Some know its influence, some crave its generosity. But each has seen its power.

For instance, U.S. Speedskating craved the Bump. A week before the start of its 2009 World Cup season, Paul Brabants, director of the team, received a call from a producer with “The Colbert Report,” the satirical Comedy Central news show hosted by the mock-egomaniacal Stephen Colbert. Word had reached the Colbert camp of the team’s troubles, which, to Brabants, seemed insurmountable: The World Cup was starting, the Winter Olympics were just around the corner and the team was facing a massive financial shortfall.

Dutch bank DSB had gone under, and with it the $300,000 sponsorship the bank had pledged to the team. So “The Colbert Report” offered to step in, raise the necessary money — and become the official sponsor of U.S. Speedskating. “To be honest, I didn’t think about it that long,” Brabants said. “I don’t want to say there were no reservations. It is a comedy show; we didn’t know how this would be perceived. But right out of the blue, Colbert proposed rallying Colbert Nation to our cause — and that is not a gift you turn down.”

Demographically speaking, it’s a dream audience: “The Colbert Report” has a nightly viewership of 1.5 million, and with “The Daily Show,” its companion fake newscast, beats both Leno and Letterman in the coveted 18-to-34-year-old viewing segment. Then there’s its knack for altruism: Our conservative estimate of how much “The Colbert Report” has raised for various charities since 2005, largely through modest viewer donations, is $3.5 million.

Simply defined, though, the Colbert Bump is a megaphone of influence, shouted by a comedian with a keen ethical compass who plays a blowhard with no ethical compass and hopes the audience gets the difference.

It began as a kind of joke — in the sense that Colbert, the host, would bluster on about the “bump” his show gave anyone or anything appearing on it. However, the Bump has become anything but a joke — in the sense that the political, philanthropic and social ramifications of Colbert and his sway over his audience have grown remarkable, touching on a dizzying range of subjects both silly and serious. “I love my brother, but I probably wouldn’t have driven out here if it wasn’t for (Colbert) being here,” Sam Engstrom, of Washington, D.C., said last month at Northwestern University, where Colbert, an alum, delivered the commencement speech.

In the spring, Colbert and Jimmy Fallon promised to perform Black’s infamous hit, “Friday,” if the Colbert Nation raised at least $26,000 for the charity Donors Choose. Done. In June, Colbert asked the FEC if he could create an organization to solicit funds for campaign advertising. “All I’m trying to do is affect the 2012 election,” he told Trevor Potter, a former FEC chairman (now Colbert’s lawyer), during an episode of the show. “It’s not like I’m trying to install iTunes.” Done.

When Colbert broke his wrist in 2007 and began selling $5 yellow, rubber “Wriststrong” bracelets (in recognition of “wrist violence”), proceeds went to the Yellow Ribbon Fund, which assists injured service members. The show raised $171,000 in a few months — and through eBay auctions of props from the set and additional sources (including proceeds from “AmeriCone Dream,” the Colbert-branded flavor of Ben Jerry’s ice cream) since has brought the total to $350,000 for the organization. As Mark Robbins, the director of Yellow Ribbon, said: “People don’t realize (Colbert) is like a conduit to money for charities. He’s raised our visibility beyond anything we had expected. Now I get random checks from people — ‘Here’s $10 in honor of Stephen’s birthday.’ No kidding.”

Indeed, a few days after Colbert asked viewers to donate to U.S. Speedskating, the show raised $202,000 through its website; soon after, its logo was stitched onto the team’s uniforms. By January, it had raised $300,000.

“That one man can have so much influence over an audience is fascinating,” said Katherine Reutter, the Champaign-born speedskater who went on to win two medals at the 2010 Winter Olympics. She said that the Colbert Nation “is not really supporting speedskating anymore, but the boost he gave us helped us create Speedskater Nation (a website to solicit donations). None of us even knew Stephen. You wouldn’t necessarily expect that he’s out to do good in this world. But I felt that. When you go on the show, they give you a basket backstage and inside is a $100 gift card to the charity of your choice. That’s real decency.”

The Bump, however, is not solely warm and fuzzy. In fact, though it has been a good summer for the Bump, the Bump is not necessarily something you want. A few weeks ago, after Colbert mocked “Terry the Fracosaurus,” the hard hat-wearing, pro-drilling dinosaur mascot of Canada-based natural gas provider Talisman Energy, the character disappeared from the company’s website. And in June, after Sarah Palin supporters reportedly altered a Wikipedia page for Paul Revere to reflect her widely quoted remarks about the Revolutionary War figure, Colbert asked his viewers to change Wikipedia’s entry for “bell” to also reflect her comments. A minute later, it read: “Used by Paul Revere to warn the British that hey, you’re not going to succeed in taking our guns.”

On the political side, there are the many implications of the Colbert SuperPAC, the organization that the FEC approved and Colbert plans to use to promote or oppose political candidates during the 2012 presidential election. Its specific implications are debatable, though that’s probably Colbert’s intention.

Potter, who steered Colbert through the FEC process, said: “Stephen’s PAC is a teaching moment. People are learning what the loopholes are, and that’s a good thing for a democracy. The FEC is obscure and terrifically important, and anyone who can get the country to focus on campaign finance reform is doing a public service. Remember, he just wanted to ask a question: Why can’t I have a PAC?” According to Robert Weissman, president of the Washington group Public Citizen — which opposed the comedian’s FEC endeavor on the grounds that he was opening a barn door to rampant media-based election financing — Colbert is making a point about the 2010 Supreme Court ruling that allowed unlimited corporate funding of political campaigns.

“Which was an absurd decision,” Weissman said, “but Colbert just happened to take his joke about it all the way to a decision, which has consequences. My guess is he’s making it up as he goes along. His first obligation is wondering if something is funny, not if it’s going to change the way the FEC operates. And that’s not minor.”

Regardless of what his PAC means, however, the line between Colbert the satirist and Colbert the advocate has grown increasingly thin, said Sophia McClennen, a professor of comparative literature at Penn State who has a book about Colbert’s influence, “America According To Colbert,” coming this fall. “Someone with a massive fan base who can get them to do whatever they want is not what anyone wants to see in a healthy democracy. But I think he has a knack for choosing causes that are meaningful and causes that are silly, and, more importantly, he has the faith in the audience to understand the difference — and the larger lesson.

“I think his playing a right-wing blowhard character, balancing it with a reality — that’s not new,” she added. “But Colbert is offering us a new definition of what it means to be a public intellectual, which is about amusing ourselves to activism.”

Dick Gregory, the legendary political activist and comedian who got started in the early ’60s in Chicago, couldn’t agree more: “He works for this generation because he know its cadences, its lingo. If I wanted young people to read the Bible, I’d want a rap group to deliver it, then kids would know it better than preachers. Colbert gets this, but I wonder if he knows how powerful he is, that (he and Jon Stewart) are in position to determine policy! I think I first realized that when they did that rally.”

Jennifer Hudson’s concert Sunday night, the second of two weekend performances at Ravinia, was part homecoming celebration, part self-esteem pep rally, and above all a display of soul singing at its most theatrically dramatic.

In this last regard, Hudson simply was matching the much-publicized drama of her own life. The South Side Chicago native rebounded from a seventh-place finish in the third season of “American Idol” with her Academy Award-winning role in the film version of the musical “Dreamgirls.” More film roles and a successful debut record followed, but so did tragedy when her mother, brother and nephew were murdered in 2008.

Hudson indirectly alluded to these events in introducing “I Remember Me,” the title track of her second record, which was released earlier this year and provided most of the 14 songs in her 75-minute set. “I feel like in 29 years I’ve lived four or five lives,” she said before giving the song’s sorrowful mournful melody a smooth, supple delivery.

Her most expressive singing, though, came on a gospel-style rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Swathed in the harmonies of her three backing singers, she carefully weighting each word for maximum impact before finishing with a long, towering cry to the heavens.

