Q: I just attended the nauseating wedding of my 30-year-old niece to her boyfriend of several years. Both of them seem as gay as possible but they are diehard religious fanatics. I can list 50 signs these two are gay and once you point it out to someone who isn’t a Bible thumper they go, “Yeah, that makes so much sense.” The bride’s father, who was also the minister, praised them for not moving in together before the wedding—another sign....
Al from Nebraska (Ben Cumings) goes searching for love through the heavy steam of a Boystown bathhouse in this endearing Pride Month offering at the Annoyance, now in its third staging since 2012. The show, which is sponsored in part by the actual Steamworks, has plenty of cute songs and memorable prop action to its credit. Witness the instructional ballad on poor Jacuzzi hygiene in act one, featuring a gang of tiny turd puppets with mouths, flanked by singing gobs of sperm....
Eugène Ionesco’s Killing Game, first produced in 1970, will always be relevant—which paradoxically explains its dramatic ineffectiveness. It’s set in an unnamed town visited by a vicious, unaccountable plague. Death roams the streets unfettered (personified in this Red Orchid production as a towering, black-clad night terror lumbering purposefully across the stage throughout the evening). As tens of thousands drop without warning every week, the besieged living respond in all-too- familiar ways: blaming the victims for their immorality, carelessness, or ignorance; insisting that wealth, science, religion, or government can save everyone; cowering before authoritarian officialdom or fomenting insurrection against it....
The drama and intrigue of female friendships has filled works from the sublime (Margaret Atwood’s 1988 novel Cat’s Eye) to the louche (any installment of the Real Housewives franchise). Tina Fey’s 2004 film Mean Girls mined some of the same cutthroat teenage frenemies territory as 1988’s Heathers—though it was directly inspired by Rosalind Wiseman’s 2002 self-help book about surviving high school cliques, Queen Bees and Wannabes. Crucially, the narration that frames the story, voiced in the film by Lohan’s Cady, now comes from Janis and Damian, which serves to distance us from Cady’s own growing awareness of what her attempts to fit in have cost her personally and socially....
A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Demilich When I previewed the first Chicago show by these veteran Finnish death-metal weirdos, I didn’t get into their dry sense of humor. So here’s my best recollection of my favorite stage banter by front man and guitarist Antti Boman: “We were afraid to play in Chicago because of all the Mafia movies....
For as long as I can remember, every political thinker from Milton Rakove to Mike Royko divided Chicago politics into two main factions: independents and regulars. Independents being the handful of elected officials who were unafraid to stand up to the boss—usually a powerful mayor—and the regulars being the loyal troops in the boss’s army. The Machine—as created by the old bosses such as Mayor Richard J. Daley—is rooted in an alliance between Democratic Party and union powerhouses....
If you’re not working retail this Christmas Eve, spare a thought for those who are—possibly by carving out time to listen to Isaac Gómez‘s Wally World, a two-act audio play now available through Steppenwolf’s “Steppenwolf Now” digital season. And if you need a last-minute dose of resistance and joy to help you get over the last days of 2020, About Face Theatre’s digital celebration of Black queer lives, Kickback, has heart and fire to spare....
The Block Beat multimedia series is a collaboration with The TRiiBE that roots Chicago musicians in places and neighborhoods that matter to them. Written by Arthur E. Haynes IIPhotography by Morgan Elise Johnson Video by Alex Y. DingShot at Fishman’s Fabrics, 1101 S. Desplaines The Sheila Rashid Brand attracted interest around the world in 2016, when Chance the Rapper wore a pair of Rashid’s now-famous drop-crotch overalls at the MTV Video Music Awards....
Dungeons & Dragons’ 45-year history has had its volatile moments. Remember the 1980s moral panic when the role-playing game was widely criticized for encouraging suicide (not to mention witchcraft, murder, rape, homosexuality, insanity, and cannibalism, at least according to the international activist group Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons)? Through all the turmoil, one stereotype has remained constant: D&D players are oddballs and misfits holed up in their parents’ basements letting their nerd flags fly free and proud....
An old, recognizable poster is visible on the wall of Fox Mulder’s office during the new X-Files miniseries. It shows a blurry image of what appears to be a flying saucer hovering over a forest. Printed in bold type below the shot: i want to believe. It serves as a testament to Mulder’s earnest faith in extraterrestrial or paranormal beings and a deep skepticism towards a heavy-handed federal government that suppresses and obfuscates their existence....
