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The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. This year marks the 50th anniversary of many landmark cultural events (the original release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Broadway debut of Hair, the release of the Beatles’ White Album, etc.)—including the premiere of Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking gay-themed drama The Boys in the Band, which opened on April 15, 1968, at the off-Broadway venue Theatre Four, produced by the visionary Richard Barr, whose other producing credits included Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story and The American Dream and Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Happy Days....

In Willy Russell‘s 1980 play Educating Rita, the title character (a working-class hairdresser taking Open University literature courses in London) responds to the question “Suggest how you might resolve the staging difficulties inherent in a production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt” with “Do it on the radio.” It’s hard to say with certainty what kind of digital theatrical work will survive post-pandemic, though nearly every practitioner and producer I’ve spoken to in recent months promises that digital content will always be part of their programming going forward....

In their effort to re-do last year’s mayoral election, the principals of Chicago yesterday elected Troy LaRaviere over Mayor Emanuel in the race for the presidency of their association. It’s easy to understand why principals might’ve opted for a more Karen Lewis-like leader to deal with the mayor. Principals, arguably, have been hit even harder than teachers by the mayor’s education policies; unlike teachers, principals have to pretend they agree with the mayor’s cuts and closings, as well as his testing, curriculum, and privatization programs....

Enforced mass social isolation can really make you crave constant stimuli. As each day feels longer than the one before, the slow crawl of hours makes the frenetic dance music on Blood Blood Blood Blood Blood—the latest howler from Chicago-based producer RXM Reality, aka Mike Meegan—sound like a salve. It’s Meegan’s sixth album under that name and his most tightly crafted yet, brimming with ideas. “Exhale” evolves from glossy synth arpeggios to cryptic, fumbling beats, then employs an angelic vocal sample....

In a recent Illanoize Radio interview, south-side rapper Lil Romo said he started to approach his music more professionally in October 2018, after he dropped “Realla (Scrilla Remix),” where he raps like he’s trying to outrun the anxious, zippy instrumental. Since then, his career has seemed to draw on the energy of that track. He’s dropped four singles since February, and most of them have racked up at least 100,000 YouTube views....

The drastic aesthetic differences between the members of Wire are part of what’s made the music of the British postpunk quartet so rich, but they’ve also made it necessary for each of them to step outside the group to explore anything that doesn’t fit into the gridlike results of their collective songwriting process. Guitarist Colin Newman confirmed his mastery at writing barbed pop songs with solo albums such as 1982’s Not To and 1986’s Commercial Suicide, and starting with the 1981 release of Provisionally Entitled the Singing Fish, he’s also been crafting instrumental music....

After organizing a solid platform, devising a shrewd get-out-the-vote strategy, and ironing out countless important details, a political candidate is finally faced with the only electoral decision that actually matters: choosing a soundtrack. The right campaign anthem has the power to crystallize a message or inspire dedicated supporters. It can even achieve the minor miracle of making a very stiff white man in a suit appear slightly less square, if only temporarily....

For Glenn Danzig, the past 15 years have been especially weird. Starting with the infamous 2004 backstage TKO punch delivered by North Side Kings singer Danny Marianino, the Misfits mastermind—in his heyday one of the most enigmatic and distinctive vocalists in punk history—has been on a downward spiral of unintentional self-parody and apparent madness. Every bit of news about Danzig to emerge since then has been strange and hilarious: the onstage meltdowns, the viral shopping-for-cat-litter photo, the bizarre assortment of Looney Tunes collectibles and other pop-culture memorabilia left behind for whoever purchased his former Los Angeles home in 2018....

Sometimes I think it’s best not to read the press materials for a new album too closely. Seth Graham, an experimental electronic musician from Dayton, Ohio, has made some claims in the PR for his new record, Gasp, that I’m still trying to wrap my head around. The album comes out next Friday via Orange Milk, which he runs with Keith Rankin of Giant Claw, and among other things Graham has said that it was inspired by the “playfulness” of composers such as spectralist Gerard Grisey and minimalist Julius Eastman, who “explore teasing, lighthearted audio elements....

To brine the pork, Pederson used birch beer—made from birch sap and much easier to find than birch syrup—as well as salt, pepper, herbs, and a little birch syrup. After brining it for 12 hours, she cold-smoked it for another ten, noting that the brining and smoking gives it a flavor similar to ham. She cut off a two-inch-thick slice, seared it on all sides, and then added pork stock and birch syrup to the pan before finishing it in the oven....

