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The world premiere of this Northlight Theatre- commissioned work, written by Sharyn Rothstein and directed by Jess McLeod, presents a wonderfully complicated female relationship anchoring a larger story of income inequality and abuse of power. Christine (Leah Karpel) is a single mother struggling to find a home and keep herself and her daughter afloat, all while getting away from a destructive ex named Poet (Julian Parker). Lying about her situation, she rents an apartment from Marti (Shanesia Davis)....

Tampering with an artist’s memory can be dangerous business: In 2011, Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh published Van Gogh: The Life, an acclaimed biography arguing, among other things, that the Dutch painter’s gunshot death in July 1890, in the French town of Auvers-sur-Oise, was no suicide, as scholars had agreed for years, but homicide at the hands of a local bully. The blowback from Van Gogh fans and art historians was severe....

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art announced Friday that its board and leadership has given up on Chicago as a site for the museum and will build in California instead. No specific California location was named. Here’s the mayor’s full statement: “No one benefits from continuing their seemingly unending litigation to protect a parking lot,” said George W. Lucas, founder and chairman of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. “The actions initiated by Friends of Parks and their recent attempts to extract concessions from the city have effectively overridden approvals received from numerous democratically elected bodies of government....

When Philadelphia’s Beach Slang first appeared in 2014 with a couple of EPs, I was fully obsessed. Fronted by former pop punker James Alex Snyder, who spent the 90s cofronting Weston, the band produced hook-filled brilliance by summoning the heartfelt, clean-channel warmth of punks-turned-alt-rock-icons such as the Replacements, Hüsker Dü, and the Lemonheads and adding a big tip of the hat to radio-ready acts such as Goo Goo Dolls and the Gin Blossoms....

Paul Burch is a musical time traveler: four years ago he released Meridian Rising, a pristine concept album in the voice of Jimmie Rodgers, the greatest pop star of the Great Depression era. The choice made sense, since Burch likewise is an expert stylist who meshes past popular genres but always manages to sound like himself—he can even stand out when working with artists who are distinctive in their own right, such as art-country collective Lambchop and Chicago country-punks the Waco Brothers....

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 their new electronic material and refused to perform any of their beloved early songs. So they booked a Wire tribute band, the Ex-Lion Tamers (which included Chicago music critic Jim DeRogatis), to open for them and play their iconic 1977 album Pink Flag in its entirety....

All the Way, the latest full-length from local ambient project TALsounds, aka Natalie Chami of experimental group Good Willsmith, opens with gentle synth notes, unearthly and largely indecipherable vocals, and what sounds like the gentle pitter-patter of leaves and branches rustling in the wind. Good Willsmith member and Hausu Mountain cohoncho Max Allison sent me All the Way at the end of April, and though I can’t recall connecting the dots at the time, the opening song, “Only One,” and some of the other tracks on the immersive All the Way have elements reminiscent of spring, of nature slowly appearing out of winter’s shadow....

As long as Omnivore Records continues its reissue program dedicated to idiosyncratic California indie-pop greats Game Theory, I’ll keep using that as an excuse to share my favorite tunes. Last Friday the label released a deluxe two-CD version of the band’s excellent 1987 album, Lolita Nation, considered by many to be the group’s apex. I prefer its predecessor, The Big Shot Chronicles, but Lolita Nation was a great leap forward for Game Theory in terms of artistic ambition, with all sorts of cool fragments and sonic experiments scattered among its sophisticated pop songs....

Peter Gannushkin / downtownmusic.net Jerome Cooper The singular percussionist Jerome Cooper died on Wednesday at the age of 68 following a battle with cancer. The Chicago native is probably known best for his long involvement in the Revolutionary Ensemble, a daring trio with bassist Sirone and violinist Leroy Jenkins that moved easily between group improvisation and knotty compositional gambits that reached well outside of strict jazz traditions (and, of course, its instrumentation offered something utterly new as well)....

