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Susanne Bier’s Bird Box became a cultural phenomenon at the end of 2018. The Netflix original film had one of the most popular debuts in the streaming service’s history, with over 46 million accounts watching in the first week of its release. Bird Box is split up into two parts. The first shows the beginning of the apocalypse. The second takes place five years later, when Malorie takes a two-day journey down the river in search of refuge....

CHICAGO – Camelot Illinois has announced a new partnership with Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to fund two new school projects as part of its Computer Science for All Initiative (CS4All), an innovative computer science program that provides equity, empowerment, and opportunities that maximize the potential of every student. “As private manager of the Illinois Lottery, we work to create winners every day, by consistently contributing to educational funding and supporting good causes,” said Keith Horton, Acting General Manager, Vice President and General Counsel of Camelot Illinois....

In a recent video interview with New York City arts and culture site Lumka, Chicago producer Casper McFadden explained that he made his new second album, Stasis (Log), while his landlord renovated his bedroom over the summer. The construction took longer than anticipated, and McFadden spent months stuck on his couch, unable to access the gear he’d left in his room or make music where he was used to doing it....

In the early 90s, comedian Sean Flannery says, he told a really big lie for the first time, impersonating a New Jersey pharmacist to sneak into a Huey Lewis and the News concert at a medical conference in Cleveland. At the afterparty, he drunkenly walked off a roof, breaking his back and shattering his heels. But as other partygoers tried desperately to get ahold of the pharmacist’s wife, they realized Flannery wasn’t actually the person he’d claimed to be....

If anybody knows puppets—like really knows puppets—it’s Blair Thomas, founder and artistic director of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival and codirector of the Chicago Puppet Studio. And yet, if you ask him about the artists who are most attracted to the form, his answer is entertainingly vague. “Chicago could boast over 150 companies in town,” Thomas continues, “but the aesthetic was of a very narrow palette.” So what changed? For him—and also for much of the city’s theater community, he believes—it started with a festival....

Ever since Norwegian singer and art-pop provocateur Jenny Hval released her gripping 2011 debut, Visceral (Rune Grammofon), her most important musical partner has been guitarist Håvard Volden, a staunch experimentalist who’s helped realize her fizzy, ambitious pop. In her live performances she’s usually accompanied by several wig-wearing women, and though Volden joins her too, often wearing his own wig, he tends to stand off to the side behind a mixing desk—Hval is the focal point, and he seems happy with that arrangement....

The title of John Mulaney’s current stand-up tour is “Kid Gorgeous,” which conjures up expectations of an easygoing golden boy. But onstage at the Chicago Theatre last Friday, Mulaney practically ran from one side of the stage to the other, shouting at the audience. He’s pissed, he explained, because his college alma mater (unnamed at the show, but it’s Georgetown University) had the gall to solicit a donation for the alumni fund....

When humanity’s ship goes down due to a global pandemic, vulture capitalism, and corrupt politics, the band picking and singing the final notes will be Chicago’s Judson Claiborne. So this month—when we’re grappling with the messy aftermath of an election while watching COVID-19 cases skyrocket before our eyes—feels like the perfect time for Christopher Salveter, the group’s auteur, to release this collection of finely wrought songs that confront apocalyptic anxiety with beautiful melodies that make sticking around feel like a better option....

Dennis Lee New frontiers in dining are being explored. Celebrity chef Marc Vetri of Philadelphia is the latest chef to write a cranky old man anti-food-journalism-as-it-exists-in-2015 piece, for the Huffington Post, of course. He hits all the usual get-off-my-lawn notes, recalling a lost era when one learned reviewer for the local paper waited a month before reviewing, with invariable respect, the latest hometown-hero restaurant. And now you have these kids with their snark on Twitter and their lists!...

In January 2015, when Northwestern University announced a $101 million donation from Roberta “Bertie” Buffett Elliott—a 1954 graduate of the school and investment guru Warren Buffett’s younger sister—there were a lot of happy folks on campus. For those most closely associated with the institute, the bonanza had turned into a problem. It looked to them like their proudly independent research center was about to be co-opted by the federal government’s military and foreign policy establishment....

Looking to reignite your creative spark? If you’ve always wanted to try your hand at acting, learn a new instrument, or make some ceramics with a kiln, you should check out the Chicago Park District’s adult education classes. They’re truly one of the best bargains in the city, as many of the instructors are working musicians, artists, and members of Chicago’s theater community with years of training that they’re eager to pass on to new students....

