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Do a Google search for the Indianapolis Museum of Art these days and you’ll land at discovernewfields.org, a website that looks like the online home of a botanic garden. Indianapolis Museum of Art director Charles Venable incurred the wrath of the art world last year by changing the museum’s identity, reducing its world-class art collection to just one component in a group of attractions on a 152-acre campus known as Newfields....

The most challenging films about the stand-up world, including Chicago-based filmmaker Ned Crowley’s Middle Man, dwell, sometimes unbearably, in despair. The viciousness of the comedy format is easily accessible, as most contemporary stand-up is fueled by aggression. Even the parlance is violent: to perform well is to “kill,” to fail is to “bomb.” Over coffee at Atomix Cafe, Crowley and I discussed the pitfalls of a life in comedy, making a labor of love on a shoestring budget, and how his long-standing friendship with O’Heir inspired his directorial debut....

This week’s fantasy gig comes to the Reader from local artist Daniel Williams and takes us to a long-shuttered venue in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. Not everybody can make a fantasy gig poster, of course, but it’s simple and free to take action through the website of the National Independent Venue Association—click here to tell your representatives to save our homegrown music ecosystems. And anybody with a few bucks to spare can support the out-of-work staffers at Chicago’s venues—here’s our list of fundraisers....

Beverly, a graphic novel by Chicago cartoonist and illustrator Nick Drnaso, consists of six overlapping stories of suburban life. The bleak tales are told mainly from teenagers’ perspectives. The characters, though shapeless and rarely expressive, are recognizable, and their situations are unenviable. The settings verge on the mundane: an after-school job, a house party, a pizza place, soccer practice, the playground where kids smoke. But in this world, the slightest aberration resounds like a shot....

UPDATE Wednesday, March 18: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. This cabaret by singer-actors Nancy Hays and Alexa Castelvecchi pays homage to two of the greatest performers of the 20th century: Judy Garland and her daughter Liza Minnelli, who teamed up in November 1964 for a pair of concerts at the historic London Palladium, one of which was televised. At the time, Judy was a 42-year-old veteran of movies, TV, and vaudeville, while Minnelli was an 18-year-old fledgling on the brink of a promising career....

For about a decade, Tim Presley has worked to combine aspects of pop, punk, and lo-fi psychedelia under the name White Fence. On the recent I Have to Feed Larry’s Hawk (Drag City), the guitarist and songwriter delivers what might be his best amalgamation of those musical interests yet. After leading Los Angeles psych band Darker My Love from the mid- to late 00s, Presley launched White Fence in 2010 to focus on stripped-down garage....

This review contains spoilers. A playwright originally, Lonergan understands that people rarely say what they mean, especially if their feelings are raw, and both Lee and Patrick protect themselves with tough talk. This posturing keeps their feelings in check, and when this pretense fails, their encounters are more clumsy than cathartic. In a humorous scene, Patrick breaks down over a piece of meat in the freezer that reminds him of his father’s refrigerated corpse, and Lee kicks in Patrick’s bedroom door to offer awkward consolation....

Flaunt your knowledge of the film Mean Girls and meet the writers behind the satirical site ClickHole at events happening this week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Wed 2/7: On the first Wednesday of every month at Schubas (3159 N. Southport), storytellers from all walks of life discuss God, sex, and death at the appropriately named God, Sex, and Death Variety Hour. The Reader‘s Gwynedd Stuart called it “. ....

This weekend saw the passing of Milos Stehlik, cofounder of Facets Multimedia. I don’t have the space in this post to enumerate all the ways that Stehlik influenced Chicago film culture—such as his championing of films and filmmakers from around the world (especially eastern Europe), his role in establishing the International Children’s Film Festival, and his contributions to WBEZ—so instead I’ll briefly note how Facets Multimedia has influenced me. Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator An early (1967) film by Dušan Makavejev, the master of the eastern European dirty joke (WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Montenegro)....

