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In one of the strongest, visceral productions of Shakespeare running in this city now, the Babes With Blades production of Othello feels devastatingly contemporary. Under the swift direction of Mignon McPherson Stewart, nothing is as it seems in this defiant take on a 17th century text. In classic Babes With Blades style, all members of the cast are women or nonbinary. Thus, Othello is played by the stellar Brianna Buckley, who gives an astounding performance, running the gamut from fierce flirt to terrifying embodiment of toxic masculinity....

I considered myself quite lucky when in 1996 I caught two legendary flash and funk showmen, James Brown and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, at the Petrillo Music Shell. Recently George Clinton, who possesses the best aspects of both of these wild bandleading performers and who’s slated to play the same venue as part of Taste of Chicago, admitted he isn’t quite in top form these days. In a statement to Billboard he wrote, “Anyone who has been to the shows over the past couple of years has noticed that I’ve been out front less and less....

On paper, Bill Walker and Dapper Bruce Lafitte, the subjects of separate, free, and ongoing art exhibits, don’t have much in common. Walker, who died in 2011, was based in Chicago and known primarily for his murals, in particular the Wall of Respect, which Reader contributor Jeff Huebner called “one of the most significant, if unsung, artistic events of the turbulent 60s.” Lafitte, 46, lives in New Orleans, where he makes elaborate drawings with markers and ink....

The meeting of minds between Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett might have been one of the greatest in performing-arts history if their minds had actually met. In July 1964, the silent-comedy legend arrived in New York City to spend three weeks shooting an avant-garde short from a script by the lionized Irish playwright. Beckett was strongly influenced by the great clowns—Vladimir and Estragon, the eternally patient protagonists of Waiting for Godot, are nothing but a pair of baggy-pants comedians—and while the play was first being staged in Paris, Beckett got to see Keaton perform at the Cirque Medrano....

On a Saturday in mid-March, nearly 800 people packed the cavernous near-west-side studio of painter Wesley Kimler for a party called Fantasty, billed as a celebration of Chicago’s DIY art and music scenes—and of the creative studio, VAM, that organized the event. Fantasty was a one-year anniversary party for VAM. It began as an online magazine and now promotes the underground scene more directly, mostly by shooting artist profiles and other video series and curating video content from local artists—though the studio also helps its partners realize their own work when it can....

I’m thankful for the first full-length collaboration between Chicago rappers SD and Brian Fresco, the new Muddbruddas (Empire). Its mere existence takes a wrecking ball to the tired cliche that the local scene is split into two camps, “drill” and “alternative hip-hop,” that are isolated from each other’s sound and influence. When Chief Keef kicked off the drill boom in 2012, SD was part of the crew around Keef’s label and collective, Glory Boyz Entertainment....

Rapper-singer Rich Jones and producer Montana Macks have been friends for nearly two decades, which surely helps explain how the Chicagoans’ new self-released album, How Do You Sleep at Night?, hits so smoothly. For the past few years, Jones has leaned into the downy plushness of his voice, more and more often rhyming in a relaxed croon—and he’s also one of the few MCs who can drop Yiddish into the middle of a verse without sounding fakakta (the exact word he uses in “Clicksonmyphone”)....

It’s one of the funniest scenes in Singin’ in the Rain. Gene Kelly and Jean Hagen are a pair of 1920s movie stars at an advance screening of their first sound picture—their first “talkie”—when there’s a problem: the sound is messed up. Onscreen, Kelly’s clothes squeak like rubber boots, Hagen’s pearls clink, and her shrill voice comes in, then fades out, then comes in again. In their seats, Kelly and Hagen shift anxiously as the audience laughs and cheers and heckles like it’s watching a slapstick comedy instead of a drab costume drama....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, December 30, 2016. Have a great New Year’s weekend! Rahm considered a Chicago-only lottery to generate revenue Mayor Rahm Emanuel considered launching a Chicago-exclusive lottery to help the city get out of its financial crisis, according to the recently released trove of his e-mails. Former Illinois Lottery director Michael Jones suggested the idea in a memo to senate president John Cullerton, who then forwarded it to Emanuel, who passed it on to deputy mayor Steve Koch and Chicago Public Schools chief Forrest Claypool....

Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1977) thought herself ugly yet couldn’t stop painting self-portraits. Not many of the forty-some pictures in “Portrait of the Artist as a Landscape,” now at the Elmhurst Art Museum, attempt to render Abercrombie’s actual features, but almost all of them try to depict her mental or emotional states. They are indeed overwhelmingly landscapes, as the title of the exhibition states, but of anxiety, fear, and loneliness rather than of sea, sky, or earth....

