Category: Arts & Culture 2015 Critics’ Picks

Fabulous Freddie Ninja Unlike you and me, Fabulous Freddie Ninja (aka Freddie Leroy) irons his white jeans before an all-styles dance battle. And unlike anyone else, he fearlessly integrates breaking and voguing—two of the perhaps most disparate elements in Chicago underground dancing—spinning on his head, then jumping to his feet only to collapse to the […]

The Comedy Exposition When Just for Laughs stopped staging its huge annual festival in Chicago last year, it seemed there would be nothing in its place to bring big national acts to the city. Lucky for us, a group of local comics came together to create something even better: the Comedy Exposition, a showcase with […]

Algren and Nelson Algren: The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All &#8203  The past year brought not one but two documentary portraits of Nelson Algren, the bard of Division Street: Michael Caplan’s Algren, which premiered at the Chicago International Film Festival last October, and Mark Blottner, Ilko Davidov, and Denis Mueller’s Nelson Algren: The End […]

Kate Fry and Mark L. Montgomery No, they aren’t married. Not to each other, anyway. But they’ve been paired enough that I’m beginning to think of them as the Lunt and Fontanne, the Bogart and Bacall, the Bill and Hillary of Chicago theater. Over the last four years I’ve seen Kate Fry and Mark L. […]

I Shit You Not Pooping is one of the things that unite us as humans. Hell, there are entire books on the subject (remember Everyone Poops, anyone?). And because everybody poops, many have inadvertently done it in public, which is where I Shit You Not comes in. A monthly storytelling showcase, ISYN features local comedians, […]

All Our Tragic The day before I saw the Hypocrites’ loose adaptation of all 32 surviving Greek tragedies, I flew back to Chicago from a vacation in Austria. The flight lasted nine hours, the show 12. But although it took significantly more time to get through than it takes to cross the Atlantic, All Our […]

Everybody vs. Chris Jones and Hedy Weiss In February, Steppenwolf Theatre’s young adults program presented This Is Modern Art (Based on True Events), a new play by Chicago-based writers Idris Goodwin and Kevin Coval, about young street artists—also Chicago based—who in 2010 decided to tag the Art Institute’s new Modern Wing. Reader critic Albert Williams […]

Eula Bliss It was Jeff Shotts, Eula Biss’s editor at Graywolf Press, who came up with the term “citizen-thinker” to describe her, and it’s remarkably apt. Biss isn’t afraid of knotty and complicated subjects—her two most recent books, Notes From No Man’s Land and On Immunity: An Inoculation, consider race and vaccination, respectively—but she’s no […]

Chay Yew to Marcus Gardley It was December 2014, and playwright Marcus Gardley was trying to complete the latest draft of his new play A Wonder in My Soul in advance of its April world premiere at Victory Gardens Theater. Gardley was having a hard time, though: our country’s racial heartache was getting to him. […]

Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative When I interviewed artist Theaster Gates for a Reader profile in 2011, the Dante Harper Chicago Public Housing project two blocks from his home was boarded up and deserted. A series of two-story redbrick town houses that spread across two blocks on 70th Street in the Grand Crossing neighborhood, it […]

“No Longer Art,” the Salvage Art Institute When art conservation first entered the jurisdiction of insurance companies, “totaled” works were routinely destroyed. Adjusters haven’t grown less depraved of heart, but at least today they consign wrecked art to storage facilities, usually for 30 years, until a condition known as “acceptable degradation” is reached and the […]