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Trumpeter Adam O’Farrill is just 23, but there’s already plenty of weight attached to his name. His father is the acclaimed, innovative Latin jazz bandleader and pianist Arturo O’Farrill, and his grandfather was the great Afro-Cuban bandleader Chico. He began to forge his own path early on in his career, making waves playing alongside saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa on the latter’s 2015 album Bird Calls (ACT) and establishing himself as an improviser of protean strength and melodic clarity....

When The Americans—which I came to think of as possibly the best TV show I’d ever watched—came to its conclusion last week, I looked back at what I’d written in 2013 when it was new and, in my view, pretty silly. I quoted le Carré reflecting on the novel that made him famous: “The merit of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, then—or its offense, depending where you stood—was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible....

Ty Segall and his crew are notoriously prolific. Segall himself is constantly releasing new records and announcing new projects, and over the years, his sidemen have started stepping out into the spotlight themselves, most notably Mikal Cronin with his albums of bubbly, baroque pop. Now it’s Charles Moothart’s turn: the guitarist for the Ty Segall Band and Fuzz is now fronting his own project, CFM, and its first tune has crept out of the shadows....

Bow down to It Came from Outer Space, the OG mother of all alien blockbusters. Since invading movie theaters nearly 70 years ago, the film (based on an original story by Ray Bradbury) has helped cement the genre’s place in the zeitgeist. It has left its influence on everything from Alien to Star Wars to Star Trek to your Uncle Bob’s conspiracy theories about the Bermuda Triangle and Area 51....

Philip Montoro Music editor Anna They’re one of the youngest on the bill, if not the youngest; lead singer Kelli Mayo is 19. Leor Monarchy Over Monday show a lot of promise—they’ve clearly listened to the Misfits quite a bit. They’re gonna open things Saturday, which is a great way for Riot Fest to invest in the newer generation the same way they did when they booked Twin Peaks for their first festival gig....

Audrey Cefaly’s new play, receiving its world premiere at 16th Street Theater as part of the National New Play Network 11-theater rolling world premiere, tells the story of a photographer who comes to shoot a lonely agoraphobe in Alabaster, Alabama, and ends up having an affair with her. The fact that the plot sounds a lot like The Bridges of Madison County is even joked about by one of the characters late in the play, but actually the differences between this story and that one are so profound, you would be forgiven for not noticing the parallel....

The meandering series of bits, skits, monologues, and pantomimes that makes up Hot Kitchen Collective’s exploration of outer and inner space doesn’t necessarily have a narrative, but it has no shortage of things to say. Nine performers take turns riffing on science facts and fiction while wearing very homemade, provisional astronaut garb. I spent most of its 75-minute running time with a smile on my face. References to shopworn pop culture signifiers like the musical theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey (used repeatedly as an interstitial, to varying comic effect) are counterbalanced by moments of poetic, often wordless wonder....

Q: I’m a gay guy who’s involved with a guy I met a few months before COVID-19 took off. He’s a great guy, smart, funny, hot, healthy, and easy to be around. It started as a hookup but we have chemistry on several levels and, without either of us having to say it, we started seeing each other regularly. We both live alone and decided to be exclusive due to the pandemic....

The spaceship under construction across from Old Orchard Mall was the first thing that gave me comfort after I moved to Evanston on March 10. Moving during the first week of a pandemic-induced global lockdown that one suspects might also signify end-times is unnerving, but back in the early days that immediately followed the end of the before times, that spaceship made me smile. I decided to investigate. The dog owners are a tough crowd....

In The Blood is an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s masterwork, The Scarlet Letter, in which Hester Prynne is required by the leaders of Puritan Boston to wear a letter A to identify her as an adulteress after she gives birth to a child while her husband is away. Suzan-Lori Parks, a 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner, updates the story to include five bastard children who have different fathers. Hester Prynne (played by a phenomenal Nyajai Ellison) is now Hester La’Negrita, an illiterate African-American woman who is unable even to write the letter A but is determined to provide for her children....

Q: I’m a gay man in a relationship and we’re both really happy since we met a year ago. We’re “open” in the sense that he wants the option to be intimate with someone else if a connection happens and in turn he said he would be supportive of me being involved in my kinks. But I haven’t done anything yet out of fear. I’m not afraid of my kinks. I’m worried that if I ask to go do something kinky it will ruin our relationship....

