Posts

“I love Black women and girls. I love them and I think that we need to center a lot of their stories and amplify and uplift them as much as possible,” says Sydney Chatman. Thanks to an award from the Joyce Foundation, Chatman—a longtime theatermaker, director, teacher, and mentor in Chicago—will be working with Congo Square Theatre on a new community-based project focused on healing from “intracommunal and state-sanctioned” violence. Says Rolle, “In the past year with Congo Square, we’ve gone through a lot of transitions as well....

The Ghost Network is a mystery novel at least once, but up to three times over. At the center is pop superstar Molly Metropolis, who disappears without a trace hours before a sold-out performance at the United Center. Following her disappearance, three underemployed Chicago hipster intellectuals—Gina, Molly’s personal assistant; Nick, one of Molly’s closest friends; and Caitlin, an aspiring music journalist they team up with—spend months combing through the journals and projects Molly left behind trying to discover where she went, until one night Caitlin disappears as well....

The Reeling International Film Festival returns this week for its 37th year to—as The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Erika Girardi has famously said—give the gays everything they want. Reeling’s crop of documentaries offers an equally wide breadth of stories, with films that tell and preserve queer history, films that represent what it’s like to be queer in this very moment, and films that investigate wonderful, niche queer subcultures. “This is a culture that you do not see represented,” says Knight of the films....

Tod Lending’s documentary All the Difference, which is set in Chicago and screens this weekend at the 22nd annual Black Harvest Film Festival, is an inspirational account of black male ambition and perseverance in the face of some harsh statistics. According to information presented in the documentary, in Chicago’s most underprivileged communities, only about 50 percent of young black men graduate from high school; of those who do graduate, fewer than half will go on to college, and even fewer will graduate from college within four to six years....

Got your back! Got your back!” a troupe of improv actors chant to each other as they prepare to hit the stage in Mike Birbiglia’s incisive showbiz comedy Don’t Think Twice. Birbiglia, a veteran comedy writer and performer who made his screen directing debut with the stellar rom-com Sleepwalk With Me (2012), frames his second feature as a love letter to the art of improv and its attendant values of trust, openness, and spontaneity....

Fifty-nine-year-old Natalie Saffold walks slowly down the sidewalk, her hands tightly clutching to her walker. Every few paces she pauses and looks over the land spread before her. Wire fence surrounds 44 acres of overgrown grass, dandelions, and trees—a lot more trees than she remembers. This lot was once the site of LeClaire Courts, a public housing development around two miles north of Midway Airport on Chicago’s southwest side. As Saffold walks, she points to things that remind her of days past....

Sun-Times Media Neil Tesser in 1985 When I read online that jazz critic Neil Tesser had just received a lifetime achievement award I posted the comment that he’s young enough to win it again if he keeps busy. Then I thought twice and asked Tesser his age: 63, he said—so maybe not. (Time flies.) “These days, I suppose a lifetime in journalism (let alone JAZZ journalism) is an achievement by itself,” Tesser e-mailed me when I asked him to comment....

As the audience enters The Ready storefront space in Lincoln Square, they’re asked to take off their coats and shoes and don threadbare pink slippers before entering the theater. Inside, the black box theater has been transformed into an oval or lozenge, with two tiers of hard wooden bleachers for seating. All is painted bordello red, with old-fashioned fringed lamps enhancing the atmosphere of a house of ill-repute. A woman in black lies immobile below red gauze, while three women holding infants pace around the middle of the room, muttering, trying to hold onto their shifting, kicking, wailing cargo....

Not even ten minutes into director Gerald Fox’s 2004 documentary Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank, the legendary photographer-collagist-filmmaker, then turning 80, explodes when the camera runs out of film again and he’s asked to do another take. “Well, look, forget it! Look, I’m not an actor, you know? I can’t go through this shit, you know? I mean, there’s no spontaneity in this; it’s completely against my nature, what’s happening here....

It can be overwhelming trying to decide where to see comedy in Chicago. Once you start looking, there’s a seemingly endless list of showcases every week, and, thanks to an embarrassment of riches when it comes to talented comics in Chicago, most of them are a guaranteed good time. Still, there are standouts. This list features the results of a quick informal poll of some local comics—the people who arguably see more comedy than anyone—combined with some of my personal favorites, shows that have inclusive lineups, creative concepts, or were simply just a blast to attend in 2019....

