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Peppy, bright, and oblivious, this musical revue at the Cornservatory, first performed in 2016 and “updated” for 2019, feels like it was created during a middle-school sleepover in a small, all-white midwestern town. Propped up by the music of powerful black women—from the songs of Missy Elliott, Beyoncé, and Janelle Monáe to parodies of Ciara and Whitney Houston hits—performed by a cast of 13 white women, this may be the least-nuanced portrayal of feminism I’ve seen since the 1980s....

When Patrizia Acerra founded the International Voices Project in 2010, she sought to create a community for Chicago artists and audiences to experience the work of global playwrights. Since the company’s inaugural season, IVP has presented staged readings of contemporary translations at venues across the city, in collaboration with cultural partners and local artists. Certainly, the virtual festival has brought about new possibilities surrounding who might be tuning in. “For the first time our global work can have a global audience,” Acerra says....

In 2016 Gossip Wolf described jazz guitarist Dave Miller as a Chicago expat based in NYC, but even then he seemed to do as much recording and gigging here as he did there. He’s since moved back to Chicago, and his new self-titled album, which comes out Friday, May 22, via Tompkins Square, would make any hometown scene proud! The funk- and soul-inflected grooves on Dave Miller feature standout local players such as Chicago bassist Matt Ulery, Milwaukee drummer Devin Drobka (whose groups include Field Report and Bell Dance Songs), and V....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Older strips are archived here.

There were some surprises at the latest Obama Presidential Center (OPC) court hearing last week, none odder than the fact that four years after President Barack and Michelle Obama announced Chicago as the site for what was then known as the Obama Presidential Library, we’re still futzing around with court hearings about where it should sit—dithering over technicalities like whether Jackson Park was ever submerged land while, at the same time, waging a life-and-death battle with a Darwinian pandemic under the surreal national leadership of an unhinged egomaniac....

What better way to celebrate the joys of the holiday season than by listening to a bizarre, hyper death-metal track titled “What the Heck, Richard Speck?” Local trio Macabre—whose mashup of death metal, grindcore, thrash, and serial killer obsession has been dubbed “murder metal”—have been ringing in the holiday season with a showcase of twisted extreme music called the Holiday of Horror for two decades now. And they’ve been crafting their twisted homages to some of the darkest humans on the planet for even longer, starting with their debut release, Shitlist (which includes an early version of their ode to Speck), in 1987....

In the Reader‘s latest installment of In Rotation, Anatomy of Habit bassist Kenny Rasmussen laid out the reasons he finds the music of the Grateful Dead so boring, cutting to the quick in 29 words. “What I found were meandering guitars, dispassionate vocals, instrumental indulgence with little thought to hooks, melody, harmony, or power, and a dampening of the political spirit of the time.” He concludes, “AC/DC and the Ramones have never sounded better....

Since its founding in 2012, Otherworld Theatre has been a haven for theater fans who also love gaming, sci-fi, and fantasy. But over the past two months, a wave of allegations involving Otherworld, the resident company Out on a Whim (creators of the long-running hit Improvised Dungeons & Dragons), and Moonrise, Otherworld’s LARP gaming division, have hit social media outlets. For their part, Otherworld’s board of directors announced October 23 on the company social media feeds that they have hired the New York-based HR firm of Peale Piper to enable them to “conduct a thorough review and bring healing and accountability to the community....

Full disclosure: Mike Lust has recorded a handful of records I’ve played on. I also played in a band with him for a while. But there are probably a few hundred local musicians who could say the same thing. Between his prolific career as a recording engineer, his nearly 20-year tenure as the high-kicking, guitar-shredding front man for local outfit Tight Phantomz, his countless stints as a sideman for all sorts of punk and rock bands, and his reliable presence as a larger-than-life, always-on, out-and-about personality, Lust is ubiquitous not only in Chicago music but in Chicago life....