Steppenwolf Theatre’s robust Garage Rep, in which the mighty Lincoln Park institution hands over its handsome 80-seat Garage Theatre—as well as production and publicity teams—to three substantially less-than-mighty local companies for nine weeks, has traditionally been something of a free-for-all. It’s never mattered whether the shows had anything to do with one another, hewed to any particular aesthetic, or offended anyone’s tastes. If a chosen company wanted to try it out, it was in....

Cindy Eigler and Aislinn Pulley are co-executive directors of the Chicago Torture Justice Center, which seeks to address the traumas of police violence and institutionalized racism through access to healing and wellness services, trauma-informed resources, and community connection. The center’s Survivor Family Advisory Council also contributed to this piece. The survivors we work with at the center underwent the most hideous and inhumane violence at the hands of the police and spent decades in prison taken from their families and communities—and yet, the pain they describe most often is the pain of telling their stories of being harmed, being dismissed and disbelieved....

Chicago multi-instrumentalist and recording engineer Vivian McCall helped turn Andrew Smith’s bedroom project, Jungle Green, into a bona fide six-piece band when she joined in 2017. Since they all began playing together, she’s engineered sessions for projects by the band’s other members, and she’s also stepped out on her own with her self-titled solo debut as Pansy. The nine-track album came out early this month via Earth Libraries, a label in Birmingham, Alabama, whose catalog includes punk, experimental, and lo-fi music....

Dave Blanco called for his daughter Carli, but she wasn’t there. The 14-year-old had stayed home from school that day with a stomachache, but she was in good spirits, even laughing and joking with her father—a retired Chicago police lieutenant—as they watched YouTube videos on that Tuesday, April 4, 2017. The jovial nature of that morning was a welcome respite from the past few months, when Carli’s battle with mental illness had reached crisis levels....

Michael Gebert Kurumaya in Elk Grove Village During the course of my interview with Japan-obsessed cook Scott Malloy yesterday, we got to talking about what Japanese restaurants we liked, especially in the suburbs around O’Hare, where there are a number of authentic ones serving the employees of Japanese companies based near the airport. Many were ones we both knew, but his absolute favorite was one completely unknown to me—though, as it turns out, he heard about it from a mutual friend (thank you, Charlotte Tan)....

Twenty years ago Illinois emo trio American Football released their self-titled debut to little interest or acclaim, but since then the wistful, gentle record has become a totem that’s eclipsed many bigger indie and emo releases of that era. Even the album’s cover art—an angled photo of an Urbana house none of the band’s members even lived in—has proved inspiring, becoming the subject of works of art and memes, as well as being referenced by bands on their own album sleeves....

For better or worse, former Gage chef Dirk Flanigan is largely responsible for bringing back the Scotch egg over the last decade, as Chicago writhed in the throes of its love affair with gastropubbery. The snack quickly proliferated all over town, and for every molten ovum core jacketed in crispy, hot sausage there were a dozen fryer-petrified fossils as rock solid as a carbon-frozen Han Solo. The preponderance of snacky, meaty, beer-friendly foods is practically a given, so maybe that’s how I got snookered by the Scotch egg....

On an Amtrak platform in Springfield, I met that rarest of Illinoisans: a woman who divides her time and her loyalties between downstate and Chicago. Pat Staab lives in the state capital most of the time, but she was on her way to Chicago, where she keeps a condo in River North. “I’m from New York,” she told me. “I need a big city.” As a result of her peregrinations between upstate and down-, Staab is well versed in how the state’s rival regions view each other....

James Cagney was pegged as a wisecracking gangster early in his career, but his range as a performer extended far beyond those limiting roles. The streaming channel FilmStruck currently features Cagney as its star of the week, collecting some of his best gangster films (The Public Enemy, White Heat) but also some, noted below, that showcase his skill as a dancer and comic actor. Footlight Parade One of the best of the Warner Brothers showbiz musicals (1933), with James Cagney turning in a dynamite performance as an enterprising producer, and Busby Berkeley contributing some of his most engaging and bizarre production numbers (including his first water ballet, “By a Waterfall”)....