During a recent All Elite Wrestling (AEW) Dynamite event at the Sears Centre in Hoffman Estates, broadcast live on TNT, one of the AEW’s main talents, Cody Rhodes, stepped into the ring to face off against local wrestler “Marvelous” Matt Knicks. Rhodes is a legacy wrestler—his father Dusty Rhodes was a common adversary of Ric Flair—and is known as one of the good guys in the newly popular AEW promotion. More often than not, if he’s about to fight, the audience is cheering for him....

George Arthur Calendar, a Chicago musician who describes himself as the creator of “some of the most suave and velvety narco synth pop/soul/funk north of Tijuana,” is blindfolded and tied to a chair. “It talks about that kind of relationship when you’re starting to get dependent on someone,” Calendar says. “It’s about when you’re a little bit blind in your situation. You’re so content and wanting to be there, even though it’s not necessarily the right choice....

A 2018 XLR8R profile of German producer Stefan Kozalla, aka DJ Koze, mentioned his predilection for telling the press that when he was a child his parents had left him in a Marrakesh forest with just an Akai MPC. It’s a totally batshit yarn, but it provides an illuminating way to approach his music. His third album, May’s Knock Knock (Pampa), meanders through the woods of pop music’s past, gathering its wildest roots, most beautiful flora, and squiggliest fauna and merging them into a kaleidoscope of sound....

Mana Contemporary Chicago will create something new in 2017: a film festival about dance that also expands commonly held interpretations of what “dance” means. Presented in collaboration with Chicago Dancemakers Forum and Montom Arts, the first annual Body + Camera Film Festival will celebrate “the intersection between the moving body and the moving image” and welcome emerging and established artists “with contemporary, experimental projects that push traditional mediums to their edge....

Cthulhu is a fictional creature described by H.P. Lovecraft in the short story “The Call of Cthulhu” as a terrible monster that simultaneously resembles an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, with “a pulpy, tentacle head” atop “a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings.” It’s also one of the drinks on the menu at Leviathan, the new bar from the Fifty/50 Group on the mezzanine level of the Dana Hotel adjacent to sister restaurant Portsmith....

The weekend after George Floyd was killed by police officers in Minneapolis, like in hundreds of other cities across the country, protests against police brutality swept Chicago. Thousands marched downtown and in neighborhoods across the city to demand justice not only for Floyd, but for the thousands of people, especially Black Americans harmed by police in every corner of the United States. He added, “all of us arrested were Black....

Last year I became a big fan of Norwegian piano trio Moskus on the strength of its second album, Mestertyven, released in 2014. When I wrote about the record in August 2015, I noted that the group had just finished making a new album and that I couldn’t wait to hear it. It came out early this year, but I guess I’ve been distracted—I only got around to playing it this week, and now I regret the months I could’ve been listening to it and wasn’t....

Since Kacey Musgraves released her 2015 album Pageant Material she’s gained popularity and also a husband, fellow singer-songwriter Ruston Kelly. On her third studio album, Golden Hour (MCA Nashville), the new-breed country star moves away from sharp observations of small-town life toward something more universal. The shift in her lyrics is matched by a musical pivot toward grand pop gestures that sometimes turn the songs’ country instrumentation into chintzy decoration, as when banjo licks ripple through the stiff expression of wanderlust on the Coldplay-like “Oh, What a World....

The “ad-rap-tation” of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, created by the Q Brothers Collective of GQ, JQ, Jax, and Pos (if you insist on formal names—Gregory Qaiyum, Jeffery Qaiyum, Jackson Doran, and Postell Pringle) has played at Chicago Shakespeare for seven years now, but I’d never seen it before last week. (Navy Pier. Holiday season. Enough said.) For 80 minutes, the Qs, along with DJ Clayton Stamper, take us on a cyclonic journey through Scrooge’s transformation from a gray-suited tightwad hissing “Chris-My-Ass-Mas” (played with convincing vitriol by GQ) to a goofy guy happy to join his nephew Fred (Doran) and Fred’s husband (Pringle) in holiday charades, while dumping wads of cash on poor Bob Cratchit (Pringle) to make up for his past parsimony....

Though he’s collaborated with Arcade Fire and Bon Iver, reedist Colin Stetson is best known for his remarkable solo work. He’s developed a mind-warping practice in which he deploys extended techniques used most often in free improvisation—circular breathing, extreme tonguing effects, et cetera—to create a kind of richly atmospheric art-pop using only his breath and a horn (most often a tenor or bass saxophone, but only one at a time). By positioning an army of microphones on and around his instrument (as well as one on his neck to pick up the humming sounds he makes in his throat), tapping the horn’s various pads and keys, and using circular breathing, he’s able to create beats and simultaneous lines....