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The heyday of vaudeville is over and done with 15 minutes into this delightful new musical from Underscore Theatre Company, with book and lyrics by Brian Huther, Ben Auxier, and Seth Macchi and music by Huther and Auxier. Its heroes are two relics of the old school with a duo act to beat the band and nowhere to perform it, what with music halls shuttering and Hollywood’s first flowering guzzling the entertainment market share....

Every week our film critics tackle the movies they’re most excited to see. Some more than exceed our expectations, and some, well, some don’t (this week we’re looking at you, Desperados). Before you settle in to stream this weekend, check out what we have to say. More new releases, revivals, and currently streaming films can be found every week at Movies of Note, and you can dive deep into the Reader‘s film review archive here....

Hell is a blast. Beats living. You get to garden, the drugs are free, and if the Harrowing’s planned for anytime soon, no one’s informed Judas Iscariot or Pontius Pilate, the double-quadruple-damned linchpins to Houston playwright Brendan Bourque-Sheil’s show, which makes its Chicago debut here with Death and Pretzels under director Madison Smith. Minus an understandable touch of guilt at having brought about the death of Christ, this Judas (Jake Baker) and this Pilate (Nick Strauss) are set....

Julia Thiel View from outside the festival The hallmark of a successful beer festival may just be that the critics don’t have much to say about it. Chicago Ale Fest, which was initially scheduled for last September and then canceled due to “anticipated inclement weather and financial concerns,” went off without a hitch this past Friday evening and Saturday afternoon—at least as far as I can tell. I was only there for the second half of the Saturday session, but if there’s one thing people like to do it’s complain, and if there had been issues I’m pretty sure they would have been tweeted, Facebooked, and blogged about....

Last week the Sea and Cake released its 11th album, Any Day. The record embodies a simmering cool, which is demonstrated in the elegantly crystalline guitar lattice sketched out by Archer Prewitt and singer Sam Prekop—whose vocal lines have never sounded more sweetly aspirated—and also serves as an impressive assertion of commitment. A year after the band released its previous album, 2012’s Runner, longtime bassist Eric Claridge had to step back from touring due to carpal tunnel syndrome, and he left the group permanently soon after....

Last week, Payton Leutner, the victim in the Wisconsin “Slender Man” attack in which two of her schoolmates stabbed her multiple times as tribute to a fictional ghoul (one they believed to be real), spoke out for the first time since the horrific event. That’s serendipitous timing for Underscore Theatre Company’s new musical by composer Alexander Sage Oyen and book writer Austin Rega. In Proxy, Vanessa (Carisa Gonzalez) is 15 years out from the time her best friend, Veronica, or Ronnie (Tessa Dettman), plunged a knife into her torso a dozen times....

The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Last week, the traveling mainstream punk festival slash outlet mall known as the Vans Warped Tour announced the lineup for its final cross-country tour, which begins June 21 and comes to the Chicago area July 21. This is Warped Tour’s 24th year, and the bill is the same as it ever was: bands that played the gathering during its halcyon days in the early and mid 2000s....

Earlier this month, in the wake of her own attention-grabbing press conference, Wheaton College professor Larycia Hawkins was worrying about something besides the fact that the school is trying to dump her. Since then, students and faculty at Wheaton and other schools have been protesting on her behalf; 67,000 supporters have signed a petition seeking her reinstatement, and the school has attained a certain notoriety. That’s what was foremost on Hawkins’s mind....

Neo-Futurists founder Greg Allen made the surprising announcement today that he’s ending the 28-year Chicago run of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind on December 31. He’s doing so in order to create a new, diverse Chicago theater company that will be entirely dedicated to social activism. Too Much Light continues to be produced by Neo-Futurist ensembles in New York and San Francisco and by other companies around the world....

As sacrifices go, staying home when possible and wearing masks in public seem like fairly small requests. But as we’ve seen, when hyperindividualism trumps community, the results can be deadly. ALAS is a fragment of a larger Vişniec piece, Cabaret of Words, translated by Daniela Șilindean and directed by Michael Mejia, featuring a cast of 16, from Trap Door local regulars to artists from their sister company, Trap Door International in Barcelona....