Hudson also displayed her soaring range and vocal power as she belted, pleaded, called and wailed her way through songs that drew on old-school soul, from the disco groove of Alicia Keys’ “Don’t Look Down,” the staccato piano driving “No One Gonna Love You” and the Minnie Riperton-indebted trills of “Spotlight.” A quartet of dancers in Jane Fonda-style leotards aerobicized their way through most songs, adding to the 70s vibe.

Dressed in sleeveless bright yellow blouse and a very short red skirt that sometimes billowed up to her waist, Hudson walked up and down the aisled of the pavilion on high heels as she encouraged the crowd to sing along with her on Keys’ “Angel.” During a second stroll, she gave a shout-out to family members sitting near the stage, and she repeatedly spoke of being glad to be back in Chicago.

Introducing “I Got This,” she both credited her origins for keeping her grounded and preached faith in dreams before singing a verse a capella, emphasizing the song’s theme of perseverance. That fortitude was even more evident during her encore rendition of her “Dreamgirls” anthem, “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going” as Hudson’s gale-force cries turned what had been an aspiring starlet’s anthem into a survivor’s defiant determination to endure.

ctc-arts@tribune.com

With a title equally infused by an optimistic spirit and the sense that you really can’t trust your power to stay on for long these days, the zesty new revue at the Second City e.t.c. has a shrill start. But then Tim Baltz pulls out a set of index cards.

Baltz, a formidable talent, is playing a guy on a first date, as guys at Second City so often do. This fellow is so terrified, he has written his wooden dialogue on cards, shuffling to find the closest match at any given moment to what his date, played by Mary Sohn, might be saying. When she smiles back at one of the lines, you see him squeeze his fist in momentary triumph. Meanwhile, Michael Lehrer’s snarky Lettuce Entertain You waiter comes in and out, serving and mocking.

The director, Matt Hovde, has been smart enough to give Baltz a lot of room. This is one of those rare Second City sketches where you fall hook, line and sinker for a character you’ve known for about 30 seconds. The piece turns very dark — you quickly start to read the signs of painful shyness on Baltz’s increasingly agonized face. Even the waiter changes his tune, delivering apologies. You don’t want this drama to end. But end it does, and, with the level of talent established, the show thereafter flies.

“I’m not ready for a child,” says a pregnant woman in the following blackout sketch. “I think we should get rid of it,” says her partner, calling to the boy, “Jason, can you come in here?”

Hovde’s cast is a mix of old hands and new faces — most notably, Jessica Joy, a glamorous newcomer with the air of impending tragedy that serves performers at Second City well. (Full disclosure, Lehrer and Joy have written for the Tribune’s “Talk” page, and Baltz, Sohn, cast member Aidy Bryant and Hovde have all contributed to the Tribune-produced show “Chicago Live!”)

Joy, who clearly has all kinds of promise, has the other killer sequence in the show. It’s a comic song in Act 2 that’s notable, first, because Joy can really sing and, second, because every single one of its gags lands. It’s merely a series of sung questions: “Is there a heaven for atheists when we watch the Christians at the moment when they realize there is no heaven?” “If Jesus doesn’t sing on your album, why are you thanking him for your Grammy?” And, my personal favorite due to my frequent actual ponderings, “What happens when someone doesn’t turn off their electronic devices when the plane takes off?”

At a couple of other spots in Sunday night’s opening, sharp improv skills rescued the proceedings. When an audience suggestion stuck a group of characters in a porn shop — usually the kiss of death in the land of improv — the promising Bryant comes up with the line, “My mom said I could celebrate my 11th birthday any way I wanted.”

Both Bryant and Brendan Jennings could do with darker material, letting them round out the broader shtick. And — note to cast — I’m not currently seeing the humor in taking ballpark risks to catch a foul ball. Get rid of that. And, while we’re on that note, the character of Rahm Emanuel as back-breaking, Mafioso-style enforcer is already tired, and the guy has barely taken office. Time for a fresher take.

Otherwise the laughs are thick and frequent, the concept is provocative, and the material both varied and stellar.

Before the end of the night, the women in the cast say they want to remind Rep. Michele Bachmann that she’s a woman (“it’s like a chicken snacking down on some wings”) and the guys, playing a group of gay men, say they want to put a face on the threat to heterosexual marriage.

“We’re coming for your women,” they say, menacingly. “You can’t even buy clothes that fit right.”

cjones5@tribune.com

Twitter@ChrisJonesTrib

When: Open run

Where: Second City e.t.c., 1608 N. Wells St. in Piper’s Alley

Running time: 1 hours, 50 minutes

Tickets: $22-$27 at 312-337-3992 and secondcity.com

Just when you thought there were no accomplishments left for Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, here’s one:

She and her cinematic collaborators have found a way to make 18- to 21-year-olds wistful.

Back when the Potter film franchise was launched in 2001, the big, looming question was how the kids would age as the series progressed. The kids, in this case, were the actors who played Harry, Hermione and Ron: Daniel Radcliffe, who was 12 when “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” hit theaters, Emma Watson, then 11, and Rupert Grint, then 13.

The trio was initially signed only for the first two movies, just in case their growth patterns, skills or off-screen behavior went kablooey — or in case Warner Bros. and Rowling (who had finished just the first four books by the time of the “Sorcerer’s Stone” film) couldn’t keep up the relatively breakneck pace of producing one special effects-laden blockbuster almost every year.

Not only did those kids make it all the way through all eight movies, but their progression struck power chords with audience members who had boarded the Hogwarts Express — on the page (starting in 1997) or in theaters — when they were about the same age as the three young heroes. This was the demographic that dominated those first 12:01 a.m. “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2″ showings last Friday, which looked like giddy, wizard-themed-pajama parties but were colored by something more melancholic.

“It’s been such a huge part of growing up, and now that we’re grown up, the series is ending,” said Tess Johnson, 18, in town from Kalamazoo, Mich., to watch the new movie at a midnight screening at AMC River East with her 21-year-old sister, Adel.

“I’ve had new Harry Potter things to look forward to since I was 8,” chimed in Adel, a recent Columbia College Chicago graduate who, like her sister, was wearing a white T-shirt that read, “a free elf” (a shout-out to Dobby, don’t you know). “It’s kind of ridiculous how you feel like you’ve insinuated yourself with the story. You’ve grown up with them, and now you’re matriculating with them.”

Filmmaker Michael Apted (“Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “The World Is Not Enough”) knows something about watching characters grow up on screen. As the director of the “Up” documentary series, Apted began interviewing a group of 14 British children in 1964 and has checked in with them (minus the two who dropped out along the way) every seven years to see how their lives and attitudes have progressed. “49 Up,” the most recent film in the series, came out in 2005, and he’s about to travel to London to begin production on “56 Up,” scheduled to be broadcast on British television next May.

The Potter actors, he said in a phone interview from Los Angeles, have experienced an even more intense scrutiny than his subjects.

“It’s such a novelty, especially since they’ve been watched growing up by billions of people,” Apted said. “It is odd, and it is a unique record of them.”

The changes in the subjects’ appearances are as fascinating as they are obvious. Anyone who has come across the earlier Potter films recently can’t help but think: Aw, those guys were so little.

“We were just watching (‘Sorcerer’s Stone’), and they’re so small, and their voices are so high,” Tess Johnson said. “It’s cute.”

But as Apted found with his films, what’s more intriguing is how that progression reflects back on the viewer.

“I think what it does is make you look at yourself,” Apted said. “It really does hit you on the head that life passes you by, and it makes you ask the question: How has my life worked out?”

That’s a heady question for people just entering adulthood, yet the Potter movies aren’t the only ones making young viewers take such stock. Last year’s “Toy Story 3″ may have been about the further adventures of Woody and Buzz Lightyear to most fans, but members of that same sweet-spot Potter age group homed in on the boy, Andy, having to move beyond the toys of his childhood.

