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When we first catch sight of her, waiting at a Greyhound Bus stop in the mountain hamlet of Spruce Pine, North Carolina (which actually exists, by the way), the eponymous 25-year-old heroine of Violet looks like any young woman on the verge of an adventure. What we can’t see is, ironically, what’s most obvious to the people she meets over the course of this 1997 musical set in 1964: a grotesque facial scar, the result of a freak accident she suffered as a child....

The Chicago police officer who shot and killed a mother of five and a distraught teen wielding a baseball bat in the early hours after Christmas has now been identified. A Reader analysis of internal police records and scanner audio from the day of the incident point to Robert Rialmo as the officer who fatally shot Bettie Jones, 55, and Quintonio LeGrier, 19, on December 26. According to the scheduling logs obtained by the Reader, Rialmo was assigned to work an overnight shift in beat 1172R beginning at 10:30 PM on December 26....

Ohio-bred singer-songwriter Jessica Lea Mayfield has made it hard to know just who she is musically. Over the course of four albums she’s reinvented her sound, stumbling between country, soul, hard rock, and boilerplate indie rock. Her diminutive voice—a small, fragile warble—has been the consistent element, but it exhibits a chameleonic effect that seems defined by the musical arrangements. Mayfield’s album Sorry Is Gone (ATO) doesn’t demonstrably alter that pattern, but it reveals a strong, compelling perspective....

The low rumble of the double bass slides up and down with the rise and fall of a tumult of waves to begin the piece. The dancers’ movements manifest a calm sea, storms, and the ebb and flow of the tide. Water’s qualities take on a form that parallels the evolution and modulation of human relationships—waves that are external as well as within oneself. King created and maintains an all-female-identifying dance company in part to address the privileges that male-presenting dancers are accorded in the dance world, due to their rarity relative to women....

T wo years ago a taqueria in Santa Ana, California, filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against KFC seeking damages from the death-peddling corporate protein merchant for using “Para chuparse los dedos” (“to suck the fingers”) as the Spanish-language analog to “finger-licking good.” Chef Montes de Oca, who’s mostly a one-woman operation, fries pica pollo to order every day she’s open, and marinates a batch for the next. But not everything on the menu hanging above the register is always available....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Hot Snakes, “Suicide Invoice” The Greatest Living Posthardcore Band played this cold knife of an earworm at Music Frozen Dancing. The next day, I learned that Jeff VanderMeer (of Annihilation fame) had used its lyrics as an epigram for his new novel, Dead Astronauts: “And when I dream / I keep my promises to you / I really do....

Three versions of lovers Daniel and Greg—in their 20s, 30s, and “50s and older”—occupy the stage in this original musical by Dennis Manning (songs) and Ronnie Larsen (book). The pair meet in college, maybe around 2000, a fact gleaned from tossed-in pop culture references: John Denver’s dead, Beyoncé is famous. Thus the oldest iteration of the couple, who’ve weathered 40-plus years, is living in the 2040s at the earliest, which here looks identical to the present day....

Frequent visitors to Rodrick Markus’s lair expect to encounter powerful aromas such as truffle, strawberry, or barrel-aged tea. No one expects it to smell like weed. But that was the unmistakable perfume I inhaled one recent afternoon as we sat at the table in his twilit warehouse-tasting-room/laboratory at Rare Tea Cellar in Ravenswood. Between us he’d lined up a half dozen glass bowls, each filled with a different premium tea blend—except for the one containing a pile of fat, green Oregon- and Vegas-grown Honolulu Haze nugs....

When guitar wunderkind Ryley Walker releases his first album of proper songs in a couple of years, this new glimpse at where he’s headed in his music is cause to rejoice. The Rockford native shredded in a noisy fashion as a youth, playing in free-jazzin’ bands Heat Death and Tiger Hatchery, but about a decade ago Walker seemed to undergo a seismic shift: he traded in dissonance a la jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock for the mellow sound of troubled singer-songwriters such as the Tims Hardin and Buckley....

With more than 350 sites to choose from during the Chicago Architecture Center’s free Open House Chicago event this weekend, it can be a challenge to decide which to visit. Here’s a suggestion: Bronzeville’s Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church, at 45th Street and Vincennes Avenue. It has a unique place in the architectural and musical history of the city, but the most compelling reason to get there may be the one that stands just under two miles away, on the southeast corner of Indiana Avenue and 33rd Street....

