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It’s not unusual to have your identity stolen on the Internet. What happened to Adam Busch is a little less common, a lot less sinister, and a bit more complicated. Busch, who moved to Chicago in 1999 from Saint Louis, lived here until 2014, and during those years he fronted two excellent bands, Manishevitz and Sonoi. Shortly before leaving for Austin, Texas, he made his first solo record, River of Bricks, with assistance from another former Chicagoan who’d headed south, Michael Krassner of the Boxhead Ensemble....

Like Hamilton cast members on Mike Pence, holiday shows are swarming Chicago­-area theaters. We review eight of them here, and there are more to come next week. —Tony Adler It’s a Wonderful Life: Live in Chicago A number of holiday favorites in Chicago have become tradition, families returning year after year for anodyne entertainment. This mainstay from American Blues Theater was new to me: a live radio-style version of Frank Capra’s beloved 1946 movie starring Jimmy Stewart....

When Jesus “Chuy” Garcia announced last October that he was challenging Rahm Emanuel for mayor, the incumbent had already raised nearly $10 million for his reelection bid. An affiliated political action committee, Chicago Forward, had collected about $2.5 million more, according to state records. The old Democratic machine had armies of patronage employees to deliver the vote. The new political system that controls City Hall is based on a network of wealthy campaign donors....

Indigenous was formed by guitarist Mato Nanji, along with his brother, sister, and cousin, in the 90s. As Native Americans growing up on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, they originally heard the sounds of blues from Nanji’s father—a musician who regularly played this style of music around the house. Though his family members eventually left the band to pursue other interests, Nanji has kept it going strong. Forty years ago, a band like Indigenous would have been considered a commercial rock group with blues elements, but in some circles today it’s considered to be a straight-up blues band....

For decades, there has been speculation as to the identity of playwright “Jane Martin.” One thing is clear after watching Martin’s atrocious Keely and Du. There’s no way anyone capable of ever needing an abortion could have written this reprehensible piece of “let’s-look-at-both-sides” false equivalency. Not even the most stellar four-person cast (director Michelle Altman’s quartet is two-quarters competent) could make this work. The plot follows antichoice terrorists Du (Mary Mikva) and Walter (Scott Olson, chewing the scenery into toothpicks) after they kidnap Keely (Andie Dae), a pregnant rape victim, from the clinic where she’s seeking an abortion....

When fledgling screenwriter Diablo Cody was nominated for an Academy Award in 2008, feature writers across the U.S. clicked their heels to learn that she’d once worked as a pole dancer. Her 2005 memoir Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper provided an easy angle on Cody and, combined with her irreverent sense of humor, helped turn her into a media darling. Inevitably she’s become an object of fun, parodied as an empty vessel on Saturday Night Live and skewered in Bobcat Goldthwait’s movie God Bless America as “the only stripper with too much self-esteem....

If you rub this bottle, Jimmy Whispers will magically emerge* and not grant you any wishes. (*No he won’t.) Chicago singer-songwriter Jimmy Whispers, who describes himself with disarmingly transparent bravado as “the greatest bedroom popper in the tri-state area,” recorded his new debut album, Summer in Pain, way back in 2011. For years he’s been holding out for the right label (and the right moment), refusing until very recently to post any music online, and on March 24 he finally releases the album through local imprint Moniker....

From 1935 until her death in 1996, Birdie Reeve Kay ran a secretarial service in the Hyde Park Bank Building. She answered phones, transcribed tapes, and typed papers for University of Chicago students. It was no secret Birdie was once a vaudeville star. Billed as the world’s fastest typist, she wowed audiences with her effortless speed and her photographic memory. Birdie once played 20 men at chess simultaneously, beating them blindfolded....

Named after the devilish sprite in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and established in New York in 1876 by Austrian immigrant Joseph Keppler, Puck was a German-language satirical magazine (with an English edition following in 1877) that skewered powerful people and high society for the next 40 years. “With a Wink and a Nod—Cartoonists of the Gilded Age,” now open at the Driehaus Museum, displays 74 original drawings and some 20 magazines from this pioneering publication, providing invaluable insight into how the visual and written press interpreted, elucidated, and took the piss out of events in American history in the years between the Civil War and World War I....

This holiday season may God (or whatever you believe in, higher power or otherwise) bless us, everyone, but especially Shawn Childress (aka rapper-producer Awdazcate), who in 2011 brilliantly created an event where people could gather to eat and watch different generations of local hip-hop acts. Waffle Fest has been going strong ever since. Near the top of this year’s yuletide iteration is Chris Spencer, aka rappers Chris Crack and Vic Spencer....