“Harry Potter, you grew up with the kids; ‘Toy Story 3,’ you grew up with the kid,” said Michael Zarowny, 19, a Columbia College Chicago student from Wilmette wearing a Dumbledore beard and incongruous shorts for one of 18 sold-out midnight showings at the Century Evanston multiplex. “Our generation has a lot of stories resonate with us because we grew up with the characters, and we identify with the characters.”

“I cried horribly (when I saw ‘Toy Story 3′) because it was so relevant to my life,” added his friend Gemma Brennan, 19, costumed as dead owl Hedwig, complete with X’s over her eyelids. “It was the summer before I went to (college).”

The impulse here isn’t just to recognize the parallels between lives lived on and off screen; it’s also to mark them for posterity. Eddie Lopez Villa, 18, of Lakewood, who was in third grade when the first Potter movie came out, felt such a need to pay homage to his shared years with Harry that he worked overtime at his forest preserve job so he could take off two days to attend the Potter film marathon leading up to the “Deathly Hallows — Part 2″ premiere at Marcus Theatres’ Gurnee Cinema multiplex.

“I grew up. Harry grew up,” he said. “He went through stress, I went through stress. He went through the teenage stuff, I did too. It’s so weird to think about it, but it’s all true.”

At least the big-screen graduation ceremony was deemed a success in more than just box-office terms.

“I didn’t think I’d get so choked up over Harry Potter,” said Jannett Loza, 19, of Berwyn, as she left a Friday matinee at the Navy Pier Imax. “I didn’t realize I got so attached to the characters.”

Emailed Tess Johnson after seeing the movie: “Even though I was very aware that it felt as though my childhood was ending, I left the theater feeling so satisfied. It was the perfect end to the best decade I could imagine.”

Tribune reporter Christopher Borrelli contributed.

mcaro@tribune.com

Twitter @MarkCaro

The Pitchfork Music Festival 2011 is a wrap. And here’s our wrap-up of Sunday’s action in Union Park, with reporting once again from your truly (GK), the tireless Bob Gendron (BG) and the ever-vigilant Kevin Pang handling video and editing.

12:10 p.m. Pitchfork spokesman confirms three straight sell-outs this weekend, with 18,000 in attendance each day. Tickets moved slower than usual – in recent years the festival has sold out well in advance – but still the walk-up was strong Friday and Saturday. Different story today: an advance sell-out and lots of anticipation for everyone from Odd Future to TV on the Radio. Also, 13,000 bottles of water were distributed free Saturday to help concertgoers stave off the effects of the heat. Even more are likely to be handed out today as heat becomes oppressive and a major safety concern. (GK) 

12:31 p.m. Want a viewing spot in the shade? Better get here early. Fans, prepared for oppressive heat and humidity levels, have already staked out a majority of the prime spots. (BG)

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1:14 p.m. The Fresh Onlys must own a great collection of old seven-inch singles. The San Francisco quartet channels the vintage psychedelic-kissed garage rock of its hometown, circa 1968, in a manner that conjures Love and introduces a slightly heavier bent. Dressed in a Grateful Dead tie-dye and fisherman’s cap, front man Tim Cohen sings amid reverb-soaked backdrops that make his wanderlust voice seem as if it emanates through a narrow tunnel. Country accents and surf delay spin the guitar lines, which curl underneath wordless harmonies and tamed feedback. Possessing just enough variation, and refreshingly sans cute devices, the group’s tautness indicates that, with more songs in the vein of the persuasive “Fascinated,” bigger things await. (BG)

1:31 p.m. Go to sleep. Darkstar is the latest synth-dominant artist to appear at this year’s festival, which booked far too many electronically droning purveyors of calm. Judging from this weekend, keyboard sales must be through the roof – almost every act seems to have one. Doodling on modulators and twisting knobs, the trio’s atmospheric fare feels ideal for soaking in a bubble bath or zoning out to trippy visuals. As music, however, it falls short. And as performance, it’s no more engaging than watching the Grateful Dead struggle through a “Space” sequence on their worst night. Ironically, “Dark Star” happens to be the name of the Dead’s most famous exploratory epic. Coincidence? (BG)

1:55 p.m. Featuring nasal vocals, tuneful distortion and volume-dealing effects pedals, Yuck’s “The Wall” could pass as an A-side on Dinosaur Jr.’s breakthrough “Green Mind” album. And, akin to mid-period Dinosaur Jr., the group this British band most closely resembles, Yuck also touts a Fender Jazzmaster guitar in its instrumental toolbox. Polite and straightforward, one doesn’t get the sense that the English upstarts seek to intentionally replicate or resuscitate alt-rock’s bygone era. After all, most of the members weren’t even out of diapers when the movement peaked. Still, as nothing more than fine transparencies, the drowsy waltzes (“Suicide Policeman”), well-mannered shoegaze laments and bashful, talking-out-of-the-side-of-your-mouth love declarations (“Georgia”) pale next to the originals from which they’re cribbed. Who knows: Alternative FM station Q101 may have gone off the air, but if Yuck is any indication, the latest nostalgic revival may already be upon us. Just don’t expect it to last very long. (BG)

2:03 p.m. Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis is everywhere today, if only as an inspiration. Kurt Vile appropriates Mascis’ laid-back, ultra-laconic vocal delivery and takes it to new levels of slurry incoherence. And, like Mascis, Vile offers contrast by way of some sharply verbose guitar leads. Each verse sounds like a toss-off just so Vile can get to the guitar part quicker. Plus, he’s in the running for best rock-star hair of the weekend, his wind-aided mane getting an extra boost from an electric fan whirring at his feet. It’s like watching a Winger video from the ‘80s. (GK)

2:11 p.m. Give How to Dress Well an “A” for effort. Execution is another matter. Wearing an oversize white tank top and baggy shorts, geeky leader Tom Krell looks like the underdog that draws applause at a party for possessing the nerve to get up and croon a tender song. His quiet falsetto and skyscraping blue-eyed soul croon border on syrupy, and, scored with extremely delicate passages and lulling tempos, the smooth easy-listening fare follows suit. A full-on string quartet, complete with a conductor, accompanies the singer, whose pretty compositions tread so lightly they wouldn’t even scare a noise-shy bird. As such, they’re often drowned out by the echoes of Yuck’s feedback arriving from an opposite stage. How To Dress Well might work better in an elevator or in the bedroom, via headphones. Here, the preciously weightless Valentines, often indistinguishable from one another, suffer information loss before they even carry for 20 feet. The fest’s chill-out mood continues. (BG)

3:10 p.m. “I want it back. I want it back. I want it back,” chimes Twin Sister, over and over, until the phrase gets uttered more than 20 times in a row. Disjointed and unmemorable, the group’s primarily hushed fare occupies a hallucinogenic, ephemeral dance-pop territory. Live drumming assists in providing the annoyingly coy, exceedingly wispy daydreams a groove, but there’s no saving the childlike giddiness and high-pitched waif vocals of Andrea Estella. Eye-catching tresses, though. Her floor-length blue-green hair – is it a wig or real? – is Twin Sister’s most distinctive trait. (BG)

3:15 p.m. Cupcakes. Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (above) brings cupcakes to the party, personally delivering them to the Between Friends advocacy group’s kiosk, where literature about violence against women and gays is being distributed as a counterpoint to some of the Los Angeles hip-hop collective’s more explicit lyrics. Then the group opens its set with Bob Marley’s “One Love” and Black Eyed Peas’ “Where is the Love,” which gets the requisite laughs. Humor, snacks – these are good counters to being a controversy magnet. Odd Future quickly returns to form, turning on the hate for everyone and everything, sometimes even themselves. Musically, it’s kind of a dud – these are more chants than actual songs. But they’re enough to rev up the rather large crowd that gathers in the mid-afternoon heat. The fans are in fist-pumping mode, and group leader Tyler the Creator, sporting a tie-dyed T-shirt with a peace sign (What? More irony?), leaves his crutches behind and – leg cast and all – dives into the crowd. Other Odd Future members follow suit. It all ends in a hail of profane chants directed at school, property and people in general – these are equal opportunity haters, if nothing else, and major wind-up artists. The more upset skeptics become, the louder and more extreme Odd Future becomes. Thousands thrust middle digits in the air, shout along, then disperse in orderly fashion as Odd Future leaves the stage. By then the cupcakes are all gone.

