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Recently, for more than a month, ex-Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob kept a vigil. Like many former, and even current, employees of the newspaper, he’d been among the harshest critics of the daily’s Rush Limbaugh-like conservative bloviator John Kass. As I had, they’d frequently called Kass out on Twitter for his cynical right-wing talking points and flat-earth arguments. After that, every few days Jacob tweeted at Kass, razzing him for failing to follow through....

This past weekend saw the release of John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum, the latest in Chad Stahelski’s immensely entertaining series about an unflappable (and endlessly pursued) assassin played by Keanu Reeves. These films are generally categorized as action movies, but for me their chief pleasure is their inventive and breathless fight choreography. (Indeed, in my capsule review of the latest John Wick, I compared the series favorably to Gene Kelly’s musicals....

Michael Schmidt/Sun-Times Jesus Garcia speaks outside the DuSable Museum before a recent debate. He pledges to hire a thousand more police officers if he’s elected mayor. A politician campaigns in poetry and governs in prose, Rahm Emanuel’s buddy David Axelrod likes to say. That maxim, coined by the late New York governor Mario Cuomo, is astute, but the “poetry” of a campaign is rarely the challenging type. It tends to be shallow and ingratiating—it’s designed to be music to the ears of voters....

Bars and restaurants are slowly opening up, now that City of Chicago COVID-19 guidelines have loosened a bit and indoor dining is possible for establishments with a food license. The limit is still 50 percent capacity, and food must be available, but the shift to Phase IV has meant that a few of our favorite tippling houses are waving hello again. Fri 3/12, 8 PM: Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois-Chicago hosts Funk Lessons: a Tribute, a homage to artist Adrian Piper’s 1983 performance piece Funk Lessons presented by artist Felicia Holman with DJ Cqqchifruit....

“The reality is women actually run the world,” Ida Nelson told me over the phone last week, which got me laughing and clapping at the same time. Women know this statement as fact, but we still have to prove ourselves and our worth within mostly white, male-dominated industries. Nelson is using the hustle from the pandemic to change that and showcase her strength in entrepreneurship within the cannabis industry, which has grown tremendously in Illinois since the state legalized recreational marijuana in 2020....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Walkoe, Ball, Allison, and drummer Ron Januchowski (aka Ron Lee) could all sing, and they got inspired to do something about it when they saw proto-supergroup the Exceptions play at Club Laurel in Chicago, near Foster and Broadway....

If today’s woman were lost in space, would she care more about having enough food to survive or having enough laptop battery to finish Parks and Recreation on Netflix? How should you deal with a sexual attraction to Bigfoot? And why do guys dressed as Waldo from Where’s Waldo? think it’s OK to be a total creep to women at Halloween parties? The sketch show I Think, Therefore I’m Sorry searches for the answers to these pressing questions....

I can’t say I mind the recent shift of young country singer-songwriters embracing the 70s as creative inspiration—the tar-black darkness of Jamie Johnson or the cosmic vibes of Sturgill Simpson are both good examples. There’s something about the music these folks are making that doesn’t feel retro; the way their acoustic guitars, pedal steels, and rhythms support their observation-rich storytelling feels timeless. Earlier this summer Tyler Childers entered the fray with his impressive Simpson-produced debut album, Purgatory (Hickmen Holler/Thirty Tigers)....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, September 8, 2016. Cook County public defender slams “war on guns” Cook County public defender Amy P. Campanelli disapproves of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Police Department superintendent Eddie Johnson’s push for tougher gun laws and longer prison sentences for illegal gun possession. “Increasing minimum sentences will not stop violence; it will merely incarcerate one generation while another generation steps up and continues the violence,” she wrote in a Tribune op-ed....

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. Mueller, as it happened, had taken up shooting because she’d been raped. The standard advice at the time—don’t walk alone at night, stay in well-lit areas, run from your attacker or, if he has a gun, try to reason with him—had turned out to be completely useless....

It’s a brave new world during these days of quarantine, and for the technology-challenged among us, it can be daunting to keep up. If you’re willing to learn a few basics, there’s a world of free and low-cost workshops on the cyberweb that can help you exercise your brain and give you new skills. Zoom is just one of the many video conferencing platforms that are free to use (whither WebEx?...

When artists of all sorts pivoted to livestreaming, the results were mixed at best. The technical difficulties of a Zoom show, the learning curve of TikTok, the inevitable energy shift that comes with playing to a computer screen, it can all add up to a bad show. But once NoonChorus entered the scene, enjoying live performances from both sides seemed possible again. The Chicago-based streaming platform was designed with the artists in mind, whether that be musicians, comedians, podcasters, and more who have since found their shows a home on the site....

