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With Autumn de Wilde’s new film version of Jane Austen’s Emma being released next week (the seventh time it’s been adapted for film or TV, not counting Amy Heckerling’s Clueless), it seems propitious that Chicago Shakespeare has Paul Gordon’s musical adaptation currently on the boards. I missed Gordon’s world-premiere musical of Sense and Sensibility on Navy Pier in 2015. But with Emma, Gordon and director Barbara Gaines create a world that, while charming, doesn’t really do much to expand the dramatic universe of Highwood, the bucolic country estate where self-involved Emma (Lora Lee Gayer) plots the romantic futures of others—with unforeseen results....

Titus Andronicus is a bloody tale about the illusion of peacetime. Despite being a child of the Clinton administration, I didn’t realize it until I sat through Haven’s latest production at the Den, directed by Ian Damont Martin. But that’s exactly what keeps the show relevant. Haven handily rises to that occasion, loading the show with contemporary commentary about race, gender, legacy, and violence that expands the Bard’s work in rebellious form....

This story is part of a package on homelessness during the COVID-19 pandemic. Click here to read the accompanying piece. The hundreds of local hotel rooms designated as isolation housing, however, are not currently available to homeless people trying to get off the streets. Instead, they’re reserved for health-care workers and “individuals who either have a COVID-19 diagnosis or who are awaiting test results, but who cannot safely return home and do not need hospital care,” according to the mayor’s office....

On his latest album, It’s a New Day Tonight (Wick), Montreal tunesmith Michael Rault takes a big leap forward, sharpening his pop instincts and shedding the glammy specter of Marc Bolan and T. Rex that haunted its predecessor, Living Daylight. He hasn’t exactly stepped into the present, though; nearly every crisp arrangement and irresistible hook conjures 70s AM pop-rock radio, and the sparkling production by Wayne Gordon, head engineer at New York’s Daptone studio, only sharpens the music’s bite....

Analisha Santini wants you to know she’s got attention deficit disorder (“with a dash of dyslexia”). And she’s bisexual too. And as far as she’s concerned, there’s nothing coincidental about the combination. She’s also more than happy to tell you about the time she drove her parents’ car down to Saint Louis without permission, to see a suicidal girlfriend. And about the bad patch she suffered when a lot of issues hit her all at once....

To get the right people to your party, sometimes you need to personalize the invitations. Miller and Simpson shared with me the e-mails asking them to take part. Miller’s came from a producer with Emergent Order, the production house in Austin, Texas, that’s creating the documentary. It read: We’re looking for your extensive knowledge of Illinois’ political climate and unique perspective on what’s happening with the state, particularly as it relates to Michael Madigan’s 31 years as speaker of the house....

At a time when the word “organic” defines responsible living and municipalities wring their hands over soil contamination, stormwater management, and the overtaxed sewer system, how do we put two and two together and harvest the rich minerals and organisms present in our waste streams? Working with waste challenges cultural taboos, as well as presenting as an environmental risk. But sane, safe, low-tech systems for processing waste also present a real solution to reconnecting our bodies to earth....

This story was originally published by ProPublica. In the letter, I had asked him about a murder I’d been examining: the unsolved killing of a prominent Black politician in Chicago. I had reason to think he knew something about it. Nearly six decades later, no one has been brought to justice for executing Lewis, thought to be the last elected official murdered in Chicago. Officially, the case is still open, but Ben Lewis has faded from public memory....

One of the most respected film essayists in America, Thom Andersen is best known for his cult classic Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), an epic meditation on the town he calls home and its deep connection to the history of the movies. For nearly three hours, Andersen combs through the city in search of locations that appeared in famous (and not so famous) films, juxtaposing his own footage with archival clips to show how real places became part of our collective imagination....

With the Black Lives Matter movement taking center focus in Chicago and outside our city walls, the community is teeming with active engagement and empowerment. We see this with protests, public art, music, and even Columbus statues coming down: racial justice activism is uniquely alive after months of pandemic hibernation. A new multigenerational coloring book called #BlackArtMatters seeks to contribute to the cause by highlighting Black artists, representing the breadth of Blackness and the importance of racial and gender equality....

Warning: This review contains spoilers. But, it’s in episode three that the deep-seated issues of Chicago housing come into play when heroine Letitia “Leti” Lewis (played by Jurnee Smollett) buys a huge old house on the city’s north side. As an opening title card reminds us, “pioneering is dangerous,” and to stay in this home, Leti battles both physical and spiritual evil. But as scary as the supernatural storyline may be, nothing is quite as chilling as knowing what a group of Black folks have to face when moving to an all-white neighborhood....