4:09 p.m. After a 20-minute delay/soundcheck, Shabazz Palaces (above) integrate abstract free-jazz vibes, African percussion, defiant lyrical phrases and disorienting hip-hop progressions into an impressively cerebral whole that qualifies as one of the weekend’s most visceral, futuristic performances. Led by former Digable Planets MC Ishmael Butler, the Seattle rap duo experiments on multiple levels; it’s more about music that seeps into the subconscious rather than settling for immediate payoff. Extending visionary outer-space motifs set in motion for black music decades ago by Sun Ra and his Arkestra, Shabazz Palaces cast its collective eyes toward similar outré eccentricities but don’t forget the importance of the song. There’s a consistent flow to the challenging cross-continental aural maneuvers, weaved together with hand drums, maracas, wobbly voices, cut-and-pasted rhymes and funky surprises. Straying from the obvious, the dizzying concoction defies conventional rules of time and space – disorienting in all the best possible ways. (BG)

4:33 p.m. Will the real Ariel Pink (below) please stand up? Coated in processing and reverb, it’s impossible to recognize the true tenor of the junkyard pop tunesmith’s voice. And still, his collective’s California-baked hooks and gauzy fragments express a fondness for Spirit, mid-1970s Frank Zappa, Zombies and acid-addled Beatles. Pulling the spare parts and bizarre fragments from such material is Pink’s specialty. He and his mates in Haunted Graffiti don’t place value on perfection, choosing to sail on a free-spirited wind that, blow as it may, favors anything-goes looseness and rollicking fun. Pink mutters introverted banter between songs, the transmissions crackling with static and CB fuzz. Think of him as the antithesis of Auto-Tune. Despite some sloppiness – drop-outs, dips and crevasses regularly appear – the fuzzed-out music mates with the skin-frying rays of the overhead sun to make it appear as if everything and everyone is unavoidably subject to distortion. (BG)

5:01 p.m. Will Weisenfeld, the man behind Baths, stops mid-sequence. He confesses that he’s made a mistake. The interruption is an aberration in an electronic set that attracts an overflow crowd and establishes an enjoyable balance between human-created pop and machine-manufactured chill-wave. Unlike several of his contemporaries on the bill, Baths takes precautions to inflate his beats with muscle and contrasts relaxed lines against a miasma of sputtering samples and turntable scratches. Seen controlling the boards and knobs of various gadgets, he’s a technician, pulling both arms away from the gear as soon he’s satisfied with the program with the sudden rapidness of someone who just burned their hands on a stove. (BG)

5:30 p.m. Everyone else seems to age, but not Superchunk. The veteran indie-rockers still pounce on songs like freckled-faced kids, and their enthusiasm is like a free shot of adrenaline in the heat. Who’s more fun to watch? Jon Wurster with his hyper-speed drum fills? Bassist Laura Ballance with her pogoing harmony vocals? Mac McCaughan and Jim Wilbur with their jousting guitars?  They bridge the distant past (“Slack MF”) with the present (“Digging for Something”) with no loss in quality or urgency. (GK)

5:59 p.m. A circle pit forms in front of the stage as Kylesa (above) cooks a Southern stew of sludge metal, swampy boogie and cosmic hard rock. Finally, a band whose music leaves a thick, mud-caked footprint. No niceties. No fear. No irony. No soft-soled treading. Just fat-toned Orange amplifiers, two drummers and a third bass drum for extra low-end punch. Rumbling like a herd of wildebeests, the Georgia crew isn’t out to crush or smash. Instead, the rotor-chopping riffs, groaning wah-wah solos and guttural traded-off vocals shake limbs and warp minds. To this extent, a frequency oscillator doubles as a theremin, and the molten power chords pass rough yawning, spacious echo chambers that prevent the material from collapsing under its own weight. Kylesa means business and attacks with a purpose that doesn’t give fans the option of viewing its double-barreled craft as incidental sonic wallpaper. Another helping, please. (BG)

6:15 p.m. Have to echo Bob Gendron’s comments above and put in a plea for more heavy music at Pitchfork to balance the large percentage of pleasantness that dominated the first two days of this year’s festival. There’s so much great music being made in the underground metal scene, not only in Chicago (Nachtmystium, Yakuza, Minsk, Pelican, etc.) but nationwide that it deserves a greater slice of the bookings. Kylesa’s wow factor is the double-drummer alignment; hearing those dueling kick drums drive the music suggests a stampeding herd of very fast, very large, very ticked off carnivores. (GK)

6:42 p.m. Bradford Cox (above) holds his guitar up against a giant cooling fan, hoping to capture additional vibrations. The Deerhunter leader and his colleagues step into play the role that normally falls to Sonic Youth, treating their four- and six-stringed instruments as unexplored pieces of wood, wire and metal. Diversity, long a hallmark of the quartet’s core, remains but seldom is it funneled through such vibration-rich, feedback-friendly flurries. Deerhunter’s ambient flights, twangy rave-ups and jagged strolls cascade like waterfalls, the band spinning it all in a kaleidoscopic centrifuge that threatens to blow a fuse. The momentum peaks as the group puts the throttle down on an elongated German art-rock groove that throws passing glances to piercing no-wave and street-tough post-punk before segueing into an excellent Patti Smith cover. “Horses!” yelps Cox, bringing Deerhunter’s intersection of detached pop cool and ragged, beat-poet frenzy full circle. (BG)

7:07 p.m. Tori Y Moi’s voice is smooth, melancholy, a lonely bedroom sound that spirals off into infinity. Wordless, high, sing-songy vocals double as hooks. It’s so breezy, it could be called wind-chime RB. His band is solid, nothing special, but the bass assumes a foreground role, and the fans are bobbing along. Odd Future’s Tyler the Creator is at the side of the stage nodding along too. Who knew? (GK)

7:50 p.m. There’s something about a band that can deliver a knockout performance that sweeps the park just when dusk cools off a long, hot day of music. Cut Copy is in the prime slot and the Australian quartet delivers an exultant performance. Originally a Dan Whitford solo project, Cut Copy has evolved into a formidable band that straddles the rave and rock cultures. With a festive, occasionally blinding light show, and beats that run the gamut from Caribbean syncopations to Berlin techno, Cut Copy knows how to orchestrate a glow-stick celebration. But it also boasts a strong sense of songcraft and melody. Based on this performance, a Phoenix-like breakthrough seems to be in their future. (GK)

8:13 p.m. Is it live or is it artificial? Should there be a division between the two forms? These questions are posed by HEALTH’s chaotic ruckus, barely controlled mayhem that prizes dissonant commotion and attention-deficit-disorder paradigm shifts. Grimy and provocative, the spastic fusion of noise rock, corrosive disco and anthemic rave suggests chainsaws cutting through wrought-iron fences, blaring emergency sirens, subterranean jungle bass lines, busy telephone signals, malfunctioning Speak ‘N Spell games, sparking power transformers. Band members jump, rearing their torsos back in mid-air and occasionally play on their knees. Hectic, for certain, and at the end of a hot day, it would usually be too much. But coming at the close of a weekend during which mellowness dominates, the feverish energy arrives as a fun respite. (BG)

9:27 p.m. TV on the Radio (above) brings the sixth annual festival to a close with a set that starts in an imaginary church – fast soul handclaps, and falsetto gospel vocals animated by call-and-response patterns. The sextet explores a few ballads from its latest album, “Nine Types of Light,” but even here drummer Jaleel Bunton lays down subtly funky groove. “Will Do” manages to be both sensual and danceable, a slow-swaying seduction rolling out of the speakers. Then TVOTR morphs again, this time into a spikier beast, with a rampaging “Wolf Like Me” and a furious “Satellite.” It’s a great band that can be anything it wants as the moment demands. (GK)

greg@gregkot.com

Photos by Mike Rich and Brock Blake

With a couple of exceptions, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s residency weeks at Ravinia this summer are not notable for blockbuster events. Even so, festival audiences heard two really extraordinary concerts over the weekend, when Christoph von Dohnanyi returned to the Highland Park pleasure dome to conduct the CSO in two all-Brahms programs.

