Posts

UPDATE Friday, March 13: this event has been canceled. Contact the box office for refunds. Along the way, we learn about Heidi’s mother and grandmother and great-great-grandmother, about the 19th-century American west practice of purchasing brides from Europe, about domestic violence and sexual abuse and rape, and about Amendments Nine and Fourteen. And at the end, the still-energetic Dizzia engages in a debate with a 15-year-old competitive debater (the earnest Jocelyn Shek at the performance I saw, alternating with Rosdely Ciprian) about whether it’s worth trying to save the document at all....

As You Like It Midsommer Flight’s As You Like It is outdoor Shakespeare done the old-fashioned way, complete with Elizabethan costumes and musical interludes. The banished duke’s daughter, Rosalind (Emily Demko), and her sisterly cousin, Celia (Charlee Cotton), flee the frigid atmosphere of court for a life of revelry and disguise amid the forests of Arden. They bring the motley fool Touchstone (Adam Habben) along for the ride; despite overemphasizing his punch lines from time to time, Habben makes a fine clown....

Kim Gordon always struck me as the Sonic Youth member most rooted in a primal punk foundation. Her no-frills bass lines anchored the chaos surrounding them, and the songs she sang lead on always packed a streamlined gut punch. That makes it all the more interesting that in our post-Sonic Youth landscape, she’s the only member who’s really letting her freak flag fly. While Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo continue to release Sonic Youth-lite indie-rock records with various projects, Gordon’s been going strong with Body/Head, her guitar duo with experimental musician Bill Nace....

As one sexual harassment horror tale after another emerges from Springfield, I’m coming face-to-face with the heretofore seemingly unthinkable: It’s only a matter of time before Michael Madigan is forced to step down from his positions of power. Didn’t like the obvious conflict of interest between his profitable property tax appeal law firm—specializing in winning tax breaks for downtown property owners—and his influence in selecting the judges and assessors involved in the process....

A turbulent year ended for principal Mary Beth Cunat when, two weeks before the last day of class, she announced her resignation from Wildwood Elementary School on the far northwest side. She made the decision in the wake of parent outrage—and even threats—after she brought an anti-police speaker to the school. The most proximal cause of Cunat’s resignation was a controversy that erupted at the end of May, after she’d invited police abolitionist and community organizer Ethan “Ethos” Viets-VanLear to speak to sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders for career day....

In 1964, when his one-act Dutchman premiered off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre, Amiri Baraka was still LeRoi Jones—a 30-year-old black poet with a BA in English, a dishonorable discharge from the U.S. Air Force (for possessing Soviet propaganda), and a complicated interracial love life. You might also say he was full of rage, but that would be an awfully polite way of putting it. At least as he expressed himself in the play, he was an antiwhite, misogynist bigot....

Thunder Road The summer movie season officially starts this weekend with the release of Furious 7, the latest installment in the remarkably durable action franchise that’s drawn think pieces and hot takes galore. The series is a Hollywood staple, a bloated and bombastic moneymaking machine that shows no signs of slowing down, but its roots are found in cheapo B-pictures. The 2001 film that started this whole thing borrows its title from the Roger Corman-produced 1955 cheapie The Fast and the Furious, one of the many automotive adventures that make up the surprisingly diverse car genre, whose varied canon is shaped by exploitation absurdity, art film sophistication, and everything in between....

To cheer you up during this pandemic, I’ve pored over last week’s election results, looking for the good news. I know it’s not nice to gloat. But this is a gloatable moment. On top of everything else, Burke was Donald Trump’s property tax lawyer. He made you pay more in property taxes by using his clout to get Trump to pay less on his tower. So, c’mon, Chicago. Let’s all gloat together....

The history of house music would be incomplete without southeast-side native Steve “Silk” Hurley. After landing a regular DJ gig at south-side house hot spot Sauer’s in the early 80s, he was inspired to make his own tracks, and the work he produced throughout the rest of that decade played a critical role in informing the world about house. As one half of J.M. Silk he created the “Music Is the Key” 12-inch, which in 1985 became the first release from DJ International, the local outfit that would become an influential house label; with 1986’s “Jack Your Body” he popularized “jack,” one of the genre’s definitive terms, and introduced Chicago house to the UK, where the song hit number one on the British dance charts; he also released some of the first major-label house hits through RCA....

Bye Bye Birdie In the wrong hands, this 1960 homage to/parody of Elvis Presley and that awful “music” all the kids are listening to can seem very dated indeed. It was, after all, written to entertain old farts (my parents among them) who considered 50s rock ’n’ roll a mere fad. Thankfully, director-choreographer Tammy Mader is a clever woman who respects the material enough to find the comedy in the show’s gentle send-up of middle America while also moving us with the glorious, albeit prerock, score....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Yellow Eyes at Subterranean on Sat 8/6 In my preview of this show, I compared the lunging, turbulent fury of Yellow Eyes’ Sick With Bloom to a spectacular spring flood, and they’re even more powerful onstage. The vagaries of live amplification turn most black-­metal percussion into a hissing wash punctuated with rapid-­fire kick drum, but Yellow Eyes’ drummer pushes himself so viciously, painfully hard that you can hear every crack of the snare even in his most frenzied blastbeats....

