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It was less than a year ago that Wayne Self’s UpStairs: The Musical was produced at the Pride Arts Center, so it would be reasonable for audiences to confuse it with Circle Theatre’s current production of Max Vernon’s unrelated 2017 musicalThe View UpStairs. It’s sort of an Armageddon/ Deep Impact situation. But considering how far the two shows deviate from a similar starting point, a more apt analogy might be Gremlins and Gremlins 2....

Since 2005, Northwestern University’s American Music Theatre Project has been boosting fledgling musical theater composers. For the young artists whose work will debut this year, AMTP offers a double milestone: the aspiring composers and lyricists (all seniors at NU) will finally see their work—much of it years in the making—on its feet. For months, Khazanchi says, the creators of A Bridge to the Moon could only meet outside, so they’d work on the show while going for walks....

Plenty of couples banter, woo, and fall in love in Chicago, despite the vast majority of American films locating romance elsewhere (most often in New York). But in dramatizing the first date of Barack and Michelle Obama in the summer of 1989, when they were colleagues at a Loop law firm, writer-director Richard Tanne returned to the city where the couple met and, three years later, married. Shot over 15 days last summer, Southside With You showcases a city as photogenic, dynamic, and charming as the lovers themselves....

Fabulous Freddie Ninja Unlike you and me, Fabulous Freddie Ninja (aka Freddie Leroy) irons his white jeans before an all-styles dance battle. And unlike anyone else, he fearlessly integrates breaking and voguing—two of the perhaps most disparate elements in Chicago underground dancing—spinning on his head, then jumping to his feet only to collapse to the ground in a precipitous Vogue Fem dip, one leg tucked behind his back, one up in the air....

While it’s become quite common for social-justice-oriented community groups to begin their events with an acknowledgment that the panel/forum/workshop is taking place on land once violently usurped by white colonists from this or that Native American tribe, the practice hasn’t yet become typical of more mainstream civic circles. But on Tuesday morning, as the Metropolitan Planning Council unveiled an extensive new report detailing strategies for achieving racial equity in the Chicago region, MPC vice president Marisa Novara emphasized that the conversation about remedying segregation must begin at the beginning....

On a scorching hot Sunday in early August, drag performers at Hamburger Mary’s in Andersonville braved the heat, wearing showstopping costumes and performing slickly choreographed routines for patrons on the burning pavement. If performers were tired or overheated, it didn’t come across to the audience as they utilized their new performance space, which now includes both a standard indoor dining room and an extended outdoor patio. While the queens’ overall drag styles varied between performers, they all sported the latest accessory within the community: over-the-head face shields to protect from potential exposure to coronavirus....

The other night I watched about 15 minutes of episode one of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale and turned off the TV and went to bed, wondering if I should feel more guilty than I did. For isn’t it the responsibility of every American to know all there is to know about dystopias? But I’d already read the novel, so I knew its drift, as well as most of the standard dystopian literature—1984, Fahrenheit 451, It Can’t Happen Here....

The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. In Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. During the 1991 NBA finals against the Lakers, Hodges approached Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson to suggest a walkout. “I wanted to stand in solidarity with the black community and call out racism and inequity,” Hodges told Joravsky. “It would be a united front with the whole world watching....

Rapper-producer Supa Bwe provided local hip-hop group Hurt Everybody with some of the heat that made their best material catch fire. As a rapper, he has an affection for Auto-Tune, and as a producer, he has a mosaicist’s eye for collage. He’d been making solo material on the side, but he’s since shifted his priorities—Hurt Everybody dissolved in January. Supa’s not done with groups, though, and recently announced that he’d formed Fight Me with local rapper UG Vavy and producer Shepard Hues....

Chimera Ensemble presents the Chicago premiere of MJ Kaufman’s 2014 drama. Four very different people decide it’s their life’s mission to be sent to Mars for the rest of their days in order to make it habitable for humanity. But in the final countdown before the “winning” candidates are chosen, each questions why they want to go and what it means to leave everything literally 142 million miles away. One way or another, all four would-be space explorers want to be part of the mission in order to lend meaning to their lives....