Berwyn born, internationally acclaimed soprano Sondra Radvanovsky is performing an operatic marathon this week at Lyric Opera, singing the difficult final acts of all three Gaetano Donizetti Tudor queen operas: Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda, and Roberto Devereux in one fell swoop. If this sounds like opera for short attention spans—well, yes! No need to spend hours watching the tragedy gel: Lyric provides giant projected text (“Henry VIII loves Jane Seymour”) that fills you in on what transpired during the acts you’re not having to sit through....
Before Australian singer-songwriter Stella Donnelly released her debut EP on cassette last year, she played in an aggressive, all-woman band that pulled from punk and thrash metal. That musical background inspired the name of her EP, Thrush Metal, which Secretly Canadian will reissue on vinyl with a bonus track in June, and the ferocity that smolders beneath its songs’ stripped-down arrangements. Donnelly’s own fierceness is evident in the prescription-strength steeliness of opener “Mechanical Bull,” and it quietly courses through the unvarnished single “Boys Will Be Boys,” on which she denounces those who’ve allowed for a system that punishes victims of sexual abuse to persist....
Don’t let the name fool you—the feverish, furious electronic nightmare-pop produced by the Massachusetts duo Boy Harsher leaves the gender binary feeling as antiquated as a phonograph. Vocalist Jae Matthews and producer Augustus Muller are intimately obsessed with the tactile urgency of now, and their musical language is born of chaotic, reactionary emotional shards. The new Careful (Nude Club), their third full-length, explores the wreckage of explosive love, and not necessarily the romantic kind....
Multi-instrumentalist Liam Kazar has been so crucial to my evolving understanding of Chicago’s bustling, magnanimous music scene that I felt a little heartbroken when he moved to Kansas City in 2019. He’d risen to national fame in the early 2010s as part of the youthful fusion ensemble Kids These Days, whose idealistic collision of jazz, rock, and hip-hop worked thanks to the personalities involved, among them Macie Stewart of Ohmme and rapper Vic Mensa....
It’s never been lost on the gay community that the entire blueprint for modern child rearing and tin-through-golden-years marriage is based upon the written and unwritten laws of straight people. But only in the past decade have LGBTQ folks gotten the opportunity to put, on a wide scale, different philosophies and theories about partnerships and raising a family into practice within mainstream culture. “Isn’t being normal the most radical thing of all?...
One hundred years after the 1917 Soviet revolution in Russia, two baffling museum exhibitions attempt to recast one of the bloodiest regimes in human history in a positive light. “Revolution Every Day” at the Smart Museum and “Revolutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test” at the Art Institute take different approaches to their subject, but neither pays much more than lip service to the millions of victims of the historical period these shows celebrate....
Few spoken-word artists working the posthip-hop landscape can match the intensity, precision, and metaphoric power of Philadelphia’s Moor Mother (aka Camae Ayewa); I’ve seen her twice this year, and both times she had total control of the audience by the end of the set. She’s involved with several collaborative projects, and one of the most exciting, Irreversible Entanglements, recently dropped its self-titled debut album, a joint release of Chicago’s International Anthem and New Jersey’s Don Giovanni....
Playwright Kenneth Lin’s got nothing on Frank Capra. In this gauzy, diagrammatic new play, given its world premiere by Jackalope Theatre, two forensic economists descend upon the aftermath of a plane crash that took the life of Hank Baylor, 63rd richest man in the world. Cynical Mitch (Joel Ewing), hired by the airline, is a once-heralded math genius who’s now designing algorithms to calculate the value of lives snuffed out in accidents....
In 2017, Paris-based electroacoustic composer Kassel Jaeger (born François Bonnet) and Chicago-born multi-instrumentalist Jim O’Rourke joined forces for Wakes on Cerulean, a kaleidoscopic duo recording filled with shape-shifting electronics and field recordings. On their brand-new second collaborative album, In Cobalt Aura Sleeps (Editions Mego), they aim to convey a similarly rapturous experience, but the piece they deliver develops in an even more striking and engaging manner. The recording begins with the serene, soothing sounds of waves, insects, and birds, before a spurt of electronics makes evident the artists’ presence....
In an October 31 letter directed to felony trial attorneys, a supervisor in Cook County public defender Amy Campanelli’s office forbade staff from entering courtroom lockup areas at the criminal court building at 26th and California “until further notice.” The reason? Public defenders are being sexually harassed and even assaulted while visiting their clients in lockups. One of the most common forms of assault cited is defendants masturbating in front of female public defenders....