Musicians are a scrappy lot. No matter what challenges life throws at them, they do whatever they can to pursue their art and bring the party (or whatever it is they’re starting) to the masses. What happens when those challenges include an uncertain amount of time without concerts or even gatherings of any kind? How do you stay fulfilled when your work depends so heavily on having an audience? Everyone did whatever they could to stay afloat last year, and the Internet provided a lifeboat for many local entertainers....

Q: Here goes: I’m a 32-year-old gay male and I have trouble staying out of my head during sex. I feel like there may be many issues. The one nonissue is everything works fine on my own. When I’m single or “available,” I am OK. Let’s be honest: I’m a slut and I enjoy it. But when I invest in someone, when I’m trying to have an actual relationship, the sex suffers....

Self-described as a “bi bilingual political dance sax punk party,” Providence’s Downtown Boys stamp that mouthful to vinyl by creating a frenzied, intense clatter that sounds as if it’s reverberating off the crumbling brick—and cutting through the musty stench—of every basement, corridor, and back alley in the underground. Their newest record, Full Communism, dropped earlier this month via Don Giovanni Records, and today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Monstro,” boils over right from the start as smooth sax—which works so well in context it’s kind of amazing—climbs behind vocalist Victoria Ruiz while she demands “Today, today we must scream at the top of our lungs....

Many of the best sounds in music come from pushing a piece of equipment past its limits. Obvious examples include what Jimi Hendrix created with his electric guitar and amplifier and what King Tubby coaxed from a mixing board. Just as mind-blowing are the sonorities that Don Dietrich and Jim Sauter, Dietrich’s partner in the long-running ensemble Borbetomagus (which also includes guitarist Donald Miller), obtain from their saxophones. For 40 years these musicians have combined the overtones and multiphonics first exploited by saxophonists such as Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders with overdriven effects and maxed-out amplification—the results come across like field recordings of the destruction of a city by giant monster-movie insects....

When the big theaters have a changing of the guard in artistic directors, it’s understandably big news. But in a city as dependent on the small-to-midsize storefront theaters for its creative lifeblood as Chicago, succession plans at those companies also have a huge ripple effect. Both Prop Thtr and Haven have acquired new artistic directors within the last two years—Olivia Lilley and Ian Damont Martin, respectively. And both are taking their companies in new directions for new generations, while still staying true to the missions that inspired their formation....

With all the unrest and pain in the U.S. right now, it can feel strange or wrong to listen to an album of calm, airy songs that recall sunnier days, even if those days were sometimes bittersweet. But in a way it’s just like massaging an extremely tense muscle: if you can keep leaning into the bad feeling, you’ll be rewarded with some relief. In that respect, How Much Works, the new album by veteran Melbourne singer-songwriter Ester Edquist, aka Sweet Whirl, feels a bit like a balm—despite the melancholy mixed into its warm, easygoing songs....

Wednesday, August 31 Jazz Institute of Chicago Jazz Club Tour 6 PM till midnight, multiple venues (Andy’s, Green Mill, Jazz Showcase, Constellation, Hungry Brain, Jerry’s Sandwiches Wicker Park, M Lounge, City Life, Old Town School of Folk Music, 50 Yard Line, Drake Hotel, Norman’s Bistro, the Quarry, Rosa’s Lounge, Reggie’s Rock Club roof deck, Red Pepper Lounge), jazzinchicago.org/jazzfest/jazz-club-tour, $50, $40 in advance ($40 and $30 for members), 21+ Thursday, September 1...

When house music is recounted in books, television shows, and other media, three things are always mentioned: Chicago, the Warehouse club, and Frankie Knuckles. UrbanTheater Company’s Back in the Day, written by artistic director Miranda González and based on José “Gringo” Echevarría’s memoir The Real Dance Fever: Book One, fills in the blanks of mainstream retellings with an all-encompassing “dancesical” of teens in the underage club scene that laid the foundation for house parties today....

In its 15th and final installment, the fundamental problems with Collaboraction’s Sketchbook Festival are unmistakable: its scale and its irrelevance. Collaboraction artistic director Anthony Moseley admits to the latter, after a fashion, in his program note. What began a decade and a half ago as an experiment in “the convergence of theatre, music and visual art” has become to a large extent de rigueur on the theater fringe. “Multidisciplinary short play festivals are the new norm,” Moseley writes, and he’s dead-on....