Whenever you see Charlie Chaplin prospecting for gold in the Arctic tundra, say, or eating his shoe, it just wouldn’t seem right without a wobbly player piano droning in the background. Or would it? Attempting to re-create the live-vaudeville atmosphere of early-20th Century silent films, the 12-piece Paragon Ragtime Orchestra accompanies the Charlie Chaplin Film Festival at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Visual and Performing Arts Center, 1700 Spartan Drive, Elgin. Tickets: $36, $32 and $26. 847-622-0300.
Eleanor Antin’s 1991 silent Polish melodrama “A Man Without a World” will receive the same treatment but this time by New York City’s After Quartet. The show takes place at 7 p.m. Saturday in the Claudia Cassidy Theater of the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St. Free. 312-744-6630.
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