Posts

The Second City is nothing if not responsive. I mean, really: Nothing. Responsiveness is the whole point of an improv-based, satirical theater. The institution has no entertainment value if its ensemble members fail to respond to one another and no relevance if it fails to respond to the world. One standout apolitical sketch consists of nothing more than a quiet conversation between a successful son and his fuckup of a mother as they sit outside his Lake Forest manse....

The wit of Ian Svenonius is something to which we’ve never quite been privy, a clever commentary between him and himself that’s probably brilliant despite being totally impenetrable to everyone else. (Have you read his book Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ’n’ Roll Group?) Sometimes you have no choice but to respect an artist’s commitment, even if you can’t totally parse their ambition. Lucky for us, we’ve been privileged to watch Svenonius live his own legend for three decades, dressed to the nines and commanding stages with a panache that he’d probably be the first to say is borrowed from 60s soul front men....

If I’ve learned anything from The Great British Baking Show, it’s that you should always acknowledge the bravery and hard work behind any given bake—even when someone forgot to preheat the oven. The Secret of the Biological Clock is one such underbaked confection, though it is clearly a labor of love: playwright Andie Arthur blends junior detective heroes like Nancy Drew with crises of adulting. The scrappy cast give it their best....

Days after a man was fatally struck by a hit-and-run SUV driver in River North, there were still chunks of road salt on the west side of LaSalle Street just north of Chicago Avenue. According to a security guard at a nearby building, city workers hosed the victim’s blood off the street after the crash and spread the salt to keep the pavement from icing over in the freezing weather....

In the run-up to Election Day, Donald Trump’s eponymous tower on Wabash Avenue had been widely viewed as a 98-story joke. Thousands of people had RSVP’d on Facebook for a “Point and Laugh at Trump Tower” event scheduled for the evening following the election, the presumption being that he would lose to Hillary Clinton. On the sidewalk along Wacker Drive directly across the river from the skyscraper, someone had set up a makeshift photo studio—a framing device that passersby could use to complete what had become the selfie du jour: a middle finger directed at Trump’s obnoxiously monogrammed building....

In my mind Jeremy Pelt is as good a mainstream trumpeter as anyone in jazz, a highly skilled player with a sure grasp of postbop fundamentals who routinely shakes up his own practice. He’s not radical, and he never strays too far from a hard-swinging path, but he’s clearly driven by curiosity and the urge to try new things. For years he led one of my favorite acoustic bands, a deft and nuanced quintet that explored fresh territory from the starting place established by the great Miles Davis Quintet with Wayne Shorter....

Credit: Joe Mazza Jeeves Intervenes ShawChicago, which generally specializes in concert readings of George Bernard Shaw’s dialectical social satires, eschews intellectual comedy for pure farcical fun in this rendition of Margaret Raether’s adaptation of stories by British humorist P.G. Wodehouse. Set in 1928 London, the nonsensical plot concerns dimwitted, idly rich aristocrat Bertie Wooster’s efforts to evade marriage to the young lady his overbearing Aunt Agatha intends him to wed. The situation is complicated by the arrival of Bertie’s old school chum, feckless Eustace Bassington-Bassington, who needs to “borrow” Bertie’s fashionable flat to pose as a successful businessman so he can avoid his uncle’s intentions to send him off to India to learn the jute trade....

The Auditorium Theatre—that massive, stony hunk of Chicago history—celebrated the anniversary of a rebirth earlier this month with an evening of spectacular dance by members of 14 top national and international companies, including Alvin Ailey, Berlin State Ballet, and American Ballet Theatre. Also on the bill were some familiar pleas for financial support. The celebration came on the heels of some unexpected news, however. The Joffrey Ballet, which has been the Auditorium Theatre’s prestigious resident company for 22 years (in what seemed like a perfect pairing), will dump the Auditorium at the start of the 2020-’21 season and move in with Lyric Opera....

In the late 80s and early 90s, Chicago was in the midst of a comedy-club turf war. Zanies, the Funny Firm, Catch a Rising Star, the Improv, and All Jokes Aside, to name only a few, fought dirty. “Sources say that since that tidal wave of openings, club managers have increasingly been forced to turn to free passes (‘papering’) to fill their many seats, while counting on drink tabs to cover operating costs,” wrote the Reader’s Lewis Lazare in 1990....

6:30 AM I sit in my car in the parking lot and psych myself up before shift. The uncertainty and chaos of the coming hours, the reality of what’s happening—12 hours feel like 20 these days. We gather for our morning huddle. The medical surgical nurses stand by us, just as scared as we are. Forget the information we told you yesterday. Be careful, be safe, be smart. Remember, there is no emergency in a pandemic....

