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If you love the Cubs and don’t see many musicals, then Miracle is the show for you. Like watching a mediocre baseball game, it’s predictable and uninspiring with long stretches of little action interspersed with occasional cheers. Containing every possible baseball metaphor, it covers all the bases without ever hitting a home run. The opening Cubbie Bear blues number with wonderful video screens makes one hope for so much more....

In Kristiana Rae Colón’s Good Friday, an abused soul does the unconscionable in response to the unforgivable, exacting vengeance (or administering justice, take your pick) by shooting students on a college campus. Good Friday opens on a feminist studies class meeting to analyze Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. The real subject, however, is the preoccupations of the four female students and their nominal mentor, a professionally stymied adjunct named Asha. Through 9/17: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 7 PM, Mon 8 PM, Oracle Productions, 1802 W....

The Chicago Palestine Film Festival “is dedicated to exhibiting film and video work that is open, critical, and reflective of the culture, experience, and vision of the artists,” writes Barbara Scharres, director of programming for the Gene Siskel Film Center, in her introduction to the festival’s 14th edition. No other national film festival requires such a clarification, but that’s the world we’re living in. Fortunately, you don’t need a state to be a nation; all you need is people....

In Illinois, 76,000 people are behind bars and roughly 42 percent of Illinois’ population has a criminal or arrest record. With the exception of people in prison, all citizens in Illinois have the right to vote. However, barriers to participation in our democracy for people impacted by the American legal system extend far beyond felony disenfranchisement. The jail serving as a polling location, allowing for voting machines to be brought into the facility, protects the enfranchisement of those who rely on same day voter registration–the majority of people in the jail....

One of the saddest things about John Kass’s present status as a right-wing blowhard is that he previously played a role in Chicago’s media landscape as a government watchdog, reporting for the Chicago Tribune on shady dealings at City Hall under Richard M. Daley. But following the death of legendary newspaperman Mike Royko in 1997, it was determined that Kass would be more of an asset to the Republican-leaning daily as a columnist....

I remember a time in the 90s when certain critics just didn’t believe that Jon Spencer’s impassioned retro-rock stage presence wasn’t some sort of ridiculous gimmick. Though some derided his band the Blues Explosion as a second-rate mimic of Canned Heat fronted by a white guy with Mr. Dynamite-era James Brown aspirations, for others his combination of dirty swagger and bluesman showmanship was a revelation. If you weren’t on board for Spencer during this era, it’s probably because you didn’t appreciate (or didn’t know about) the crazy damaged garage rock of Spencer’s previous band, Pussy Galore—which walked the line between audacious and disastrous, notably on a skull-rattling 1986 reimagining of the entirety of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St....

It’s easy to lose track of the restaurants Dudley Nieto has had a hand in over the decades. Adobo Grill, Zapatista, Xel-Ha, Zocalo, New Rebozo, Chapulin, Chapultepec, La Canasta, Eivissa, Mezcalina, Barbakoa—to name a few. There are so many that it’s almost easy to look right past Rojo Gusano, the latest, a taco-focused Albany Park joint with a somewhat labored Sammy-Hagar-staggering-around-on-the-beach-vibe. But after Ixcateco Grill, it’s the second midscale Mexican joint with a pedigreed chef to open in the neighborhood, and as such it deserves a look....

There’s a white Michigan rapper with a whiplash-inducing staccato flow who shocked the pop music world when he topped the Billboard 200 last year. No, it isn’t Eminem. The real shocker came in October, when the number one album on Billboard belonged to Nathan John Feuerstein, aka Christian rapper NF. His third album, Perception (Capitol CMG/NF Real Music), is “Christian” in the sense that it’s obscenely polite and lightly peppered with references to religious ideology....

When I wrote a few months ago that I intended to continue writing after I began my new career as a special education teacher, I was grossly underestimating how much time outside the classroom I’d have to devote to teaching. I’ve spent much of the last two months planning lessons and completing sundry other paperwork. I find all this fascinating, though time-consuming. (There’s also the Chicago teachers’ strike, which is still going on as I write this and which has proved almost as time-consuming as teaching....