It’s a daunting task to try and break the mold of the high school coming-of-age film, let alone do it successfully. But every so often, a filmmaker takes the reins on the widely popular formula and dares to disrupt it without compromise, making for an unforgettable and expansive addition to the genre. Everyone in Knives and Skin has something to hide. Joanna sells her mother’s underwear to older men, including her male teachers, in order to afford college application fees....

When obscure downer-folk singer Sixto Rodriguez announced his 2009 show at Schubas, I was beyond thrilled—and nearly in shock. Outside record-collector circles, hardly anyone seemed to be aware of the Detroit musician’s work. It was practically impossible to get a copy of the records he’d made in the early 70s (except for bootlegs), and rumors persisted that he’d been shot and killed years before, so hearing that he was alive was a welcome surprise....

Retractions generally aren’t fun for journalists. But the announcement last week that Mercury Theater Chicago isn’t dead after all makes me happy—even if it means that my obituary for them as one of the losses in Chicago theater for 2020 now has to be taken back in its entirety. The fact that the company is also bringing in Christopher Chase Carter as artistic director just adds to the spirit of renewal for the venue....

UPDATE Friday, March 13: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. Jess McLeod directs the Chicago premiere of Do You Feel Anger?, Mara Nelson-Greenberg’s trenchant 2018 satire of office and gender politics. Empathy coach Sofia (Emjoy Gavino) walks into a hornet’s nest of toxic misunderstanding and abuse when she’s hired to help a debt collection company get their act together. From the cheerful yet traumatized Eva (Sadieh Rifai) to the friendly but clueless boss, Jon (Lawrence Grimm), and alternately horrifying duo of Jordan (Bernard Gilbert) and Howie (Levi Holloway), Sofia’s got a whale of a job on her hands....

The 2020 fall arts season looks a lot different than it has in years past, for the obvious reason. But even if gallery attendance is restricted and many performance venues remain shuttered, there are a ton of great writers, performers, visual artists, and multigenre talents to catch up with, no matter what stage of personal shutdown you’re in right now. We asked some curators, along with Reader staff, to tell us what they’re excited about right now....

When I interviewed poet and soul singer Jamila Woods for the People Issue, she told me about what she tries to accomplish with her work: “I want my music to be that elixir that keeps people able to stay woke, and also stay healthy and loving themselves.” She also mentioned her forthcoming solo debut, and yesterday she announced that she’d inked a deal with local hip-hop indie Closed Sessions. Billboard broke the news and premiered her first single, “Blk Girl Soldier....

I always leave the School of the Art Institute (SAIC) graduate opening reception sweating. With more than 100 artists, it’s a marathon art-viewing experience. Bring your water, grab some cookies, and take it all in. Every year I leave saying, “I’m exhausted.” However, this year, things look a lot different. “Process has always been at the core of my image-making practice,” Emuakhagbon says. Her photographic project began in Dallas while working on a series that focused on family and her uncle’s migration from Nigeria to Japan....

On most of Olivia Block’s records, what she does to sounds matters much more than how they were originally made; using field recordings, instrumental passages, or electronics, she cuts, distorts, and layers the material until even the quietest passages feel packed with multiple meanings. But in concert, things can happen for a long time without intervention; the sustained organ notes and prerecorded electronics of 132 Ranks, which she performed last April at University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel, turned the building’s interior into one giant instrument for an hour....

Putting together one musical is hard. Wrangling multiple original productions from different creators and producers sounds like a nightmare, but it’s how Underscore Theatre Company advances its mission to support new musicals. Since 2014, the Chicago Musical Theatre Festival (CMTF) has enabled local and national artists by helping them develop full productions that will be performed before a paying audience. After three years of summer festivals, Underscore is making a big change for the fourth CMTF, moving to February to take advantage of Chicago Theatre Week and avoid pesky street-fair conflicts....

The need for care has never been so vital—and so exhausting. While a long summer of protest pushed the boundaries of what must happen to make Black Lives Matter, often resulting in violent reprisal, the impending presidential election continues to narrow this open terrain of communal support and anger into the compromised binary of America’s two-party system. Hovering over everything, of course, are the hundreds of thousands of global COVID deaths that cannot be mourned in any traditional way, the very impulse to grieve together a major contributor to the virus’s continuation....