Looking for something fun to do around town this weekend and beyond? Read on, and stay safe! FRI 5/6 At 7 PM tonight, the Block Museum (40 Arts Circle, on Northwestern University’s Evanston campus) hosts Looking at Listening, an evening of audiovisual experiments by and about women in film and sound. The program includes four […]
Tag: Vol. 51 No. 15
Issue of April 28, 2022
The Chicago Reader will be fully nonprofit
by Tracy Baim and Karen Hawkins
Find a print copy of the Reader.
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Posted inColumns & Opinion
My wife wakes up at 3 AM to masturbate
Quickies on topping, whipped cream, and chastity cages
Posted inArts & Culture
Julie Doucet is back
In 2018, the Reader ran a cover story: “Julie Doucet is done making comics.” The underground artist famously abandoned the scene in 2006, leaving fans of her cult-classic series Dirty Plotte and graphic novels like My New York Diary bereft. Through the years, her autobiographical comics became renowned in the canon. She explored other art […]
Posted inCity Life
Come what May
Time continues its mind-boggling push through dimensions as we find ourselves entering the fifth month of 2022, and there’s no shortage of fun things to do on the horizon. FRI 4/29 House Theatre of Chicago’s artistic director Lanise Antoine Shelley’s latest production honors her Haitian heritage, and the story of Henri Christophe, a leader of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The big world of Brandon Breaux
Yes, Chance the Rapper did give a big push to artist Brandon Breaux’s career when Breaux designed the covers for three of the singer’s mixtapes: 10 Day, Acid Rap, and Coloring Book. Breaux also recently landed two high-profile commissions—the February 2022 Ebony cover honoring editor André Leon Talley, and the cover of Carry On: Reflections […]
Posted inTheater Review
Space and race on the Chicago Metra
Tina Fakhrid-Deen’s latest play, Pulled Punches, gives audiences a close-up of a developing relationship between two characters, Isis (Melanie Victoria) and Charles (Brad Harbaugh), over the course of their 90-minute Metra ride. As Isis, a Black woman, eagerly looks forward to returning home to watch Scandal, Charles, a white adjunct African American studies professor from […]
Posted inTheater Review
Check yourself
Every once in a while you encounter a show that makes you laugh so much it hurts. But rarely do you get a show that, sometimes seconds later, causes painful silence in the crowd. The fact that the late Joel Drake Johnson’s Rasheeda Speaking first premiered in 2014 (at Rivendell Theatre Ensemble) is an all-too-pointed […]
Posted inTheater Review
Some favorite things
Banish all thoughts of Julie Andrews and the classic film The Sound of Music and take in the stage version at Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire. From top to bottom, from eldest to first-grader Reese Bella, the voices are stunning. Whether standards such as “My Favorite Things” or the lesser-known “How Can Love Survive,” the songs […]
Posted inTheater Review
Special needs
Kristine Thatcher’s drama about a couple adopting (or not adopting, as it turns out) a child born with profound disabilities kickstarted Thatcher’s profile as a playwright in its 1996 Victory Gardens premiere. It’s back at City Lit, once again under Terry McCabe’s direction. And while some parts don’t hold up well, the production builds to […]
Posted inTheater Review
A cluttered Passage
Though it has some of Lifeline’s patented how-do-they-do-that effects, like a completely persuasive storm at sea achieved with nothing but video, some noise, and actors purporting to be blown around, Middle Passage is too cluttered to be satisfying. Rutherford Calhoun’s misadventures on the high seas include a captain mad enough to compete with Ahab, participation […]
Posted inTheater Review
Evergreen grief
When my mother was nearing the end of her battle with stage four cancer, she opened Google on the family computer one day, keyed in “assisted suicide,” and hit search. Scared, selfish, and in my early 20s, I pretended to have never stumbled across the phrase in the browser history and tried to keep it […]
Posted inMusic
Indie-pop goofballs Baby Teeth ratchet up their reunion with another single
Gossip Wolf doesn’t like to speculate about which band breakups will stick (it’s no fun to be wrong), but when local indie-pop goofballs Baby Teeth announced their final show in 2012, it seemed unlikely that Chicago had heard the last from them. In the years that followed, singer-songwriter Abraham Levitan, front man of the trio, […]
Posted inTheater Review
Birthday dreams
The world premiere of Carmela Full of Wishes at the Chicago Children’s Theatre offers young audiences a vibrant story of hope, family, and community. Directed by Michelle Lopez-Rios and adapted by Alvaro Saar Rios from the children’s book by author Matt de la Peña and illustrator Christian Robinson, the play tells the story of Carmela […]
Posted inTheater Review
Red windmills of your mind
Full disclosure: I don’t think I’m the target audience for Moulin Rouge, inasmuch as the 2001 film on which it’s based mostly left me feeling like I had a case of the bends, what with all the swooping and zooming camera action. But if you’re a fan, then you’ll probably want to see the current […]