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A video rite of passage for anyone who’s ever donned a pair of breezers and nearly had his or her teeth knocked out of his or her head, Slap Shot is to the sports comedy what The English Patient is to the teary wartime epic. You’ll find more than a few non-hockey-buffs who’ll vouch for the 1977 film’s classic status, but its vulgar one-liners, ruthless body-checking, bared butt cheeks, and bespectacled Hanson brothers are best appreciated by those who’ve actually braved the ice. Paul Newman’s performance as a last-gasp hockey coach charged with a team of hard-hitting misfits may not be his most nuanced, but ask yourself: How often do you find yourself quoting lines from Absence of Malice in the wistful company of half-drunk buddies? By releasing Slap Shot 2: Breaking the Ice—a poorly conceived, straight-to-video sequel starring Stephen Baldwin and Gary Busey—to coincide with this reissue, Universal taints what might otherwise be considered the year’s most triumphant non-Olympic hockey moment. Here’s an audio commentary track by the Hansons themselves and a restored soundtrack featuring Elton John and other giants of 70s dementia.

Proof covers all the big themes: death, depression, the relationship of intellect to madness, professional success and personal failure, seduction and deduction, memories of the past and dreams of the future, and does it in a scathingly witty and highly pleasurable evening on a back porch. It is the story of Catherine, whose genius father has just died, and Hal, the former student who wants to use her to get to her father’s unpublished material. Throw in a visiting sister, who wants to put Catherine in an institution, and flashback appearances of Daddy deadest and you have a much more enjoyable and insightful treatment of the relationship of intelligence and insanity than A Beautiful Mind. Higher mathematics is the hinge on which all this pivots, but if you passed ninth grade algebra, none of it will be over your head. This is the national touring version of the production that swept the Tony Awards last year, and won the Pulitzer for Drama for David Auburn. Unfortunately, you won’t see Mary-Louise Parker as Catherine, as we did on Broadway, but you can watch her on West Wing and imagine.

What makes commercial theater commercial is the way it delivers the reassuringly familiar, and Chanhassen’s current revival of The Music Man does not disappoint. The audience for this show expects to see a stage version of the movie version of the original Broadway musical, so that’s what director Michael Brindisi and his cohorts have put onstage. This is not a bad thing. It may feel a bit like visiting a wax museum, but once you get past that aspect of it you can hardly fail to enjoy yourself, because this is a highly professional mounting of one of the best musicals ever written. The songs especially, even after all these years, remain incomparably brilliant, growing organically out of the story in ways that no other musical can match. Keith Rice, who looks a little like Jim Carrey and sounds almost exactly like Robert Preston, turns in a strong, high-energy performance as the title swindler. Other standouts include James Cada and Katherine Ferrand as the mayor and his artsy wife. And you’ll never see a better staging of the famous opening scene—the one in which a gaggle of traveling salesmen aboard a train chant a patter song.

Although the American theater has spent the last 30 years exploring issues of group identity, until recently the agenda has not included folks with disabilities. This show, which originated in Chicago in 1999, takes a step in that direction. The History of Bowling pulls together a collection of monologues and scenes in order to tell the story of a parapalegic and an epileptic who fall in love. It’s a marvelous idea for a play, and the script offers more than a few good moments—keen observations about life as a disabled person, flashes of gallows humor. In total, there isn’t quite enough. The two supporting actors, Gavin Lawrence and Marquetta Senters, are fine. But the two leads, Robert Ness and Ann Kim, come off rather poorly. Forgive us, but when half a dozen scenes end with non-ironic sitcom hugs and kisses, something has gone seriously amiss. We hope this show is merely the first in a wave of plays about disability, a dramatic subject whose time has arrived.

You’d think the corporate-HQ-storming antics depicted in Michael Moore’s breakout feature Roger & Me (and his too-short-lived TV Nation) would be enjoying a full-on revival in this heyday for reality–TV and Enronic corporate America. But no—this relentless agitator’s most regular exposure comes by way of his much-forwarded Internet missives in the wake of 9/11. (The January installment was a call for the president’s resignation, calling Bush a “complicit accessory” in the Enron hoo-hah and casually referring to the veep as “Big Dick.”) Just in time for the recession, Moore is on the road to promote his new book, Stupid White Men and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation, which promises a fresh supply of wry proletarian rants. The Twin Cities’ mix of passive-aggressive MPR liberals, corn-fed Republican wonks, and carob-munching greenies usually makes for some healthy debate over Moore’s watchdogging and stick-it-to-the-man reflexes, but more often than not, he’s preaching to the choir. Still, his folksy mix of hot-button lefty rhetoric always entertains. More than that, Moore is one of the few liberal pundits with a detectable sense of humor and that in itself is worth the price of admission ($5). In fact, we’d gladly trade away Mark Dayton and the next five seasons of A Prairie Home Companion for more. Where do we sign?

A month after we bought a house from Pete Hautman in South Minneapolis, he slyly asked “Have you found the secret door yet?” and we’ve been looking ever since. This town’s most deserving and least celebrated mystery novelist recently published his eighth novel (three of them are “young adult titles”), a terrific little number called Rag Man, part genre detective story and part unpredictable, noirish thriller. Not unlike the cinema of the Coen brothers. Lookit: Hautman went to school in St. Louis Park with Joel and Ethan, where there must have been something in the water. (Diehard film geeks will recall that Frances McDormand’s husband in Fargo was a wildlife painter obsessed with beating “the Hautmans” in a wildlife stamp-art competition. Pete’s two brothers are, in fact, very successful wildlife painters who frequently win these competitions.) This book has been out for a little while, but go and buy it dammit, along with anything else by Hautman, a darkly comic writer who deserves to be at least as rich as Gary Keillor by now.

