Back when nightclubs were smoke-filled rooms, where people dressed up for a night on the town, and before the 1980s explosion of comedy rooms like Zanies (and various other Ha-Ha Huts, Laugh Lodges, and Chuckle Chambers featuring generic brick walls and a lone mike onstage), there was Mister Kelly’s. Now the history of the club lives on, just around the corner from its old Rush Street location (currently occupied by Gibsons Steakhouse)....
When used in the improvisatory style pioneered by performers such as Lionel Hampton, the vibraphone is traditionally a clanging, percussive, hard-charging instrument. The marimba is arguably best known for providing the hip-shaking backbone for many traditional Latin musics. New York composer Patricia Brennan takes both instruments in more delicate and less sweaty directions. Her debut album, Maquishti (Valley of Search), is a solo tour de force in which she uses unusual techniques to create gossamer flutters and cascades of crystal tones....
Online menswear giant Bonobos recently put together an ad campaign with a video that features a rotating panoply of men wearing its clothes. The people behind the clip began it with a shot of effortless cool: a close-up of Chicago activist and rapper Ric Wilson (the ad also closes with images of two other key figures in Chicago hip-hop, star-in-the-making MC Kweku Collins and eminent poet and mentor Kevin Coval). Wilson certainly fits the role of leader in his stance against prejudice and violence—he’s worked with racial justice organizations including Black Youth Project 100 and We Charge Genocide (the latter sent him to speak about the torture of people of color at the hands of CPD before the United Nations Committee Against Torture), and he’s also at the forefront of Chicago hip-hop....
Space. The final frontier. X, a Sideshow Theatre production by Alistair McDowall (directed in its U.S. premiere by Jonathan L. Green), follows the misadventures of a group of British astronauts on Pluto. All life on earth, with the exception of humans, has died out (yet they can still mount major space missions). But bummer, communications from earth have ceased and no one can pick them up. Dysfunction reigns. Space madness sets in....
The Band’s Visit, which cleaned up with ten Tony Awards in 2018 (including nods for David Yazbek’s score, Itamar Moses’s book, and David Cromer’s direction), seems at first to be an unlikely Broadway smash. It’s a small story about small moments—all of which can easily be swallowed up on a bigger stage. Having seen the wise and poignant magic this show revealed in New York, I was both excited and trepidatious about how it would stand up on tour....
When you hear the term “art book,” what do you think? Do you imagine a gleaming, high-end store exclusively for sophisticates, academics, and design geeks? Do you reflexively visualize a heavy, clunky publication that never moves from the same spot on your living room table? Or do you just pine for all the beautiful-looking books that are too expensive and unwieldy for you ever to display in your tiny apartment?...
It’s a toss-up for me between the floating torso with a desk lamp for a head and the disembodied hand holding, improbably, a whisk. These are a few of the evil, cunningly devised puppets ghouling it up at this Rough House Theater show, a hybrid haunted house and wordless play. Entering deranged architect Milton Harrow’s studio through the basement at the Chopin, we are greeted by his creations. Displays along the walls (no touching, please, except where you see a “touch me” sign) show his unfulfilled plans for an ideal society, from scale models of bleak fortresses to a cassette tape playing his spooky dicta on an endless loop....
Moody Tongue Brewing’s new tasting room in Pilsen isn’t for everyone. It’s not for those who prefer to watch TV or snack on fried foods while drinking a pint. In fact, it’s not even for those who want to drink from a pint glass. Or from a tasting flight of small glasses. The beer is served in hand-blown Austrian goblets with stems so delicate they look liable to shatter if you sneeze too hard, and there are no flights....
At the end of April, Bandcamp announced that it would waive its revenue share on the first Fridays in May, June, and July to help support the independent labels and artists who use the platform to sell their work. Bandcamp had already done this on March 20, just as COVID-19 cancellations began to disrupt the live-music ecosystem upon which so many artists rely; that day, Bandcamp sales totaled $4.3 million. When “Bandcamp day” returned on Friday, May 1, total sales increased to $7....
Ah the heady, dreamy days of midsummer 2015, when Arun Sampanthavivat was readying Taste of Thai Town in a repurposed Albany Park police station, and all were dreaming of a Thai Eataly, a one-stop repository for the universe of Thai flavors. Alas, ToTT, turned out to be nothing special. Just a large restaurant with an unsurprising menu, mostly full of the familiar standards you can find on practically every block of the city....
