Posts

I ‘d been hearing about the Third Coast International Audio Festival for as long as I’d been a journalist in Chicago. Reporters’ circles in this city have been shrinking, so if you’re from the newspaper world you’re bound to cross paths with radio people. They rhapsodize about Third Coast as a magical place for audio producers, or as a kind of forum for inspiration and networking, one that transcends your average professional conference....

Anything and Always . . . To say that Nic Wehrwein’s Anything and Always is a trite sob story fit for the slush pile at Lifetime would be to pile on one more cliche to an interminable 140 minutes full of them. A young victim of breast cancer, Courtney (Michelle Alejandra Limon) frolics in the afterlife as she did in life, crashing onto the stage with such vigor that the vibrations can be felt in the last rows....

Chicago indie singer-songwriter Nayla Jungheim knows that putting her own needs first is the best defense against a cruel and indifferent world. She made her new debut album, the lively and big-hearted This Might Be Healing (self-released digitally and available on cassette via Solidarity Club), using largely acoustic instrumentation as a retort to people in her circle who consider such stripped-down music to be trad, staid, and unremarkable. Jungheim handily demolishes that criticism: cuts such as “Note to Self” and “Any Questions?...

Editor’s note: During the play, one of the characters uses a racial slur. Although the offensive language came directly from the script, we should have not printed it. We have removed the offensive word. We apologize. The author has written a statement. Or rather, not until Mr. Prentice’s pointed outburst late in act two, during which he paints for his son a horrifying picture of the life he’ll face. At best, white America will take credit for his research....

When writer and actor Erin Diamond steps onstage at Uptown Underground, she’s spray-tanned, her eyes piled with mascara, squinting as if she’s in desperate need of prescription lenses. She wears a gold-sequined gown that blends in with the gold-leaf design on the maroon pillows and cushions on the thronelike seats onstage. In Christmas: By Melania, Diamond subverts Mrs. Trump’s obsession with opulence by playing her as the host of a chintzy TV Christmas special, the kind emceed by Bob Hope or the Osmonds during the 1970s and ’80s....

At the beginning of the pandemic, I became mildly obsessed with a video of Limp Bizkit playing a Moscow venue in February 2020. I wasn’t drawn to the performance so much as to the sight of front man Fred Durst, who’d been an emblem of white male millennials’ bottomless teenage angst at the turn of the century—like a nu-metal Santa Claus, he wore a gray-and-white beard radiating from his chin. Nothing else has quite crystallized for me how much time has passed since Limp Bizkit could compete with blockbuster boy bands and sell albums by the millions....

On the evening of August 18 last year, Eboni Senai Hawkins, cofounder of Chicago’s chapter of the black bicycle group Red Bike and Green, witnessed Joshua Thomas, a 22-year-old African-American, being stopped by police while riding a Divvy bike-share cycle on the sidewalk near Chicago Avenue and Rush Street. The officers handcuffed and frisked Thomas, called in the serial number on the baby-blue bike, and discovered it was stolen. They arrested Thomas, who was later sentenced to two days in jail....

Glamorous movie actresses often win respect through highly unflattering roles: Jessica Lange ranting and raving as the mentally ill starlet in Frances (1982), Nicole Kidman wearing dowdy outfits and a prosthetic nose as Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002), Charlize Theron grunging out as trailer-trash serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2003). Playing an unattractive woman has certainly been the ticket this year for Jennifer Aniston, whom I knew as a hairstyle before I knew her as a performer: as the scarred, brittle, nasty survivor of a horrific car accident in Daniel Barnz’s indie drama Cake, she’s collected best actress nominations from the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Broadcast Film Critics Association....

Texan Jolie Holland was only briefly a member of the Be Good Tanyas, from 1999 to 2000, but that was apparently enough for her to develop a rapport with cofounder Samantha Parton. Six years ago Parton suffered a concussion in a car accident, and as she healed, doctors discovered an aneurysm and a benign tumor behind her left eye. When she finally resumed touring in 2016, it was with Holland—in fact, most of Parton’s musical activity since getting back on her feet has been with her old bandmate....

La Havana Madrid, Sandra Delgado’s award-winning immersive musical, returns to Chicago, transporting us to the vibrant Caribbean Latinx music scene of the 1960s. Filled with intimate vignettes of Cuban-, Colombian-, and Puerto Rican-American life, it paints a picture of young immigrants acclimating to life in a segregated city while searching for love and connection. It is a celebration of the power of music to unite people and to instill a feeling of belonging....