Greenbeard are a grimy-sounding stoner-rock trio from Austin who riffed their way onto the scene in 2014 and have produced three albums since. Like its predecessors, last year’s Lödarödböl (Sailor Records) has a confident swagger in its crunchy, crusty hard-rock, psychedelic custom-van boogie. It clocks in at less than 40 minutes, and not a second of it is wasted, though the band stretch out their grooves with the calm of a stoned occult guru on a waterbed....

For Grizzly Bear’s first album in five years, Painted Ruins, the band broke from its independent roots to join forces with major label RCA. Produced by bassist Chris Taylor, the new music has a glossier surface finish than ever, and the band hasn’t simplified its intricate style. In fact, the tension between the world-weary lyrics of Ed Droste, Daniel Rossen, and (for the first time) Taylor and the churning grooves, ethereal harmonies, and sparkling melodies of the music does nothing to reduce life’s complexities into digestible bites....

The Block Beat multimedia series is a collaboration with The TRiiBE that roots Chicago musicians in places and neighborhoods that matter to them. Everything about Chicago rapper Ric Wilson is rooted in the Baptist church. As a teenager, the 22-year-old began working as an organizer for Black Youth Project 100 and We Charge Genocide, and his drive to fight for black lives arises from his upbringing in the black church—placing his activism in the tradition of the civil rights movement, also born from the black church....

Few people have had as profound an impact on experimental techno as German producer Wolfgang Voigt. Since debuting as Mike Ink in 1991, he’s released hundreds of records under more than 30 names—Studio 1, Popacid, M:I:5, Sog, Wasserman—and in 1998 he cofounded the influential Kompakt label, whose operations also include a music shop and record distributor. The most important of Voigt’s many projects is undoubtedly Gas, whose lovely, unsettling ambient electronica he says was inspired by dropping LSD as a kid and walking through the dense woods in Königsforst park near his hometown of Cologne....

Guitarist Ripley Johnson (also of Wooden Shjips) and keyboardist Sanae Yamada have been churning out fuzzy psychedelic reverb and shimmer on Sacred Bones Records for close to a decade as Moon Duo. The San Francisco group’s 2011 debut, Mazes, is heavy, head-nodding stoner rock with more sheen than you’d expect from the genre. But on their new album, September’s Stars Are the Light, they take a delightful left turn toward the dance floor, finding the common ground between spacey psych and spacey disco....

Courtesy the artist Everyone in Norway looks like this on the weekends. Norwegian black-metal veterans Khold released their sixth full-length, Til Endes, on Peaceville Records in September. The album didn’t get a lot of love around here at the time, but its moment has finally arrived. I mean, if you’re looking for a belated excuse to write about a band called Khold, you can’t do better than this weather....

When I first saw the lineup for Porchlight Music Theatre‘s 2016 season, I thought: Wow! This might be our chance. For all these reasons, I was ecstatic to see Miranda’s story—our story—of gentrification, racism, and hope, told from our perspective on a Chicago musical theater stage. “American musicals, Chicago style,” as Porchlight’s motto goes, seemed like the opportunity so many of us had been waiting for. Speaking to American Theatre Magazine on the issue, Hudes made a similar argument: “Casting the roles appropriately is of fundamental importance,” she wrote....

Barrie Cole presents a series of overheard phone calls on the CTA that add up to a beautiful, polyphonous portrait of city life. Nine performers, sitting among the audience like fellow riders on a train, occasionally changing seats—prompted by familiar-sounding station arrival announcements—talk into their phones and inadvertently reveal more than they intend to a roomful of strangers. It’s a deceptively simple setup and, on the face of it, doesn’t offer much more than the vicarious thrill of hearing something one isn’t supposed to be privy to....

Playwright and MPAACT founding member Shepsu Aakhu was inspired to write this campus sexual assault drama by a conversation initiated by one of his two college-aged sons, “two Black males living a life completely free from my daily protection.” The fear he has on behalf of his family is palpable and, regrettably, well-sourced—conversations about the prevalence of misogyny and assault on universities often sidestep the reality that young Black men in this country still live under an unjust cloud of suspicion....

At 5 PM Saturday, March 21, Governor J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 Executive Order No. 8, aka the Stay at Home order, took effect. Here’s a daily-ish journal of how Reader staff, our friends, family—and our pets—are spending our time. Narcos: Mexico on Netflix Fantastic Fungi on the Gene Siskel Film Center’s streaming site What we’re cooking: To make it yourself, you need: Sift in flour once the chocolate is melted and mix into a paste....