My Friend Dahmer (which is now playing at Webster Place) takes place in 1978, and the movie evokes a certain type of filmmaking that flourished in the U.S. around that time—an improbable mixture of art house sensibilities and exploitation-movie content. Dahmer draws viewers in with a provocative title, which promises to reveal intimate secrets about serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, then refuses to deliver any details about his crimes. Rather, it’s a portrait of the killer as a young man—the movie depicts Dahmer’s senior year of high school and the events leading up to his first murder....

“There wasn’t a single moment when the chummy, jovial craft beer industry became a battlefield of ‘us versus them,’” Josh Noel writes in Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out: Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch, and How Craft Beer Became Big Business (Chicago Review Press, June 1). “It happened slowly. And then, seemingly, all at once.” But John Hall and his son Greg, who became head brewer in 1991 after the first one quit, did take risks....

Azhar Usman’s website quotes Dave Chappelle as calling Usman a “comedian from the future,” and that’s true enough. A big-bearded, believing, yet “secular” Muslim of Indian descent, who puts himself in the “brown” racial “bucket” and affects hip-hop idioms when it suits him (“Yooo . . . whatsup? ISIS in the house!”), Usman is well situated to appeal to just about every segment of America’s postwhite posterity. Usman is much more compelling when he leaves us to our thoughts and focuses on his own instead....

T his past Monday, April 30, marked 41 years since the first demonstration by the women who became known as Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. On that day in 1977 a dozen or so of them assembled in the square across from Argentina’s pink version of the White House to bear witness on behalf of their children—journalists, students, activists, the hapless—who’d been “disappeared” by the military dictatorship then in power....

President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan, an eight-year, $2 trillion infrastructure spending proposal announced on March 31, is refreshingly city-friendly. About a third of that cash would be earmarked for transportation, including generous slices of the pie for public transportation, vehicle electrification, and Amtrak, which will be especially helpful for big cities. Chicago is no exception. But transit analyst and former Chicagoan Yonah Freemark detailed the massive upsides of Biden’s plan for sustainable transportation and addressing climate change in a recent The Hill op-ed....

The spacious loft is kept dark, which calls attention to the office’s LCD screens with constantly moving imagery. A 3-D model of a frog mounted on the wall comes to life with skin that changes color—a projection mapping created for the Shedd Aquarium’s “Amphibians” exhibit. A virtual Air Jordan shoe, a project created for Nike, rotates on a touch screen and explodes into its components when tapped. The workshop includes a Computerized Numerical Control machine and 3-D printer to create parts for projects, and the main floor is kept clear for building projects....

As part of a late-in-life effort at self-improvement, I’m trying to become a better journalist by studying Robert Caro and Rahm Emanuel. In contrast, Rahm falls into the category of powerful men committing dastardly deeds. And yet in his latest essay in the Atlantic, he offers interview tips to journalists. For the record, this is the second recent series. The first was on the Lincoln Yards TIF deal—aka, the fleecing of Chicago by Mayor Rahm....

Rage, a new thriller playing at this year’s Polish Film Festival in America, feels like a throwback to the cinema of moral anxiety, a movement of the late 1970s and early ’80s that used interpersonal stories to examine social codes and political forces inside Communist Poland. The film centers on an amoral journalist for an ultraconservative cable news network who suffers an attack of conscience over various personal and professional concerns, and Michał Węgrzyn, directing a script he wrote with Marcin Roykiewicz, shows how the journalist’s treatment of people at home and at work mirrors his engagement with the public....

Like the Gospels, this review contains spoilers. With Reverend Toller, Schrader has finally gotten his hands on the real thing, a troubled spiritual seeker who—like the protagonist of Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951)—keeps a journal as a form of prayer. As Toller explains to Michael, he served for years as an army chaplain and, over his wife’s objections, persuaded his son to enlist in the wake of 9/11; after the son was killed in Iraq, the minister’s wife left him and he retired from the military....

As the novel coronavirus pandemic rages on, homeless people may be facing bleak prospects in Chicago, but not homeless pets. In the days before Governor J.B. Pritzker issued his stay-at-home order and in the weeks since, local animal shelters have been inundated with demand to foster and adopt dogs, cats, rabbits, lizards, roosters, and every other available critter. The number of available pets has dwindled to historic lows even as animal shelters (deemed by the state to be an essential service) have continued to take in new animals....