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Candy formed in 2016, and given their relatively quick ascent among the ranks of hardcore bands, it’d be easy to use the cliche that they came out of nowhere. But in reality, Candy came from everywhere. They’re often pegged as a group from Richmond, Virginia, the hometown of guitarist Michael “Cheddar” Quick, but the five members are spread across the country, with no two residing in the same city and only a couple in the same state....

Ike Holter’s Red Rex, the sixth in his seven-play Chicago cycle set in the fictional neighborhood of Rightlynd (aka the 51st Ward), is a play at war with itself. On the one hand it wants to entertain: the play is a spot-on send-up of Chicago storefront theaters and the quirky people who make up those ragtag companies. On the other hand, it wants to be a serious play, packed with meaningful observations about life and art....

The homecoming prompted by weddings and funerals is a staple of American family dramas. But in Leah Nanako Winkler’s hands, old tropes burst open with startling insight and dollops of acidic wit. In 2015’s Kentucky, now in a local premiere at Gift Theatre (which has moved into more spacious digs at Theater Wit for this show), Hiro (Emjoy Gavino), the eldest daughter of foul-mouthed abusive lout James (Paul D’Addario) and lonely beaten-down Masako (Helen Joo Lee), goes home to Kentucky to try to talk her younger born-again sister, Sophie (Hannah Toriumi), out of marrying at age 22....

Late last month one of the hardest-working bands in town, La Armada, digitally released Anti-Colonial Vol. 1, their first new music in four years. The album blends crusty hardcore and monolithic metal with a whiff of the rhythms of the Dominican Republic—where La Armada formed in 2001 (they moved to Chicago in 2008). Front man Javier Fernandez sings about injustice and corruption in Spanish and English, and his furious but playfully elastic vocals make him sound like an heir to the throne Serj Tankian seems to have vacated....

R Martinez has a peculiar, three-pronged way of telling this story. One prong focuses, naturally enough, on the principal players, Reagan and Gorbachev, as well as their wives, Nancy and Raisa, whom we see practicing their own sharp-elbowed, sotto voce form of diplomacy on their husbands and each other. Another concentrates, also naturally, on Shultz and Shevardnadze, the resourceful underlings who find themselves forming a team of rivals as they attempt to make history....

The first time I wrote about Chicago singer-songwriter Scott Free was in 1998, for my old column Spot Check. He’d just released his first album, Getting Off, and was sharing a bill with lesbian punk greats Tribe 8, but even then he was no newbie to the music scene. Free had already been a house-music producer, a drag performer for Michael Hyacinth’s Tuck series at Foxy’s, and a staple booking at Joanna Brown and Mark Freitas’s Homocore shows....

A vacation sounds pretty good right about now, doesn’t it? Or it would in a world without COVID-19, large-scale lockdowns, and an overabundance of existential dread. Seoul-based Korean/Japanese duo Tengger can’t do anything about the pandemic, but their music can provide a bit of a mental escape, or at least uplift the spirit. Inspired by their own experiences traveling, the group create meditative, light-as-silk sound sculptures by interweaving drone, psychedelia, Krautrock, and new age music with occasional field recordings and wordless vocals....

A good rule for making plays full of gratuitous deaths into comedies is to flesh the victims out as little as possible. When this show’s villainous hero, Monty D’Ysquith-Navarro, played by Andres Enriquez, engineers the remorseless killing of all eight members of the D’Ysquith family who stand in the way of his becoming the next Earl of Highhurst, it should feel like the mowing down of quaint little cardboard dolls. And it does....

Numerous prominent hip-hop artists have emerged from Chicago: Kanye West, Chance the Rapper, Common, Chief Keef, Vic Mensa, Psalm One, and Mick Jenkins (to name a few). And yet a feature-length, comprehensive documentary about the history of the local hip-hop scene has yet to come to fruition. The team behind Midway: The Story of Chicago Hip-Hop hopes to change that. Meanwhile, the Midway team is working with the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago to archive music, photographs, videos, posters, and other materials as a means to educate audiences about Chicago’s hip-hop culture....

My earliest memory of playing games involves cards. In a cabin in the woods, my grandma Dorothy taught me war (the easiest and most endless game), then gin, cribbage, and most importantly, solitaire. How wild, I thought as a four-year-old, to have a game you can play all by yourself! I was, at the time, an only child, and my only friend was my small black cat, Doodle. Having games to play alone suddenly opened up a whole world of entertainment that filled the void when my cat was sick and tired of our tea parties....

