What raises this above the typical nostalgia-logged music doc is the clear sense that Johansen is not reliving his long discography onstage but continuing to live it in that moment.
Author Archives: Dmitry Samarov
Army tales
Jonah Saesan and LanDis Frederick are veterans of two different branches of the U.S. armed forces. After being discharged in 2015, they started processing their experiences in the military through sketch comedy, which has culminated in their first two-person show. Lasting 60 minutes, the program covers topics such as the difficulty of forming meaningful friendships […]
Review: Hilma
Watch the excellent 2019 documentary Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint, or better yet, just look at the paintings.
Unraveling X
What if you fall in love with a monster who engulfs your entire world then dies? You’re bound to have questions, and, if you’re a writer, or just a certain type of obsessive, you’ll turn over every rock and upset every applecart looking for answers. In Catherine Lacey’s immersive new novel, Biography of X, a […]
Review: The Worst Ones
The line between fact and fiction always blurs when a camera is pointed at people, but in Lisa Akoka and Romane Gueret’s arresting new feature, it’s more like a game of three-card monte.
Hands-on reading
The act of reading is rarely just a simple matter of decoding text, but as this diverting exhibition demonstrates, book designers have been augmenting blocks of words with fold-out extensions, rotating dials, opening doorways, and 3D elements for almost as long as there’s been a printing press. Composed of objects from the Newberry Library’s own […]
The Girls shows Chicago, warts and all
What can a book about three generations of unmarried women in Chicago, set between the Civil War and World War I, originally published over 100 years ago and now out in a new edition by Belt Publishing, have to say to a contemporary resident of our city? Quite a bit, as it turns out. Its […]
Fire sale
What does material success look like to young people in 2023? Is it possible to attain the lifestyle they see in 80s TV shows? Is that something to aspire to? A talented Neo-Futurist troupe takes on capitalism, parents’ expectations, their own hopes and dreams, and whether it’s even possible to just get by in this […]
Review: Inside
An art thief breaks into a New York City penthouse and is unable to get back out.
Review: Art Talent Show
This funny, thoughtful, verité look at the yearly selection process in Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts manages to pack insights about education, societal shifts, and intellectual differences without getting bogged down in culture war cliches.
Review: Cocaine Bear
A smuggler dumps duffle bags full of cocaine into a forest before plunging to his death, and a 150-pound bear gets into the drug packets and dies. Great plot for a comedy, right?
When a chair is a springboard
Appropriation, wordplay, riffs on news headlines, improv skits, and a grab bag of absurdist tropes get thrown in a hat to very uneven ends in Curious Theatre Branch’s set of four half-hour plays responding to Caryl Churchill’s This Is a Chair. This Is Not a ChurchillThrough 2/25: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Facility Theatre, 1138 N. California, […]
Viking rock
In a world . . . where Norse mythology meets prog rock on a set seemingly built by precocious middle-schoolers, brothers Jorik and Jarl battle one another and several deities (best known to modern audiences via the Marvel Universe) to wear the crown of their kingdom. Songs are sung, seas traversed, swords crossed, and evil […]
The backstabbers
In Witold Gombrowicz’s fictional kingdom of Burgundia, the royal court is bored. One day Prince Phillip (Keith Surney) and his consort, Simon (Gus Thomas) happen upon Ivona (Laura Nelson), a cowering and often mute peasant girl. Having nothing better to do and looking to outrage his family and friends, the prince announces that Ivona will […]
Reckoning with life
I rarely read wall labels in art exhibitions as I find the verbiage gets in the way of my experience. My goal is to have a one-on-one reckoning with what I’m looking at without someone else’s words confusing or directing my reaction. The curators of this survey of some 250 sculptures, masks, and ornaments from […]