When it comes to gay nightlife in Chicago, the Lucky Horseshoe occupies a category all its own. Known to regulars as “the ’Shoe,” the Boystown joint at the corner of Halsted and Belmont is the city’s only bar featuring a daily lineup of male dancers. My ritual is always the same: scoop up an empty stool and scan the room to figure out which comely lad in a jockstrap shall be the recipient of the wad of singles the bartender has handed me....

Chicago’s skyscraper modernism—the Hancock, Marina City, Sears/Willis—is the city’s treasured calling card. What’s less known and much less appreciated is our area’s parallel cache of modernist residential architecture. Modern in the Middle, a new book by historian and preservationist Susan S. Benjamin and IIT professor Michelangelo Sabatino, sets out to fix that. At a time when great urban centers were considered the hubs for everything serious and sophisticated, “What we tried to show is that these clients were perfectly fine with living in the suburbs,” Sabatino said in a phone interview last week....

For Chicago sports fans suffering through a pretty miserable January, baseball can’t come any sooner. But 120 years ago, this time of year was the height of the winter baseball season—indoor baseball, a game that once packed arenas across the city. Indoor baseball spread throughout the country, but nowhere did it attract as passionate a following as it did in Chicago. A little more than four years after the first game played at the Farragut Club, a charity match at the Auditorium Theatre drew a crowd of 3,500....

I’ll watch any movie shot in Chicago. I’ve lived here nearly 30 years and seeing the city on screen makes me happy. It’s great when the movie is entertaining like The Fugitive, exciting like Thief, alternately inspiring and depressing like The Interrupters, or horrifying like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. These and dozens of other great films show off the city while also having a story to tell, but there are countless others set here, which, aside from their setting, don’t have much to recommend them....

“My dream was to have a company. My dream was to create a space that was inclusive in every way, diverse, but really personable and connected,” says Nick Pupillo, founder and artistic director of Visceral Dance Chicago. “It’s in my body and my blood. My mom holds something in my scrapbook—in fifth grade I wrote about having a dance company someday! I always wanted to dance, but more than that, I loved programming, designing, producing, costumes, music—all the elements that go into it....

When the project ended, the media attention dissipated, the students returned to their regularly scheduled high school programming, and after a couple additional days during which he painted two more murals at Rush University Medical Center, Haring went home to New York. The Grant Park mural stood for about a week before it was dismantled—and that was the last time it was ever displayed in its entirety. Haring died of AIDS nine months later at the age of 31....

I’d been thinking about Silk Road Rising, the mission-driven performing arts company founded by Jamil Khoury and Malik Gillani in 2002, before I got an e-mail from Khoury last week. According to Arts Alliance Illinois (citing a survey by Americans for the Arts), 42 percent of Illinois arts organizations “are not confident they will survive the impacts of COVID-19.” On September 13 last year, Khoury told me, Gillani, then 49 years old, collapsed with a heart attack in the 150 N....

In April, Republican legislators set their terms for supporting social justice measures, telling Democrats in so many words: If you want our support, you have to give us something in return. Rauner’s amendatory veto came on HB 1468, proposed by state rep Jonathan Carroll, a Democrat from Northbrook. It would require a 72- hour wait before purchasing an assault weapon, a sensible piece of legislation if ever there was one. At least, it might give relief from the demons that lead someone to take another person’s life....

Onstage or -screen, the tropes of horror (teens in peril, demonic children, stormy nights, rusty saws, etc) have been exhausted for generations. What was once revolutionary is now mostly just revolting torture porn. Which brings us to the hellishly fine cast. The cabin is home to Raleigh (the magnificent Kirsten Fitzgerald) and her children, Marlow (Sara Cartwright), A1656 (Haley Bolithon), Bernie (Kayla Casiano), Squirrel (Autumn Hlava), the Boy (Charlie Herman), and the Ancient (Dado)....

AP Photo/Richard Drew In 2005 the New York Times cracked down on the use of unnamed sources. It wrote itself a new rule. As then public editor Byron Calame explained a few months later, “Readers are to be told why The Times believes a source is entitled to anonymity—a switch from the previous practice of stating why the source asked for it.” By now the Times had a new public editor, Margaret Sullivan, who’d turned anonymous sourcing into a crusade....