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To call a work of theater a “graphic novel for the stage,” as playwright Caridad Svich does in the preface to her script for De Troya, implies a couple of things: (a) a heavy emphasis on dynamic visual storytelling, and (b) some novelistic character development—maybe something that takes advantage of the illustrated medium’s lack of limitations when it comes to fantasy. The degree to which Rinska Carrasco-Prestinary’s Halcyon Theatre production delivers on those varies from recognizable but off the mark to downright inscrutable....

“I’m working-class,” says Danny Cimaglio, when asked to describe his occupation. The 63-year-old’s matter-of-fact demeanor and scrappy work history were the norm in Bucktown back in 1986, the year Cimaglio and some friends opened Danny’s Tavern, a funky bar in a solidly blue-collar hood that helped usher in the area’s bohemian phase. In the mid-80s, Damen Avenue was the dividing line between Mexican and Puerto Rican gangs—not a place to buy yoga pants—and Cimaglio and his wife, Barbara, were raising their daughter Anna in a three-flat on Armitage and Hoyne....

Massive newsroom job cuts and a populace in isolation helped drive the upsurge in single-operator newsletters in 2020. The number of active writers on Substack doubled between March and June alone, and Mailchimp and Medium also reported increased activity. Chicago music journalists—including the three Reader contributors quoted in this piece—have contributed to that boom. Ernest Wilkins, who writes about the business of culture on Office Hours With Ernest Wilkins, describes newsletters as a “necessity-built thing” that arose in the mid-2010s when the demand for highly curated content outstripped the resources that traditional publishers devoted to the specialized writers who could create it....

Wil Akogu calls himself the Most Valuable Poet, and the 19-year-old Chicago-based rapper seems certain the rest of the world will too—he wants to use his rhymes and music to change the way we think about self-love, purpose, and our own identities. On his recent second EP, The Language of the Soul, he turns his journey to find himself into an invitation to other lost brethren. “It was really hard for me to find myself....

It seems like every year Wale, arguably the first D.C. rapper to maintain a long career as a national star, promises that he’s working on an album built around go-go. But though he’s flirted with the funk sound of black D.C. that dates back to the mid-60s (see the 2011 regional hit “Bait”), he has yet to deliver that album. Fortunately, D’Anthony Carlos, aka 24-year-old rapper Goldlink, has picked up the slack: his major-label debut, March’s At What Cost (RCA), intertwines rap and go-go with its celebratory throng of percussion, and one especially live-sounding track captures the infectious energy and communal groove of a go-go show (“Hands on Your Knees,” featuring D....

Everyone knows that Chicago is an indigo city in a solidly blue state. This is the land of the Democratic primary that’s treated like a general election. But there are Republicans even here. And three wards on the southwest side saw a majority of those registered with the GOP vote for Trump in the primary. Krupa was happy to have the day off from school due to a parent-teacher conference. He describes himself as a “day-one Trump supporter” and hopes Trump’s law-and-order politics will shake up both the “inner city” (which he defined as “State and Madison”) and his own neighborhood....

Even the most hard-core Harry Potter fans can suffer from wizard fatigue these days. What started as a seven-book series has exploded into theme parks, spin-off movies, and a flood of ill-advised J.K. Rowling tweets. (Please, someone, change her password.) But just when all seems lost, wizard-rock band Harry & the Potters return to save the day with Lumos, their first album in 13 years. The core members of this Massachusetts group are round-glasses-and-Gryffindor-tie-sporting brothers Paul and Joe DeGeorge....

I first met Brooklynite J.R. Bohannon when he was working as a booking agent for underground bands and cult artists, so I was surprised when he left that business to focus on his own music. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Bohannon moved to New York in 2009 to soak up the avant-garde music scene (in an interview with Premier Guitar he mentions Sonny Sharrock and Acid Mothers Temple as favorite bands). In 2015 he released the debut album of his ambient project Ancient Ocean, but the earthy bluegrass sounds of his southern upbringing remained in his consciousness....

We no longer have a mayor at my local coffeehouse. There used to be a guy—a genial Hal Holbrook type—who filled that unofficial position. But I hear he left in a huff when management changed the seating plan while redecorating. I don’t know who might become mayor next. Maybe the retired translator who chats up college students. Or the doughnut-eating Bernie supporter. Or the lean, fastidious man who reads poetry while breakfasting on zucchini bread swimming in honey, sprinkling wheat germ from the Ziploc bag he carries with him....

Daniel Ash is associate vice president for Community Impact at the Chicago Community Trust; Lolly Bowean is program officer for Media and Storytelling at the Field Foundation; Kathy Im is the director of Journalism and Media at the MacArthur Foundation; Channing Lenert is a program officer at the Polk Bros. Foundation; Andres Torres is Democracy Program officer at the McCormick Foundation. In fact, as the devastation of COVID-19 falls most heavily on lower-income communities of color, according to Pew Research, people of color rely on local news more than their white counterparts and turn to it more than any other source for coronavirus news....

