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The communal traditions of folk music encourage musicians to play together in the most casual settings—a common repertoire can erase the issues of learning a song so that singers and players can instantly focus on melding their talents. Such gatherings can lead to more sustained partnerships, which is certainly the case with I’m With Her, a dazzling trio featuring three of the most distinctive and thoughtful figures in contemporary folk and sophisticated pop: Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan, and Sara Watkins of Nickel Creek....

A Comedical Tragedy for Mister Punch Punch, the vindictive wife-beating hand puppet, comes to life as a masked, strutting scoundrel in the House Theatre’s A Comedical Tragedy for Mister Punch. So do his traditional friends: not just Judy but the dog, the baby, the clown, the crocodile, and the prostitute Pretty Polly (Echaka Agba). Kara Silverman has set her play in 18th-century London, where Pietro (Adrian Danzig), an immigrant puppeteer, must flee the swinging cudgel of a towering constable (the delightful Will Casey) just to eke out daily bread for himself and his sidekick, the urchin Charlotte....

Anna Romina Guevarra is the founding director and associate professor of Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago and a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project. She is an award-winning author on race, labor, and migration, and an expert witness on asylum cases. In the aftermath of the pandemic, state and federal agencies classified essential services—and workers—needed to maintain critical operations and functions and ensure that Americans have the basic necessities for everyday functioning and survival....

You’d think by now we’d need no more convincing: bankers are crooks, the financial system is a top-heavy house of cards, and Brooks Brothers is for assholes. Enter Broken Nose Theatre’s Labyrinth. A riveting drama—and compelling primer on how U.S. loans fucked over Latin American countries back in the 70s and 80s—the story dissects economic corruption at a subjective level. As director Spenser Davis points out in his program notes, Labyrinth is about “the people getting the deals done....

Courtesy the author Michael Czyzniewjewski and some friends There’s something comforting about a book that concentrates exclusively on doomed relationships. It makes our own romantic failures seem so much less egregious. You’ve dated some callous men, but none so callous he’d pawn off your internal organs and still dare to stroke your hair with a gold band wrapped around his finger. Or maybe you’ve been caught cheating, but never while your wife was in space, spying on your drunken misdeeds through the lens of a high-powered telescope....

When Chicago Quarterly Review was launched in 1994 it aspired to live up to its name and hasn’t exactly succeeded—that is, it’s published 19 issues in those 21 years. But founder Syed Haider tells me he’s picked up the pace—the latest issue is the third in a year’s time. “Suddenly we are becoming what we should have been—some kind of quarterly,” says Haider. Are other publishers taking notes? Pay all Contribute to the expenses out of your own pocket—as Haider and his coeditor, Elizabeth McKenzie, do— and the agonies of capitalization fall away....

Cold Specks’ Ladan Hussein (aka Al Spx) is one of a number of artists, among them FKA Twigs, Kelala, Dawn Richard, and Frank Ocean, who combine R&B and rock into uncategorizable pop—though her particular version of it has been characterized as “doom soul” or quirky indie soul in the past. The Somali-Canadian performer’s latest album, Fool’s Paradise, sounds less odd than her earlier material, in part because it’s so perfect. Hussein’s new arrangements are less fussy than before, their electronic elements seamlessly incorporated into a series of dreamy midtempo tunes worthy of Sadé, and also like Sadé, above it all floats Hussein’s marvelous, insinuating voice....

For nearly two decades Pittsburgh band Black Moth Super Rainbow have twisted psych, lo-fi electronics, trip-hop, noise, and cybernetic pop into shapes so wondrous that the most imaginative balloon-animal-making clowns might envy. The group’s seventh album, last year’s Panic Blooms (Rad Cult), brims with Technicolor synth notes that ooze like cough syrup. BMSR have long revelled in the zone where pastel dreams flit into Day-Glo nightmares and back again, and this album holds listeners in a particularly foreboding space: through processed murmurs, front man Tobacco unravels a brief passage about someone having their mouth split open by a razor blade hidden in a tangerine—a narrative that also aptly describes the veiled, enticing horror in BMSR’s music....

Seeking out others to lean on is an indispensable part of tending to our mental wellness. The Center on Halsted (COH) offers an array of virtual therapy groups facilitated by psychologists and counselors that support LGBTQ+ individuals and their allies facing similar challenges during the pandemic and beyond. Although not pandemic-specific, two other groups provide coping strategies that apply to those suffering from COVID-related stress. Grief and Loss provides alternate ways to connect and grieve when attending a funeral isn’t an option, and Queer Body Image & Body Positivity addresses struggles related to self-perception and those using food to self-soothe, particularly during the pandemic when many people are less physically active....