For a certain type of person, Stephen King has lived the ultimate American dream. He’s been a wildly successful novelist for more than 25 years, publishing some 60 books, and countless articles, comic books, and even poems. That’s not all—in this televisual age, you can’t be a true creative superstar until you make the leap to the big screen. Did you forget The Shining? How about Carrie? Not only were these memorable movies in their own horrific genre, they’re still counted as classics in any genre. Cripes, the man’s actually written an e-book, and been run over by a minivan. What hasn’t he done? Naturally, rumors suggest he’s less a person than a corporation or a trademark—like, say, The Simpsons, Tom Clancy, or George Lucas. Once you’ve reached this kind of mythic status and reaped the financial rewards, people want to discredit you as an artist. Some say King’s novels are all written by sweatshop teenagers in a secret creative writing program hidden in the Maine outback. Others say King has been recycling the same story since about 1987. We can’t say one way or another. But it is noteworthy that his next book will be a collection of short stories… a decidedly literary genre that you simply can’t hand off to unpaid interns or caged teenagers.

It’s no longer surprising to see rock’s most strident singer-songwriters seduced by the siren ProTools. Nor is it anything new to hear erstwhile guitar gods discovering the joys of the synthesizer (even Eddie Van Halen had a soft spot for that Vangelis flavor) or diving headlong into largely electronic sonic experiments. Still, there’s something unnerving about the opening minutes of Bob Mould’s new solo disc, his first since 1998’s The Last Dog & Pony Show. The digi-pop ditty “180 Rain” opens with a few bars of musical telemetry before the plaintive post-punker’s voice slides in from somewhere off in the ether. The absence of guitars is suspicous enough for starters, but when his vocal steps up into a Vocoder-treated refrain—we swear it’s like Cher’s “Believe” or Kid Rock’s “Only God Knows”—it begs the question: Has Bob lost his freaking mind? The lyrics and linear pop arrangements are definitely more Pet Shop Boys than Autechre though he does achieve some beautifully tweaked textures, especially on the instrumental “Without?” and “Homecoming Parade.” There are plenty of guitars, melodic hooks, and satisfying Mould-school anthemics elsewhere on the album, but anyone still tethered to a bygone Hüsker heyday had better find a sturdy chair. The rumors that the former Sugar daddy has been writing scripts for pro wrestling are true, by the way, but we guarantee you won’t hear anything off Modulate on this week’s episode of SmackDown.

There’s a theory that good economic times breed conservative bubblegum pop and bad times generate the other kind of music, a theory with legs, when you consider the Long Boom’s saccharine soundtrack starring Britney Spears, ’N Sync, the Backstreets, and countless others we begrudge for taking up a whole sentence in the mentioning. Where was Billy Bragg during all this time—our modern-day Woody Guthrie, our English Bob Dylan, our postpunk folknik savior? He sired at least one little Bilbo Braggins, moved out of London to Dorset, and prudently lay low. Who can forget Bragg’s astonishing debut back in 1984, Life’s A Riot With Spy Vs. Spy? More political than any American folkie has ever been, what distinguished Bragg from other British tubthumpers was the fact that his music wailed, and we found ourselves singing all the words a capella in the car. When Nora Guthrie got fresh to him belatedly in the mid-90s, Woody’s daughter and spiritual executor hired him to finish dozens of Guthrie originals that had lyrics but no music. The result was Billy’s celebrated collaboration with Wilco, The Mermaid Avenue disks. That all went so well that Bragg made good his inevitable return—this time fully ensconsed in a five-piece band. Here’s England, Half English, which is a great record not only because it’s a great record, but because it sends us into the closet, digging around behind those old pea coats and suede smoking jackets in search of vinyl, dusting off that filthy turntable to hear secret classics like “Levi’s Stubb’s Tears,” and “St. Swithen’s Day.”

Now it can be told: When a federal judge ordered the break-up of Wu-Tang Clan Corporation back in 1993, he was acting in the interest of fair competition. The Clan had established a formidable market monopoly with its gritty, esoteric alternative to Cali gangsta funk, bundling cinematic kung fu lore together with its jagged, rubbernecking rhymes, spare beats, and crackling minor-key string samples. Some market rivals cried foul, prompting an investigation that would uncover a wealth of hostile e-mail threads stored on various Wu-Tang hard drives. (“Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nothin’ to [mess] with!” read one particularly damning memo from the RZA, longtime president and CEO of the enterprise.) But dismantling the dominant hip-hop juggernaut served only to strengthen its overall market position as various corporate offshoots—most notably Method Man Inc., Ghostface Killah Ltd., and the much-scrutinized offshore venture Ol’ Dirty Bastard International LLC—continued to outperform their direct competitors throughout the 90s. Subsequent deregulation of the industry at large has allowed for a controlled reorganization of the original company, and with the release of its new product, Wu-Tang Iron Flag, its commitment to tireless power-branding and synergistic hip-hop initiatives continue to yield high margins both fiscally and aesthetically. Now, please don’t come and kill us.