In March 2020, the Joel Hall Dancers were preparing for a concert celebrating the work of cofounder and artistic director emeritus Joel Hall, with dances spanning each decade of his choreography, from the company’s origins in the 1970s to the present day. LEGACY: Phoenix^5 was originally intended to be a sequel to The Life and Legacy of Joel Hall—in the words of current artistic director Jacqueline Sinclair, “a glimpse into the future by those of us who are carrying the organization into the future....

Kimberly Dowdell looks down at her iPhone, which blasts red app badges and notifications from a cluttered screen. She has thousands of messages, e-mails, and calls that beg her attention, but she merely smiles at them and closes her phone case. The 36-year-old architect and director is used to it by now. “We really need to create greater pathways into the profession and greater access to our K through 12 students, our college and graduate students, our licensure candidates, [and] support them through that process,” she says....

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. While inside, inmates relied on one another’s voices to cope with the loneliness: Last Sunday I visited an inmate at Pontiac, a maximum security prison 100 miles from Chicago. He’s been serving a two life sentences for murder since the mid-80s. After a successful escape from another IDOC prison in the 90s, the man was sent to Tamms....

courtesy of the artist Anna Webber Last summer I wrote about Simple (Skirl), a trio recording by New York-based, British Columbia-born winds player Anna Webber. Flanked by drummer John Hollenbeck and pianist Matt Mitchell, Webber maintained the tricky complexity of the writing on her 2013 album Percussive Mechanics, but she also gave herself space to showcase her improvisational prowess. Her compositions are dense and multipartite, with loads of interlocking parts and shifts in tempo and mood....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, July 22, 2016. Have a great weekend! Ex-NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani slams Rahm at RNC Former New York City mayor and 2008 GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani is back in the spotlight after speaking at the Republican National Convention Monday evening. He criticized Mayor Rahm Emanuel for the city’s crime surge and the lack of support for the Chicago Police Department. “You need to tell all police officers you have their back,” the New Yorker said Thursday during a speech to the Arkansas GOP delegation....

In ye olde late 90s, American Primitive fingerstyle guitar by the likes of Robbie Basho, Sandy Bull, and Peter Walker seemed to come back into fashion, possibly because the founder and overlord of the genre, John Fahey, was making some very cool new experimental records. After Fahey died in 2001, adept pickers such as Jack Rose, Kevin Barker (of Currituck Co.), and James Blackshaw appeared to pick up the torch and run with it....

If I were a state House Dem, I like to think I’d join the crew urging Michael Madigan to step down as speaker—what with the Commonwealth Edison scandal endangering the Democratic Party. And even if I miraculously survived Kasper’s challenge, Madigan would order some aide to dig through my past, looking for dirt to use against me. And he’d be as sweet as Tupelo honey . . . And, two, they know how tough he can be....

If you don’t leave this show furious you have no heart. The story alone should make you furious: a group of young women, full of life and hope, take the only jobs available to them and earn early deaths for their pains. That the story is based on fact—the young women in question worked at the Radium Dial Company, in Ottawa, Illinois, in the 1920s, painting the faces of clocks and watches with radioactive paint, ingesting lots of radium in the process and contracting deadly illnesses as a result of their exposure—makes it all the more infuriating....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, December 12, 2016. The New York Times returns to Chicago’s 11th police district When the New York Times tracked shootings in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend, they noted that 16 of the 64 shootings happened in the city’s 11th police district, and three of those shootings happened along the same stretch of Walnut Street. The newspaper returned to the community to learn more about the gun violence tearing the neighborhood apart....

The contemporary dance-music scene and the underground arts community have been in mourning since Friday night, when a fire destroyed Oakland underground arts space the Ghost Ship during a show, killing dozens—as I write, the official death toll is 36, though that number is expected to rise. The tragedy has forced a conversation about Oakland’s housing crisis into the national press, and it’s brought the issue of unlicensed venues to the attention of people who may not have even known they existed....