Nothing about this past year has been normal. (You’re welcome for that insightful news flash!) But for theater in Chicago, one of the constants every January is the Young Playwrights Festival with Pegasus Theatre Chicago, which opens the first week of the year and highlights three one-act plays crafted by students in Chicago-area high schools. The symmetry for the festival (headed up by Pegasus’s executive producing director, Ilesa Duncan) has always been pleasing to me at least: new year, new voices....

In 2010, when the young actor Corbin Bleu took over the lead role of Usnavi in In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who’d written the show’s score and also originated the role, hailed him in rap: Chicago actor Tommy Rivera-Vega, who also auditioned for Porchlight’s production, makes an argument similar to Romano’s in a post in today’s Bleader: That authentic was held against her by everyone who believed the actual casting wasn’t—though Weiss tells me she was merely repeating a claim made by Porchlight—hence the quotes....

Who are you really? Well, the late college basketball coach John Wooden famously offered this litmus test: “The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is looking.” Today’s cover is a stand-alone work of art by illustrator Greg Houston. Hell, it should hurt, like a punch in the gut. Love always, Mark Konkol Executive Editor Pritzker the sneak disser might as well have said the N-word By Adeshina Emmanuel Pritzker the sneak disser might as well have said the N-word J....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Electric Wizard, Wizard Bloody Wizard Only time will tell if the new Electric Wizard LP will join Dopethrone and Come My Fanatics . . . in the doom-metal canon—as much as I like the bass playing on this one, I’d prefer less blues-rock and more evil down-tuned slop. But I’m just happy they’re still out there, trolling the pious hypocrites who have to believe in covens of satanic baby killers in order to maintain their self-serving persecution fantasies....

Getty Images The Loop and surrounding areas get most of the investment from the tax increment financing program, according to city data. In case you were distracted Tuesday by that other debate—you know, the one between Rahm Emanuel and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia over who’s best equipped to be mayor—you might have missed the latest showdown over the city’s tax increment financing program. TIFs have become a hot issue in the mayoral race as both Emanuel and Garcia promise to dip into the funds to pay for a range of city expenses....

Friends of the Parks declared victory today in an early round of the legal battle to keep the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art from building on Park District-owned lakefront land. “We are very pleased that the District Court is allowing the case to proceed,” said Lauren Moltz, Friends of the Parks board chair. “We are thrilled to finally have the opportunity to depose the City and the Park District and fully make our case....

In Book Swap, a Reader staffer recommends two to five books and then asks a local wordsmith, literary enthusiast, or publishing-adjacent professional to do the same. In this week’s edition, Reader culture editor Aimee Levitt trades recommendations with Northwestern professor, Algren scholar, and fellow Rogers Parker Bill Savage. Both The Battle of Lincoln Park and Hardly Children have been on my to-be-read pile for months. (My copy of The Battle of Lincoln Park is literally six inches from me as I type this....

It was Friday, the 13th of March, 2020, when Lyric Opera general director Anthony Freud had to cancel the company’s decade-in-the-making, mega-bucks project—a three-week run of Richard Wagner’s four-opera opus, the Ring Cycle. Friday the 13th was also the last day that the full Lyric staff worked in the opera house. Freud says he couldn’t have imagined that a year later he’d still be working from home, having weathered the cancellation of the entire next season....

Neko Case has rarely voiced her ideas directly in gorgeously, meticulously plotted music, preferring allusion, metaphor, and the pure sound of language, but there’s no missing a sense of mission and drive on her new album Hell-On (Anti). The travails Case endured during the production of the album have been widely reported; her Vermont home burned down while she was in Sweden recording with Björn Yttling of Peter Bjorn & John, and she dealt with both a fanatic stalker and a prying reporter....

Courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin Continuum by Bridget Riley When op art attained a faddish popularity in the mid-1960s, its leading figure was Bridget Riley (b. 1931). The British painter’s early canvases, featuring fields of dynamic black-and-white patterns, were the purest expressions of the movement’s mind-bending aesthetic. And yet Riley has always been uncomfortable with the label’s application to her work. “It was one that was imposed on me, one I dislike very much,” she has said, “because it implies an emphasis on visual tricks rather than actual perceptual experience....