Forest Bathing (LM Duplication) is the first album by Hawk and a Hacksaw, the Albuquerque duo of Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost, in five years. Since releasing 2013’s You Have Already Gone to the Other World—a project inspired by Soviet-era director Sergei Paradjanov’s 1964 film Shadows for Forgotten Ancestors—they’ve become more efficient in adapting the eastern-European and particularly Roma sounds that have provided their key influences for more than a decade....

Bushra Amiwala represents a growing trend of 20-something college students running for public office. When she put in her ballot to run for the Cook County Board of Commissioners in 2017, she was only 19 years old running against a 16 year incumbent. After coming in second in that three-person race, she pushed forward with another campaign. This time, a successful run for a position on District 73.5 Board of Education, where she currently serves as the youngest on a seven-member board....

Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein raised the bar for New York City underground boom-bap back in 2001. On that album, rappers Vast Aire and Vordul Mega rapped in short bars and slow flows over a dizzying, asymmetrical, gelatinous sci-fi-hip-hop soundscape provided by producer El-P. Whereas most underground hip-hop releases of the time relied on jazz samples laced over straightforward drum loops and rappers forcing similes and punch lines, Vast Aire and Vordul Mega often spoke in metaphor over off-kilter beats, depicting New York City as a bleak, anxiety-ridden metropolis full of vermin and metal, and somehow locating the axis between pre-Giuliani and post-9/11 Manhattan in the process....

In December 2015 world-class DJ and WGCI on-air personality Timothy Jones, better known as DJ Timbuck2, died from stage-four renal cancer at the age of 34, leaving the Chicago hip-hop community bereft. Jones had been involved in the scene since before he could legally enter most clubs; in the early 90s, he apprenticed with Common’s right-hand DJ, Twilite Tone, who was friends with his older sister. Jones went on to spin at popular clubs such as Dragon Room and Slick’s Lounge in the early 2000s, joined WGCI and the elite DJ crew Heavy Hitters in the mid-aughts, and went on to tour as a DJ for Kanye West and Lupe Fiasco....

When it comes to music, Sweden is perhaps most famous for sweetly catchy pop and brutal death metal. Five-piece Electric Hydra finds the spiritual midpoint between those genres on its self-titled debut album by leaning into another Swedish tradition—retro hard-rock revivalism. The record’s cover art brackets the band’s name with two gaping snake maws that look like tattoo flash, and the music is very much what you’d expect from that: 34 minutes of adrenaline-pumping, stadium-size pop-metal goodness....

I would have been perfectly content to get through life without ever reading a credit-rating report. Before I get to the details, you should know something about credit-rating reports. They’re supposed to be independent analyses of a government body’s financial strengths and weaknesses. Anyway, I read Moody’s recent reports on the city and the Chicago Public Schools to see if it discovered that Chicago has started sliding into the lake—that whole neighborhoods are going under, hundreds of businesses are collapsing, or thousands of residents are skedaddling for the suburbs....

When T.S. Eliot wrote “April is the cruelest month,” he wasn’t thinking about what passes for spring here. But this time every year, Gossip Wolf breeds lilacs and grudgingly mixes memory and desire—while listening for new jams that sound like warmer weather. Singer-songwriter Danielle Sines and her beach-ready jangle-pop project, Impulsive Hearts, reliably provide! Last month, Sines and the band (drummer Dan Julian, bassist Doug Hoyer, violinist Jess LeMaster, and saxophonist Fallon McDermott) dropped the sun-dappled four-song cassette MeToo: A Benefit for Resilience, proceeds from which will support Chicago nonprofit Resilience, which helps victims of sexual violence....

Most top-ten lists of queer feminist authors don’t mention Louisa May Alcott, and Little Women is better remembered as a quaint account of feminine domesticity than the subtle revolution that it is: the story of sisters in a wartime household headed by their mother that includes but does not focus on their relationships with men. At the center of the narrative is Jo—an impassioned author of hilariously melodramatic thrillers who won’t bow to fashion or tradition as she drives and then chronicles the escapades of the March girls....

The consensus is that composer, bandleader, and pianist Duke Ellington did his best work in the 30s and 40s, but he achieved so many moments of brilliance in the decades that followed that there’s no good reason to cling to that thinking—few 20th-century musicians adapted and grew like he did while retaining a clear artistic identity. One of my all-time favorite Ellington works is The Far East Suite, recorded in December 1966 and released early the next year....