On its 1981 album, Points, San Francisco-born experimental-music group Negativland doesn’t care to jive with traditional songwriting. Shocking, I know. Instead much of the record represents a crash course in sound art, via, among other examples, the layering of chilling, ambient soundscapes or the distortion and warping of crowd noise till certain voices possess themselves (basically). Still, my favorite track from the outfit’s sophomore effort is the one that features the most distinct structure....

It would have been easy to begin this letter by writing “Chicago is a theater town,” but also stupid because everybody knows that, even people who don’t live here: Steppenwolf, Second City, City Hall, blah blah blah. We respect you, dear readers, and so we’re not going to insult you by filling this special Spring Theater and Dance Issue with stuff you already know about and have probably seen. Instead, we asked our writers and one photographer to go out and learn more about places and performers that fascinated them....

Lyric Opera of Chicago announced today that music director Andrew Davis will end his two-decade tenure after the 2020-2021 season; he’ll be succeeded by a relative newcomer to Lyric—Italian conductor Enrique Mazzola. Freud said in a written version of the announcement that Mazzola, who has “a wealth of international experience . . . is tremendously well-liked and respected by the Lyric Opera Orchestra and Chorus.”

We’re heading into that stretch of the political campaign season when everything’s getting a little goofy. Talk about shooting a fly with a howitzer. Boiling it down to the basics, a Dunkin win weakens Madigan and a Stratton win weakens Rauner. One, Stratton’s falling behind, and her team’s desperately throwing the ultimate Hail Mary. If Dunkin loses, I expect Rauner and his gang will take care of him, somehow or other....

Q: One of my very close friends, a lesbian, has been married for a couple of years now. It’s been nothing but drama since the day they met. My friend had a terrible home life growing up and doesn’t understand stability. She also has zero self-confidence. My friend and her wife are constantly calling the cops on each other, getting restraining orders, and then always breaking them and getting back together....

Chicago Heights (2010) and Hogtown (2014), the first two installments of a projected trilogy by writer-director Daniel Nearing, both made their local debuts at the Black Harvest Film Festival at Gene Siskel Film Center, and they return this week in honor of Black History Month. Yet Nearing is a white artist drawing heavily on white literary sources: Chicago Heights is adapted from Sherwood Anderson’s classic story collection Winesburg, Ohio, and Hogtown is an unacknowledged remake of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown....

This morning Lollapalooza announced the lineup for its four-day Chicago festival in August. Headliners are the Weeknd, Bruno Mars, Jack White, and the Arctic Monkeys. Now that the lineup is confirmed, it feels underwhelming compared to past years. Three of the headliners are Lolla repeaters—this will be the Arctic Monkeys’ fourth go-round since 2009. And while Bruno Mars can carry a Super Bowl halftime show, his catalog doesn’t scream “festival headliner....

One day last week I got a call from a friend at an out-of-town airport, who breathlessly announced that Mayor Rahm’s big old mug was on every TV screen in the terminal, raging with righteous indignation to Wolf Blitzer over the latest travesty of justice in Chicago . . . By the way, youngsters—Ralph Metcalfe was the south side congressman who decided to break from the Machine and Mayor Richard J....

Christian Wolff is the only living member of the New York School, the coterie of composers that revolved around John Cage during the 1950s and included Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and David Tudor. Their experimental music mirrored developments in the art world at the time, including Fluxus and abstract expressionism. The group’s hallmarks—including chance procedures and durations—remain deeply influential in experimental circles. But Wolff, 83, who was born in France to German parents who relocated the family to the U....

Now that March Madness is behind us and the people need something else to be hooked on, let’s acknowledge that, while politics usually isn’t that thing, this year’s Republican race for president is the exception. It’s a kind of unscripted performance piece that the New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik calls, essentially, Dada. This situation reminds me of the medical process whereby doctors fight an opportunistic infection by introducing fecal matter that carries the antibodies needed to fight it....