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By comparison to their 2014 All Our Tragic, the Hypocrites’ Aristophanesathon is a wee little thing: running just over four hours where its predecessor lasted 12, featuring six performers as opposed to 14, and, most significantly, pulling together a mere 11 extant plays by a single ancient Greek—way down from AOT‘s 32 by three. For all that, Praxagora turns out to be a poor peg to hang an epic on, in large part because Kate Carson-Groner never manages to establish her as a force to be reckoned with....

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. Arnold soon returned to Chicago, but when Prohibition ended in late 1933, bootlegging went with it. He became a full-time bluesman, and luckily, fellow musician Kansas Joe McCoy heard him and introduced him to producer J....

Our gig poster this week celebrates the second-ever Indigenous Peoples’ Day Concert in Chicago, presented by local promoters Sky People Entertainment and the Old Town School of Folk Music. Graphic designer and community activist Mereya Lachel Goetzinger-Blanco designed this poster incorporating an original artwork by Native American artist Frederick McDonald. Not everybody can make a gig poster, of course, but it’s simple and free to take action through the website of the National Independent Venue Association....

RYAN RUSSELL Pet Symmetry The ways in which musicians tempt music fans into buying an album can be as interesting and colorful as the music itselft, especially when it comes to the items included in a physical release. Actually, I sometimes find the add-ons more entertaining than the music: I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about purchasing the “Ultra LP” version of Jack White’s Lazaretto for the vinyl’s bells and whistles (a hand-etched hologram?...

Saxophonist Dave Rempis and percussionist Tim Daisy have been stalwarts of Chicago’s improvised music scene for more than two decades. During that time they’ve grown, listened, and explored together while collaborating in many contexts and deeply expanding their sound worlds. That’s deftly illustrated on the recent double CD Dodecahedron (Aerophonic), which celebrates their shared history. Though on the duo’s 2005 album, Back to the Circle (Okka Disk), they opted for terse exchanges that tended to investigate specific ideas, the first disc of the new album mirrors a more organic, episodic approach where each participant trusts in his ability to push each encounter forward....

When state rep Juliana Stratton, scarcely a year in office, announced she was joining J.B. Pritzker’s campaign, a scramble ensued to represent the Fifth District in her stead. While it’s a majority-black district, gerrymandering has stretched its boundaries from Goethe Street in the Gold Coast to 80th Street in Avalon Park, running through some of the richest and poorest areas of Chicago with just 25 east-to-west blocks at its widest point....

Q: My son has always liked handcuffs and tying people up as a form of play. He is 12 now, and the delight he finds in cuffing has not faded along with his love of Legos. He lobbied hard to be allowed to buy a hefty pair of handcuffs. We cautioned him strongly about consent—he has a younger brother—and he has been good about it. In the last year, though, I found out that he is cuffing himself while alone in the house—and when discovered, he becomes embarrassed and insists it’s a joke....

Fans of The Golden Girls, the popular 1980s sitcom about four senior citizens—three widows and a divorcee—sharing a home in Miami, will likely enjoy this campy spoof from Hell in a Handbag Productions. Written by Handbag’s artistic director, David Cerda, and directed by Jon Martinez, the show takes the original series’ main strength—the perfectly balanced personalities of its four affectionately quarrelsome leads—and ups the source material’s already plentiful queer-appeal. Housemates Blanche, Rose, Dorothy, and Sophia—the roles played on TV by Rue McClanahan, Betty White, Bea Arthur, and Estelle Getty, respectively—are performed here by men in drag....

Lately I’ve been in the habit of powering through the morning with what squishier types like to call a “smoothie.” This always involves bananas and some other kind of frozen fruit, an avocado when I’m nasty, some hemp powder, a pinch of salt, and a lot of full-fat active yogurt, plain, blended to gastroparesis viscosity. One glass and you’re good until second breakfast. Then I discovered yogurt soda, aka doogh, a Persian drink made simply enough from yogurt and water....

Stage director Will Davis likens his experience growing up as a girl to A Christmas Carol‘s Ebenezer standing outside the window, looking in at the living. “I thought that intense isolation was just the human condition, that that’s what it means to be alive,” he says, then adds, laughing: “I didn’t know, I didn’t know! So every day for me now is like, ‘It’s another day! And I’m here! And I am alive!...