If you’re fond of the loud, outre rock bands that have emerged in Chicago over the past decade or so, Djunah have your number. Front woman Donna Diane (aka Donna Polydoros) and drummer Nick Smalkowski previously played in two of the mightier groups on the scene: Beat Drun Juel and Fake Limbs, respectively. As Beat Drun Juel petered out toward the end of 2017, Diane tinkered with solo sets under the name “Naked, Riding a Lion Made of Fire,” playing guitar and adding bass notes with a foot-operated Moog Taurus pedal synthesizer....

Theresa Rebeck’s acidic portrait of workplace discrimination, written in 1992 in the wake of the Anita Hill hearings, is still timely. That’s probably good news for Rebeck. But it’s definitely bad news for women, who are still dragged as ambitious ballbusters if they dare to do things men do (such as run for president). Compass Theatre, a new Equity company making its debut with Rebeck’s play, staged by Lauren Shouse, lands plenty of sharp jabs to the solar plexus....

There are beignets for dessert at Gideon Sweet, Matthias Merges and Graham Elliot’s reunion of sorts in the Randolph Street space that once housed the latter chef’s Graham Elliot Bistro. And scene. Now he and Elliot have tapped chef Michael Shrader,* from the last spot (and Urban Union before that). Here he’s executing a menu that’s more Yusho-like than anything previously mentioned, featuring just more than a dozen small plates with a very slight Asian bias, fairly complementary to a beverage program developed by longtime Merges collaborator and Trotter’s vet Alex Bachman....

There was Mary-Arrchie Theatre, minding its own damn business, presenting works (including such recent hits as Greg Allen’s Ibsen’s Ghosts and Hans Fleischmann’s reimagined version of The Glass Menagerie, currently being revived by the Hypocrites) that pretty much epitomize the notion of storefront theater as practiced in Chicago, when all of a sudden artistic director Richard Cotovsky and his colleagues learn that the building they work in is going to be demolished to make way for a new development....

Your affection for Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s 1990 musical Once on This Island may well depend upon how much patience you have for narratives about young heroines who sacrifice all for the love of men who clearly don’t deserve them. (See also The Little Mermaid, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, etc., ad nauseam.) Based on Trinidad-born American writer Rosa Guy’s 1985 novel My Love, My Love: or, The Peasant Girl (which borrowed from Hans Christian Andersen’s fable), the great advantage of this show (book and lyrics by Ahrens, music by Flaherty) is its emphasis on communal storytelling....

Sometime in the 1940s, it occurred to choreographer Jerome Robbins that an updated musical version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet could be a good idea. He pitched it to composer Leonard Bernstein and librettist Arthur Laurents, and when they actually got to work on it, in the mid-1950s, Laurents brought in a 25-year-old with a talent for lyrics, Stephen Sondheim. The current Lyric coproduction with Houston Grand Opera and the Glimmerglass Festival retains Robbins’s original choreography, reproduced by Julio Monge....

Who says you can’t come home again? Though he currently lives in Texas, Rob Mazurek remains closely identified with Chicago. The 54-year-old multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, and multimedia artist grew up in Naperville and right out of high school moved into the city, where he attended the Bloom School of Jazz and learned on the bandstand from local luminaries such as Jodie Christian and Lin Halliday. Since the mid-1990s he has maintained the Chicago Underground Duo with drummer Chad Taylor, and they’ve kept the Chicago Underground name (sometimes as a trio, quartet, or orchestra) even though Taylor long ago moved to the east coast and Mazurek spent eight years in Brazil....

Every winter it comes: the tunes, the tinsel, the toys—and the tale of Clara, a young girl traveling to a kingdom of sweets with a magical Nutcracker prince. Chicago’s oldest production of The Nutcracker, choreographed by Chicago ballet icon Ruth Page in 1965, has been a homegrown holiday tradition for decades. Initially choreographed for the 90-foot proscenium of the Arie Crown Theater at McCormick Place, Page’s Nutcracker, produced by the Chicago Tribune Charities, played to over 3 million people over 32 years, annually bringing together 70 dancers, 50 musicians, and guest luminaries from companies including the Royal Danish Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, National Ballet of Canada, English National Ballet, and Munich Bayerische Staatsoper to light up the stage in lead roles....