Al Podgorski/Sun-Times Media It’s Madigan or nothing these days. We were having a grand old time of it talking politics at the Hideout—and everyone was almost civil, if not sober—when, of all people, our friend professor Paul Green felt compelled to have the following outburst: Our onstage guests this week—Mary Ann Ahern and Charles Thomas—had already offered their view of things when Green couldn’t resist jumping into the fray....

John Carpenter is a master of thrills. The legendary filmmaker and composer unnerves and titillates by fusing sight and sound—how the light catches a blade or outlines a breast, for instance, and the way heartbeat rhythms drive his bare synths. Because Carpenter’s horror and sci-fi movies establish a visual and emotional vocabulary for his music, the albums in his Lost Themes series similarly build up dangerous tension followed by resolution. That’s what makes his latest release, Lost Themes III: Alive After Death, surprising....

Louisiana-based guitarist and harpist Leslie Johnson got the nickname “Lazy Lester” in 1957, ostensibly because Excello Records producer Jay Miller thought it suited Johnson’s relaxed style, influenced by Chicagoan Jimmy Reed. But as primitive (or “lazy”) as that style might’ve seemed to opportunistic whites such as Miller (who also released virulently racist music on his Reb Rebel label), it proved commercially viable and artistically significant. In the hands of Lester and his contemporaries (including Slim Harpo, Lightnin’ Slim, and Lonesome Sundown), it evolved into the regional subgenre eventually dubbed “swamp blues....

By many accounts one of the smartest comedy acts to have emerged in Chicago in recent years comes from a man who first came to prominence by calling out then-candidate Trump’s anti-Muslim bigotry—at a Trump rally. That Arish Singh turned out to have not only correctly identified a key aspect of the presidential agenda early on, but to have maintained a sense of humor despite it, is rare. On Monday, March 4, he welcomes musician and videographer Basim Usmani to his variety show, Monkey Wrench, at the Hideout....

Chicago has produced plenty of influential electronic producers and DJs who’ve become legends in their communities but remain obscure outside them. Late-80s ghetto-house producer Steve Poindexter, for instance, perfected a raunchy sound on “Work That Mutha Fucker” that other producers would make famous, but he’s hardly a household name himself. And before footwork originator RP Boo released Legacy via Planet Mu in 2013, the people carrying his torch were mostly battle dancers on the south and west sides....

Bassist, sound engineer, and devoted White Sox fan Rob Warmowski played in kick-ass punk bands for more than 30 years, but sadly he died September 1 at age 52 after a brief illness. Among Gossip Wolf’s most cherished albums is the 1987 WNUR compilation Hog Butcher for the World, which features Warmowski’s powerhouse surf-punk trio the Defoliants alongside the likes of Big Black, Urge Overkill, and End Result. He’d go on to play in Buzzmuscle, Sirs, and most recently San Andreas Fault....

Chicago singer, producer, and rapper Thomas DaVinci is a chameleon, able to adapt his supple voice and fluid flow to any instrumental track. On his album Home Grown, which he self-released in May, he applies his versatility to a broad swath of stylish sounds, including a few that wouldn’t quite fit together without him. Granted, he produced all but one of the record’s songs, and it’s hard to throw yourself a curveball, but he creates a confident through-line connecting the white-knuckle boom-bap percussion and plastic neosoul synths of “Destinfinity,” the melancholy harplike notes of “Toxic,” and the summery, nostalgic melody and minimal 808 beats of “Just Another Day....

Portuguese singer Mariza has built an impressive career essaying and stretching the sound of fado. Arguably the most celebrated indigenous music of Portugal, fado is traditionally played on acoustic guitar, bass, and trebly 12-string Portuguese guitar, with plaintive vocals that express saudade—a deep, melancholic sense of longing that is ineffably tied to the Portuguese spirit. Since she rose to fame at the start of the century Mariza has toggled between embracing fado in its purest form—following the lead of the genre’s ultimate diva, Amalia Rodrigues—and more modern pop sounds....

I smelled delicious for days after eating at Pub Royale. I’m not sure how fellow train riders felt about it, but fragrant axillae, redolent of cinnamon, clove, cumin, and ginger, are the gifts that keep on giving after eating good Indian food. And the food at Pub Royale, from Heisler Hospitality (Trenchermen, Nightwood, Sportsman’s Club, Bar DeVille, etc), is surprisingly good for a bar situated on a soulless stretch of Division Street in a neighborhood that lost its last vestiges of character around 1997....

Listening to modern traditional metal can sometimes be a little like meeting up with a special old flame. It’s a blast until you’re eventually reminded why it didn’t work out for the long haul—you moved on with your life while they seemed to stay suspended in time, and the little things you once adored now feel stale or ridiculously corny. But every so often, a band knock it out of the park so hard that they prove 70s-90s metal sounds to be every bit as timeless and cool as James Dean in a pair of Levis (or insert your own iconic imagery here) even as they expand its language....