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Glamorous movie actresses often win respect through highly unflattering roles: Jessica Lange ranting and raving as the mentally ill starlet in Frances (1982), Nicole Kidman wearing dowdy outfits and a prosthetic nose as Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002), Charlize Theron grunging out as trailer-trash serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2003). Playing an unattractive woman has certainly been the ticket this year for Jennifer Aniston, whom I knew as a hairstyle before I knew her as a performer: as the scarred, brittle, nasty survivor of a horrific car accident in Daniel Barnz’s indie drama Cake, she’s collected best actress nominations from the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Broadcast Film Critics Association....

Texan Jolie Holland was only briefly a member of the Be Good Tanyas, from 1999 to 2000, but that was apparently enough for her to develop a rapport with cofounder Samantha Parton. Six years ago Parton suffered a concussion in a car accident, and as she healed, doctors discovered an aneurysm and a benign tumor behind her left eye. When she finally resumed touring in 2016, it was with Holland—in fact, most of Parton’s musical activity since getting back on her feet has been with her old bandmate....

La Havana Madrid, Sandra Delgado’s award-winning immersive musical, returns to Chicago, transporting us to the vibrant Caribbean Latinx music scene of the 1960s. Filled with intimate vignettes of Cuban-, Colombian-, and Puerto Rican-American life, it paints a picture of young immigrants acclimating to life in a segregated city while searching for love and connection. It is a celebration of the power of music to unite people and to instill a feeling of belonging....

A month or two after most music critics compile their favorite albums of 2014, I’m finally getting around to making my list. Few international titles brought me more pleasure than Chungu, a dazzling album from modern Zanzibar taraab outfit Rajab Suleiman & Kithara; it’s the eighth installment in the invaluable Zanzibara series, released by French label Buda and curated and recorded by German producer Werner Graebner. In years past I’ve shared my love of taraab music, notably on the occasion of a majestic performance in Millennium Park by Zanzibar’s venerable Culture Musical Club as part of the 2006 World Music Festival....

Corn The record label Audika has a single-minded yet admirable pursuit: releasing and properly reissuing all of the available recorded output of avant-garde-pop cellist and songwriter Arthur Russell. They’ve already reissued Russell’s most famous work—the haunting World of Echo (1986)—and assembled immaculate compilations that showcase certain periods in his prolific and varied career: Calling Out of Context (2004), a collection of sideways synth-pop recorded between 1973 and the artist’s death in 1992; First Thought Best Thought (2006), which contains various new-music pieces; and Love Is Overtaking Me (2008), an incomparably infectious hodgepodge of country-leaning singer-songwriter material....

Lollapalooza, which turns 25 this year, announced its lineup at 6 AM, and the marquee name is a doozy: Radiohead. Booking the UK alternative-rock titans is clutch, especially considering how unexciting the other three big headliners are: Red Hot Chili Peppers, who haven’t released new music since before their previous Lolla headlining set in 2012; LCD Soundsystem, who are playing so many other festivals in the U.S. that a Lolla appearance was practically a given; and J....

If you didn’t recognize those lines as lyrics to Barry White’s “You’re The First, The Last, My Everything,” then you do yourself a disservice on two fronts: 1. for missing out on a classic, and 2. for not knowing Money Talks, the 1997 film starring Chris Tucker and Charlie Sheen. But really Chris Tucker. (Sidenote: remember phat, one of our first bungling attempts to reclaim language by coming up with a phonetic acronym that had us calling every fine woman some type of fat/phat back in the day?...

Eclipse Theatre kicks off its season of William Inge plays with this game attempt at one of his lesser works. Sue’s life is turned upside down when the son she sent to an orphanage as a teenage mother shows up at her doorstep and topples the fragile existence she has constructed as a career woman living with a failure of a younger man who won’t marry her. Set in a modern apartment in an upscale Chicago neighborhood in 1962, Natural Affection explores aspects of infidelity, alcoholism, and latent homosexuality within an atmosphere of looming dread, suggesting cracks in America’s postwar idyll....

