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Sometimes, we just don’t give ourselves the space. “[In Goods], here these two women are: in outer space, with no space, in a small space, trying to garner their personal space,” Butler says. “The thing that really excited me about [Goods] is that it’s very well written, [Ferebee] did an amazing, bang-up job with this script, and it speaks to something that we haven’t endeavored before: the future, space, our goods, what we do with them, how we look at life now, moving forward after the pandemic with social justice and change happening all around us, and we have a whole new medium of theater right now, Zoom, and that’s never going to go away....

The autumnal folk music that Alec Watson writes (and performs with pals) under the name DPCD has the uncluttered, utilitarian grace of Shaker furniture, shaped with a contemplative sense of order and sturdy enough for daily use. Gossip Wolf loved the band’s 2017 debut, Good Visions, especially “Images of No Use,” which recalls Iron & Wine, early Sufjan Stevens, and Thrill Jockey supergroup Pullman. Watson describes DPCD’s self-released new LP, False Virtue, as “centered around daily routine, memory, and family history,” and debut single “No Will” is as potently specific as the crunch of fallen leaves underfoot....

August Pullman, the ten-year-old boy at the center of Stephen Chbosky’s Wonder, is severely deformed: the bridge of his nose reaches to his forehead in a straight line, the corners of his eyes are pulled down in a perpetual sob, his cheeks are traced by scars, and withered ears peek out from under his long hair. One dreads to think what he might have looked like before the 27 plastic surgeries he mentions near the beginning of the film....

After the FCC opened up the nation’s airwaves to what the law calls “low power broadcast radio stations” in 2013, all sorts of groups jumped at the chance to apply—among them the folks behind Chicago’s Public Media Institute, who include Ed Marszewski, mastermind behind long-­running political freak rag Lumpen, the annual Version multimedia festival, Marz Community Brewing, and other groovy projects. Early in 2014, PMI received a permit to build an LPFM station in Bridgeport....

There’s no more perfect setting for Lyric Opera’s Hansel and Gretel in the Park than the North Park Village Nature Center, where—after two cancellations due to hideous weather—they were finally able to perform it this weekend. The leafy, 46-acre preserve is so ideal for this tale of two siblings lost in the woods, nobody in the small, still-masked and COVID-limited audience on Friday even bothered to complain about the 90-degree temperature....

Hillary Clinton’s latest outburst against Bernie Sanders gives me a chance to shatter one of my least favorite myths about Chicago politics—that popularity is linked to productivity or that only those who go along get things done. That’s even nastier than what she told Howard Stern a few weeks ago. You know, I’m no Sigmund Freud, but it sure looks like Hillary’s not about to get over that 2016 primary campaign anytime soon....

After 90 homicides and more than 2,300 shootings made August the city’s most violent month in roughly 20 years, many Chicagoans are understandably shaken, saddened, and fearing for their safety. National Guard deployments have historically occurred during natural disasters or other emergencies. For instance, Rauner called upon the state’s National Guard in January to respond to flooding in downstate Marion. After one of Illinois’s biggest-ever blizzards, in 2011, then-governor Pat Quinn activated more than 500 members of the state’s guard to assist in response and recovery efforts....

Being a public driver has never been an easy way to make a living. But with the demise of the traditional taxi industry, the job has gotten even harder. Throw in systemic racism, classism, then top it off with COVID-19, and it’s a wonder there’s anyone left willing to risk driving strangers anywhere, anytime. Yet, this is precisely the setting of Reginald Edmund’s Ride Share, a solo play that grew out of Edmund’s own experiences driving....

Over the course of its career the Scandinavian juggernaut known as the Thing has collaborated with a wildly diverse group of musicians: art-pop singer Neneh Cherry, free-jazz warrior Joe McPhee, Japanese experimentalist Otomo Yoshihide, polymath (and former Chicagoan) Jim O’Rourke, and Sonic Youth front man Thurston Moore, among others. The trio—saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, and bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten—surveys classic free-jazz tunes by Don Cherry as well as garage-rock classics by the Sonics—highlighting the inextricable link between soul and muscularity, and digging into how sound can be both a weapon and a balm....

On April 5, 2010, a coal-dust explosion at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine in Raleigh County, West Virginia, killed 29 miners. Though subsequent investigations found that a pervasive pattern of negligence and safety violations had led to the entirely preventable tragedy, in 2015 Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship got off with a slap on the wrist: a single misdemeanor conviction for conspiring to violate mine safety and health standards and a one-year prison sentence....

