Illinois news

• Bubblegum tragedy

  16-10-2024 22:43 via chicagoreader.com
  
  I can’t say this millennial was aware they were seeing a modern adaptation of a Greek tragedy (Hippolytus), but it shouldn’t have been surprising, given the fates of many of our early 2000s pop music girlies. The Story Theatre’s world premiere of its emerging playwright-in-residence Justine Gelfman’s one-act is a funny, sharp, and ultimately quite […]
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• The not-so-friendly confines

  16-10-2024 22:21 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Subtext Studio Theatre Company’s production of Omar Vicente Fernandez’s Que Te Vaya Bien marks the reunion of two actors—Nelson A. Rodriguez and Adriel Irizarry—who delivered knockout performances as boxers in Visión Latino’s production of Franky D. Gonzalez’s That Must Be the Entrance to Heaven during last year’s Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival. In Que […]
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• Skooby snacks

  16-10-2024 22:12 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Two television universes have unexpectedly collided on Chopin Theatre’s mainstage with The Golden Girls Meet the Skooby Don’t Gang: The Mystery of the Haunted Bush—a funny and raunchy new installment in Hell in a Handbag’s popular Golden Girls parody franchise.  The Golden Girls Meet the Skooby Don’t Gang: The Mystery of the Haunted BushThrough 11/3: […]
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• Revisionist religion

  16-10-2024 21:49 via chicagoreader.com
  
  David Javerbaum’s comic one-act, about God and his mysterious ways, is a delightfully contradictory show, at once a send-up of shallow TV values, a parody of bad old-old-time religion (now, sadly, making a comeback) and a witty, intelligent exegesis of the Bible and the crazy, unpredictable, but oddly beguiling ways of the Old Testament deity. […]
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• Let Fat Jesus make you a plate when Fat Plate Fridays takes over the next Monday Night Foodball

  16-10-2024 21:42 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Fat Jesus’s grandma is recovering from knee surgery, so she won’t be making greens next week. Ma Ma, aka Rosemary Holloway, usually makes the greens for Von Harris’s pop-ups, but as she’s out of commission, he’s making them himself. But don’t worry. He won’t be using liquid smoke in his collards this October 21 when […]
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• A psychological Malört shot

  16-10-2024 20:56 via chicagoreader.com
  
  It’s Rough House Theater’s sixth year of making immersive haunted houses and they’ve really nailed the discerning horror lover’s ideal haunted zone with House of the Exquisite Corpse IV, playing for the entire month at Steppenwolf’s Garage space. “We’re trying to make work that is both ensemble-based but also that features artists at the same […]
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• A note on our Occult Issue

  16-10-2024 20:40 via chicagoreader.com
  
  It’s serendipitous that our Occult Issue is out on the same day as the full moon. As you know, we always publish the new issue on Thursdays so we didn’t plan it that way. Whether through magic or pure luck, you’re likely reading this during one of the most energetically charged times of the month.  […]
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• Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered

  16-10-2024 20:31 via chicagoreader.com
  
  For better or worse, a well-crafted work of historical fiction tends to overshadow the real people and events that inspired it. English monarchs such as Richard III and Henry V are nearly inseparable from their Shakespearean incarnations. The first U.S. treasury secretary transforms from the subject of a doorstop biography into a rapping revolutionary in […]
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• Jinx Dawson speaks on the legacy of Coven

  16-10-2024 20:00 via chicagoreader.com
  
  The occult is so baked into hard rock and heavy metal that you can forget that the combination was once new, misunderstood, and even feared. Black Sabbath and Mercyful Fate are often credited with mainstreaming occultism in rock, but its roots go back further—to a Chicago band called Coven. Teenage singer Jinx Dawson founded the […]
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• The language of magic

  16-10-2024 19:57 via chicagoreader.com
  
  I’ve seen too many up-close magicians to count since the onset of Chicago’s magic renaissance. But I’ve never seen any as close as I was for the magicians of the seventh Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival at the long-running Magic Parlour (now hosted by the Goodman Theatre). The invited guests of usual Magic Parlour […]
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• Mixtape memories

  16-10-2024 19:16 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Nostalgia for the mixtape—its potential for randomness and its personal touch—is the structuring factor in Ruth on the Rocks, written and performed by Ruth Guerra, directed by Ricardo Gamboa, and presented by Concrete Content as part of the seventh Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, staged in the actual storefront where Guerra’s father once repaired […]
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• Miquiztli and Sabedoria

