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“We are what we are and what we are is an illusion.” —Les Cagelles in La Cage aux Folles That’s the situation in Music Hall, a 1988 play by French theater artist Jean-Luc Lagarce, running now in a 90-minute English-language staging from TUTA. The role of the Artiste has been performed by women in the past; Jeffrey Binder takes it on in this production directed by Zeljko Djukic. Binder does an effective job of driving the character between extremes, from Miss Mannersesque grace to something more befitting Miss Manners’s evil twin....

Earlier this year Alison Krauss released Windy City (Capitol), her first solo recording without her longtime combo Union Station since 1999. Her 2007 collaboration with Robert Plant, Raising Sand, revealed her natural range for multiple strains of American music, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that when she decided to push beyond her bluegrass sound for a covers album of classic country hits, she brought on veteran producer Buddy Cannon to tackle them in lush, countrypolitan style....

Saxophonist Caroline Davis was based in Chicago for seven years before relocating to New York in 2013, and her five years there have demanded serious adjustment. She’s spent much of that time gigging as a side person while forging new partnerships and developing new music of her own. Last month she revealed what she’s achieved since leaving on Heart Tonic (Sunnyside), the first recording she’s released under her own name since 2015’s Doors (Ears & Eyes), a session made with Chicago musicians and inspired by veteran Chicago musicians like Lin Halliday and Von Freeman....

Body/Courage Danielle Pinnock started hating her body in junior high. Her adolescence and early adulthood were full of diets and self-loathing. A few years ago, she started interviewing other people about how they felt about her bodies and transformed the interviews into a series of monologues. The subjects encompassed a wide range of ages, races, genders, and nationalities, and Pinnock embodied them all with skill, empathy, and humor. Now, in the project’s final incarnation, Pinnock has interwoven the monologues with her own story to show all the different ways people can feel uncomfortable in their own skin....

Footwork producer, Teklife member, and south suburban high school science teacher Nate Boylan turned 40 last month, and on Friday party promoters Custom Vibes throw him a belated birthday bash at Exit. “Boylan said he hasn’t had a birthday party in forever,” says fellow DJ Erik “Pranas” Voit, who cofounded Chicago electronic collective Mucho Culo. “You only turn 40 once, so we agreed to help him put this together.” The performers with their names in the biggest type on the flyer are ghetto-house legend DJ Deeon and underappreciated footwork veteran Jana Rush, but there will also be an extremely special guest whose identity won’t be announced in advance (trust me on the “extremely” part)....

Chicago Opera Theater’s double bill of two rarely performed one-act operas by Gaetano Donizetti presents the composer’s first work, Il Pigmalione (written in 1816 when he was 19 years old), and one of his last, the farce Rita (written in 1841). They’re both about love—one idealized, the other gone wrong—and COT has attempted to link them with a tough-to-pull-off intermission performance by members of the 500 Clown troupe, who also function as a silent, comic chorus in Rita....

On an Amtrak platform in Springfield, I met that rarest of Illinoisans: a woman who divides her time and her loyalties between downstate and Chicago. Pat Staab lives in the state capital most of the time, but she was on her way to Chicago, where she keeps a condo in River North. “I’m from New York,” she told me. “I need a big city.” As a result of her peregrinations between upstate and down-, Staab is well versed in how the state’s rival regions view each other....

It’s been four and a half years since Los Angeles-based noise-rock duo No Age released An Object, their most recent full-length record. At that point, drummer and vocalist Dean Spunt and guitarist Randy Randall had been going hard as No Age for six years or so—beginning in 2008, they’d released three acclaimed full-length records on indie giant Sub Pop, and they’d toured unstintingly, including a handful of international trips. Onstage they burn a whole lot of calories, fueling outbreaks of sweaty, euphoric moshing, and for the LP release of An Object they took a similarly effort-intensive approach, making everything but the actual vinyl themselves by hand....

Tap dancer Jumaane Taylor, 34, made his professional debut in 2001 with the company M.A.D.D. Rhythms, where he now serves on the board of directors. He teaches at the Sammy Dyer School of the Theatre, the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, and Roosevelt University. He debuted the John Coltrane interpretation Supreme Love in 2015, and as a 2017 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist he assembled the Jazz Hoofing Quartet. His current work in progress, Ugly Flavors, uses the music of Ornette Coleman and Igor Stravinsky....

Bedouine is the moniker of singer-songwriter Azniv Korkejian, a woman of Armenian descent born in Syria and raised in Saudi Arabia before her family won a green-card lottery and moved to the U.S. The music on the eponymous debut she released last summer feels lighter than air. She’s now based in LA, and the breezy melodies and gentle textures of the record’s songs are reminiscent of the 70s folk rock from the heyday of Laurel Canyon....