“To this school . . . we bring our history, our culture. Our pain, our suffering as a people, is all in here. The army says, ‘Be the best that you can be.’ We try to be the best artists that we can be,” says Lawrence Donley in Robert Wyrod’s 2002 documentary South Side Warriors. Describing his practice at the Tornado School of Martial Arts, a karate school on the south side of Chicago, he says, “It exhilarates me....

There’s no alley equivalent of the Magnificent Mile. The 1,900 miles of backstreets that crisscross Chicago’s Grid—more than in any other municipality in the U.S.—are only beautiful for their utility. The city has tried to redefine these corridors of concrete and asphalt in recent years by giving a few of them environmentally friendly makeovers or temporarily transforming them into outdoor venues for art and music festivals. But for the most part they’re still a rough and rugged part of our infrastructure—unassuming, unmanicured, and ready to perform a host of important functions while hiding in plain sight....

First Greg Wade of Publican Quality Bread lost out for Outstanding Baker. Then Sarah Rinkavage of Marisol went down for Rising Star Chef of the Year. And then Meg Galus of the Boka group lost for Outstanding Pastry Chef. Chicago’s first win tonight at the James Beard Foundation chef and restaurant awards, held at the Lyric Opera House, was Abe Conlon of Fat Rice for Best Chef Great Lakes. Conlon beat out four other Chicago entrants: Andrew Brochu of Roister, Beverly Kim and Johnny Clark of Parachute, David Posey and Anna Posey of Elske, and Lee Wolen of Boka....

I’ve got a plan to make things better in America and it’s a good plan, a healing plan. Please don’t think of it as some sort of modest proposal, because I’m not feeling modest about it at all. There are lots of smart people in Chicago but nobody else came up with this one. Just me. To ask the question was to answer it. Simply by coming up on us in the dark he’d made me squirm a little....

It’s Such a Beautiful Day Hey, did you know the Academy Awards are tonight? Of course you did, because this year, the noxious noncontroversies generated by the annual awards show are particularly noxious and particularly noncontroversial, save for the Academy’s legitimately egregious and transparently racist dismissal of the biopic Selma—though I’m sure you’ve read one too many think pieces on that subject, so I’ll spare you the soapboxing. Meanwhile, the far less significant squabbling surrounding American Sniper‘s nebulous politics and The Lego Movie‘s supposed snub in the Best Animated Feature category cloud the fact that most of the films nominated tonight really aren’t very good....

For the past few years, Chicagoan Guido Gamboa has been one of the city’s best purveyors of experimental music, though too few people have noticed. He launched his record label, Pentiments, in December 2015 with the release of his debut solo album, Saturday’s Notes, a collage of field recordings and electronics expertly arranged to render familiar sounds (car horns, camera shutters) enigmatic and beguiling. His second album, 2018 (Regional Bears), is more austere, and his new third LP, A Droll (Pentiments), further refines his sonic mischief....

UPDATE Saturday, March 14: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. Interrobang Theatre Project presents a revival of Daniel MacIvor’s daringly strange one-person show, Here Lies Henry, starring Scott Sawa in the title role, directed by Elana Elyce. Suspenders, jitters, throwback mustache and all, Sawa delivers a bravura performance as either the worst inspirational comic of all time; a soul in purgatory who keeps blurting out unsavory disclosures involving past awkwardness and possible murder; a pathological liar; or some fiercely winning jumble of all three....

Starting Friday, the Gene Siskel Film Center will close its doors for a month to renovate its two theaters. This effort marks the organization’s first extensive renovation since it started operating at its State Street location in 2001. All the seats in the two theaters will be replaced, as will the wiring; the latter renovation is to improve hearing for patrons with cochlear implants. The carpeting between the two theaters will also be replaced....

Courtesy of Stripped & Chewed This month Chicago boutique dance label Stripped & Chewed is reissuing 2000 (And We’re Still Here), which local house veteran Merwyn Sanders released under the name Merle. For Sanders, the fact that anyone besides himself is excited about the EP is an unexpected delight. It’s certainly different than the reaction Sanders received when he released the record in late 1999. “I didn’t sell anything, I didn’t hear any response,” he says....

Q: My boyfriend and I were having relationship issues until we tried something new: pegging. He wanted to try it, but he was afraid and sometimes said the idea disgusted him. Then we tried it, and it was better than normal vanilla or even kinky bondage sex. It was the most emotionally connected sex we’ve ever had. I actually pegged him three times in 24 hours. He says now he wants to be “the girl” in our relationship....