Larry Yando has been a prominent presence on stages in Chicago and beyond for many years, including as Ebenezer Scrooge in the Goodman’s annual production of A Christmas Carol (this year marks his 15th outing). He plays Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express at Drury Lane Theatre through October 23. (Read […]
Tag: Vol. 51 No. 25
Issue of September 15, 2022
Fall Theater & Arts Preview
On the cover: Illustration by Frank Okay. For more of Okay’s work, go to frankokay.com.
Find a print copy of the Reader.
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Posted inTheater Review
Mystery train
It is 2022 still, so . . . a nostalgic romp through a bygone era with a whodunit twist? Bring it! Ken Ludwig transformed Agatha Christie’s novel into a riveting stage text. This timeless mystery is an examination of the limits of a justice system, which may account for its eternal appeal. I will say […]
Posted inTheater Review
Monster mash-up
The Chicago Children’s Theatre’s 18th season kicks off with Leonardo! A Wonderful Show About a Terrible Monster, an innovative production from the Emmy Award-winning multimedia performance collective, Manual Cinema. Leonardo! A Wonderful Show About a Terrible Monster Through 10/16: Sat-Sun 9:30 and 11:30 AM, Chicago Children’s Theatre, 100 S. Racine, 312-374-8835, chicagochildrenstheatre.org, $25-$36 Based on […]
Posted inMusic
Amanda Flores, aka DJ Flores Negras, founder of Mictlan Productions
Amanda Flores is a Chicago musician, DJ, event promoter, and licensed massage therapist. While fronting metal band Rosaries in 2017, she launched Flores Negras Productions to help create new inclusive spaces in the local music community. Soon after, she began DJing, also under the name Flores Negras. During the pandemic, she’s grown a following for […]
Posted inTheater Review
Trash talk
Lindsay Joelle’s The Garbologists, now in a local premiere at Northlight under Cody Estle’s direction, is a slice-of-life two-hander about an odd-couple pair of New York sanitation workers. Marlowe (Tiffany Renee Johnson) is a Black woman with multiple degrees in art history from Columbia. Danny (Luigi Sottile) is a brash motormouth white man from Staten […]
Posted inTheater Review
Flawlessly in tune
Originally conceived in the mid-70s as a vehicle for Nell Carter but opening on Broadway in 1981 with Jennifer Holliday in the role that might have been Carter’s (if Carter’s Hollywood career had not blown up), Tom Eyen and Henry Krieger’s musical about the rise of an African American girl group the Dreams (modeled on […]
Posted inTheater Review
Elderberry wine in new bottles
Long before the term “meta” entered common parlance there was Arsenic and Old Lace, a 1939 play by Joseph Kesselring about how plays are ridiculous. It’s also a play about the difference between reality and appearance, embodied by the saintly Brewster sisters and their killer elderberry wine. Arsenic and Old Lace Through 10/2: Wed-Fri 7:30 […]
Posted inMusic
Annie Fish simulates her dream of 90s alt-rock stardom
On Friday, September 16, Chicago singer, songwriter, and cartoonist Annie Fish will drop Weird Like Me, an album so steeped in classic alt-rock you’ll half believe Fish recorded it with Flood in 1993. Weird Like Me is a concept record about Fish’s childhood rock dreams, which she says she abandoned after seeing how the “powers […]
Posted inTheater Review
First Lady fantasia
Right before the pandemic shutdown in 2020, TimeLine Theatre presented James Ijames’s sorrowful and powerful Kill Move Paradise, in which a group of Black men murdered by the police gather in a purgatorial afterlife, where a fax machine spits out an ever-growing list of more Black people killed by the state. At the same time […]
Posted inOn Culture
The U.S. and the Holocaust
Starting Sunday, for three consecutive nights, WTTW will air a new six-hour Ken Burns documentary series, The U.S. and the Holocaust. Burns and his filmmaking partners, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, based the series on a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibit curated by Chicago-area native and current Newberry Library president, Daniel Greene. From 2014 […]
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Revamp your career and plan your future at Building Wealth Today for Tomorrow Financial Empowerment Weekend
The City of Chicago Treasurer’s Office and BMO Harris Bank are proud to present the Building Wealth Today for Tomorrow Financial Empowerment Weekend. This two-day event is open to all Chicagoland residents, entrepreneurs, and small business owners and is free to attend. “We are so excited to partner with the Treasurer and her office to […]
Posted inMusic
Pioneering electronic producer Man Parrish reworks the music of his departed friend Klaus Nomi
You might expect an album of Klaus Nomi material to sound like Klaus Nomi, but Man Parrish’s Dear Klaus Nomi isn’t that. Instead, the New York producer has added highly technical musical accompaniments to archival recordings of the cult figure’s songs to give them fresh sounds and feelings. The result is a love letter from […]
Posted inMusic
Reunited dance group Ten City help make the Chicago House Music Festival a don’t-miss event
Ten City’s fifth album, 2021’s Judgement (Ultra), was a long time in the making—and not just because the crucial Chicago house group’s previous album, That Was Then, This Is Now, came out 27 years earlier. The origins of Judgement arguably go even further back than 1986, when Ten City producer Marshall Jefferson issued the foundational […]
Posted inMusic
Plantasia puts down roots at the Garfield Park Conservatory for its third installment
Bridging the ultrasynthetic and hyperorganic, Mort Garson’s album Mother Earth’s Plantasia is a Moog-powered salve “for plants . . . and the people who love them,” as the cover art notes. Since its 1976 release, Plantasia has become cultural canon, attracting reissues of varying legitimacy and providing grist for several exhaustive cultural critiques. After New […]
Posted inMusic
Alkaline Trio play an intimate Metro gig before their Riot Fest set
The past decade has been an odd one for Alkaline Trio. Following the release of the Chicago punk band’s eighth studio album, 2013’s My Shame Is True, all three members took time off to focus on solo material and side projects. But when vocalist and guitarist Matt Skiba joined Blink-182 in 2015, the band he’d […]