The other day I stumbled across my copy of Zaïre-Ghana (RetroAfric), a sparkling 1993 CD collecting tracks that the remarkable Congolese band Zaïko Langa-Langa cut in 1976. I’ve been a fan of Congolese rumba since encountering the work of bandleader Francois Luambo Luanzo Makiadi (aka Franco) about 15 years ago, and as I broadened my awareness of the tradition, Zaïko Langa-Langa hit me with an immediacy that few bands could match....

Howry and Ijichi hooked up with Pak through the collaborative pop-up series Hungry as F*ck, where they originated the dish that would give birth to Mom’s: deep-fried Spam musubi, a Hawaiian snack of sushi rice and Spam wrapped in nori. It’s just one of Howry and Ijichi’s tributes to what they call Japanese comfort food. But in some ways it’s a full-circle embodiment of yoshoku—a branch of Japanese cuisine that adapts Western dishes—which could arguably be traced back to the mid 19th century....

After Shawn Carter grew from rapper Jay-Z into all-powerful rap mogul Jay Z, the money he made as one of the most gifted lyricists in music became a key ingredient in his songs—resulting in the sagging nadir that is 2013’s Magna Carta Holy Grail. But a switch flipped with his 13th album, June’s concise 4:44 (Roc Nation/UMG). Call it a response to Beyoncé’s Lemonade (in which she confronts infidelity, a subject her husband addresses here); call it a response to ongoing injustices and the now very public deaths of black citizens at the hands of police officers....

Nothing is more precious than the relationship between parent and child, and it’s a hell of a thing when they’re separated by death—especially when the child is the one to go. Justin Townes Earle, the firstborn son of singer-songwriter Steve Earle, was a well-established Americana artist in his own right when he passed away from an accidental drug overdose last summer at age 38. Adult children of iconic musicians have often paid tribute to their parents by performing their music, but Steve Earle reverses that pattern on his new album, J....

Footwork is often characterized by aggressive sounds and high speeds, but Chicago producer and Teklife member DJ Phil fills in the music’s framework with remarkable restraint. In the solo recordings he’s dropped on the Web over the past few years, he uses samples to set the mood, often providing them with so much breathing room that nothing else filters into the song for long stretches. From there he uses his nuanced touch to tweak the audio just enough to let listeners know that a familiar melody is about to be transformed....

Social worker Jonathan Foiles has written about Chicago’s fractured mental health system before. In a January 2018 report for Belt Magazine on the current state of the city’s mental health, he included an intimate story about a client named Anthony who’d lost his son to gun violence on the city’s west side. Using Anthony as an example, Foiles addressed the inadequacy of the city’s mental health system in treating similar clients....

This weekend the Music Box Theatre will present two midnight shows of Mod Fuck Explosion (1994), underground writer-director Jon Moritsugu’s breakout film. The movie was made during an exciting time in Moritsugu’s career—he directed two features the previous year, the deadpan provocation Hippy Porn and the PBS-produced family drama Terminal USA; moreover, it comes from an exciting period in American independent film in general, when a new wave of underground filmmakers were first getting mainstream or near-mainstream recognition....

Simon Joyner has been composing nuanced expositions of loss, longing, and hope since at least 1987. That’s the year he wrote the earliest songs that appear on A Rag of Colts (Gertrude Tapes), a compilation of home demos recorded over 25 years that has just been reissued on vinyl. “Daylight,” from his most recent album, Step Into the Earthquake (Shrimper, 2017), puts the listener in the shoes of someone so deep in denial after losing a loved one that even the sun’s rays yield visions of his dearly departed....

Gaby Kerpel has spent nearly two decades pushing traditional music forms from South American toward electronic music, recontextualizing styles like Colombian cumbia and Andean huayno with inventive club rhythms. It makes sense that the Argentine musician, who makes club work under the name King Coya, was embraced by the electro-cumbia adherents behind Buenos Aires’s ZZK label. Unlike many of his labelmates, Kerpel has steadfastly retained the sound of traditional music in his creations, making prominent use of sweet-toned native string instruments like the charango and ronroco as well as plaintive wooden flutes such as the tarka....

Amy Rigby was already a veteran of two New York indie bands—proto alt-country quartet Last Roundup and female harmony trio the Shams—when her first solo album, 1996’s Diary of a Mod Housewife, drew critical raves and catapulted her into the national spotlight. By turns angry, funny, and heartrending, its songs fused folk-rock melodies with country-western lyrics as they chronicled a disintegrating marriage (to drummer Will Rigby of power-pop legends the dB’s) and a life of transient, low-paying office jobs....