Though The House on Mango Street is classified as fiction, it’s also a sideways glimpse into author Sandra Cisneros’s Chicago childhood. Cisneros based much of the book on her experiences growing up on Campbell Street in Humboldt Park. More than three decades after Mango Street was published, we get another look at Cisneros’s life in […]
Tag: Fall Preview 2015
Posted inMusic
Prince protege Lianne La Havas is out for Blood
“We are unstoppable,” Lianne La Havas sings on the first track from her second album, Blood (Warner Bros.). So far she’s done nothing but prove herself right. The UK singer-songwriter and Prince protege has toured through Europe since Blood‘s release at the end of July, and now she’s about to jog through North America. Live, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chicago Humanities Festival asks what it means to be a citizen
“Citizens” had already been chosen as the theme of this year’s Chicago Humanities Fest by the time Jonathan Elmer took over as artistic director last February, but he think’s it’s a good choice. “It’s very, very appropriate for the moment,” he says. “I can’t think of a time in recent memory when the idea of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Saigon Sisters get into fast-casual with Bang Chop Thai Kitchen
Siblings Mary Nguyen Aregoni and Theresa Nguyen, whose family migrated to Thailand after the Vietnam war, got started selling banh mi in the French Market before introducing reimagined Vietnamese food at the West Loop’s Saigon Sisters. At the forthcoming Bang Chop Thai Kitchen they’ll try their hands at fast-casual Thai. The 25-seat BYOB spot within […]
Posted inFilm
The Boston Globe’s pedophile priests investigation gets dramatized in Spotlight
I’m a junkie for newspaper dramas, from Park Row to All the President’s Men to Shattered Glass, and Spotlight promises to be a good or even a great one, with a gifted writer-director and a powerhouse cast. Thomas McCarthy—whose dramas The Station Agent (2003), The Visitor (2007), and Win Win (2011) mark him as one […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Leslie Zemeckis’s Goddess of Love Incarnate tells of how Lili St. Cyr made stripping classy
Back in the 1940s, burlesque was considered a shabby, second-rate, and mildly sleazy form of entertainment. Then Lili St. Cyr took the stage. “Lili,” writes Leslie Zemeckis in her new biography Goddess of Love Incarnate, “revolutionized stripping and redefined what a stripper could be. Lili’s audience held their breaths, mesmerized by her queenly carriage. . […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Art Shay ‘Troublemakers’
The title of Art Shay’s new photo exhibit, “Troublemakers,” was deliberately chosen to play with audience expectations, says Erik Gellman, the Roosevelt University history professor who curated it. Visitors may come in expecting to see images of hooligans. Instead they’ll find photos of scenes from the freedom movements of the 1950s and ’60s as they […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Imperial Lamian promises dishes not found in Chinatown
The Indonesia-based Imperial Group lands in River North later this year with Imperial Lamian, a Chinese restaurant that’ll feature dumplings, dim sum, and hand-pulled noodles in the space once occupied by the erstwhile Centro. The kitchen will host three chefs, one who specializes in stir-frying, one in noodles, and one in dim sum. The company’s […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The first Chicago Architecture Biennial brings the world to the lakefront and environs
Under a canopy of trees in Portugal’s Quinta Da Conceiçao Park, Belgian architects Jan De Vylder, Inge Vinck, and Jo Taillieu spent hours entranced by youngsters hitting tennis balls against the bright coral walls of Fernando Távora’s modernist pavilion. Arrested by how the simple game transformed the strict horizontal planes of pink concrete, they contemplated […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The silent half of Penn & Teller adds some magic to Shakespeare’s Tempest
Commonly interpreted as Shakespeare’s farewell to theater, The Tempest is the tale of a magician performing his final and greatest feat. Prospero plans to use skills acquired over a lifetime to put his wrecked world back together. When that’s accomplished, he promises, “I’ll break my staff, bury it certain fathoms in the earth, and deeper […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Pulitzer winner Margo Jefferson explores the peculiarities of black privilege in Chicago in the memoir Negroland
Technically, Margo Jefferson grew up in the south-side neighborhoods of Park Manor and Hyde Park. But metaphorically she comes from Negroland—her name for a small segment of black America “where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.” Her father was the head of pediatrics at Provident Hospital; her mother graduated from […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Intro hosts Jean-Georges Vongerichten protege Stephen Gillanders
Back in March, when the weather was still cold and dreary, we praised chef C.J. Jacobson for bringing some west-coast sunshine to Intro, the Lettuce Entertain You concept that hosts a new chef—who presents a new menu—every three months or so. Another LA chef is on his way to the restaurant’s kitchen, by way of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
At Confidential Musical Theatre Project, mum’s the word
The experimental production Confidential Musical Theatre Project makes its Chicago debut with, well, no one knows exactly. Avra Fainer and Steve Lavoie cast the top-secret musical, but even the performers won’t meet each other until an hour before the show; everyone involved rehearses on their own time and just prays that everything comes together. “You […]
Posted inArts & Culture
In a time of antigovernment Oath Keepers, Idris Goodwin’s The Raid seems appropriate
Last winter local theater critics Hedy Weiss and Chris Jones got worked up over a play for young people, This Is Modern Art (Based on True Events), arguing in their separate reviews that it romanticizes the illegal act of tagging. That got lots of people worked up over Weiss and Jones—including Kevin Coval, the play’s […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Neil Hamburger brings his notorious anticomedy to Schubas
Neil Hamburger is the Tony Clifton-like character of Gregg Turkington, a bumbling, drunken, pathetic comedian who has covered a lot of ground over the past two decades. He’s a prank phone call expert, a Tim & Eric sideman, and an awkward country singer. But what Hamburger has always been best at is being a horribly […]