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The truth about theaters is that they’re boring. This is not, however, to say that what happens within them is boring; merely that they’re rather blank, expectant, waiting. This waiting assumes added significance at the present moment, as no one can predict when lights will return to Steppenwolf, the Goodman, the Lyric. Like us, some will die. Less than two weeks after temporarily closing on March 14, the venerable Hubbard Street Dance Chicago announced the nearly half-century-old Lou Conte Dance Studio would remain shuttered indefinitely....

Recommended for ages four through ten, Filament Theatre’s production of this one-act by Ramón Esquivel creates a well-balanced environment of both interactive fun and sensitive exploration of challenging themes. Before the show, audience members are given paper star necklaces to color. We play the role of stars, best friends to the moon, Luna, played by a charismatic and warm Deanalis Resto. Luna is the best friend of the story’s central character, Soledad, a child of migrant farm workers, played by bright-eyed and earnest Samantha Nieves on the afternoon I attended....

When the late, great Logan Square loncheria Cafe Marianao mysteriously shut down and the property went on the market in the summer of 2016, it was like the unexplained disappearance of a loved one: shocking, brutal, and offering no closure. For decades, stoic countermen at the Milwaukee Avenue sandwich shop plied a steady but disordered scrum of adherents with cafe con leche and Cubano, steak, and medianoche sandwiches. And suddenly, without warning, it was all over....

W After considering 38 cities, including Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C., the society settled on the former home of its current executive director, Rick Fosbrink, where it plans to rent space in the Smithsonian-affiliated Heinz History Center while gearing up to eventually build its own museum, the National Center for Theatre History. For decades, the society got along with a single staff member—executive director Richard Sklenar—a minuscule budget, and a lot of volunteer help from its members....

Filmmakers frequently present a world that is lush and extravagant, but they can be equally adept at capturing the hardships and difficulties of life. Currently showing on Filmstruck are a series of films that humanize those experiencing hard times. We’ve selected five to highlight: Greed Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 silent classic is more famous for its original eight-hour version than for this cut that MGM carved out of it (though apparently there were several prerelease versions, which Stroheim screened privately for separate groups)....

On December 12, 2015, stand-up comedians Rhea Butcher and Cameron Esposito got married onstage at the Hideout. The pair met at an open mike at Cole’s Bar that Esposito was hosting; they moved to LA together two years later. Season one of the autobiographical show Take My Wife, airing on NBC’s comedy-streaming app Seeso, follows the couple during the time between their move and their engagement as they try to balance their relationship and careers....

There’s a video of Young Jean Lee performing her 2011 play We’re Gonna Die on Vimeo. It’s an exercise in minimalism and mortality: a single person with a mic backed up by a band—part stand-up, part rock concert, part TED talk, and part campfire confession—relaying a series of humiliating, horrifying, gory, and mundane incidents-in-the-life-of, and Lee is brilliant: eyes dry, voice wry, bangs on her face, feet on the ground, and a pocket full of tunes that worm their way into your ear....

To view Nora Helmer’s girlish high spirits as proof of immaturity is as much a mistake as viewing Blanche DuBois’s flights of nostalgia as proof of weakness. Both of these indelible dramatic heroines reach their breaking point (or in Nora’s case, a breaking-away point) only after making huge—and unsung—sacrifices for their families. True, Nora’s forgery of her dying father’s signature in order to get the loan she needed to save her husband Torvald’s health is technically a crime, whereas Blanche drowned in legal debt shepherding sick relatives on their “long parade to the graveyard....

If you’d stumbled unawares into one of Joanna Connor’s regular gigs at the House of Blues or Kingston Mines in the 2010s, the blues singer and guitarist might’ve seemed like some sort of hidden treasure. But Connor has been playing all over the local blues scene for almost four decades, and she’s attracted devoted fans drawn to her forceful stage presence and fiery slide guitar. When she moved to Chicago from Massachusetts in the mid-1980s, she started out as a guitarist for Dion Payton’s 43rd Street Blues Band, then the house band for the storied Checkerboard Lounge....

Kava is like a combination of weed, booze, and caffeine,” the barista behind the counter informed me on my second visit to Tropikava Kafe and Juice Bar. A chalkboard on the wall described it as a “magical root” from the South Pacific, Hawaii, Fiji, and Tonga. WebMD, on the other hand, warns that it can cause liver damage, concluding, “Kava is POSSIBLY UNSAFE when taken by mouth. Don’t use it.” (Emphasis theirs....

James Beard Foundation Donnie Madia accepting his Outstanding Restaurateur award from Lidia Bastianich We invited the food world (well, of America anyway) to honor our hot chefs and restaurants, and we wound up paying tribute to restaurant owners instead. But that’s not a bad thing. Last night’s James Beard Foundation Awards, held at Lyric Opera in the first installment of a three-year stop in Chicago, reminded us that just as we often overlook the producers of movies in favor of the directors, our restaurant scene is at least as much the work of entrepreneurs seeking to fill (or create) a market niche, as it is the work of chefs seeking to put their vision on the plate....