Percussionist Samuel Scranton and bassoonist Katherine Young (who was, in the distant past, a Reader editorial staffer) combine improvised and composed material in the sui generis duo Beautifulish. Their name may sound tentative, and their preference for small-run cassettes may seem humble, but there’s nothing timid about their radical sounds. Beautifulish’s music arose from weekly sessions of improvisation, which gradually unearthed a shared vocabulary of electronically magnified textures and dogged actions that sound more like field recordings from an imagined world than any known genre of music....

Even as a dedicated member of the Kiss Army, I understand that Gene Simmons and crew have provided plenty of ammo for trash talkers. But it’s really hard to hate on lead guitarist Paul “Ace” Frehley. He’s a founding member of the greatest rock ’n’ roll spectacle of all time, and his sloppy, shredding, high-gain solos are as much a part of the Kiss fabric as fire breathing and blood spitting....

It’s easy to get the impression that Natalie Chami dreams in music—she’s immersed in it in practically every minute of her waking life. By day, she teaches choir, vocal technique, and music technology at the Chicago High School for the Arts. She spends her free time immersed in Chicago’s experimental-music community, making noisy drones as one-third of Good Willsmith and exploring ambient soundscapes with her solo project, TALsounds. In the decade or so that Chami has been active, she’s become a crucial contributor and even one of the faces of the city’s contemporary avant-garde electronic scene....

Since I wrote about the cuisine of Kerala and Glenview’s terrific grocery-caterer Kairali Food & Events last week, someone pointed out that there is, in fact, a full-service restaurant in the area featuring the food of India’s southwestern state. That would be the two-year-old Mainland India in Niles, whose menu looks very promising. In early May, she and Kalathil opened Thattu with a concise menu of four entree-size dishes and a few snacks, including the biscuits and egg curry, but also Kerala-style fried chicken, a mild coriander chicken curry, and a Portuguese-influenced vegetable stew called ishtu....

So many local hip-hop artists have helped me see the city anew through their work that I doubt I could name them all. Chicago hip-hop followed up on a tremendous 2016 with a flood of great releases that helped me get through the lows of 2017: to pick just three, Joseph Chilliams’s cheeky and tender Henry Church, Cupcakke’s brash and ecstatic Queen Elizabitch, and G Herbo’s introspective and ferocious Humble Beast....

There’s no way to complain about distracting music in a restaurant without sounding like a long and lingering fart. But this won’t be the first time I’ve been accused of that, so here goes anyway: Turn it the fuck down, Beatnik. Black Bull chef Marcos Campos’s menu takes a similar approach to collecting, drawing on a sweeping variety of cuisines, from Africa to Asia to Europe and South America. In these balkananized times, it’s nice to see so many cultures come together at once, and there are some interesting ideas here, like lemongrass-scented sepia steaks (since 86’d from the menu) perched on tubular squid-ink masa dumplings (Hey, you got your Thailand in my Mexico!...

Last week’s announcement of the city’s “Arts 77” plan was a jaw-dropper. A major chunk of the money for Arts 77 is coming from the capital improvement budgets of the city and the Park District. It’s money intended for long-term infrastructure projects and funded by long-term public debt. Among projects up for grabs right now is a new Neighborhood Access Program that’ll hand out $1 million in grants of $5,000 to $50,000 each to “support the cultural vitality in neighborhoods....

Gossip Wolf is still digging through the heap of new Chicago music that came out on May 1, when Bandcamp waived its revenue share on all sales for 24 hours, but so far Berta Bigtoe is right at the top of the favorites list. The band’s cofounders and sole members, Ben Astrachan and Austin Koenigstein, made Berta Bigtoe Publicity Stunt as a lark. They decided to write and record an entire album on May 1, specifically to post on Bandcamp then (though they spent much of that 24-hour period working on it)....

Your ability to go along with this 2014 Steve Martin-Edie Brickell musical may hinge on your general willingness to accept the see-through sentiment and plucky hokum that pervades the American musical stage. But given the level of baked-in, overearnest nostalgia, especially in director Ericka Mac’s sparkly-eyed staging for BoHo Theatre, even the most romantic sap might ache for something with a bit more depth. It’s 1945, and young soldier Billy Cane returns from the war to small-town North Carolina only to find his mother has died, a trauma he successfully processes with about 32 measures of “She’s Gone....

In 2011, a group of friends who are also heavyweights in free jazz and improvised music—including Paal Nilsen-Love, Mats Gustafsson, and Ken Vandermark—formed Chicago-based cooperative and clearinghouse Catalytic Sound to give fans a way to buy music directly from the artists. Catalytic Sound originally addressed the problem of physical recordings with limited distribution—many of its members’ releases were on tiny overseas labels—but as the cooperative has grown, it’s expanded aggressively into the digital realm....