I’ve been observing the artistic growth of Haley Fohr since she moved to Chicago in 2012 from Bloomington, Indiana. She’s matured in leaps and bounds since the release of her breakthrough album, In Plain Speech (Thrill Jockey), in 2015, but nothing could have prepared me for her achievements on the remarkable new Reaching for Indigo (Drag City)—which might be the best album I’ve heard in 2017. Early on, Fohr convinced me that she possessed lots of ideas, but at the time she seemed to struggle to sort through them....

Christen Thomas‘s boisterous laugh could charm everyone in the room—and because she worked in the music industry, she was in a lot of crowded rooms. She made too many friends to count, not just in Chicago but around the world. Within a few months of moving here in 2007 from New York City, where she’d worked for Cornerstone Promotions and Vice Records, she landed a gig in media relations at the Empty Bottle....

Here’s an odd pairing. On the one hand you’ve got Anton Chekhov, Russia’s poet of stasis, revered for a handful of delicate tragicomedies about minor aristocrats slipping into lives of quiet desperation. On the other, the Hypocrites, Chicago’s jolly party ensemble, known lately for a Pirates of Penzance done beach-bash-style, an H.M.S. Pinafore performed in PJs, an Into the Woods set in an outsize playroom. Even All Our Tragic—the company’s marathon effort to visit every extant Greek tragedy—played out as gory fun, meals thrown in....

Inside Out Wed 7/6, 8:45 PM, Northwestern University Norris University Center’s East Lawn, 1999 Campus, Evanston, 847-491-2300, northwestern.edu. Hotel Transylvania 2 Thu 7/7, 8:30 PM, Riis Park, 6100 W. Fullerton, 312-746-5363, chicagoparkdistrict.com.

Had La Luz been around during the garage revival of the early 2000s, they would’ve done a great job saving us from all the monotone Strokes imitators. But regardless of which era they emerged in, they’d have been able to make it on their own terms as a rock ’n’ roll band, not as trend hoppers. Formed in 2012 in Seattle and based in Los Angeles since 2015, La Luz capture a moodier, more introspective side of garage rock—and never drop the beat....

Singer, songwriter, and filmmaker Thomas Comerford is all about the fundamentals. To teach his cinematography students at the School of the Art Institute about lighting, he has them re-create images from their favorite movies—you can see some of their picks, drawn from the history of monster movies, in the video to Comerford’s song “Lord of the Flies.” That song, which kicks off his latest LP, Blood Moon, shows how his core influences come into play: it combines a stark, pithy guitar lead that’s close kin to the one on the Go-Betweens’ “Part Company” with soulful backing vocals reminiscent of those on Van Morrison’s Saint Dominic’s Preview....

There are a lot of events this weekend—murder mysteries and sci-fi abound. Here are some recommendations for what we recommend: Sat 3/17: Mystery and crime lit lovers and writers shouldn’t miss the Murder and Mayhem in Chicago conference at Roosevelt University (430 S. Michigan). Speakers include Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, as well as detectives, journalists, and others involved in the genre. Various times, $65, $35 students, $75 at the door

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, December 5, 2016. Professional boxer Ed Brown dies in East Garfield Park shooting Boxer Ed Brown, 25, died after being shot in the head while sitting with his cousin in a car in East Garfield Park, according to ESPN. Brown had been shot twice before, and his manager, Cameron Dunkin, had “begged him to get out of Chicago.” It’s not the first time tragedy has struck the Brown family; his mother was one of the 21 people killed in the E2 nightclub stampede in 2003....

I was fortunate enough to be one of the 51 critics selected for the Sundance Press Inclusion Initiative, a program that provided free tickets to the ten-day Sundance Film Festival and cash for lodging and airfare to, as the festival notes, “critics, freelancers, and journalists from backgrounds underrepresented in the critical mainstream, with an emphasis on people of color, women, and people with disabilities.” Fifty-one participants in an inclusion program is extraordinary....

Drive-ins have emerged as a popular method for getting concert audiences out in the world to see their favorite acts, and this week’s gig poster advertises a show featuring some classic Chicago house-music artists. The singer, DJ, record producer, and Chicago native known as Green Velvet (born Curtis Alan Jones) did triple duty for this outdoor show at the newly configured Chicago Drive-In, in the parking lot of Bridgeview’s SeatGeek Stadium....