The distinguished German conductor had the orchestra playing at very near the top of its form, and he had the estimable Emanuel Ax as soloist for both Brahms piano concertos, sealing the success of the concerts Thursday and Friday nights. Seldom has standard Teutonic repertory felt less standard, in terms of both execution and interpretation.

Dohnanyi, who will turn 82 in September, has been a welcome visitor to the orchestra’s downtown subscription series since his return to the roster in 2002 following a lengthy absence owing to his responsibilities at the Cleveland Orchestra, from which he stepped down as music director that same year.

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All the same, these Ravinia concerts marked only his second season at the festival, after his debut there in 2004. One must hope, on the evidence of the two Brahms programs, that the summer management invites Dohnanyi back at the earliest opportunity.

You could, if you wished, play a game of free association to trace the maestro’s Brahms connection back to the source. His grandfather, the Hungarian composer and pianist Erno Dohnanyi (who once taught the young Georg Solti at the Budapest conservatory) knew Brahms personally and championed his music.

But Dohnanyi’s authority as a Brahmsian is entirely his own. At its foundation are his familiar musical virtues of intelligence, integrity, rigor and firm formal control. In both the Second and Third symphonies he enforced a sense of Old World grandeur without lapsing into staid Old World stodginess. He reminded us that depth and weight of sound are not incompatible with beauty and lucidity in this repertory.

His seating plan for the strings (the same plan Daniel Barenboim used during his CSO tenure) reverted to classic European models Brahms knew and wrote for – violins divided across the podium, cellos to the inside left, double basses at the far left.

This layout gave added prominence to the string basses, which suited the Brahmsian sonority Dohnanyi was after. It was built upwards, from a rock-solid foundation of lower strings, through a carefully blended middle-register sound, up to singing strings and lyrical winds on top.

His Brahms Symphony No. 2 moved with a clear-eyed sense of destination that was refreshingly free of fussy deliberation (no Christoph Eschenbach, he), with lovely playing from oboist Eugene Izotov and the rest of the woodwind choir. Dohnanyi observed the exposition repeat in the first movement but came into his own with a third movement that was light, fleet and flowing, and a finale that exploded in a headlong rush of confidently shaped energy.

The Third Symphony was hardly less enjoyable, marrying vertical strength and horizontal sweep with pliant lyricism and refinement of instrumental detail, especially with respect to the woodwind choir. Once again, all repeats were taken.

Ax was in good form for the D minor Piano Concerto on Thursday and even better form for the B flat major Concerto on Friday. The occasional awkwardness of Brahms’ piano writing held no terrors for him. But no less remarkable than his ability to maintain power, concentration and stamina throughout this two-night marathon were the rich poetic instincts he applied to his collaboration with Dohnanyi and the orchestra.

This was a summit meeting of kindred artistic spirits on a massive playing field, where piano and orchestra are cast, more or less, as musical equals. John Sharp’s cello solo, thoughtful and beautifully turned, as always, added a further cachet of distinction to the slow movement of the Second Concerto. Ever the gentleman, Ax grabbed the cellist’s hand and pulled him to the front of the stage so he could share in the cheers of the crowd. The audience had much to cheer, at both concerts.

jvonrhein@tribune.com

Twitter @johnvonrhein

By Sid Smith, Special to the Tribune

Muntu Dance Theatre of Chicago has been a reliable home for the African and African-American tradition for decades now, all the while peopled by dynamite dancers who put on a great show.

That proved the case at Saturday’s Harris Theater outing and then some: The troupe introduced two terrific new works broadening the company’s aesthetic scope while managing a top-flight program blending dance and live musicianship. Artistic director Amaniyea Payne and company are on a red hot roll.

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Reggie Wilson, an American choreographer with deep ties to contemporary African choreography, delivers a knockout in “SHOUTing Rings–a work,” a tribute to historic song and dance. At times, the dancers, clad in white, just seem to amble about the stage as they sing great folk classics, one overcome for a spell with religious frenzy. But intermittently they erupt in dance, leading to a sensational climax, their bodies vibrating intensely amidst an exhilarating circle dance.

Theodore Jamison’s homage to Katherine Dunham, “The Blood,” also mixes song and dance as it travels through time and space to link gospel tradition and African authenticity, tying church service to invigorating ritual. Throughout, the overall concert featured vocalists, including Frances Sanders Rush in a spoken and sung serenade to mothers, and the traditional Muntu percussion interlude quite simply threatened Saturday to set drum skins aflame. The finale from “Kakilambe,” was reminder of the excitement embedded in the troupe’s ongoing mission.

Muntu’s performance ended a busy Chicago dance week, which welcomed delegates to the Dance/USA convention and included Friday’s showcase at the Dance Center of Columbia College featuring a peek at Ron De Jesus Dance. The onetime Hubbard Street Dance Chicago star-turned-choreographer showed off his smart, savvy, kinetically vibrant “Wham of Sam,” to a live Sammy Davis, Jr. medley, with infinite undulations and snappy stylistics from soloist Francisco Avina, electrifying the stage with newfound pizzazz.

Also Friday, at the Harris, the Ishara Puppet Theatre Trust, visiting from India as part of the “Eye on India” festival, performed “Transposition,” an imaginative one-hour piece exploring the mythic struggle between mind and body, the intellect and the flesh, enacted by means of life-sized puppets, shadow play and an enticing mix of classical Indian and contemporary dance.

Ctc-arts@tribune.com

The reunited Soundgarden that played the UIC Pavilion Saturday night really had nothing to prove that it didn’t already prove last summer at Lollapalooza. That show officially ended a 13-year silence, simultaneously reemphasizing the Seattle group’s potent, primal power, once-mighty cultural dominance and hard rock relevance an entire generation removed from the heyday of grunge.

If there were no surprises Saturday night, no revelations, there were at least a couple of reassurances. The first and most obvious was that, a year later, the Soundgarden reunion has clearly stuck; the band’s reportedly neared completion of a new record, though it didn’t offer any new songs this evening. The second is that the near-capacity crowd was enthusiastically craving what the band had to offer, namely a tight, heady mix of metal muscle, psychedelia and melodicism whose variety perhaps went a little undervalued while the band lay dormant.

The last and most important reassurance was that, as a musical unit, Soundgarden sounded as strong as ever, invigorated despite its focus on songs exclusively from 1997 and before. Drummer Matt Cameron (lately of Pearl Jam as well) and bassist Matt Shepherd formed a formidable, if unconventional, rhythm section, with Cameron’s fills often ricocheting around and over Shepherd’s low rumble. Guitarist Kim Thayil and singer/guitarist Chris Cornell, meanwhile, offered the kind of intricately complementary interlocking riffs and licks that have allowed songs such as “Spoonman,” “Rusty Cage” and “The Day I Tried to Live” to stay compelling after all this time.