In the liner notes to his dense but enjoyable new album, Sixteen: Drummers Suite (Pi), percussionist Dan Weiss explains that working with a large ensemble on his previous recording, Fourteen, opened up his thinking. He wanted to do dig in deeper, and that’s exactly what he’s done with his latest project—its title refers to the number of musicians on the recording. Sixteen pays homage to legendary drummers who’ve inspired Weiss, among them Max Roach, Elvin Jones, and Philly Joe Jones, and not just in broad strokes....

The listings department is still recovering from last weekend’s Gordon Lightfoot backyard karaoke festival* so without further ado . . . Sat 9/12, 1-6 PM, and Sun 9/13, 1-5 PM: opening weekend for “Field Measure,” an exhibition featuring work of artists Ruth Burke, Zack Ingram, and Libbi Ponce, who all attended the ACRE Residency in Wisconsin. On view through Sun 10/11 at LVL3 Gallery in Wicker Park. Sat 9/12 at 1, 3, and 5 PM and Sun 9/13 at 5 PM: The 96 Hours Festival featuring performance artists, dance, puppeteers, musicians, and more assembled into teams and challenged to create an original work in 96 hours....

This fantastic double bill testifies to the enduring power and malleability of mainstream jazz tradition, where dazzling facility, individual voice, and casual erudition can bring new vitality to decades-old approaches. For me, no current jazz singer can touch the effortless mastery, range, and imagination of Cécile McLorin Salvant, who just won a Grammy for Best Vocal Jazz Album for her stunning 2017 double CD Dreams and Daggers (Mack Avenue). Her aesthetic is rooted in the sounds of classic singers such as Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington, and she essays standards and blues with dazzling pitch control, improvisation-rich phrasing, and an easygoing theatricality that emphasizes her nuanced lyric reading—a skill she often utilizes to sharp comic effect....

Otherworld Theatre has taken over the former Public House Theatre space in Lakeview, and the acquisition may have taken a big bite out of the operating budget because its debut production there is a continuation of the very cost-effective Fight Quest series. Fight Quest 4 Peace features an ensemble of actors improvising a superhero story based on audience suggestions from the audience; the improv forms the connective tissue between choreographed fight scenes....

In the graphic novel BTTM FDRS, Ezra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore capture the horrors of gentrification in a Chicago neighborhood through a Technicolor lens. The book follows Darla, a young Black artist and Chicago native, as she grapples with the colonization of the Bottomyards, the fictional south side neighborhood that she was born and raised in. She comes to the frightening realization that there has been something living in the walls of her apartment building, a monster that will take her body over from the inside out....

Steven Soderbergh shot his new psychological thriller Unsane (which is now playing in general release) on an iPhone 7 Plus and in the unusual aspect ratio of 1.56:1. Slightly wider than the classic Academy ratio (which is 1.33:1) but noticeably narrower than the formats in which most modern movies are shot, this aspect ratio heightens the film’s sense of claustrophobia as much as the iPhone imagery heightens its sense of disorientation....

To be queer and in love in a 90s play is a pitiable fate. At best, characters who express romantic interests outside of heteronormative societal expectations are forced to live their truth in shameful secrecy or as a risky act of public defiance. At worst, by violence or sickness or despair, they’re issued a death sentence. Lest anyone think Diana Son’s ubiquitous 1998 one-act romantic drama is dated, though, it is worth remembering that the recent London bus assault on two women—an attack that eerily mirrors Stop Kiss‘s plot two decades on—occurred less than a year ago....

“You know what the midwest is?” Kanye West asked in 2004’s “Jesus Walks.” This may in fact be true. I have no idea, since I’ve never been to a small town in Iowa and haven’t set foot in South Dakota since Michael Jordan was playing for the Bulls. I’ve spent over two decades living in the midwest, in two different states, and have family in two more—and yet somehow managed to have zero experience with the cultural touchstones that supposedly define my region....

What happens when people are truly left to their own devices? The first minutes of Anna Jordan’s 2015 play about two brothers raising themselves on a diet of porn, video games, and junk food in a garbage-laden London council estate flat are abrasive and over the top. It takes some time to suspend one’s disbelief enough to buy that two young men are portraying a 16- and 13-year-old. But as more and more details of their lives emerge, it becomes a devastating portrait of the effects of neglect, building to a violent but inevitable climax....