Yes,” wrote Ben Brantley, “it really is that good.” Tracking the price of a seat became a pastime in itself. Noting that the average face value for a ticket to the Broadway Hamilton is $189, another Times story reported: “For most of May [2016], the median price of a ticket on the secondary market was around $850. Between the Tonys and the July 9 performances, it pushed toward $1,600. Before Mr....
In April 1999, I conducted a phone interview with singular pianist, composer, and thinker Muhal Richard Abrams, who died Sunday at his Manhattan home at age 87. I was writing an article about the Chicago native in advance of a special performance at the Cultural Center in his honor—Mayor Richard M. Daley had proclaimed April 9 of that year Muhal Richard Abrams Day in the city. I remember being nervous about chatting with such a towering figure—a cofounder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), he provided the organization with sure-handed leadership for decades, operating with thoughtful clarity and an unshakable sense of purpose....
With the release last Friday of a batch of police shooting videos, Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority has given the public what it’s been clamoring for. But as visitors to IPRA’s portal have already learned, videos of police shootings rarely are clear, coherent, and germane. Many of the videos show “hours of things like cops milling around at crime scenes and grainy images of tree tops,” as WBEZ put it....
UPDATED to add video of interview and listening party from May 9. Singer, poet, and teaching artist Jamila Woods did a stint as city spokesperson during the press run for her 2016 debut, Heavn. She’s an activist herself, and mentoring is her method of choice. At Young Chicago Authors, a youth literary nonprofit where she serves as associate artistic director, she helps developing minds tap into their poetic selves and use their voices for change....
The snow is melting, which means it’s time to make Lollapalooza predictions! This wolf thinks Drake and ASAP Rocky are locks—hat tip to Fake Shore Drive mastermind Andrew Barber, who posted that to Twitter and ought to know. Reunited Armenian-American metal band System of a Down could show, as could rapper Action Bronson, indie-pop singer Florence and whoever’s in the Machine now, and Mark Kozelek favorites the War on Drugs. Potential locals on the bill: Save Money group Leather Corduroys, rapper Mick Jenkins, and garage wunderkinds Twin Peaks....
Henry Godinez isn’t the Don Quixote type. That is, he doesn’t much resemble the popular image of that famously misguided knight errant, propagated by everybody from Daumier and Doré to Dali and Picasso. Based, I guess, on a brief description that appears at the beginning of Miguel de Cervantes’s vast 400-year-old comic novel The Adventures of Don Quixote, we’ve come to picture the man from La Mancha as your basic long drink of water....
Natalie Chami (aka TALsounds) and Whitney Johnson (aka Matchess) have been pillars of the city’s avant-garde electronic music scene for years, crafting elegantly droning ambient music on their own and engaging in thoughtful collaborations with other local artists. (Chami is also one-third of impressively far-out trio Good Willsmith, and Johnson has collaborated with the likes of Tortoise, Circuit des Yeux, and Bitchin Bajas.) Over the past few years, they’ve periodically joined forces onstage as the duo Damiana, and they’ve stolen pretty much every show Gossip Wolf has seen them play—in 2019, they opened for Meg Baird and Mary Lattimore at the Hideout and for Thou with Emma Ruth Rundle at Subterranean, and they were the best set both nights....
Just south of the Loop and along the east bank of the Chicago River, there’s a sprawling parcel of land overgrown with trees, wildflowers, and thistles. Rabbits, turtles, and even coyotes hide in the underbrush. For a minute you forget you’re in the city—until you see the foliage is masking slabs of crumbling concrete, protruding rusty pipes, broken glass, reservoirs of fetid trash, discarded clothing, liquor bottles, and beer cans....
There’s an overpass hill that arches Lake Shore Drive over Foster Avenue where we could make camp and inflate the beach ball and spread out our snacks. It’s a space I’ve walked and driven by hundreds of times without a glance or a thought, but my four-year-old daughter Lena and I settle in. She runs for miles across the hill, spending hours picking through pinecones and leaves, and generally, blessedly, having no idea what is going on in the world....
Painted banners hang long and low from the rafters of the Pulaski Park Field House, and when the music begins with a noise like a siren, the dancers flicker in and out of view through them, as animals in a thicket or words obscured by censorship bars. They are jointed and joined, mechanical and organic, as they emerge and retreat from view, in groupings that create dependencies through the tensions of push and pull that pulse within and beyond the self....