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In fact, one of the highlights of the set was hearing Soundgarden stretch back to its 1987 debut EP with the song “Nothing to Say,” its sludgy simplicity in stark contrast to a song like “Jesus Christ Pose,” about as complex and frenetic as at the quartet gets. It’s that evolution that makes the prospect of the band’s enduring reunion so tantalizing. With Cornell’s famous wail in fine form and the group apparently enjoying each other’s company once again, expectations are high that Soundgarden can translate its renewed vigor into music made for the present, just as its formative works connected the hard rock of the ’70s to the ’90s.

Ctc-arts@tribune.com

The eighth and final movie in the “Harry Potter” series raked in a record $168.6 million at the domestic box office in three days, easily breaking the previous record of $158.4-million set by 2008′s “The Dark Knight,” according to an estimate by distributor Warner Bros.

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2″ also sold more tickets during post-midnight screenings than any other movie in history and set a record for highest single-day-gross with $92.1 million.

Abroad, the last “Potter” installment also did well. As of Saturday, the film had collected $157.5 million in 59 foreign markets since it opened Wednesday in some overseas markets. That put the film’s receipts 45% above those of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 1″ after the same time period in those countries.

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For most fans of “Pinkalicious,” the full-on live experience begins in the selection of the day’s attire. The uniform is open to individual interpretation in style and fabric but not in color. Thus the sea of pink that greets the theatergoer at the Broadway Playhouse is of a pulsing wattage. Show up wearing something else and you’ll feel like a visiting fan in enemy bleachers.

Pinkalicious Pinkerton, whom you’ll detect is the heroine of this little musical fable for the preteen set, was born on the pages of the much-loved children’s book by Elizabeth and Victoria Kann. This young lady, pink from head to toe, has a thing for pink cupcakes. And as with so many of us, her penchant for sugar quickly morphs from manageable pleasure to crazed obsession. Green vegetables are the first to go.

• Chris Jones

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A girl, alas, cannot live on cupcakes alone, which is pretty much the moral of this little enterprise.

“Pinkalicious” was turned into quite a witty, melodic and peppy hourlong kids’ musical by the original authors, along with composer John Gregor (whose score is really very witty and artful). The piece has been exploding all over the country in various productions and tours — very much like cupcake shops.

The production at the Broadway Playhouse is a non-Equity show created by the Emerald City Theatre and first produced at the Apollo Theatre (where it was a big hit). Broadway in Chicago is presenting the show for the summer in its Water Tower Place venue.

This piece does not come with the production value you might expect in such a theater (although, in fairness, tickets are quite affordable). And I think Broadway in Chicago and Emerald City should have ponied up for a live band. Singing to tape is one thing in an off-Loop family theater, but this show will doubtless attract many young theatergoers attending their first downtown show, and at least a couple of live musicians should be part of anyone’s first musical. The Sunday morning show I attended was packed; there should be room in the budget.

But assuming you can get past all that, (tape always drives me nuts, especially in kids’ musicals) Ernie Nolan’s well-paced production is sassy and on target. These characters and performances aren’t exactly of Chekhovian subtlety, and most of the actors are very early in their careers. But you cannot help but like the perky Lara Mainier, who plays the title role as if pink cupcakes were the very lifeblood of civilization. Mark Kosten, who plays the brother trapped in a sea of all things pink, is both a very fine singer and a funny actor. He’s a name to watch.

If you have a lover of pink (or of cupcakes) under your roof, you’ll also appreciate the way this show celebrates family, healthy living and, well, moderation in all things. It is a pleasant change from the staples of Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel, which tend to market young stars. Pinkalicious may be pink, but she’s also a Pinkerton, willing to learn from Mom (Rachel Klippel) and Dad (Patrick Byrnes).

And my favorite Gregor number? “You Get What You Get and You Don’t Get Upset.” I tried singing that parent-friendly lyric at home, but, alas, there is not much love of pink in my house.

cjones5@tribune.com

Twitter@ChrisJonesTrib

When: Through Sept. 3

Where: Broadway Playhouse at Water Tower Place, 175 E. Chestnut Ave.

Running time: 1 hour

Tickets: $16-$22 at 800-755-2000 or Broadwayinchicago.com.

The heat, Odd Future and cupcakes were the big stories as the sixth annual, three-day Pitchfork Music Festival wrapped up Sunday in sun-drenched Union Park.

Promoters handed out 13,000 free water bottles each of the last couple of days as capacity crowds of 18,000 a day braved sunstroke and exhaustion to see 45 bands perform on three stages. Major bands closed the festival Sunday, including the excellent TV on the Radio and veteran indie-power-pop juggernaut Superchunk. But there was little doubt who most of the early-arriving crowd was there to see. The Los Angeles hip-hop collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All was a major draw, attracting a huge and enthusiastic midafternoon throng. Their explicit lyrics prompted local advocacy groups to set up a booth at the festival and pass out information to concertgoers about violence against women and gays.

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Odd Future tried to defuse things with humor and cupcakes, both always good ideas. They preceded the set by delivering the treats to the Between Friends booth — where the organization collected more than 100 signatures for its mailing list over the weekend — then played uncharacteristic intro music to their set: Bob Marley’s “One Love” and Black Eyed Peas’ “Where is the Love.” Which was thicker, the humidity or the irony?

Pretty soon, however, the group was back to business as usual and didn’t back off an inch from an agenda that targets pretty much everyone and everything as worthy of spite, including itself. Group leader Tyler the Creator, wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt with a peace sign, hobbled on stage with an injured leg. But he did not shy from stage-diving, and orchestrated bursts of invective into crowd-rousing shout-alongs, more chants than actual songs.

The performance ensured that the group’s detractors and critics will still have plenty to write about, but the music was almost beside the point. This was a collective outburst, the crowd fist-pumping itself into exhaustion. Dozens of fans streamed past me at the edge of the stage, soaked in sweat, some wobbling to the medical tent, at least one throwing up, swigging water and then returning to the fray. Medical personnel reported no major problems, other than treating some concertgoers for sunstroke symptoms and dehydration.

Tyler and the rest of the group’s MCs were at the lip of the stage for the final group message to the world: “Kill people! Burn (expletive)! (Expletive) school!” Middle digits raised on high were everywhere in the crowd. A few curiosity seekers were less than impressed. “What was that?” one muttered as he strolled past. Odd Future: they came, they jumped around, they got a boatload more notoriety. We’ll remember the cupcakes.

Otherwise, pleasantry prevailed, but not a lot of music that demanded attention in the way Odd Future does, for better or worse. Pitchfork has become one of the premier midsize festivals in the country. After some growing pains coping with inadequate amenities and sound in its early years, the festival has become relatively expert at turning Union Park into a small, temporary city. This year, it marshalled 120 production staff, 140 security guards, 240 volunteers a day and 30 stage crew, plus 18 food vendors and, perhaps most critically, 220 portable restrooms. When the heat ratcheted up Saturday and Sunday, promoters responded immediately by passing out the free water to fans as they entered the main gate, and continued passing out freebies from the main stages.

Pitchfork prides itself on being far more community-oriented than most larger festivals, and fans roamed a variety of kiosks devoted to everything from family planning to handmade accessories, posters by local artists and a massive record fair that drew high-profile customers such as OFF! singer Keith Morris.

“This festival is the best,” said Ald. Proco “Joe” Moreno, 1st, an avid music fan who was checking out East Coast pop-rockers Wild Nothing. “What’s the ticket price — $45? Where else do you see that?”

There was an undeniably larger, if not entirely intrusive corporate presence at the festival as well. The big video screen between the main stages didn’t go dark between sets, instead featuring a steady stream of advertisements for everything from the forthcoming St. Vincent album to cellphone apps. A tent near the main stage served as a beer-company ad — but at least it was an air-conditioned ad, a major attraction on a brutally hot weekend.

Ultimately it’s the music that determines a festival’s success, and this was not one of Pitchfork’s better years. Part of the issue stems from the relative youth of many of the acts, uncertain how to look, act and entertain on an outdoor stage in front of a big audience. So many of the acts would’ve translated far more persuasively in a smaller, more intimate setting.

