Daryl Sherman (Oak Room, Algonquin Hotel, 59 W. 44, Monday nights through April 27). A smart, light-footed songstress whose piping, Mildred Bailey-flavored voice never fails to swing or to please, Sherman is currently appearing on Mondays at the Oak Room, accompanied by James Chirillo on guitar and Boots Maleson on bass. They don’t come any hipper (TT).

Jane Freilicher: Changing Scenes (Tibor de Nagy, 724 Fifth Ave, up through April 18). New and old work by one of my favorite American modernists, a chronically underrrated painter whose soft-spoken still lifes and landscapes reflect the influence of Pierre Bonnard and the cubists yet remain unmistakably American (TT).

Our Town (Barrow Street Theater, 27 Barrow St.). David Cromer’s revival of Thornton Wilder’s greatest play, which is still going strong two months into its off-Broadway run, is the best show in New York–if not America. Arrestingly and incisively unsentimental, it cuts to the heart of Wilder’s familiar tale of a small New England town and makes it as fresh as a news flash. I’m not normally fond of surprise endings, but Cromer has tucked one into this production, and it packs the punch of a bolt of lightning. Do not miss this show for any reason whatsoever (TT).

Blossom Dearie, Four Classic Albums Plus (Avid, two CDs). Readers of my recent tribute to “the hippest person in the world” should hasten to snag this British import, which couples her first three Verve LPs, Blossom Dearie, Give Him the Ooh-La-La, and Once Upon a Summertime, with an ultra-rare instrumental trio album from 1955 that shows why Dearie’s crystalline piano playing was as widely admired as her fey, delicately swinging vocals. The three Verve albums are accompanied by Ray Brown on bass, Herb Ellis or Mundell Lowe on guitar, and Jo Jones or Ed Thigpen on drums, which is maximally cool (TT).

Steven Suskin, The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations (Oxford, $55). Part history, part handbook, this staggeringly well-informed study of Robert Russell Bennett, Don Walker, Sid Ramin, and the other virtuoso technicians who scored the classic musicals of the pre-rock era is long overdue. If you read my posting about how The Letter was scored and want to know more about the mysterious process of turning a black-and-white piano part into a full-color orchestration, The Sound of Broadway Music will walk you through the drill with a minimum of technical obfuscation (TT).

Richard Stark, The Mourner/The Score/The Jugger (University of Chicago, $14 each). The University of Chicago Press has just published the second batch of titles in its ongoing uniform edition of the early Parker novels of Richard Stark (that’s Donald Westlake to you). Regular readers of this blog know all about Parker, the toughest career criminal ever to inhabit the pages of a paperback, so suffice it to say that if you have yet to make his acquaintance, now’s the time. When it comes to crime fiction, these hard, laconic novels are as good as it gets (TT).

Constant Lambert Conducts Ballet Music (Somm). In addition to being a brilliant critic, a gifted composer, and a provocative personality, Constant Lambert was the best ballet conductor who ever lived. The proof is on this imported CD, which contains the never-before-reissued suite from Sleeping Beauty that he recorded in 1939 shortly after leading the Sadler’s Wells Ballet in the first complete production of Tchaikovsky’s ballet given outside of Russia. Lambert and the company’s pit orchestra perform this nine-movement suite with a breathtaking blend of poise, elegance, and rhythmic lift–exactly what it takes to bring a stageful of dancers to swirling life. Would that Somm had also included the equally rare excerpts from Sleeping Beauty that Lambert recorded with the Covent Garden pit orchestra after World War II, but this recording, coupled here with other ballet suites by Boyce, Meyerbeer, and Rossini, is more than precious enough in its own right (TT).

A.J. Liebling, The Sweet Science and Other Writings (Library of America, $40, in stores Mar. 19). This omnibus, edited by Pete Hamill, is very nearly the best single-volume collection of Liebling’s domestic writings that could possibly be put together. (His World War II journalism has already been collected here.) It contains The Sweet Science, The Earl of Louisiana, The Jollity Building, Between Meals, and The Press, which between them cover all the bases. The New Yorker never had a better staff writer: Liebling’s prose was an exuberant, extroverted alloy of uptown and downtown, more or less what H.L. Mencken might have sounded like had he stuck to reporting instead of switching to the editorial page. If you don’t know his work, this is a very, very good place to start (TT).