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I’m no fan of imperatives, but on occasion one simply must make an exception. To wit: Stop reading this. Not kidding. Cease immediately and go get tickets to Porchlight Music Theatre’s Sophisticated Ladies. Directed and choreographed by Brenda Didier and Florence Walker Harris with music direction by Jermaine Hill, it is to jukebox musicals as the Grand Canyon is to sinkholes. Every song in the revue tells an elaborate story rich in detailed characters, the transitions between songs adding layers on layers....

Sandy Ewen’s music is a constant series of negotiations. She’s constantly seeing what new sounds she can get out of her guitar, using found objects such as steel-wool scrubbing pads, dowels, bolts, cat-grooming brushes, and lengths of chalk. She’s also an inveterate collaborator who relishes chances to test her compatibility with new acquaintances or to explore possibilities within her enduring partnerships with drummer Weasel Walter, bassist Damon Smith, and guitarist Tom Carter....

Someday, there will a Great American Novel (or Screenplay) set in 2016, a year that will stand in the collective mythology of millennials in the same way that 1968 is remembered by baby boomers—in the sense that this is the year Americans are convinced our country is going to hell. Someone is probably already taking notes for it. But until then, there is the Truth Booth, a 15-foot-tall, 22-foot-wide inflatable speech balloon/video studio that has been touring the country to record people finishing the statement, “The truth is....

The pandemic has kept many of us from leaving the house, but honestly, why would you want to? There is too much TV to watch to go outside. Outside doesn’t have Hulu or Netflix or HBO Max. To encourage you to stay home and stay safe, comedian/writer Rima Parikh and myself (two people who watched just as much TV in the before times) will be diving deep into the shows we’re loving or lovingly hate-watching, social-distance-style, over Google chat....

“Make sure you can read the label!” #ArtMom #NewMom #ChicagoMom “Frida Kahlo: Timeless” Through 9/6: seven days, 10 AM-6 PM, Thursdays until 10 PM. Cleve Carney Museum of Art, College of DuPage, 425 Fawell, Glen Ellyn, theccma.org This concept lends itself to my personal experiences with the show. One facet of “Timeless” that feels especially complicated to me is the family programming. As my husband, baby, and I haphazardly walked through the show, each of us bewildered to be around so many people, we couldn’t go more than five feet without a well-meaning docent telling us about the Kahlo Kids’ Corner in the back....

The way Chicagoans dance is big and wide, fearlessly filling the amplitude of space in the midwest. The way Chicagoans dance has brashness and grit that doesn’t look for compromises. It is muscular, bold, and quite upright. They don’t call it the City of Broad Shoulders for nothing. A founding dancer of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago who also taught in and directed its studio for nearly 40 years, Claire Bataille made us see it that way, working in the studio she loved almost to her final days before succumbing to pancreatic cancer on December 30, 2018....

On July’s Full Flower (Topshelf), Baltimore’s Us & Us Only play indie rock reminiscent of the brackish waters that split the eastern part of the state of Maryland, the Chesapeake Bay. The genre is open to mixing many different things; Us & Us Only’s version is multilayered, charmingly timid and tender to the touch. The group allows their music to breathe and give it room to stealthily borrow ideas from other genres, such as the pondering melodies of slowcore, the minimal plaintiveness of folk, and the bare verses and walloping choruses of emo....

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Blackhat Catching up with Blackhat over the weekend, I found myself reminded—and surprisingly often—of selections in this year’s Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, which I previewed for this week’s issue of the Reader. Michael Mann’s latest is, on one level, a catalogue of textures that can be achieved with digital video. According to IMDB, the filmmakers used no fewer than five different video cameras, ranging from professional-grade equipment to “prosumer” models you can find at Best Buy....

In September prolific Chicago musician Seth Engel dropped Maxed Out, a full-length of woeful but ebullient power pop by his long-running solo project, Options. And when Engel turned 27 on Monday, he released Besides, which consists of tracks he’d intended to include on two Options tour EPs. He opens the glum, mellifluous “Milk” with the lines “I am afraid / Of what I’ll say / If I would just let it out of my head”—which to me sounds like a reference to the anxiety plenty of folks felt about sharing Thanksgiving dinner with relatives who supported the president-elect....