A month or two after most music critics compile their favorite albums of 2014, I’m finally getting around to making my list. Few international titles brought me more pleasure than Chungu, a dazzling album from modern Zanzibar taraab outfit Rajab Suleiman & Kithara; it’s the eighth installment in the invaluable Zanzibara series, released by French label Buda and curated and recorded by German producer Werner Graebner. In years past I’ve shared my love of taraab music, notably on the occasion of a majestic performance in Millennium Park by Zanzibar’s venerable Culture Musical Club as part of the 2006 World Music Festival....

Corn The record label Audika has a single-minded yet admirable pursuit: releasing and properly reissuing all of the available recorded output of avant-garde-pop cellist and songwriter Arthur Russell. They’ve already reissued Russell’s most famous work—the haunting World of Echo (1986)—and assembled immaculate compilations that showcase certain periods in his prolific and varied career: Calling Out of Context (2004), a collection of sideways synth-pop recorded between 1973 and the artist’s death in 1992; First Thought Best Thought (2006), which contains various new-music pieces; and Love Is Overtaking Me (2008), an incomparably infectious hodgepodge of country-leaning singer-songwriter material....

Lollapalooza, which turns 25 this year, announced its lineup at 6 AM, and the marquee name is a doozy: Radiohead. Booking the UK alternative-rock titans is clutch, especially considering how unexciting the other three big headliners are: Red Hot Chili Peppers, who haven’t released new music since before their previous Lolla headlining set in 2012; LCD Soundsystem, who are playing so many other festivals in the U.S. that a Lolla appearance was practically a given; and J....

Eclipse Theatre kicks off its season of William Inge plays with this game attempt at one of his lesser works. Sue’s life is turned upside down when the son she sent to an orphanage as a teenage mother shows up at her doorstep and topples the fragile existence she has constructed as a career woman living with a failure of a younger man who won’t marry her. Set in a modern apartment in an upscale Chicago neighborhood in 1962, Natural Affection explores aspects of infidelity, alcoholism, and latent homosexuality within an atmosphere of looming dread, suggesting cracks in America’s postwar idyll....

I’ve been observing the artistic growth of Haley Fohr since she moved to Chicago in 2012 from Bloomington, Indiana. She’s matured in leaps and bounds since the release of her breakthrough album, In Plain Speech (Thrill Jockey), in 2015, but nothing could have prepared me for her achievements on the remarkable new Reaching for Indigo (Drag City)—which might be the best album I’ve heard in 2017. Early on, Fohr convinced me that she possessed lots of ideas, but at the time she seemed to struggle to sort through them....

Christen Thomas‘s boisterous laugh could charm everyone in the room—and because she worked in the music industry, she was in a lot of crowded rooms. She made too many friends to count, not just in Chicago but around the world. Within a few months of moving here in 2007 from New York City, where she’d worked for Cornerstone Promotions and Vice Records, she landed a gig in media relations at the Empty Bottle....

W hen Jane Beachy first started the weekly performance series Salonathon in July 2011, she didn’t imagine it would run for more than two months. The show was founded with a DIY spirit, intended as an inclusive space for emerging artists to test the boundaries of performance. Soon one year came and went, then five. And now, six and a half years after that first night at Beauty Bar, the series is finally coming to a close....

Last June, when Rolling Stone contributor Andrew Matson asked Shabazz Palaces’ Ishmael Butler about the negative critiques of social media he’d gleaned from the songs on the Seattle duo’s 2017 albums, Quazarz vs. the Jealous Machines and Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star, Butler deflected him, responding, “No, it’s not mostly negative. I just feel like [social media is] too much. It’s too widely accepting without being considered. That’s all.” The interaction reminds me of how critics too often read Shabazz Palaces’ most far-out qualities in comparison to what’s hot at the moment—the music is “delightfully experimental” (the Quietus), filled with “discordant sounds and bizarro abstract lyrics” (Pitchfork), and, uh, whatever mind-numbing hyperbolic drivel A....

With a combined 40+ years of experience in restaurants, the trio understands the intricacies of the niche wine industry and are on a mission to demystify the conversation surrounding the industry. Clients can range from the novice wine drinker who wants to host a virtual blind tasting for friends or a business happy hour to wine and beverage programs and cellars in need of consulting. Cultivated in August 2020, during the height of the pandemic, Slik’s business plan is focused on sustainability, with safety protocols baked in from marketing aspects to hosting events....

Re-Animator Stuart Gordon isn’t among the most well-known or revered horror filmmakers around; in some circles, he’s downright reviled. The Chicago native has drawn ire his whole career, even here in the pages of the Reader. None other than Dave Kehr, a measured and thoughtful critic even at his most vitriolic, called Gordon’s breakthrough Re-Animator “ludicrous and inept,” describing it as the “kind of flat-footed stuff that gives garbage a bad name....