The title of Jason Diamond’s new memoir, Searching for John Hughes: Or Everything I Thought I Needed to Know About Life I Learned From Watching 80s Movies, is deceptive—it suggests a series of cheerful reminiscences about lessons Diamond learned from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club and how he applied them to his own life. But Searching for John Hughes is both darker and more interesting. Diamond grew up mostly on the North Shore, close to where Hughes lived and set his greatest sequence of films, from Sixteen Candles in 1984 through Home Alone in 1990....

“Polyester!” KeiyaA says, laughing. “The uniforms were so thick and dense.” We’re in what she calls the “studio room” of her Bushwick apartment, reminiscing about singing in the Chicago Children’s Choir. Hanging on the wall behind her is a white pegboard adorned with an assortment of audio cables. KeiyaA, 28, was in the choir till she was 12, but she tells me she doesn’t remember much besides the red vests of their performance uniforms and the dimly lit church (First Unitarian, on the corner of 56th and Woodlawn) where they rehearsed....

As much as I love the music of eras past, I’m pretty skeptical of band reunions—especially when the number of founding or classic-era members begins to dwindle. Case in point: 1970s cosmic rockers Captain Beyond are still touring, but drummer Bobby Caldwell is the only original member aboard. Caldwell played on the first and last of the band’s three proper LPs, leaving after their 1972 self-titled debut to join hard rocker Rick Derringer (of “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo” fame) on 1973’s All American Boy and then returning to Captain Beyond for the disappointing 1977 LP Dawn Explosion....

Ask a local movie theater general manager about the last four months, and you’ll get a sigh. A portion of local theaters were known as much for screening independent movies (Cold War, Uncut Gems), classics (Lawrence of Arabia in 70mm, Goodfellas), and midnight movies (Mandy, The Room) as they were for blockbusters. However, Davis, Logan, and the New 400 are waiting for blockbuster titles like Christopher Nolan’s Tenet and Disney’s live-action remake of Mulan....

Last year the New York-based pianist Mara Rosenbloom took a bold step forward with her third album, Prairie Burn (Fresh Sound New Talent), an incisive outing named for the practice of using controlled fires to encourage the natural preservation and renewal of indigenous growth. Rosenbloom, who grew up near Madison, Wisconsin, thought of the process while rethinking her work following lessons from jazz pianist Connie Crothers. As she told me during an interview earlier this year, “I was sort of looking to make something that could be like that: Can we just set loose this energy and sort of let go of everything?...

The interruptions at Thursday’s aldermanic town hall meeting on the overhaul of the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) began immediately. The Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression gathered nearly 40,000 signatures in support of the idea over the last three years. For a full minute, a representative from the group led the room in a chant of “Sixteen shots and a cover up”—a reference to the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald in October 2014....

Recently, I interviewed the writer Nathan Englander about his novel Kaddish.com, whose protagonist is a lapsed Orthodox Jew who lapses back. Englander finds this religious back-and-forthing eminently understandable. “I don’t think I was born to be Orthodox,” he said, “but I don’t think I was born to be secular. I struggle on my nonfaith the way other people struggle on their faith.” To Leo, loving God is abstract, and thus impossible....

This unholy year is winding down (or so we’re told), and as we veer between images of poop emojis and dumpster fires to do it visual justice, it’s hard to remember that there are in fact things for which to be grateful. For me, that gratitude comes in the form of recognizing how many theater, dance, and performance companies have continued to create in the digital world—one that wasn’t a familiar home for many of them before COVID-19....

A cavernous lyricism gives Will Eno’s wry, deadpan, seemingly inconsequential plays their near debilitating resonance and often gets the Brooklyn-based playwright anointed the Next Beckett. And this coy, static backyard drama, which marked Eno’s Broadway debut in 2014, certainly has a Beckettian flavor. Two married couples named Jones—one a decade or so younger than the other—mostly dither and stall and circumvent their way through several banal days, always peculiarly on edge as though some undefinable, momentous threat is perpetually in the offing....

LGBTQ people are anxious about their vulnerability under the coming Donald Trump presidency, due in part to the confusing patchwork of state and federal laws that protect them. Illinois is one of 19 states that explicitly bar discrimination based on both sexual orientation and gender identity, while Wisconsin law protects gays but not trans people, and Indiana—home state of vice president-elect Mike Pence—offers none of the above. Kim Hively had been teaching at Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana and had been denied promotions and eventually was denied renewal of her contract because she’s a lesbian....

There was a shooting in my neighborhood, Rogers Park, in October. There were probably shootings in every neighborhood sometime this year, but this one attracted extra notice because the victim, Cynthia Trevillion, was a teacher at the local Waldorf School—she was on her way out to a Friday-night dinner with her husband and was unlucky enough to get caught in gang-related cross fire. The bullets hit her in the head and neck and she died immediately....