RIP Chicago Craigslist Personals. Craigslist preemptively reacted by taking down its personals on Friday. When you go to the site now, it sends you to a message that says: Handsome, swarthy buff guy in steam early a.m. – m4m (XSport) Beautiful curly red haired lady searching for pasta (Southport Jewel) (“I was in the pasta aisle at the Jewel on Southport when I turned, saw you, and was immediately struck by how gorgeous you are....

For those still recovering from the Reader‘s Cocktail Challenge, there are plenty of laid back events to choose from in Chicago this weekend. Kick back or keep the party going with some of our top picks: Fri 9/16: According to Eula Biss, Belle Boggs’ The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood suggests that “all our moments that feel fruitless may be bearing their own sort of fruit, in their own time....

Published nearly 200 years ago, Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” tells of a man who falls asleep during the colonial era and wakes up two decades later, after the American Revolution, to find himself living in a different nation. This notion of a long sleep and a rude awakening is tailor-made for social satire—think of Chance the gardener, the graying simpleton played by Peter Sellers in Being There (1979), who has spent his entire life cloistered in a rich man’s home but, upon the man’s death, is turned out onto the mean streets of Washington, D....

The Onion’s satirical website Clickhole is famous for lists, videos, and articles with titles like “8 Bullshit Cats We Wish Judas Could’ve Betrayed Instead of Christ,” “Inspiring! People Describe the First Time They Drank Gatorade,” and “The Kindest Man Alive: Jon Hamm Makes Crepes For A Beached Whale.” Behind every giggle-inducing page on the site is a staff of writers, editors, and producers who are stepping onstage to show off their chops for The Clickhole Writers Present Amazing: A Live Show....

Having just built themselves a stately home, the folks at Writers Theatre are christening it with a play set in one. Tom Stoppard’s 1993 Arcadia takes place in a study at Sidley Park, an English estate that’s housed members, guests, and servants of the Coverly clan for at least 200 years. Michael Halberstam’s staging of Arcadia, meanwhile, unfolds at the new Writers Theater complex in downtown Glencoe, designed on a multimillion-dollar budget by Jeanne Gang’s Studio Gang Architects....

For decades, percussionist Hamid Drake and reedist Ken Vandermark have sustained a partnership founded upon a deep engagement with the history of free jazz. Both within and outside the DKV Trio, their long-running ensemble with bassist Kent Kessler, their improvisations often arise from rhythmic foundations. But they’re also restless explorers, and on Open Border a pair of Italian musicians helps them move into new territory. Neither Gianni Trovalusci nor Luigi Ceccarelli has much background in jazz....

When wolves form a pack, they form bonds that last a lifetime. A similar feeling of familiarity and connection suffuses the duo project of Will Oldham (aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy) and Matt Sweeney. Each musician is an indisputable titan in his field: Sweeney made his name as a guitarist for 80s cult favorites Skunk and math-rock stalwarts Chavez, while Oldham has endured as one of folk’s most disarmingly frank songwriters. In 2005, they joined forces for Superwolf, a collaborative album intended to mirror the working alliance between Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, and on the new Superwolves, they continue to meld lovely, stripped-down arrangements and forthright lyrics....

Austin band Glassing have a pretty deep Chicago connection: drummer Jason Camacho spent years here as a major part of our underground harsh-noise and experimental-rock scenes. After arriving from Texas nearly a decade ago, he and a few other Lone Star State transplants opened Logan Square DIY venue the Mopery—a lawless, windowless warehouse whose inhabitants lived in tents and hosted legendary shows by bands as varied as Screaming Females, Bloodyminded, and Liturgy....

Julia Thiel Inspired by ponche, the traditional Mexican Christmas punch, the great minds at 5 Rabbit have come up with a monster of a barleywine (11.5 percent alcohol), brewed with muscat and Concord grapes, apple juice, orange peel, Mexican cinnamon, cassia buds, date syrup, and cloves. Ponche was released just before Christmas, but I picked up a bottle a couple of weeks ago at Trader Joe’s, and it still appears to be widely available....

Sparrow for Everyone sparrowforeveryone.com In recent years a beauty essential has been added to the standard cosmetics arsenal: so-called “miracle oil,” a cocktail of essential oils applied to soothe skin. I thought I’d found the right one, which cost more than three digits and was made by a high-end national chain. But I was wrong: the perfect blend was being produced and sold locally at Logan Square’s Sparrow Salon. Developed by co-owner Susan Flaga, who tired of googling the complicated ingredients used in other products, Sparrow for Everyone ($80 for a 50-milliliter bottle) is a blend of 12 healing plant extracts whose names need no further explanation—like almond, hazelnut, and jasmine, to name a few....