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Two badass early 20th-century feminists shatter convention like a Bull in a...
Meet the indomitable Mary Emma Woolley and Jeannette Marks. About Face Theatre's midwest premiere of this empowering Bryna Turner-penned comedy explores the connection between academics and feminists...
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Chicago Underground Film Festival: Tribulation 99
San Francisco filmmaker Craig Baldwin, this year's guest of honor, appears in person for a screening of his paranoid 1991 classic, about an alien conquest of earth. Is America catching up to Craig...
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The improv games at iO’s Riff turn into a goofy, full-fledged sing-along
Lines blur between the cast and the audience. Riff, iO’s new late night musical improv show, plays in the theater’s private event space. It’s the only room configured to accommodate a live band, but...
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Two Guards at the Taj meditate on the nature of beauty
The most beautiful thing ever made also contains unspeakable suffering. A magnificent mausoleum, commissioned by Shah Jahan as a monument for his most loved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, designed by the...
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Daniel Kyri turns in a triumphant performance in the Gift's Hamlet
He brings utter control over the language and a quality of hard-won majesty to the role. Make the ghost real. Make Hamlet a genius and a killer at the same time.…
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In The Displaced, the ghosts of gentrification won't leave a young couple alone
Bumps in the night blend with poignant social commentary. Isaac Gomez's exciting new thriller mixes bumps in the night with poignant social commentary, similar to Jordan Peele's Get Out. In its world...
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Under chef Erling Wu-Bower, Pacific Standard Time is now
The River North restaurant presents a distinctive vision of a west-coast oasis in the midwest. Ranch dressing as we know it was invented by a Nebraska-born African-American cowboy working as a...
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Groundbreaking Chicago house artist Steve “Silk” Hurley headlines a special...
The history of house music would be incomplete without southeast-side native Steve “Silk” Hurley. After landing a regular DJ gig at south-side house hot spot Sauer’s in the early 80s, he was inspired...
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Tracyanne Campbell works through the death of her Camera Obscura bandmate in...
Glaswegian Tracyanne Campbell understandably retreated from playing music after her best friend and longtime bandmate in Camera Obscura Carey Lander died from bone cancer in 2015 at the age of 33. The...
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Country-rock singer Jade Jackson ripples with potential despite her tired tropes
Jade Jackson reveals her relative inexperience in songwriting when she opens her debut album, Gilded (Anti), with the couplet, “I grew up my father’s daughter / He said, ‘Don’t take no shit from no...
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Fingerstyle guitar virtuoso Sarah Louise’s new Deeper Woods is a love letter...
Fingerstyle guitar is a peculiar thing—it’s a practice that often sucks its practitioners into a rabbit hole at the expense of other approaches. That’s certainly not the case with Sarah Louise (née...
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Chicago rock vet Thomas Comerford’s new album Blood Moon was worth the...
Thomas Comerford is a devoted student of rock music who takes his own contributions to the form as seriously as its rich history. He operates with meticulous detail and patience, which might explain...
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Two generations of noisy oddballs from the LA underground descend on Chicago
Veteran LA noise maven John Wiese has dramatically slowed his release schedule in recent years, but he’s made up for that relative scarcity by increasing the rigor in each project. Last month he...
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Copenhagen’s Iceage trades in its gloom to make an art-punk masterpiece with...
When your ragtag, noisy hardcore-meets-postpunk band has spent the better part of a decade as one of the most deservedly hyped rock groups in the world, which direction do you choose next? In the case...
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Rebirth Brass Band carries the torch of New Orleans brass band music while...
In a sense, New Orleans brass band music is much like acappella doo-wop. The better practitioners of either style can make you forget you’re listening to a wordless art form where the music does the...
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Paal Nilssen-Love’s Large Unit explores varied compositional gambits through...
It’s no small feat that Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love has maintained his sprawling, heavily improvised big band—the dubiously named Large Unit—for half a decade in an era where economic...
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Mamby on the Beach presents a human mixtape of longtime favorite artists and...
If you’re going to spend an entire summer day in the sun at a music festival, why not pick the one that takes place right on the lakefront? The Oakwood Beach location of Mamby on the Beach sure is...
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New Jersey posthardcore giants Thursday revisit the two albums that made them...
I’d rather not describe New Jersey posthardcore heroes Thursday in nostalgic tones, but the group played such a part of my early musical development it’s hard not to. I was all of 17 when they flooded...
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The Tempel Lipizzans show off their mastery of equine ballet
Then they nuzzle you and devour sugar cubes. Showbiz ain’t easy. Come hell or high water or 90-degree temperatures and biting flies, the show must go on—and smile, damn it.…
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Twenty years on, The Laramie Project is as relevant as ever
It asks questions that are fundamental to our national identity. With text drawn in part from court transcripts, this complex, multilayered piece of theater chronicles the case of Matthew Shepard, the...
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