Posts

Theater Oobleck presents the world premiere of Mickle Maher’s latest hilarious tragedy. In the basement of a community theater (very much like the Chopin, where this production is being staged), two middle-aged sisters who have given 20 years of their lives to the company flail while holding auditions for an adult-oriented version of The Three Little Pigs. Meanwhile, upstairs on the main stage, the pompous artistic director is mounting his take on Macbeth....

courtesy of the artist Jonah Parzen-Johnson Saxophonist and Chicago native Jonah Parzen-Johnson calls his work “lo-fi experimental folk music for solo baritone saxophone and analog synthesizer,” a classification that has met my resistance since I first encountered it. Isn’t it enough to say he makes music for saxophone and synthesizer? As heard on his album Remember When Things Were Better Tomorrow (Primary), he writes engrossing, accessible melodies that do indeed convey a folky simplicity and directness, but using a variety of extended techniques and interactive synthesizer programs of his own design, those melodic phrases fan out and mutate in countless ways—sometimes decidedly abstract, sometimes florid and tuneful—as he improvises on each composition....

Paige Wynne Diane Glick Berolzheimer Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Diane Glick Berolzheimer, a child of 1930s and ’40s Chicago. “We never had a car. We took public transportation. Streetcars or buses. My mother’s father had a school supply and candy store on Potomac Avenue, right off of Western, and I remember taking the Western Avenue streetcar there, or maybe it was Broadway....

The cover art for Cosmovore, the latest album from Oakland metal trio Ulthar, is immediately arresting: it’s an illustration of a group of plantlike monstrosities that each appear to be vomiting nervous systems made of fibrous bundles and gaping maws. It’s from a work called The Mountains of Madness 3 by fantasy artist Ian Miller, who got his start illustrating the covers of paperbacks by horror author and noted racist H....

Rosario Zavala Jeff Williams Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Jeff Williams, traditional sign painter. “In the middle 80s is when there was this change with the sign industry. People were buying computers, and they knew how to press buttons, but they had no idea as far as layout, color combinations, et cetera. The people with the computers, they were beating each other up so that they could get the work....

This week’s poster is for Eating Rainbows, an outdoor celebration of the rainbow and the LGBTQ+ community. This annual event is organized by Jenna Liberman and Paul Octavious of the Eye Eaters project, which brings artisans from the culinary world together with visual artists to create gatherings that combine food, music, and interactive art installations. Octavious is also a photographer and graphic designer, and he created this poster using art provided by Aaron Lowell Denton of Bloomington, Indiana, whose poster work has been highlighted in the Reader before....

Feeling cooped up? There’s a few pop-up experiences opening this weekend that can get you out of the house while being mindful of recommended safety guidelines. First, the north-side bar and music venue Cobra Lounge opened Chicago Craft: a Collective Grip, a pop-up shop within the venue to support local artists, bands, and breweries that have been hurting financially during the pandemic by giving them another platform in which to sell their wares....

Formed in England in 1967, Procol Harum are probably best known for their massive debut single, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” a chilling, Bach-inspired, organ-led beauty of a tune deemed by some the first progressive-rock song ever. But prog or not, it introduced the world to the baroque-rock grandeur Procol Harum came to specialize in, with its sweeping arrangements and epi, story-driven lyrics, double-keyboard interplay between singer and pianist Gary Brooker and organist Matthew Fisher, and complex, bluesy shredding by guitarist Robin Trower....

In a time characterized by waiting—waiting to leave the confines of our homes, waiting to see our loved ones closer than six feet away, waiting to truly exhale—those of us who have found ourselves estranged from our usual gigs in Chicago’s illustrious independent music scene knew that waiting was simply not an option. In a matter of days following March 12, 2020, COVID-19 splayed across the country, tours were scrapped, venues were shuttered, and income for a majority of music industry workers slipped away like sand through a sieve....

Quin Kirchner blew into Chicago in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina devastated his old hometown of New Orleans. He wasted no time making himself essential as a drummer, and since then he’s played with a wide variety of acts: Afrobeat combo Nomo, tropical pop band Wild Belle, singer-guitarist Ryley Walker, and countless jazz ensembles. In all these settings, he’s supplied crisp grooves and percussive coloration that keep the music flowing. Kirchner didn’t release his first album as a bandleader, The Other Side of Time (Astral Spirits/Spacetone), till 2018, and it was worth the wait....