Genre-agnostic antifolk singer and former Chicagoan Willis Earl Beal is making a return visit. On Sun 1/25 he plays the Portage Theater, which will also screen his movie debut, 2014’s Memphis (a favorite of Reader critic Drew Hunt). Beal also has a brand-new self-produced album called Noctunes, which has this wolf’s stamp of approval. You can buy one of the 300 CDs of Noctunes at the show for $10 (or e-mail Beal at thewillisbeal@yahoo....
Transporteur We’ve written about local trio Bitchin Bajas a few times before, including a 12 O’Clock Track write-up, but I’m going to drop another nooner for this band because their music only seems to be getting better and headier. On “Marimba,” off of the Transporteur EP (out May 4 on Hands in the Dark), percolating synth notes pitter-patter in repetitive, circular patterns while woody flutes flutter on top; at just over nine minutes long, the song is the kind of stoner library music perfect for spacing out or zoning in, depending on your wavelength....
Sandra Bland’s death is shrouded in tragedy and mystery. In July 2015, Bland was driving on a rural Texas road when she was pulled over for failing to use her turn signal. An argument ensued and the 28-year-old was jailed for assault on an officer. Three days later, Bland was found dead in her jail cell of an apparent suicide, triggering a national outcry. Last month her family settled a wrongful death suit for $1....
Braunschweiger, a type of liverwurst that’s usually smoked, has some ardent fans. Stephen Colbert likes it so much that when Martha Stewart appeared on The Colbert Report in 2010, he not only prepared her a snack with the pork sausage, but also licked some off her blouse after she dropped it. Simmons hasn’t lost his taste for braunschweiger over the years. He made two three-pound sausages, and he and his kitchen staff consumed half of one in a single afternoon—and the other half the next afternoon....
Much of silent cinema is lost to us forever. In an illuminating report from 2013 titled “The Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912-1929,” historian and archivist David Pierce revealed that approximately 75 percent of American silent-era feature films are considered lost. But that’s no longer the case for Edward Sedgwick’s The First Degree (1923), one film included in the exhaustive database of lost U.S. silent features maintained by the Library of Congress....
Some of my favorite recent hits have taken months to peak—Chief Keef’s “Faneto,” for instance, came out in October 2014 but didn’t achieve omnipresence till spring 2015. I suspect Kami’s “Payload” will follow a similar arc, and not just because I love the song. Kami is betting on it too: though the Save Money rapper initially released it on June’s Superstar (a five-song follow-up to April’s luscious full-length Just Like the Movies), he dropped the video for it last week....
I was hesitant as I walked into Pride Films and Plays on Friday night. Though the theater’s shows themselves offer powerfully human takes on queer identities, PFP’s work is often overshadowed by a shirtless-boy marketing shtick. In terms of queer representation, the image of sweaty, hairless white men is so pervasive and so limiting, a visual language favoring a singular type of transgressive sex and body. Ryan Oliveira’s Desire in a Tinier House is another gorgeous example of this dissonance at work....
Editors note: The September 17 screening and performance is sold out. CLATA will livestream the event for free through Facebook. Now, Destinos is going drive-in. Destinos al Aire takes place on Thursday, September 17 at Pilsen’s ChiTown Movies. The evening will include an open-air screening of the Mexican rom-com American Curious (directed by Gabylu Lara and set in Chicago and Mexico City), preceded by performances (both live and taped) from the Chicago artists of UrbanTheater Company, Aguijón, Repertorio Latino Theater, Teatro Vista, and the Cielito Lindo Family Folk Music ensemble....
The popular belief that the cells in our bodies replace themselves about every seven years has been challenged by the brief lives of cells in our stomachs and the longevity of those in our brains. This fall Visceral Dance Chicago launches its seventh year with seven new dancers, as well as one new dance. Yet its season opener this week at the Athenaeum takes a long look at the past with a selection of repertory from previous seasons by artistic director Nick Pupillo....
A man crawls on all fours across the stage. His eyes remain fixed on the ground directly beneath him. Two women sit astride him looking out, faces neutral as they progress through the space. One moment it’s a show of wanton subjugation-pageant queens swanning on a laboring human float. Another moment the three are a single body, an insect, or maybe a chimera, something fascinatingly wrong. “Shame is an emotion we all experience....