July 2001 I work at a record store in Chicago, where I am paid six dollars an hour (I take my day’s pay right from the register at the end of my shift) and can have any used CD in the store I want so long as I clean it. On my last day at the store, two albums come into the shop that I’ve never heard before: Hunky Dory and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars....

As its title implies, Rebecca Gilman’s new play, Soups, Stews, and Casseroles: 1976, is set during the American bicentennial—but its roots are very much in the present day, notably the 2011 protests in Madison, Wisconsin, after Governor Scott Walker proposed eliminating collective bargaining for public sector unions in order to alleviate the state’s budget crisis. The play explores the various communities and loyalties in Reynolds, Wisconsin, after the local owners of the town’s cheese plant sell out to a Chicago-based conglomerate....

Chilean-American author Isabel Allende is famous for using magical realism in her fiction, a stylistic attribute that often overshadows how deeply her stories are rooted in her personal experiences. For instance, her debut novel, The House of Spirits, was formed out of a real-life letter to her ailing grandfather. Allende’s first cousin once removed was Salvador Allende, the controversial former president of Chile and the first Marxist to come to office in Latin America through open elections; Isabel eventually fled her home country to escape death threats from the Chilean government....

Under the name Itasca, Kayla Cohen has released some of the most sublime under-the-radar singer-songwriter sounds of the decade. As a teenager, Cohen picked up the guitar to explore the experimental strains of music she liked, and soon her own tunes began to bubble to the surface. In 2012, she moved from New York to Los Angeles and released her first cassette, Grace Riders on the Road, which showcases her breezy, sepia-toned vibrations in sparse, mostly instrumental pieces that occasionally veer into fuzzy psychedelic drones....

Today local label Vinyl for a Cause drops a limited-edition vinyl seven-inch called VFAC 004 in collaboration with Chicago-based online record marketplace Reverb LP. It’s the fourth Vinyl for a Cause release, and like the first three, it brings together two local artists to reimagine each other’s original creations—and half of the net proceeds go to a nonprofit chosen by the artists. On side B, Coval flips Woods’s “LSD” (featuring Chance the Rapper) into “Snow Day,” a song dedicated to Chicago’s winters....

Jane Austen is not a writer whose work you’d automatically consider as material for a full-blown, unironic musical. It’s true that all six of her books center around the marriage plot, and there’s usually a large and colorful supporting cast, including someone who can be counted on to play the pianoforte at a party, and sometimes one of the heroes will even say or write something absolutely swoon-worthy like “You pierce my soul....

The Jacaranda Collective’s inaugural production is a one-woman dramatization of the notes and journal entries of Rachel Corrie, the young American woman killed by a bulldozer as she tried to prevent the leveling of a Palestinian home by Israeli forces. Adapted to the stage by actor Alan Rickman and journalist Katherine Viner, it’s meant to be a provocative salvo from a brand-new theater company. But fraught, tragic source material doesn’t necessarily equal great drama....

A distinct aroma reminiscent of hookah smoke hangs in the air at the Sixth. The cocktail bar doesn’t allow patrons to smoke—but the bartenders can and do. The smoke created by grinding up cedar wood, dried citrus peel, and shisha, and putting the mix into a handheld smoker is a key element of one of the most popular drinks: the mescal-based Spaceman Spiff, which is served atop a small, smoke-filled bowl....

Nature’s Care may be a medical and adult-use cannabis dispensary brand in Illinois, but its mission includes much more than selling cannabis. Nature’s Care believes in doing the right thing and using its resources to support under-served communities and citizens in Illinois. With its upcoming new cannabis dispensary slated to open in the West Loop on September 28, Nature’s Care is taking this time to show Chicago the reality of their mission and just what they’ve been up to for the past year....

Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times Media Wouldn’t Rahm just love to announce Obama’s library is coming to Chicago? With parents and students up in arms over the state’s insistence on shoving another dumbass standardized test down their throats, I thought it would be as good a time as ever to come up with a multiple-choice quiz of my own. For the last year or so, President and Mrs. Obama have been courting sites competing for the library, weighing them against one another to see which most deserves it....