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This morning, the Pitchfork Music Festival announced its lineup for 2021, which includes most of the acts scheduled to play in 2020—with some notable exceptions. Erykah Badu replaces the National as the headliner of the festival’s closing night, St. Vincent takes the Saturday-night headlining slot previously held by Run the Jewels (who are playing at this year’s Riot Fest instead), and Phoebe Bridgers wraps up Friday night instead of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs....

Mary Gauthier has often looked to her turbulent past for subject matter for her poetic, hardscrabble songs; amid flinty folk rock she’s openly grappled with being adopted as a child and her struggles with addiction and heartbreak. But on Rifles & Rosary Beads (In the Black/Thirty Tigers), her first album in four years, she turned outward to work with SongWritingWith: Soldiers, a program that brings veteran and active-duty members of the U....

Late in the action, when a missile hits the hull of Captain Nemo’s submarine, the Nautilus, the lights turn red, dramatic music kicks up in the background, and the actors onstage respond to the impact in slow motion. It’s one of a handful or more of moments that seem off about this Lookingglass production. The sheer scale of the story undermines its ambitions as a work of theater. Playwrights David Kersnar and Althos Low, who adapted the script from Jules Verne’s novel, steer the action through Victorian drawing rooms, the ocean floor, and a deserted island, transitioning so abruptly from one locale to the next that the prerecorded voice of Professor Aronnax (Kasey Foster) has to keep piping in to remind us where we are....

Up to this point, comedian and actor Amy Schumer has been known as a boundary pusher. The best sketches on her Comedy Central series Inside Amy Schumer (2013-’17) called out and rejected the ways in which women are expected to adhere to certain beauty standards and behavioral norms in consumer society. Trainwreck (2015), her first starring feature, was a successful extension of her TV show’s themes and her stand-up persona as a raunchy, unapologetic lush....

In the 19th century, amid social unrest, crime, and infectious disease in the lower Manhattan neighborhood of Five Points in New York City, an American dance was brewing. The source of this new creative energy was a combination of cultures colliding and competition. “Black people and Irish people were on the street corner together, in the music halls together, in the pubs together,” notes choreographer Michelle Dorrance. “And Irish were referred to as Blacks, and Black dancing was called jigging....

Sexual harassment and assault have reemerged in our national discourse, thanks largely to the leaked footage of Donald Trump and Billy Bush bantering about having their way with women. Now, more than a dozen women have come forward, alleging that Trump assaulted them in one form or another. Julia’s father, Derrick Martin, described her as adventurous and ambitious; she had just received her passport for a New Year’s trip to Africa....

Time was when the future looked rather grim indeed for the latest Neos show, 45 Plays for America’s First Ladies, which opens October 8 in a streaming production. It’s the launch of the Neo-Futurists’ 32nd season. But back in 2016, the show was shelved indefinitely in the wake of a presidential election that nobody saw coming. Directed by Denise Yvette Serna, 45 Plays is as it sounds: a series of playlets about the First Ladies of these United States, Martha to Melania....

Nilo Cruz’s plays often center on people suffering displacement and trying to find distractions for that pain, as in his 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna in the Tropics, about a group of Cuban immigrants working in the cigar industry in 1929 Florida who take comfort from hearing Anna Karenina read aloud—and like Anna, engage in their own passionate infidelities. In 2018’s Exquisita Agonía, the characters are caught between life and death, past and present....

Judging from the energy of practically every Why? Records release, the four rappers who make up the underground Chicago hip-hop collective and label could easily spend the rest of their lives collaborating in different configurations on a half dozen albums per year. Udababy LP, the debut full-length from Why? duo Udababy, is no exception. Rappers Joshua Virtue (who produced most of the record) and Davis convene amid worn-in instrumentals that are just the right amount of rickety and loose, hitting the sweet spot targeted by every underground hip-hop producer with an affection for grit....

In 2012, Chicago musicians Max Allison and Doug Kaplan launched the eclectic label Hausu Mountain, which has grown into one of the city’s best indies. It also acts as an umbrella for many of its founders’ projects: Hausu Mountain has released the ambient-adjacent sounds Allison and Kaplan have made with Natalie Chami (aka TALsounds) as Good Willsmith, as well as Allison’s hard-to-pin-down experimental solo material as Mukqs and Kaplan’s as MrDougDoug....