After this year’s stylish spring edition, the Chicago Humanities Festival is rushing toward its main fall event, literally. This year’s theme, announced yesterday afternoon, is “speed.” “The theme was chosen because we all have the feeling that we live in a world with one setting: faster,” says Alison Cuddy, the festival’s associate artistic director. “What does that mean? What does it look like? The other side of it is slowing down: the interest in door-stopper novels, the way serial television has become something we can consume over a long period of time or binge-watch all at once, the DIY and Slow Food movements....

Montreal synth-pop trio Le Couleur delve into some disturbing history on their new album, Concorde, named for the supersonic airliner that in the 1970s made it possible for elite jet-setters to leave their European estates and arrive at Manhattan nightclubs after as little as three hours in the air. Midway through the record’s title track, the group deliver a gut-punching reminder of the great stain on the Concorde’s legacy: a fuel-tank explosion on a 2000 Air France flight that left no survivors....

Our thoughts are with France, and by a lucky coincidence, this week its thoughts are with us. Launched in 2011, the Music Box Theatre’s Chicago French Film Festival provides a valuable snapshot of what’s happening in French cinema, still the liveliest national cinema in Europe. Following are reviews of eight features screening this week, six of them making their local premieres; all are in French with subtitles. —J.R. Jones Down by Love In this drama by writer-director Pierre Godeau, a prison director (Guillaume Gallienne) falls in love with an inmate (Adèle Exarchopoulos of Blue Is the Warmest Color), though his passion feels more like taboo-specific lust (and mannered lust at that)....

Eclectic Full Contact Theatre presents David Lindsay-Abaire’s nails-on-a-chalkboard farce about a woman whose amnesia makes each day a completely blank slate. When Claire wakes up she doesn’t remember she’s married with a son, whether she drinks coffee, or even her own name. Her husband has helpfully put together a book of facts and photos of her life that he hopes will help her day go smoother. But can he be trusted?...

Sufferers of phantom gluten intolerance, and those with legitimate celiac disease, had cause for excitement this fall when a New York-based restaurant landed in the Gold Coast promising to feed them free of that maligned mixture of proteins. The Little Beet Table is the formal offspring of a small fast-casual chain slinging healthy, vegetable-dominant food for people with any number of the usual assortment of dietary restrictions that can make the act of eating a lot of tedious work....

Loyalists were “persons inimical to the liberties of America,” as was said by patriots during the Revolutionary War. On their worst days they were often subject to arson and tarring and feathering, but at war’s end many of them—including former slaves—were granted asylum in Canada. A casual hangout like the Loyalist is legally beholden to have fried potatoes on the menu (there are two versions, in fact); nevertheless its “smokey” potatoes, while not particularly smoky tasting, are a happy surprise, bedded on a fried egg showered with tart sauerkraut, the whole baby spuds’ crispy outer shell jacketing an ethereal interior....

It was hot on the August day in 2016 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel presented the Obama Foundation with nearly 20 acres of Jackson Park as the site for the Obama Presidential Center. Besides, the difference was as clear as the panorama of lagoon and woods stretching before us: Lucas is a moviemaker with no Chicago roots; Obama is the nation’s first Black president, a hometown hero of unprecedented status, nurtured and launched on this very ground....

Movies adapted from video games are a disreputable genre, and Warcraft isn’t likely to change that. Critics savaged the movie when it opened last Friday, competing to see who could come up with the most withering put-down and who could be first with the laborious punch line “Game over.” Of course, everything is a competition now: the gaming of America, which began with the emergence of team sports in the early 20th century and accelerated with the advent of video games in the 1980s, has reached its logical conclusion in a presidential contest destined to play out as a real-time strategy game....

Chicago punk trio the Lawrence Arms formed in 1999, and they’re aging remarkably well. Rather than settle for the kind of navel-gazing that’s common among bands of their vintage—commemorating, say, the milestone anniversary of an old favorite album with a long tour—they’ve continued to evolve as they make new music. On their seventh album, Skeleton Coast (Epitaph), the Lawrence Arms transmute their rat-a-tat drive and sweet-but-tough melodies into bruised anthems; these ruddy, lived-in songs provide a perfect setting for the band’s two singers, guitarist Chris McCaughan and bassist Brendan Kelly, to survey our scorched-earth landscape and contemplate a better future....

In November 1893, the journalist Kate Field asked what should be done with the buildings of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the great majority of which were built as temporary structures. “Apply the torch and let it go down in a day,” was one reply. Field felt a twinge of sadness for the millions who hadn’t had the chance to see with their own eyes “the greatest achievement of the nineteenth century....