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Summer: The Donna Summer Musical offers plenty of hot stuff
Three actors portray different aspects of the iconic disco queen in this touring musical. The Des McAnuff-directed Summer: The Donna Summer Musical begins with a seasoned Donna Summer, or Diva Donna...
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A winning Queen of Spades
Deal yourself in for Tchaikovsky's operatic exploration of obsession at Lyric. In the dicey business of bringing historic opera to contemporary audiences, Lyric Opera's current production of Peter...
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Kiev reveals the murky depths of a family's guilt.
Aguijón's U.S. premiere of Sergio Blanco's Cherry Orchard update is dark and chilly. Anton Chekhov's famous dictum that if a gun is introduced in the first act, it must go off by the second is...
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Lipstick Lobotomy looks at a Kennedy tragedy
JFK's eldest sister pays the price for nonconformity in Trap Door's production. Kate Hendrickson directs the Chicago premiere of Krista Knight's Lipstick Lobotomy, an arch but moving 2019 play about...
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Invictus Theatre brings light and heat to A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry's classic gets a sturdy and heartfelt revival. Before Ta-Nehisi Coates laid out "The Case for Reparations" in the Atlantic in 2014, Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 classic A Raisin in the...
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Stick Fly takes flight at Writers
A wealthy Black family confronts secrets and internalized self-loathing in Lydia Diamond's acerbic drama. In 2017, First Floor Theater premiered Leah Nanako Winkler's Two Mile Hollow—a send-up of what...
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Sandra Bland's life and death provides the inspiration for graveyard shift
The Goodman's production is lyrical and heartbreaking. Quentin Tarantino's movie Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood is in part a gauzy wish fulfillment fantasy that fictionalizes and rewrites the...
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016 Restaurant dials in the peppery, meaty spirit of southern Serbia
A vet of Publican Quality Meats and Tempesta settles in Lincoln Square. Bojan Milicevic's hometown is best known for two things: thick, sweet, and spicy ancho-like red adjvarka peppers, which blanket...
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‘The Allure of Matter’ pushes boundaries
An exhibition in two parts—Part I: Wrightwood 659 It's not every day you see 128 roof tiles displayed on a gallery floor, ash from joss sticks painted on a canvas, and artwork cocreated by trained...
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Charles Curtis revisits the first acoustic piece by composer Éliane Radigue...
Though her work is often characterized as minimalist, composer Éliane Radigue is a category unto herself. During the 1950s and ’60s, the Paris resident worked as an assistant to the originators of...
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The Chicago Flamenco Festival 2020 showcases the allure of a quintessentially...
Few forms of music and dance embody raw emotion as exquisitely as flamenco. This formidable and quintessentially Spanish art form fuses elements from Jewish, Arab, and Roma cultures and distills the...
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Chicago’s Ratboys become the toast of the national indie scene with Printer’s...
Guitarist-vocalist Julia Steiner and guitarist David Sagan met as first-year students at the University of Notre Dame in 2010, and they’ve since become ingrained in Chicago underground rock. Under the...
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Flamboyant Chicago rockers Cupcakes reunite to celebrate their debut album 20...
The alternative-rock boom of the 1990s resulted in lots of outre musicians landing major-label deals that would’ve been unthinkable in any decade before or since. Chicago four-piece Cupcakes, who...
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Ganavya Doraiswamy & Rajna Swaminathan confront historical oppressions with a...
The works of Ganavya Doraiswamy and Rajna Swaminathan offer a highly personal take on Carnatic music (South Indian classical music) that seamlessly blends ideas from different time periods and genres....
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Funky psychedelic prog band Nektar returns with a light show to scramble your...
The history of improbably successful and long-lasting 70s prog band Nektar is a complicated one. The story starts in 1968, when four British lads—guitarist-singer Roye Albrighton, keyboardist-vocalist...
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Detroit art-rock foursome Saajtak harness the power of improvisation for good
The members of Detroit art-rock group Saajtak met at the University of Michigan in the early 2010s, when all four participated in an improvising ensemble called the Creative Arts Orchestra. They’ve...
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Reigning Sound blend vintage soul and folk-rock textures into infectious...
Memphis musicians enjoy a well-deserved reputation for having more going on beneath the surface than they initially let on. Alex Chilton, Tav Falco, and Jim Dickinson are known for putting a trashy...
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Sparta marks a new beginning for NYC’s Psalm Zero
Psalm Zero have been playing a hybrid form of industrial metal informed by the noisier side of dark and electronic music since forming in New York in 2012. Originally the duo of multi-instrumentalist...
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Pioneering postpunks Wire continue to chart new ground on Mind Hive
In 1987, British punk and postpunk pioneers Wire pulled an unforgettable power move: After a few years’ hiatus, the band reconvened and announced a comeback tour. However, they were only interested in...
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Jasmon Drain joins the ranks of Chicago’s greatest authors
His debut collection, Stateway’s Garden, captures the city’s unique, ugly beauty. It's not often that a writer will make me see Chicago in a new way, but with his debut collection of interlocking...
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