Genre-bending Chicago metal quartet Arriver formed in 2006 with a lineup that had plenty of experience with a varied tonal palette: Dan Sullivan and Rob Sullivan contributed to Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co., while Dan McAdam and Joe Kaplan had played in Viza-Noir. The group are known for concept albums with historical subjects; 2012’s […]
Tag: Vol. 52 No. 10
Issue of February 23, 2023
On the cover: ‘This feels like losing a family member’
Photograh by DuWayne Padilla.
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Posted inCity Life
Perfection from the pieces
If you’ve ever dabbled in woodworking, you probably have a sense of just how much scrap material can go to waste. Lumber is sold in predetermined sizes, like the ubiquitous 2×4, so once you have the cuts you need, you’re likely to end up with various odds and ends that are hard to put to […]
Posted inMusic
Drummer Kendrick Scott scales down to a trio on Corridors
Kendrick Scott’s long-running five-piece ensemble, Oracle, is unrelentingly contemporary in its sound, in part thanks to the inclusion of an electric guitar. But arranging music for a smaller contingent of players requires a different tack. On Corridors, Scott—a drummer whose credits include work with vocalist Kurt Elling and trumpeter Terence Blanchard—scales down to a trio […]
Posted inMusic
Bill Callahan tours on an album meant to help us move past a backward reality
Right before COVID-19 hit, Bill Callahan was on a roll. After enduring five years of writer’s block, he’d made two strong albums infused with a newfound positivity that reflected the pleasure he took in family life. His lockdown years weren’t even so bad. In a recent interview with online publication Loud and Quiet, he described […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Superheroes that look like me
The story of Chicago’s own Black Child Book Fair, a traveling event that promotes literacy for Black kids across the country, starts with Chicagoan and author Darryl Harvey releasing his incipient children’s book in 2010, I Can Do Anything. It features a Black child on the cover and is the first in his Sunflower series, […]
Posted inMusic
A multigenerational lineup of blues and soul-blues favorites celebrates Cicero Blake for his 87th birthday
UPDATE as of Fri 2/24/2023, 2 PM: This concert has been canceled. Cicero Blake’s career spans the trajectory of modern soul music from doo-wop to contemporary southern soul-blues. Blake was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1936, though many biographies incorrectly state 1938. After his family relocated to Chicago in the 1950s, he attended Marshall High […]
Posted inMusic
Chicago punk loses a champion
In 1980, Chris Bjorklund frequented a River North bar called Oz, which two years earlier had become one of the first places in Chicago to embrace punk. He visited often enough that he got to know the owner, Dem Hopkins. Bjorklund played in a band called Strike Under, and Hopkins offered to introduce him to […]
Posted inTheater Review
Quixote goes airborne
Circus Quixotic, the winter circus production at The Actors Gymnasium, flips the story of Don Quixote into a modern retelling. Through metaphor and audience asides from the actors, director and adapter duo David and Kerry Catlin condense Miguel de Cervantes’s 1,072-page tome of misadventures into a family-friendly chunk of mayhem featuring the title character and […]
Posted inFilm
Harold Dennis’s diamonds are in his own backyard
Every year, countless local actors move to LA to pursue a career onscreen. But what about the ones who stay? What does it mean to be a working actor in Chicago?
Posted inTheater Review
Warm and fuzzy
Charles Dickens’s schoolmaster Mr. Gradgrind from Hard Times (he who insists, “Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts”) would feel right at home in the grim factory town run by a petulant archduke in Mac Barnett’s 2012 children’s book Extra Yarn. There, young Annabelle and her schoolmates are […]
Posted inTheater Review
Summer and smoke
Nilo Cruz’s 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna in the Tropics is a lit-fuse kind of drama, beginning with a slow but unmistakable simmer that ultimately detonates with scorching, devastating impact. Directed by Laura Alcalá Baker for Remy Bumppo Theatre, this lavishly produced, powerfully cast production shows just how relevant—and compelling—Cruz’s words remain. Anna in the Tropics […]
Posted inTheater Review
Brief encounter
Some believe that those who suspect death is near can often feel it approaching, and in Invictus Theatre’s rendition of Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. senses his end is coming. This fictional and subversive play, directed by Aaron Reese Boseman, imagines the evening after King (Mikha’el Amin) has delivered his “I’ve […]
Posted inTheater Review
Take that, Jane!
Lookingglass Theatre Company’s world premiere of Villette, a modern adaptation (written by Sara Gmitter and directed by Tracy Walsh) of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, explores the travails of a woman determined to stand on her own and not live in a fairy-tale world of romance. Graced with a rock-solid work ethic, Lucy Snowe is unwilling to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
A bright spot in contemporary painting
Contemporary painting is vast terrain. Its broad, shimmering beauty and stylistic scope eludes easy classification. In spite of digital reproduction’s awesome omnipresence and the mobile Internet’s unrestrained reach, a comprehensive view will forever exceed our vision. While we can’t see or speak of linear movements, we can still witness formal affinities and visit thematic encampments. […]