Julianna Barwick opened Saturday alone on the biggest of the three stages, with lovely full-throated arias that she mixed into lush layers of sound. It was a bit like an early-weekend church service. But Barwick was dwarfed by her massive surroundings and she didn’t have much to offer in terms of a performance. Many acts struggled with similar limitations — offering a promising sound or a song or two but unable to really sustain it or take it anywhere fresh over a 40-minute set for thousands of fidgety people holding sidebar conversations or tapping away on cellphones.

The Swedish trio Radio Dept., on a rare tour of the U.S., played so quietly that they were nearly drowned out by the cicadas conversing in the trees haloing the small stage in the park’s southwest corner. The band Woods offered amiable, falsetto-voiced pastoral pop that settled into one monotonous tempo, until finally breaking free on the final song. Das Racist, brilliant on record but erratic live, was derailed by a cameo from Detroit MC Danny Brown.

Even a few veteran acts struggled to connect in the heat, with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore digging into pretty but undernourished folk songs ornamented with harp and violin, and Guided By Voices going through the motions of a reunion show — clearly out of their element in playing a 60-minute set in blistering daylight as opposed to a typical, 21/2-hour, beer-saturated concert in a club.

Friday headliners Animal Collective also fell flat, wasting some amazing, vaguely obscene synthesizer sounds and a cracking light show on a set with very few actual songs.

The highlights included Fleet Foxes, who made the leap from midday revelation at the 2008 festival to Saturday headliners. Singer Robin Pecknold acknowledged his anxiety on Twitter and on stage, but the set was a total success, with the group’s dazzling harmonies now joined to a more forceful and expansive instrumental dynamic. The voices of Neko Case and Kelly Hogan combined to make songs about murder, dementia and despair sound beautiful, a perfect soundtrack for dusk’s arrival Friday.

Tune-Yards’ Merrill Garbus shifted between pretty trills and warrior cries in the span of a few notes while dancing to Afro-pop rhythms and thrashy chords from an unlikely source: a ukulele. Yes, those little suckers can rock, at least when Garbus plays one.

Zola Jesus, aka Wisconsin native Nika Roza Danilova, is a tiny dancer with a huge voice, perfect for hashing out psychodramas over Gothic keyboards and punishing electronic percussion. She should be on Trent Reznor’s radar for future projects.

Battles was again a fierce yet playful instrumental juggernaut, thanks to the powerhouse drumming of the shirtless John Stanier — along with Garbus and Danilova the weekend’s most charismatic musician.

But the quickest and sharpest impression was left by OFF! In a mere 25 minutes, the quartet of hardcore-punk veterans left an indelible mark on the festival.

“We are going to bring a different flavor to the party today,” singer Morris announced, and he wasn’t kidding, as the foursome blitzed through a series of brutally succinct one-minute songs/broadsides. The festival could’ve used a little more of that different flavor over the weekend.

Tribune special contributor Bob Gendron contributed to this report.

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The Ravinia Festival once offered “composer’s evenings” on which such luminaries as Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland presented their own music and, sometimes, works by others. Given the guests’ stature, the concerts were occasions, despite inadequate rehearsal and difficult outdoor conditions.

Friday night the Grant Park Music Festival took a page from that book. Krzysztof Penderecki, Poland’s most famous living composer, celebrated his country taking over the presidency of the Council of the European Union with an enticing program of the contemporary and classic.

This evening was an occasion, too. But it went beyond the performances of Penderecki’s Concerto Grosso No. 1 for Three Cellos and Orchestra and Beethoven’s Third Symphony. It marked the return of a significant international figure who had a history here.

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Penderecki’s “Paradise Lost” received its world premiere at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1978, and he presented his Symphony No. 7, “Seven Gates of Jerusalem,” with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2000. Their romantic gestures troubled listeners who recalled his radical works from the 1960s.

However controversial the stylistic changes, they have not greatly affected the rumination at Penderecki’s core, which is central to the First Concerto Grosso. For more than half an hour the three cellos – played Friday with heartfelt commitment by Julie Albers, Kira Kraftzoff and Amit Peled – have plaintive, inward-looking music that is shaken by militant tramping in the orchestra. Still, over the course of six continuous movements, romantic introspection is never shattered, and at the work’s end there is the sense of being back at the beginning, which is as satisfying for some as it’s frustrating for others.

If we expect authority from composers in their own music, we also anticipate special illumination from composers performing works by forebears. It did not come in Penderecki’s “Eroica.” Clear and always sonorous – especially in the winds – the account was only moderate in energy and soft-edged. Not as marmoreal as Hans Werner Henze’s embalmed account with the CSO, Penderecki’s nonetheless had a similar excess of reverence.

The program will be repeated at 7:30 p.m. Saturday.

Wood’s 20-K ball and other Chicago sports artifacts

Chicago doesn’t have the puck, but the city does have the mouthguard.

And the first Heisman.

While the one-year search for the Blackhawks’ 2010 Stanley Cup winning puck grows cold, it’s worth a reminder that there are still many historic artifacts safe and sound and available for public viewing.

The objects range from the majestic to the peculiar — but all reverberate with devoted fans in a way that few city cultural artifacts do.

“We have an awesome general collection,” Chicago History Museum’s John Russick said of his institution’s vast booty. “But for many of those items, we have to explain their significance. In terms of sports, that is rarely the case. There a lot of people who love sports and sports history and are every bit as knowledgeable as we are. … People have these memories, they went to the game, they know the players. So for us, sports artifacts have a different connection. … They are an avenue to people’s dreams.”

Photos by Chris Walker; Text by Tim Bannon

David Henry Hwang’s smart and enormously witty “Chinglish” is one of the first major U.S. plays to address the rising economic power of China, as well as America’s attempts to benefit from that new money. Currently in a world premiere at the Goodman Theatre, it has been an unequivocal hit for the theater, which has extended the run through July 31.

It doesn’t get any more “now” than that play’s premise. An American businessman from Cleveland arrives in China, hoping to land a contract. At the center of the negotiations is a sexy, fearsome, no-nonsense Chinese official who takes matters into her own carefully manicured hands, while indulging in a fizzy romantic dalliance with the American on the side.

Played with intellectual dexterity and a ripe sense of comedy by Hong Kong-born, New York-based actress Jennifer Lim (in her Chicago debut), she is the savviest of all the play’s characters. Dressed in severe, figure-flattering suits and sky-high heels, she is the kind of woman who strides into business meetings ready to crush a few dumplings, in a manner of speaking. But alone in a hotel room with her American paramour, her true complexity and vulnerability are revealed as she is swept up in the fantasy and excitement of the affair.

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It’s the kind of role that can make a career, and it requires an actress with a unique set of skills and attributes — specifically: good looks, a fluency in Mandarin and a proficiency for comedy.

“I play older and tougher in this show,” Lim, 32, said over lunch last week. “Friends who have come see the play are like, ‘She’s so not like you!’ Because I’m sort of polite and nice and a product of my Chinese upbringing.”

The play is truly bilingual — English surtitles show up whenever a character speaks Chinese — and the ensuing culture clashes and language barriers (on both sides of the divide) generate the bulk of the play’s humor, which is fast-breaking and exceptionally well-crafted. In one of the many jokes early on, “We’re a small family firm” is translated into Chinese as “His company is tiny and insignificant.”

And now a Broadway is in the offing is in the works, based on the play’s Chicago success. If all goes according to plan, producer Jeffrey Richards (the man behind many of Steppenwolf’s recent Broadway transfers) will bring director Leigh Silverman’s production of “Chinglish” to New York in the fall. No official casting decisions have been made, but the smart money has Lim going all the way with the show to Broadway — and possibly to a Tony nomination.

