Posted inStreet View

On a roll

“I’m just skating around town, just basically trying to get my miles in. My goal is up to 14 miles. I think I’m at about 8 right now. So I’m going to take another lap around the city,” said Alex Scott, 26, on a Monday in the early afternoon.  “It takes me a couple of […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Lyric Opera’s Proximity

Spectacle? It’s long been the grand opera’s calling card. But never quite like this. Lyric Opera’s world premiere production of Proximity—closer to Immersive Van Gogh or Art on the Mart than to Aida—opened at the opera house last week. Directed and “mixed” by Yuval Sharon (creator of the parking garage Wagner, Twilight: Gods, which he […]

Posted inGossip Wolf

Whitney Johnson of Matchess presents an ambitious durational work at Bond Chapel

For more than 15 years, the music of violist, keyboardist, and singer Whitney Johnson has been a powerful through line connecting various local underground scenes. Since 2009 she’s been developing the outstanding solo project Matchess; she’s been a member of a dizzying number of groups, including the 1900s, Verma, and Circuit des Yeux; and she’s […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Black culture as a force for change

“Things Well Worth Waiting For” is a small-scale, deeply comprehensive exhibition that transports you to a different time where women wore flamboyant dresses, men drove classic cars, segregation prevailed, and the power of soul music was palpable. Photojournalist and activist Kwame Brathwaite was there, documenting it all—in words and in photographs.  Occupying two galleries at […]

Posted inArts & Culture

A timely Turing

After a promising Chicago workshop performance four years ago, Chicago Opera Theater’s The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing returned for a two-performance world premiere at the Harris Theater last week, conducted by COT music director Lidiya Yankovskaya. It’s a gut-wrenching piece in a well-crafted production, with two major themes that couldn’t be more contemporary: […]

Posted inColumns & Opinion

The city in bloom

I have a personal tradition each vernal equinox of posting on social media some recorded version of “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.” (This year I opted for Sarah Vaughan.) But the truth is, it’s hard to feel hung up when I look over this week’s spring theater and arts preview issue. (Feeling […]