The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. An arctophile is a person who collects teddy bears. The fun fact is courtesy of Heather Kenny’s 2006 profile of Patricia Li Klayman, the former frontwoman for the punk band Grand Theft Auto (and member of the Reader ad sales team) who forged a new career for herself as an artist specializing in teddy bears and sock monkeys....

See Chicago Dance. The name is direct and specific, and the nonprofit organization formerly known as Audience Architects has wisely adopted it as part of an ongoing rebranding strategy. Audience Architects began in 2006 with a grant from the Chicago Community Trust to figure out ways to increase interest in dance in Chicago. For 13 years SeeChicagoDance.com has provided free promotional services for more than 200 local dance organizations. Unifying the website and the nonprofit under the same name strengthens the brand, and intensifies the drive to build a bigger dance audience....

Mike Sula Eggs and salsa diabla Salsa macha is an oil-based salsa—more like a chili paste—that originated in Veracruz. I’m not sure we’ll ever know why someone decided to name this excellent condiment with the feminine form of macho, but local tamale and masa tycoons La Guadalupana avoided gender confusion by calling their commercial La Lupita brand the less ambiguous “Salsa Diabla,” or “she-devil sauce.”

Late in 2006, a truck driver named Steve Wright was arrested in Ipswich, a river town in Suffolk, England, for the murders of five prostitutes who had offered themselves to men along the town’s London Road, near a newly built sports stadium. The usual media circus ensued, sullying the town’s reputation, before Wright was convicted on all counts in February 2008 and sentenced to life in prison. In the weeks leading up to his trial and afterward, experimental playwright Alecky Blythe interviewed the killer’s immediate neighbors, the reporters covering the case, and even a few sex workers, returning to London with more than 100 hours of recordings....

Chance the Rapper’s third mixtape, Coloring Book, grew into an outsize presence long before the public knew what it was called. In the three years since the Chatham MC dropped Acid Rap, he’s become a special kind of superstar, using his growing fame to benefit his friends and neighbors. He tabled the follow-up to Acid Rap to work on last year’s Surf, an album credited to Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment (the latter is the touring band Chance formed in 2013)....

A recent addition to Chicago’s festival calendar, the Doc10 documentary festival debuted in 2016 and moved to the Davis Theater last year with a mix of accessible, cable-ready titles (Obit., Casting JonBenet) and more challenging work from around the world (The Cinema Travelers, Death in the Terminal). That binary strategy continues this year with, on the one hand, portraits of Elvis Presley (The King), Ruth Bader Ginsberg (RBG), and Fred Rogers (Won’t You Be My Neighbor, already sold out) and, on the other, studies of drug cartel violence (Devil’s Freedom) and the breakup of Yugoslavia (The Other Side of Everything)....

The Sun in Your Eyes, the new novel by Chicago author Deborah Shapiro, felt familiar to me as soon as I picked it up. This was largely because of the cover photo, William Eggleston’s portrait of two young women lying on a faded floral couch. One of the women is disheveled and distraught; her calmer, prettier friend tries to comfort her. “My doubts were never much of a match for my tendency to say yes to her....

Oak Park native Amir ElSaffar has built his career pursuing a rigorous curiosity and commitment to art, and one of his greatest accomplishments is his ravishing hybrid of postbop and traditional Iraqi maqam. His recent Two Rivers project succeeded in part because ElSaffar, an Iraqi-American, is devoted to both disciplines: he studied jazz trumpet in Chicago and maqam—playing santoor and singing—with masters of the austere form in Baghdad. In 2008 he presented the earliest incarnation of what would develop into Rivers of Sound, but it’s only in the last few years that this second project has truly reached fruition....

Otis Rush released some of the most harrowing, emotionally intense blues ever recorded during his late-50s tenure at Chicago’s Cobra label. Though he continued to perform and record, sometimes brilliantly, until his 2004 stroke, those early sides remain the cornerstone of his legacy. Born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1934, Rush moved to Chicago in 1948. At first, he considered himself primarily a harmonica player, but he honed his guitar chops, incorporating progressive, jazz-influenced ideas he absorbed from the recordings of T-Bone Walker....