THE FEED/FACEBOOK Steve Dolinsky, Beverly Kim, and Rick Bayless, nominees all Last year I said the takeaway from the James Beard Foundation media award nominations was that Chicago food writing wasn’t trying hard enough. Well, I guess for once the claim of a rebuilding year actually proved true, as even a chef, Rick Bayless, managed to get as many media nominations as all of Chicago media did last year. As half of The Feed (the other half being Steve Dolinsky) Bayless picked up one, in addition to being nominated for Best Restaurant Service, which will apparently be the case for Topolobampo until the end of time....

A day after a federal judge dismissed Uptown Tent City Organizers’ lawsuit against the City of Chicago, the homeless organization’s attorneys are vowing to continue a court battle for the right of those who have been displaced by authorities to camp out in the streets. The matter ended up before a federal judge in June 2017, and there the Tent City Organizers, represented by the Uptown People’s Law Center, expanded their case into a full constitutional complaint....

The fate of the Dakota Access Pipeline still hangs in the balance, despite what was heralded Sunday as a huge victory for water protectors. Tribe members say this all violates the terms of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which established the boundaries of the reservation and encoded tribal sovereignty on the land. (The pipeline had previously been rerouted away from nearby Bismarck, North Dakota. Residents in the overwhelmingly white state capital didn’t have to put up nearly as much of a fight, as WNYC has reported....

Iron Chic’s songs move with the exhausted triumph of an Olympic athlete who’s completed the 100m butterfly race with cement blocks attached to her arms and legs. Weight is imprinted in the music; the guitars heave skyward, the rhythm section perilously pushes forward, and front man Jason Lubrano’s burly vocals muscle their way through charged instrumentals. The band’s third album, the recent You Can’t Stay Here (SideOneDummy), is anchored by loss....

Chemistry is everything in romance. The folks at Oak Park Festival Theatre prove this again and again over the course of their well-paced, nicely costumed, but ultimately disappointing revival of Shakespeare’s oft-produced comedy (directed by Melanie Keller) about two very different couples and the obstacles they encounter as they try to, well, couple (or, in the case of one pair, avoid coupling). There is just no chemistry between either set of lovers in the show....

In 2018 Nick Cave opened a new portal into his world with a question-and-answer newsletter titled the Red Hand Files. As queries from fans flooded in, Cave dutifully replied with poetic meditations, splashy Polaroids of his opulent Brighton home, and the occasional errant one-liner that shed new light on the mystique that he’s meticulously cultivated for 40-plus years. On February 25, Cave revealed one of the most momentous installments of the Red Hand Files: the surprise release of Carnage, a collaborative album with longtime cohort Warren Ellis that he describes as “a brutal but very beautiful record nested in a communal catastrophe....

Leonard C. Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense attorney and co-owner of the newly independent Reader. Since the coronavirus forced businesses to shut down, our economy has lost 40 million jobs, and millions more workers have had their wages cut or been forced to work part-time. Desperate to maintain their profits, many large corporations are planning additional massive layoffs. The temporary relief provided to working people included onetime $1,200 stimulus checks and $600 unemployment supplements that expired this summer....

LA rocker Ty Segall has made a name for himself partly through his prolificacy; over the last decade he’s churned out records in a slew of different contexts. He’s actually slowed down a bit, releasing only one album annually over the last few years (not counting his work as a drummer in Fuzz), and while recently there’s been some backlash about his need to self-edit his output, I don’t buy any of it....

The mayor’s race isn’t the only circus in town. On February 24 voters will also choose their aldermen for the first time since all 50 wards were redrawn in 2012—though we’re pretty sure we know the outcome in six wards where incumbents are running unopposed. Seventh Ward Lawyers, guns, and ballot challenges More than 50 residents applied to the mayor’s office to finish Sandi Jackson’s term, including her chief of staff, Keiana Barrett....

Update: To help slow the spread of COVID-19, this show has been postponed until further notice. Ticket holders should contact point of purchase for refund or exchange information. Canadian artist Dan Snaith, who performs as Caribou, crafts mesmerizing explorations of dance music that are alluring, catchy, and intimate. He distills various strains of house music into simple moods and fleshes out the emotions of each track with gently spoken vocals. This is especially true on his latest album, Suddenly (Merge)....