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Earth Day, lechon, and Zoomin’
We’re seeing spring temperatures burst out all over now, so we’re sure that many of you are going to use the next few days to emerge from your hibernation caves. Even though some of the masking...
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The Bad Guys
Charmingly designed and full of twists and turns, Pierre Perifel’s The Bad Guys deserves the moniker that people will most certainly give it—Ocean’s Eleven with animals. The members of the titular...
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Dealing with Dad
Dealing with Dad delivers a fresh perspective of one of Hollywood’s most recycled tropes. Director-writer Tom Huang tells the story of Margaret Chang’s (Ally Maki) tumultuous and often volatile...
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The Duke
Kempton Bunton (Jim Broadbent) is the archetypal frustrated crank. He’s perpetually getting canned from jobs for taking what he considers principled stands, to the eternal annoyance of his...
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The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
If you love Nicolas Cage, you’ll love this film—and who doesn’t love Nicolas Cage?! The star plays (a heavily fictionalized version of) himself in a script by Kevin Etten and director Tom Gormican....
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Style comes back with a vengeance at EXPO
Whoever says people don’t have much style in Chicago has no idea what they’re talking about. I’ve been photographing street style here for over ten years and I know better. When Chicagoans decide to...
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In search of freedom
This commission by Chicago Opera Theater brings to town a new opera by the prolific and celebrated Belize-born British composer, singer, pianist, and performer Errollyn Wallen, with librettist Deborah...
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Juana Molina’s folktronica is perfect for tumbling down a rabbit hole to...
To experience a Juana Molina concert is to be swept away in a most particular sort of rapture. In the late 80s and early 90s, the Argentine singer-songwriter had a successful career in television and...
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Cellist and former Chicagoan Fred Lonberg-Holm revives some local projects
Cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm lived in Chicago for 22 years. During that time, he was ubiquitous on the city’s improvisational music scene, playing in bands and ad hoc groupings with so many essential...
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The Chicago Reader is free—again—and still freaky
The Chicago Reader, one of the country’s longest-running alternative newspapers, is free once again. So we hear. Reader co-owner Leonard C. Goodman announced in the Chicago Tribune Tuesday morning...
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No Robert Mitchum, but stay for the squirrels
Heather McAdams needs no introduction for longtime Reader readers, but I’ll try anyway. McAdams contributed cartoons and illustrations to the Reader for over 20 years, self-published and distributed...
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Celia Rose, cofounder of music agency What Up Pitches
Celia Rose is one of the three founders of What Up Pitches, a music agency that combines a production house and a sync-licensing operation. Her colleagues, Mariela Arredondo and Pei Pei Chung, are...
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Cynthia Plaster Caster broke the mold
Kind. Funny. Genuine. A sweetheart, an artist, a legend. If the true sign of a life well lived is a tidal wave of emotional tributes when you die, then Cynthia Albritton—better known to the whole wide...
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Chicago’s blessed with a motherlode of stunning churches
What kind of God allows a church to burn down on Good Friday? That’s the question that came to mind when the 130-year-old Antioch Missionary Baptist Church at Stewart and 63rd Street went up in flames...
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Find this week’s issue in print
The latest issue The latest print issue of the Chicago Reader is the issue of April 28, 2022. This issue is being distributed now, Wednesday, through Thursday night, April 28. You can download the...
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Gossamer robots
“Robot”: from robota, Czech for “forced labor,” coined in 1920 in Karel Čapek’s play Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots), meaning not machines made of metal, gears, wheels, and...
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The fabric of romance
In Tasia A. Jones’s impeccable production, Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel is as beautiful as the title garments, and its characters as fragile. Set in 1905, the play follows the efforts of seamstress...
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Magic wars
Sean Masterson is cut in the mold of the classic Chicago close-up magician, with a puckish demeanor and a donnish interest in the history of the art form. Those qualities all appear in his new show at...
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Chick-Feel-Gay puns in the face of oppression at Monday Night Foodball
As recent events have demonstrated, public mockery, scorn, and derision are effective, legitimate means to achieve justice. And to that end, the Monday Night Foodball team loves a powerful pun, which...
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Red windmills of your mind
Full disclosure: I don’t think I’m the target audience for Moulin Rouge, inasmuch as the 2001 film on which it’s based mostly left me feeling like I had a case of the bends, what with all the swooping...
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