Oopey Mason Photography The gang was still bright eyed and bushy tailed at hour ten. It’s safe to say that when I agreed to sit in the iO Theater for 12 straight hours for this past Saturday’s Hijinks Fest I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Heck, the performers couldn’t even predict what was going to happen since they’d never done anything like it before. But somehow, there we were, all standing and laughing and reeking ever so slightly of cheap beer on a Sunday morning....

Obtaining medical marijuana in Illinois has been anything but easy in the two and a half years since the Medical Cannabis Pilot Program was put in place. But a bill that would expand the program and address many of its current shortcomings is making its way to Governor Bruce Rauner, who has indicated that he intends to sign it. The most surprising change affects the way patients get prescriptions. Physicians are no longer required to recommend medical marijuana for patients with qualifying conditions—something, as the Reader reported back in April, that 82 percent of doctors in Illinois have been unwilling to do....

In my review of Asako I & II that appears in this week’s Reader, I argue that the melodrama remains a genre with much to teach us. The heightened emotions we associate with melodramas speak to the feelings we all experience during moments of crisis and epiphany, while the blatant narrative contrivances of the genre can make us more cognizant of the arbitrary forces that shape our lives. The melodramatic tradition goes back hundreds of years, having a long legacy on stage before the movies began; the early cinema teems with melodramas, many of them adapted from popular stage plays....

The subject of this week’s film essay in the Reader, James Gray’s Ad Astra, imagines a future in which humanity has united in the mission to find and make contact with intelligent life outside our solar system. I won’t reveal whether the film’s characters succeed in their quest, though I’ll note that Ad Astra is a distinctive sci-fi picture in that it focuses on the hard science of how space travel and interstellar communication might work in the future as opposed to the science fantasy of how extraterrestrial life might look and behave....

When previously comparing the siege of Tribune Publishing to a corporate Game of Thrones, I overlooked an important player—the third column already inside the gates. That would be Oaktree Capital Management, the second largest shareholder after chairman Michael Ferro. Like most firms in its line of work, Oaktree has little tolerance for visionaries like Ferro, especially ones with little to point to in the way of successful visions. Oaktree sides with Gannett in its struggle to buy enough Tribune Publishing stock to take over the company, and on Monday it sent Tribune directors a letter that couldn’t have been clearer: Oaktree clearly has no faith in Ferro, and I don’t see anything in this letter that could be called a vote of confidence in whatever Gannett plans for Tribune Publishing....

This past Friday through Sunday, the fifth annual Ruido Fest brought several generations and even more genres of Latinx music together in Union Park. Not even Sunday’s rain could dampen the enthusiasm of the crowd that turned out for closing headliners Los Tigres del Norte, the most popular norteño band of all time. Photographer Rick Majewski went to Ruido Fest on Friday and came home with pictures of almost everybody on the bill....

This week’s been front-loaded with local hip-hop releases—I.L Will‘s Tattz & Flattz 2, MoBo the Great‘s Fuck the Public, and Dlow‘s Unexpected Statement. As I scrambled to listen, or at least sample, all these projects I nearly missed Sick La Familia, which south-side rapper AceSo released yesterday. The MC frequently collaborates with local producer C-Sick, whose sharply grandiose, twinkling beats appear throughout Sick La Familia. C-Sick worked his magic on the mixtape’s title song, spinning muted sirens and brooding bass into a turn-up track that’s both unnerving and thrilling, and AceSo furthers the tune’s menacing rush with a poised and barbed performance....

Beloved and influential Swedish progressive metal band Opeth play Chicago for the first time in nearly three years in support of a new album, last fall’s In Cauda Venenum (“Poison in the Tail”), released in English and Swedish versions. The band, established in 1989, have traditionally recorded only in English, so it’s fascinating to hear how the mother tongue of front man Mikael Åkerfeldt interacts with their intricate sound; when he sings in Swedish (a language I do not know at all), he seems to fold his vocals in among the keyboard sweeps with a homey, organic assurance....

On a Saturday afternoon in January, a handful of mostly middle-aged men and women gathered in a conference room on the tenth floor of the red-steel-framed skyscraper at 60 E. Van Buren. Participants in the Housing Choice Voucher Program, also known as Section 8, they’d come to the headquarters of the Chicago Housing Authority for a long-awaited meeting with CEO Eugene Jones Jr. In addition to Jones’s blessing, they expected to get a check for $850 to file paperwork to officially become a 501(c)3 nonprofit: the National Housing Residents Association....