McFetridge Sports Center Chicago isn’t what anyone would call a tennis town—and that’s not totally our fault. How could we match sun-blessed cities like Atlanta, San Diego, and Charleston, South Carolina, which serve up leagues aplenty, multiple private and public courts, and, yes, year-round decent weather? Facilities-wise, Midtown Athletic Club talks a big game (billing itself as “More resort than club. More club than gym”), but despite being well equipped, it has the major disadvantage of cost-prohibitive membership and court fees....

Q: Gay male in my late 20s. I recently ended things with a guy. Our relationship started as a strictly sexual one. We’re both involved in the kink scene in our city and have interests that align in a particularly great way. Quickly it became clear there was a real connection. The next two months were great! I had a toothbrush at his place within three weeks. But early on, I noticed that he was a much more extroverted person than I was....

I had the lowest expectations for Captive State. Alien insects in the near future subjugating earthlings and prompting a rebellion of ragtag misfits forced to band together to save humankind isn’t much of a selling point in my book. But it’s set in Chicago, so I had to go. I went in hoping for a dumb disaster flick with some cool location shots. What I got was a sly, impassioned rant about gentrification and authoritarianism, thinly disguised as a grimy B-movie....

Carcosa is a mysterious fictional city first named by author Ambrose Bierce in 1886 and later alluded to in Robert W. Chambers’s influential and evocative King in Yellow stories. As the ancient and possibly cursed capital of an alien place that’s impossible to pinpoint on earthly maps, it’s been incorporated into the works of H.P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, and other writers of weird fiction—the name even appeared in season one of True Detective....

As tempting as it is to indulge my wee-lad love of all things dream pop and compare Star’s fresh take on shoegaze to early-90s wombadelic practitioners (I’m not making up the term “wombadelia,” though it never really caught on), the band prefer the more open-ended tag “noise pop.” That said, the catchy three-minute nuggets on the local trio’s second album, Violence Against Star, sound like they could’ve charted in the UK alongside Ride and Lush if they’d been released in, say, 1992....

Under the name Colleen, French composer and multi-instrumentalist Cécile Schott has spent the past two decades traversing musical styles: She explored hypnagogic looped samples on her 2003 debut, Everyone Alive Wants Answers, dulcet folktronica on 2005’s The Golden Morning Breaks, and chamber-music ambience on 2007’s Les Ondes Silencieuses. Schott’s work is consistent in its arresting simplicity, but her pieces aren’t so much minimal as they are featherlight. Schott’s latest album, The Tunnel and the Clearing (Thrill Jockey), builds on the vocal pop of 2015’s Captain of None and the sparse electronics of 2017’s A Flame My Love, a Frequency....

In February, when Chance the Rapper won his first Grammy (Best Rap Performance for “No Problem”), the first thing he uttered when he accepted the award was “Yo, Andrew Barber.” The story behind that shout-out starts a decade ago: At a time when few outlets cared about Chicago’s rap exports (beyond maybe Kanye West), Barber launched a blog called Fake Shore Drive with the sole intent of covering the city’s hip-hop scene....

David Cross has a knack for getting involved with deeply beloved but underwatched projects. All three of the TV shows he’s starred in have been labeled “cult classics”: Arrested Development; Mr. Show With Bob and David, currently revived for Netflix as With Bob and David; and The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret (he also had a hand in the creation and writing of the latter two programs). But now, thanks to two decades of appearances on television, in movies, and in comedy clubs around the world, he’s turned into something of a household name....

To some Chicagoans, “Drab City” might sound like the name of a pickup band that plays melancholy covers of Will Oldham and Joanna Newsom tunes, but it’s actually a Berlin duo that specializes in an understated, lo-fi combo of cinematic trip-hop and folky dream pop, flavored with a little jazz and some fuzzy samples. Multi-instrumentalists and producers Chris Dexter Greenspan (who helped pioneer witch house as oOoOO) and Asia (who performs as Islamiq Grrrls) hatched Drab City after joining forces on a 2018 collaborative album under their stage names; that record, Faminine Mystique, is eclectic enough to incorporate 80s metal-ballad guitar and Auto-Tuned vocals from one track to the next without seeming incoherent....

We had reasons for feeling giddy after dinner at Beacon Tavern, Billy Lawless’s new restaurant in a former McDonald’s behind the Wrigley Building. It was a beautiful summer night. We were on the brink of a three-day weekend. And we had just eaten a splendid meal. So there’s magical, and there’s special, and there’s also very good, which is how I’d rate most of the other dishes I tried at Beacon Tavern....