Kane Quilos and Patryck Kowalick met on Tinder, and are not ashamed to admit it. They had a low-key proposal filled with lots of giggles at their favorite Mexican restaurant. When planning the wedding, the hardest part was trying to whittle down the guest list to fit their budget. Other than that, the lead-up to their May 16 wedding date was fun and easy. But as gatherings of a certain size started to be discouraged and restrictions on travel threatened a large portion of guests flying in from the Philippines and from other cities across the U....
Wyatt Waddell dropped the remarkable new single “Fight!” on Wednesday, June 3, and it vibrates with the grief, rage, and revolutionary purpose that millions of Americans have been demonstrating since the killing of George Floyd. “This song is me looking at what’s happening and what I’d tell the people protesting,” says the local singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. Waddell recorded the track—with its pumping funk instrumentation and a roof-raising choir of his multitracked vocals—alone in a single day....
Looking back, Profiles Theatre’s 2010 production of Killer Joe, Tracy Letts’s black comedy about an insurance scam in a Texas trailer park that goes terribly wrong, was probably the high point of the company’s history. During its 20 years of existence, Profiles had developed a reputation as one of Chicago’s better non-Equity theaters, regularly producing dark and edgy new work, but Killer Joe was special. For months, audiences filled the intimate 50-seat storefront in Buena Park....
Brian Wilson performs at Pitchfork on Saturday night, celebrating the 50th anniversary of his great work of sensitive, idiosyncratic genius, the seminal R&B album Pet Sounds. OK, it’s true: Pet Sounds isn’t usually thought of as an R&B album. In fact, in some ways it’s thought of as an anti-R&B album, or even as an antimatter R&B album. Bring Pet Sounds into contact with a James Brown LP, and the two will annihilate each other—vulnerable white feyness and masculine black swagger vanishing in a puff of incompatible aesthetics....
Jazz and Heritage Pavilion Young Jazz Lions Stage 11:30 AM | Lenart Regional Gifted and Harold Washington Elementary School Jazz Combo 12:15 PM | Jones College Prep Jazz Combo 1 PM | Whitney Young Magnet High School Jazz Combo 2 PM | Curie Metropolitan High School Jazz Ensemble 2:55 PM | Pritzker High School Jazz Ensemble 3:50 PM | Kenwood High School Jazz Ensemble Von Freeman Pavilion Noon | Steve Schneck Quartet...
“You and I both know that if you leave here and talk shit about this play, people will just assume you’re racist,” says K in Fragmented, a new play by Karissa Murrell Myers (who also plays K) and directed by Spencer Ryan Diedrick (with assistance from Daniella Wheelock) that explores the condition of being a “Half Filipino, Half European American” actress from Boise, Idaho, who now lives and works in Chicago....
The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. In the fall of 1982, seven people in the Chicago area died suddenly after taking Tylenol that had been laced with cyanide. During the initial investigation of the crime, a man named James Lewis wrote a letter to Johnson & Johnson, the manufacturers of Tylenol, and claimed responsibility for the murders....
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been overwhelmed with the creativity of Chicagoans spreading news, arts, music, and wellness. Staying sane and healthy during these precarious times has become a virtually spearheaded community effort. Checking in, staying hydrated, standing up, stretching, and staying informed are the basics. The folks in the Bridgeport-based hub that encompasses Co-Prosperity Sphere, Lumpen, and Marz Community Brewing are still doing what they always do (which is a lot) and supporting artists through their new periodical, The Quarantine Times....
Seven months and over 223,948 lives lost. As a theater practitioner who has given her heart, soul, and emotional well-being to her craft, I think a lot about how we protect artists going forward. As studios resume production, theater conservatories open up to students, and theatrical unions release their own COVID-19 guidelines, we have to consider the importance of personal boundaries and emotional safety of every individual involved with these productions....
Life on the road in an indie rock band can be rough, but that only intensifies the simple pleasures. A cold beer, the crack of a snare drum, the sunset on the horizon, the blue stage lights . . . It’s addictive, even when the show’s a total bust. Jon Fine still savors these moments. Now executive editor of Inc., Fine revisits his decades-long former life as an indie rocker, when he was a guitarist for Bitch Magnet, Vineland, and Coptic Light, in Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock’s Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear), a rock memoir that’s worthy of the underground’s golden age, or at least the tour van library....