V ery few people these days set out to be milliners, and, although she owns a store where she makes and sells hats, Susan Abelson is no exception. As a young woman in the 1970s, she was a merely a connoisseur and collector. She preferred 1940s styles, with veils. “I was young,” she says. “I could pull it off.” But then her entire collection was stolen from the storage space of the Minneapolis loft where she was living at the time....

Trailblazing avant-garde musician, sound artist, and composer Pamela Z, who gives a rare Chicago performance at Constellation on Saturday, began experimenting with vocal processing in the early 80s, but the first album devoted entirely to her work didn’t arrive till 2004. On “Bone Music,” the opening track of A Delay Is Better (Starkland), her voice rises in swells over thudding percussion, then plummets into speech—only it’s not quite speech. Her words, if they’re words at all, are impossible to make out....

Brianna Wellen: The second I heard Car Seat Headrest play David Bowie’s “Blackstar,” my hopes were high for this weekend. Immediately after that, though, it started pouring. But that’s the fickle nature of Pitchfork, or really any good outdoor music festival: brilliant and thrilling one moment, bleak and rainy the next. Thankfully, as the day continued, it seemed this year’s fest would start on an upswing. Twin Peaks were charming and rocking as ever....

On a recent Saturday, a crowd of about 400 people, mostly Bridgeport natives, has gathered in a large skybox at White Sox park. The place is dark except for a Jumbotron, which is illuminated with a portrait of the late stand-up comedian Pat Brice. Tonight is a tribute show in honor of Brice’s 40th birthday and a fund-raiser for the families of Chicago comics Steve O. Harvey, who lost a bout with cancer in September 2015, and Prescott Tolk, whose father, an Uber driver in New York, was recently killed in an altercation with a man carrying a hockey stick....

D aniel Kraus remembers the exact moment the idea hit him. He was 15 years old, and he was standing on a tennis court in Fairfield, Iowa, where he grew up. “The extent of the idea,” he says now, “was the Creature from the Black Lagoon is put in a lab; a janitor finds him and decides to break him out and put him in her tub. And that was it for many years....

One day in the late 1990s, local birder Leslie Borns visited Montrose Beach, as she often did, and noticed lakeshore rush, a grassy plant that hadn’t been seen in Chicago in more than 50 years. Excited by what this could mean, Borns contacted the park district to suggest they stop pulling the plants from the sand on the eastern edge of the beach and let whatever pops up continue growing....

Here’s an odd pairing. On the one hand you’ve got Anton Chekhov, Russia’s poet of stasis, revered for a handful of delicate tragicomedies about minor aristocrats slipping into lives of quiet desperation. On the other, the Hypocrites, Chicago’s jolly party ensemble, known lately for a Pirates of Penzance done beach-bash-style, an H.M.S. Pinafore performed in PJs, an Into the Woods set in an outsize playroom. Even All Our Tragic—the company’s marathon effort to visit every extant Greek tragedy—played out as gory fun, meals thrown in....

Had La Luz been around during the garage revival of the early 2000s, they would’ve done a great job saving us from all the monotone Strokes imitators. But regardless of which era they emerged in, they’d have been able to make it on their own terms as a rock ’n’ roll band, not as trend hoppers. Formed in 2012 in Seattle and based in Los Angeles since 2015, La Luz capture a moodier, more introspective side of garage rock—and never drop the beat....

Singer, songwriter, and filmmaker Thomas Comerford is all about the fundamentals. To teach his cinematography students at the School of the Art Institute about lighting, he has them re-create images from their favorite movies—you can see some of their picks, drawn from the history of monster movies, in the video to Comerford’s song “Lord of the Flies.” That song, which kicks off his latest LP, Blood Moon, shows how his core influences come into play: it combines a stark, pithy guitar lead that’s close kin to the one on the Go-Betweens’ “Part Company” with soulful backing vocals reminiscent of those on Van Morrison’s Saint Dominic’s Preview....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, December 5, 2016. Professional boxer Ed Brown dies in East Garfield Park shooting Boxer Ed Brown, 25, died after being shot in the head while sitting with his cousin in a car in East Garfield Park, according to ESPN. Brown had been shot twice before, and his manager, Cameron Dunkin, had “begged him to get out of Chicago.” It’s not the first time tragedy has struck the Brown family; his mother was one of the 21 people killed in the E2 nightclub stampede in 2003....