Chicago composer and musician Joshua Abrams likes to compare the guimbri (aka gimbri, guembri, or sintir), a traditional three-string bass lute associated with Morocco’s Gnawa people, to the Roland TR-808, an early-80s drum machine that became foundational to hip-hop, Chicago house, and a long list of other genres. “Sometimes I’ll joke that it’s the original 808, because it has a percussive skin mixed with a bass tone,” Abrams says. “It has a strong sub-bass too....

Q: My husband and I got married in August of 2019 and we were together for over five years before getting married. I’m very happy and love him with all my heart. We don’t fight, we just have some tiffs here and there. The kicker is that I have a tough time feeling him during sex and he doesn’t last as long as I would like him to. We’re adventurous enough to try different things, but I find myself sexually unfulfilled....

Over the last few weeks I’ve seen something heretofore unimaginable—people eagerly volunteering to pay property taxes that aren’t due for another three or four months. As of this past weekend, the treasurer’s office had received about 113,400 prepayments, up from just 1,775 last year. That means taxpayers have paid more than $692.3 million in property taxes, which Pappas’s office will distribute to the city, the county, the schools, and other taxing bodies....

This past Sunday night was the first really frigid night of the year, a night with the kind of weather that left the streets barren and delayed flights at O’Hare. But folks of all sorts, many even in costume—including a guy in a full-on purple-velvet Mad Hatter suit and top hat—crammed into Emporium Arcade Bar in Wicker Park to witness the return of Robot Riot, an event that its organizers describe as “the backyard wrestling of robot fighting....

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.

The Upside (2019) is, at times shot for shot, a remake of the wildly successful French film Intouchables (2011), itself a remake of the French documentary À la vie, à la mort (2003), about the quadriplegic Corsican businessman Philippe Pozzo di Borgo and his Algerian caregiver, Abdel Sellou. Not only did Intouchables become the second-highest-grossing film of all time in France, 52 percent of voters in an Fnac poll deemed it the cultural event of the year....

Gossip Wolf is a longtime fan of local weirdo bubblegum punks Swimsuit Addition because their jams are so damn tight, but lead singer and guitarist Jen Dot has also branched out into the visual arts. In January, Dot fired up a comics—centric virtual zine called Disappearing Media that includes work from Razorcake columnist Ben Snakepit as well as tarot expert and self-described “500 year old witch” Erica Walker Adams, plus three of Dot’s own comic strips, including The Political Class, Glass Rooms, and our total favorite, Emo Grrrls, whose protagonists she describes as “emotional teenagers who navigate their lives in a numb world by making friends, enemies, and genre-defying art....

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.

Luke Haughwout Tristan Shone Author & Punisher is the industrial-metal solo project of San Diego’s Tristan Shone, a metalhead mechanical engineer who built a huge collection of steel chains, levers, pistons, slides, masks, and knobs that control blown-out synthesizer frequencies and transform his movements and voice into earth-rattling, terrifyingly evil sounds. Shone’s Author & Punisher setup is constantly evolving, and now sees him using hand-built metal collars with contact mikes that turn sounds of his throat muscles into ghastly growls, and barrel-size turbines that create swooping, swelling bass pulses—and as his machines evolve, his music becomes more extreme....

Isaac Gomez’s exciting new thriller mixes bumps in the night with poignant social commentary, similar to Jordan Peele’s Get Out. In its world premiere, produced by Haven Theatre and directed by Jo Cattell, the one-act two-hander features charismatic performances by Karen Rodriguez and Rashaad Hall. They play Marisa and Lev, a young couple with a visibly strained relationship marred by the distance created by device addiction, mistrust, and some deep-seated hurt around the challenges of an interracial relationship....

Few documentary makers see their work bring results as substantial as those witnessed by producer Amy Ziering and writer-director Kirby Dick when The Invisible War, their exposé of sexual assault in the U.S. military, was screened for secretary of defense Leon Panetta in April 2012. One of the key problems identified in the movie was the policy requiring any military assault victim to report the incident directly to his or her commanding officer, who might be friends with the perpetrator or might even be the perpetrator himself....