As a member of Chicago production collective OnGaud rapper and beat maker SolarFive contributed to one of the best local hip-hop releases of 2014: Mick Jenkins’s The Water[s]. The same sumptuous, soul-influenced mystique OnGaud lent The Water[s] snakes its way through SolarFive’s brand-new debut mixtape, 88 Soul. That magic is present in the occasional weeping synths on “Amethyst”; the lazy, stumbling beat on “Float Away”; and the instrumental sections that sound like they’ve been submerged in water on “Eviction Notice....

Since her turn on Kelly Rowland’s BET reality series Chasing Destiny in 2016, soulful Chicago singer-songwriter Johari Noelle has been bowling over fans and critics alike—Reader contributor James Porter has praised the “slow, simmering grooves” of her 2019 debut EP, Things You Can’t Say Out Loud. For her new single, “Time” (which dropped last week), composer and coproducer Jeoffrey Arrington helped coordinate a slew of crackerjack players who overdubbed their parts remotely: contributors include bassist Herf Yamaya, drummer Mark Poiesz, guitarist Jackson Shepard, pianist Matt Jones, and violinist Arianne Urban....

Five years can be a lifetime in the career of a postpunk band, but that’s how long it’s been since the LA duo No Age dropped a new record. Singer and guitarist Randy Randall and drummer Dean Spunt have finally broken their silence with the exuberant Snares Like a Haircut (Drag City), a maelstrom of fury and melody that sounds like it must be the product of more than two people....

It was only fitting that 2019, the year leading up to the new Roaring Twenties, should be a time of transitions, milestones, and new beginnings in the Chicago transportation scene. Bike fatalities are down, with only four cases to date, compared with the recent average of six, but the last two cases sparked outrage. On November 6, a turning truck driver failed to yield to school counselor Carla Aiello, 37, who was on her bike, crushing her under the wheels....

Can someone please give Meshell Ndegeocello a Grammy already? The ten-time nominee, also known as Meshell Suhalia Bashir-Shakur, has forged a distinctive and idiosyncratic path since her 1993 debut Plantation Lullabies. The singer and multi-instrumentalist has also become known for her social activism, and she’s contributed work to compilations, tributes, and anthologies including AIDS-research benefits from the Red Hot Organization, a compilation album devoted to empowering women and promoting peace in the Congo called Raise Hope for Congo, and an essay about her experience as a bisexual woman in Dan Savage’s anthology aimed at LGBTQ youth, It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living....

N at the Greenhouse Theater is based on a faulty premise: that a white actor would refuse to say the N-word in a play. Stage and screen are universally acknowledged as being “allowable” environments for this. However, this incident only serves as a MacGuffin for a clunky “both sides” thought experiment on liberal hypocrisy. Stacie Doublin plays Mrs. Page, an older Black Republican forced by her son to accept a caretaker....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, October 1012016. Chicago named the third-best city for active living after Boston, San Francisco Chicago’s walkability, bike paths, parks, and public transit make it the third-best city for active living in the U.S., according to a report by Gallup and wellness company Healthways. Only Boston and San Francisco beat out Chicago’s health-friendly environment. “If you have the bike paths, if you can do what you want to do with your life easily by walking around as opposed to having to get into a car, if you have a lot of green space ....

Emma Yaaka snaps his fingers to make sure his audience is listening. He wears a chartreuse polo shirt and AirPods as he speaks into the camera. “Please, whenever you cough,” he says as he fake coughs into his fist, “cover your mouth.” He pauses for emphasis between each word and ruffles through some papers on his desk. He holds up a picture of himself, partially disguised in a baseball hat, with a tissue over his nose....

“The sense of being lost is what we wanted to convey. That is what was missing before [in most earlier movies about the Holocaust]: one individual being lost.” —László Nemes to Andrea Gronvall, Movie City News I assume this storytelling strategy is what led the New York Times‘s Manohla Dargis to describe the film, in a report from Cannes, as “radically dehistoricized” and “intellectually repellent”—attributes that I’d be more inclined to assign to the period bloodbaths of Quentin Tarantino (including his latest, also showing at Music Box)....