“It’s a flashy, sexy, amazing part,” said Silverman by phone from New York. “It’s a difficult part, it’s a passionate part, it’s a complicated part, it’s a funny part. It is a showy, showy part for her, and I think it’s a tremendously exciting time for her.”

In essence, this is Lim’s coming out party as an actress. “I’m so excited to watch her in this moment,” Silverman said, “because she doesn’t really have a huge amount of theater credits and this is a really big deal for her.”

Raised in Hong Kong until she was 18, Lim attended college at Bristol University in England, before heading stateside, where she earned her MFA in acting from the Yale School of Drama in 2004.

But it took her five years after graduation to qualify for her green card, as required by Actors Equity.

“You have to be able to prove that your body of work is at a certain international level. And even though I was from Hong Kong and had done stuff in England, it wasn’t enough. So I couldn’t really do any theater in the U.S.”

She moved to New York (where she still lives) and did “a lot of downtown, sort of off-the-map non-union stuff, which was a lot of fun.” She was also cast in productions that toured extensively through Europe and she performed in Shanghai for two months doing a Chinese production of “Hamlet” before she had a sizable body of work to finally obtain a green card in 2009. Her role in “Chinglish” is the biggest part she’s landed in her career.

But to hear her speak English, you would never guess she needed a green card because she sounds positively American. Throughout the years her accent has morphed, she said, depending on where she lives. In Hong Kong she spoke English with a mid-Atlantic accent. At college, the accent became more British. Now, 10 years after her arrival in the U.S., her accent is as American as they get.

Ironically, in the play she must speak English with a Chinese accent, all staccato syllables and punchy rhythms. It’s enough to scramble a person’s brain. Except: “I tend to pick up accents really fast,” she said.

As for the play’s specific East-meets-West dynamic, Lim brings a certain amount of real world bona fides to the table, which became an asset to Hwang as he and director Silverman and translator Candace Chong (who is also from Hong Kong) developed the script.

“The fact that Jen grew up in Hong Kong gives her a base of experience to draw on,” Hwang said by phone from Brooklyn, where he lives. “She really kind of understands what it means to be Chinese, as opposed to a Chinese-American” — such as Hwang, who was born in Los Angeles.

“But then she really understands what it is to be a Westerner, too. So she’s completely bicultural and that turns out to be a big help. When you meet her, she could very well be an American who grew up in New York or something. But because she needs to be playing a character who is from China and has lived almost all her life in China, she understands the cultural characteristics and the mannerisms that would characterize someone from China.”

As for Hwang’s portrayal of modern-day China, Lim called it “spot on,” saying he captured all the right nuances.

“Even the Chinglish that he writes — the English that my character speaks — when I read it I was like, ‘Oh, I understand exactly what she’s saying.’ It was one thing to read it, but to be in a room and speak broken English and then hearing what that sounds like? The first time we read it out loud, everybody was cracking up.”

The pool of bilingual Asian actors in the U.S. is relatively small, particularly those with the skills and talent to shoulder the demands of a major new play. Casting the Goodman production was an enormous challenge.

“David sort of thought, ‘Oh, I didn’t think it was going to be that hard,’” said Silverman, who stressed: “It was pretty hard.” Neither she nor Hwang knew of Lim, who heard through a Facebook friend that the show’s creators were looking for actors who could speak Mandarin fluently.

“She did the very first table reading when there was only a first act, and we were sitting around a table using PowerPoint to try to simulate the surtitles,” said Hwang. “We loved her then and she’s been with the show ever since. She has a kind of sophistication, I suppose, that felt right for the part. And also she can kind of get down and dirty when she’s angry and she can obviously be very attractive. She’s just got the whole package of everything that the part needs.”

The role is a marked departure from how Chinese women have been typically portrayed in American plays, TV and film. “I was writing an actual Chinese woman rather than someone who was sort of living up to a Western fantasy of Asian women,” said Hwang. “As someone who represents the new China and the particular dynamic in this play, she’s going to be a different kind of woman than the way the West has always perceived Asian women.”

Lim sees the character as part of “a new generation of movers-and-shakers,” which she contrasted with her own traditional and conservative upbringing. And yet, according to Silverman, Lim is “masterful at the comedy and the sexuality, the sensuality and the passion, and the intelligence that is required for that part.”

Or as Hwang put it: “I just think it’s interesting and fortuitous and kind of magical that the first actor who ever read this part is the actor who’s doing this show. That doesn’t happen that often.”

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Twitter @NinaMetzNews

Just when you thought the objectification of 20th century America’s preferred icon of brazen, infantilized female sexuality couldn’t go much further…along comes the 26-foot sculpture by Seward Johnson known as “Forever Marilyn,” unveiled Friday morning in Pioneer Court just north of the Michigan Avenue bridge.

In three dimensions and delivering a lot more thigh and panties than its source material, Johnson’s statue recreates the most famous moment from director Billy Wilder’s “The Seven Year Itch” (1955), an adaptation of the George Axelrod stage comedy. Marilyn Monroe and co-star Tom Ewell exit a Manhattan movie theater showing “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” on a hot summer night. Standing on a subway grate at 52nd Street and Lexington Avenue, Monroe delights in the rush and the whoosh of the train below, the train causing the updraft that sends her white skirt billowing into both cinema and lechery history.

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On location, with flashbulbs popping and sidewalk onlookers shrieking, Wilder shot take after take of this sequence in 1954. He then reshot it in more controlled circumstances, on a 20th Century Fox soundstage. The latter footage made the release print. But the memorable photographs of Monroe from the first shoot, on location in New York, spread like wildfire, flashing far more of Monroe’s body than the film itself ever did.

Monroe’s then-husband Joe DiMaggio, violently jealous and physically abusive according to various accounts, couldn’t handle the wolf-whistle spectacle of the location filming and turned his rage against Monroe in their hotel room later that night. The couple filed for separation weeks later.

Six decades later, the amazing colossal Monroe’s thighs have become the latest downtown Chicago tourist stop. In Pioneer Court Friday morning, pre-teen girls, adolescent boys and older folks (mostly men but plenty of women) took turns standing between her ankles or leaning against one of her Big Boy-sized feet. While the cameras clicked and whirred, pedestrians of all ages gazed directly up at one of cinema’s most famous undergarments, writ XXLarge.

Monroe decried and exploited her own photographic exploitation until the day she died. The ogling continues in earnest, five decades after her death. And for the record: The combination of motion pictures, women and subway grates dates back at least to 1901, to a 73-second silent film titled “What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City.”

The Pitchfork Music Festival in its five previous years in Union Park usually sells out well in advance. But tickets were still available Friday as the first of 45 bands scheduled to play this weekend took the stage.

“I wish that every time you touched me left a mark,” sang EMA in her opening set, encapsulating one of the festival’s recurrent themes: to forge connection through music. Here for about 30 hours this weekend the nation’s budget crisis and the city’s job cuts were pushed aside by more pressing matters to music connoisseurs: Which band to see in competing time slots, Tune-Yards or Battles? Das Racist or Guided By Voices, with Neko Case expected to sit in?

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Though the early crowd was pretty sparse Friday, it was expected to fill in by the time headliners Animal Collective hit the stage and be near 18,000 capacity. Three-day passes had sold out but individual tickets were available for all three days. Promoters weren’t immediately available for comment.

The festival has become a summer mainstay, curated by its namesake music e-zine and Chicago jazz drummer Mike Reed, a modest counterpoint to the considerably larger Lollapalooza in Grant Park next month.

Organizers had created the equivalent of a small city in Union Park, with more than 200 volunteers, 140 security guards and 18 food vendors. One of the upsides to the Friday’s slow-arriving crowd was that for perhaps the only time all weekend there were no waiting lines for perhaps the greatest necessity of all: the 220 portable restrooms.

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Follow Greg Kot at Pitchfork all weekend at chicagotribune.com/turnitup and on Twitter @gregkot