I f the art gig ever stalls, Chinese dissident and global activist Ai Weiwei could give stand-up comedy a try. The acerbic humor that’s a primary driver of much of his art was on display during an appearance at the Auditorium Theatre last week. Ai Weiwei: They use chemicals. I worry about that every time I have a cup of tea. The Chinese just put you in a secret place. Why did he become an artist?...

If you want a sense of what Janine Nabers‘s Welcome to Jesus aspires to be—its ideal Platonic form—take a look at the Jordan Peele movie Get Out. The two productions have an awful lot in common—except that, where Get Out is a nasty-great piece of satire, there’s not much reason to come to Jesus, running now at American Theater Company. Out of the woods and into this misery walks Him (yes, that’s as much of a name as he gets), a mysterious black teen who, it happens, can throw a football hard, far, and accurately....

Three years ago Chicago rapper Jay Wood (a member of the Freesole collective) dropped his debut full-length, Self Doubt, where he made mincemeat of hard-edged beats while sharing the mike with more established MCs, including Ajani Jones and Femdot. Since then Wood has polished his skills and reconciled his fierce vocals with his interest in pop songwriting. On his new EP, Trackstar (Freesole), he matches the ironclad mettle of his toughest instrumentals and harshest drums with boisterous performances that tease out the sweetness hidden in the tracks—on “Champagne” he rounds off his rapid raps with a light, honeyed touch....

With the ongoing kidnappings of hundreds of Nigerian girls by the jihadist militant group Boko Haram, media coverage of the country’s female population often focuses on victims rather than fighters. Choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili wants to change that narrative to highlight how women have banded together to take action throughout history. Poor People’s TV Room is a new multimedia piece from Okpokwasili and director-designer Peter Born that takes inspiration from two major events: the Boko Haram kidnappings and the Women’s War of 1929, a revolt against British colonial forces....

Chicago’s Englewood B.U. is as much an alchemist as a rapper, combining elements to create effects that defy easy explanation. On his new debut, 99 B.U. (Matthew Mason Music), the mature grit in his lilting voice gives his dusty instrumentals a worldliness that’s difficult to manufacture. He loves storytelling, and as his lyrics saunter casually atop checkered soul samples and sinewy percussion, his narratives gain extra dimensions as if by magic....

Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times 43rd Ward alderman Michele Smith, fighting hard for reelection When you’re an incumbent alderman in a race with three opponents (plus one write-in), it should be pretty good news that you’ve raised the most money and that you’re leading the latest poll by 15 percentage points. And that’s a poll conducted for Aldertrack, an impartial source. Hooray for you! Her opponents, she claimed, are naive and inexperienced and have no clue what it’s like being an alderman....

It was just about a year ago that I was happily proclaiming the ascendance of the Iberian way of eating in Chicago, most notably with my review of Wicker Park’s Bom Bolla, which so far had come closer than any place in town to approximating the casual Spanish tapas bar, where no wine is ever drunk without a bite of something to wash down. Just a little more than six months later, it shut its doors, unable to capture the imagination of Wicker Parkers with fried whitebait, bocadillos, and splashes of vermouth....

Every time Angelina Nordstrom wanted to use the restroom, it took ten minutes to get there and ten minutes to get back. Nordstrom, who is transgender, says that a former employer forced her to use the bathroom in a separate building after coworkers complained about her using the women’s facility. Democratic state senator Melinda Bush of Grayslake and state rep Sam Yingling, Democrat of Round Lake Beach, were joined by 15 other Democratic lawmakers in sponsoring SB 556....

Despite plenty of examples to the contrary, hotel restaurants have a reputation for being stodgy and overpriced, the last resort of business travelers with expense accounts who are too tired to venture out in search of more interesting options. (To be fair, there are also plenty of mediocre or downright bad hotel restaurants.) The Dana Hotel has struggled for the last ten years to figure out what works in its restaurant space, starting with Ajasteak, a steak and sushi spot that was later rebranded as Aja....

Back in January, Chicago powerviolence monsters Weekend Nachos announced that they’d call it a day at the end of this year. Before ending their run, though, they’d tour the world and release one final record—and yesterday, the first track from that record saw the light of day. It’s called “Writhe,” and it’s today’s 12 O’Clock Track—a classic Nachos explosion where they sound meaner and more frenzied than ever. The band’s final album, Apology, will come out via Relapse on May 20, and the punishing brutality of “Writhe”—even though it lasts only a minute and 45 seconds—will have Nachos fans itching for that day to come faster....