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Christine Fellows illuminates the liminal on Roses on the Vine
It’d be a mistake to call Christine Fellows’s two previous albums “concept albums,” but each has a singular point of inspiration: Femmes de Chez Nous (2011) was born out of the Canadian...
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On Fran’s debut album, front woman Maria Jacobson claims her spot as one of...
Maria Jacobson, front woman of Chicago indie-rock group Fran, recently did a podcast interview with CHIRP where she talks about how she became more interested in making music while attending...
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Itasca’s sublime singer-songwriter sounds will warm your heart on Spring
Under the name Itasca, Kayla Cohen has released some of the most sublime under-the-radar singer-songwriter sounds of the decade. As a teenager, Cohen picked up the guitar to explore the experimental...
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In their new duo, pioneering women rockers Cherie Currie & Brie Darling...
Every few years there seems to be a wave of think pieces that herald a new age of “women in rock.” That’s great in principle, but in practice, writers have often bolstered their case for the latest...
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Jozef Van Wissem’s antique lute repertoire has never been more timely
For the better part of two decades, Jozef Van Wissem has been on a mission to challenge the notion that his main instrument is a museum piece. The 57-year-old Dutchman has recontextualized the...
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After a couple of setbacks, High on Fire return better than ever
It’s finally happening! High on Fire, the most beloved heavy-metal band of the modern era, are going on tour in support of their eighth studio album and best release yet, last year’s Electric Messiah.…
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The Niceties raises the stakes for academic debate
Generational and racial divides light the fuse at Writers Theatre. In 2015, Yale University was rocked by student activists demanding change within an organization founded on white supremacism and...
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Nothing happens (twice) in Waiting for Godot
Dennis Začek's solid staging lets Samuel Beckett's existential comedy be. Written in the wake of World War II, with its carnage and cruelty committed by all sides on a scale previously unimaginable,...
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The Nutcracker retains its hold on the heart
The House Theatre's annual tradition remains one of Chicago’s best seasonal offerings. It took me nine years to get out to the House Theatre's annual nonballetic staging of The Nutcracker, but after...
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Queen of Sock Pairing pushes boundaries
Red Tape Theatre's production traces a woman's empowerment through role-playing. With ambitious productions that push the boundaries of subject matter, Red Tape Theatre continues to evolve, and its...
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Oliver! earns its exclamation point at Marriott
The Dickensian melodrama-turned-musical features an outstanding ensemble. Lionel Bart's musical adaptation of Charles Dickens's 1839 novel Oliver Twist first premiered on London's West End in 1960,...
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Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them is Christopher Durang at...
Eclipse Theatre's all-Durang seasons finishes strong with a brutal black comedy about post-9/11 paranoia. Christopher Durang's Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them is the kind of...
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Turning life lessons into a Korporate Bidness
"As long as I got YouTube and the latest iPhone, I'm Gucci." When you were in high school, did you ever sneak into a girl's house after school? And did her dad happen to come home, after being fired...
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Chef Abu Hani is back in the kitchen at Sheeba Mandi House
North Park has a new Yemeni restaurant from a veteran Yemeni restaurateur. Abu Hani opened his first restaurant in 2000, when he was an ambitious 17-year-old student at Theodore Roosevelt High School....
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Marriage Story doesn't pick sides
Noah Baumbach's latest film about divorce shows both parents not as enemies but as humans As a child of separated parents, I can attest that when you're younger it's hard to see both sides of the...
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Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby create bittersweet experimental videos...
"Amazements," a screening of recent and older works, screens at the Block Museum of Art. The cinematic world of video makers Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby is defined by live-action footage...
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Samantha Fish keeps blues-rock alive
Over the past decade, Missouri singer-songwriter and guitarist Samantha Fish has become one of the country’s leading young electric blues performers. Her 2017 album, Belle of the West (Ruf), produced...
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Ed Maverick sings Mexican folk songs for crying in your bedroom
At 18 years old, Eduardo Hernández Saucedo, aka Ed Maverick, has already become a viral phenomenon for his sweet, romantic bedroom-folk tunes; his 2018 hit “Fuentes de Ortiz” has topped 100 million...
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Pivot Gang celebrates the life of former member at the third annual John Walt...
The members of west-side collective Pivot Gang have been calling themselves a boy band since long before Brockhampton was a twinkle in Kevin Abstract’s eye. Because Joseph Chilliams, Frsh Waters, Mfn...
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Houston pop-punk miscreants Waterparks sound like the future of rock on Fandom
If the members of infamous UK pop-rock band the 1975 had grown up in the U.S. and listened to more pop punk than emo, they’d probably sound a lot like Waterparks. The Houston three-piece have become...
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