  16-10-2024 18:59 via chicagoreader.com
  
  By Juan Gerardo Chavez
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• Scrapyard dead

  16-10-2024 18:34 via chicagoreader.com
  
  “That it?” I ask, stepping through the metal scrapyard on Chicago’s east side. An employee in a gray hoodie nods.  It’s a hot, bright October day, the sun beating down on spandex-clad cyclists as they whip past industrial sites north to the Lakefront Trail or south to the rebuilt Calumet Fisheries. Gulls swoop through crystal […]
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• Theatrical witch hunts

  16-10-2024 18:19 via chicagoreader.com
  
  In the prologue to 1994’s Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts, author Anne Llewellyn Barstow observes, “The longer I have worked on these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century events, the more I have found them relevant to problems of violence and discrimination against women today.” Witchcraft and witches have appeared onstage for centuries, from […]
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• Chicago Reader Volume 54, Number 3

  16-10-2024 18:07 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Chicago Reader Volume 54, No. 3. October 17, 2024
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• Dead Chicago

  16-10-2024 17:10 via chicagoreader.com
  
  There’s some famously scary stuff at Graceland Cemetery, most notably Lorado Taft’s hulking bronze statue, Eternal Silence. It’s been spooking cemetery visitors since it was erected there in 1909, in part because of its grim reaper shrouding and in part because word got around that if you looked directly into its eyes (hard to do […]
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• Mazdaznan’s enlightened grifter

  16-10-2024 01:35 via chicagoreader.com
  
  The first time Otoman Zar-Adusht Hanish caught significant press attention was in 1904, when Emma Reusse—or Eloise, as she was sometimes called—was seen running from his temple shrieking and pulling out her hair. She was committed to an Elgin sanitarium after the guru and self-described doctor had advised her to juice fast for 40 days […]
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• William Elliott Whitmore confronts death by making the most of life on Silently, the Mind Breaks

  16-10-2024 00:08 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Iowa singer-songwriter William Elliott Whitmore self-released two albums in the late 90s and early 00s, but he really burst onto the scene with his 2003 Southern Records debut, Hymns for the Hopeless. Though he was a young man then, his voice sounded ancient and timeless, which made this fierce, beautifully grim album feel like he […]
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• Vince Staples slings eidetic lyricism and dry humor on his Black in America tour

  16-10-2024 00:08 via chicagoreader.com
  
  When I get disillusioned with the state of hip-hop, it often helps to remind myself that we still have artists like Vince Staples. Then I remember that Staples and I share a birthday. The zodiac suggests that Cancers born in July, at our worst, can be stubborn and moody—but at our best, we can be […]
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• The Lipschitz play swooning postpunk with hardcore power

  16-10-2024 00:08 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Guitarist-singer Daniel Brady and drummer-singer Rachael Boswell formed postpunk duo the Lipschitz in Savannah, Georgia, but right from the start you could hear an affinity for midwestern rock ’n’ roll in their jittery, stripped-down sound—it’s no wonder they moved to Chicago in 2017. The Lipschitz’s 2015 debut EP, Pillow Face, already had the mosquito-buzzing energy […]
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• Emily How makes alternative rock feel new again

  16-10-2024 00:08 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Like many musicians of her generation, twentysomething Peoria singer and guitarist Emily How (aka Emily Hough) grew up enamored with Taylor Swift—her first performances were restaurant cover sets of Swift’s songs. These days, How isn’t quite so squeaky-clean or hyperfocused. She and her bandmates (bassist Brenton Engel, drummer Matt Filarski, and guitarist Jacob Hill) combine […]
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• Dawn Richard reinvents herself again on a collaborative record with multi-instrumentalist Spencer Zahn

  16-10-2024 00:08 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Lots of performers say they’re pursuing their own path in defiance of the crowd, but Dawn Richard makes a better claim than most. The singer and songwriter came into the spotlight in 2004, when she auditioned for Sean Combs (then known as P. Diddy) on the MTV reality show Making the Band 3, landing a […]
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• Chicago hip-hop label Closed Sessions looks to the future on its 15th anniversary 

  16-10-2024 00:08 via chicagoreader.com
  
  I’m not surprised that Closed Sessions landed a west-coast star as big as Cypress Hill’s DJ Muggs to headline its 15th-anniversary party. The Chicago label has done impressive work not only flying the flag for midwestern hip-hop artists but also establishing their work as part of a larger continuum, connecting MCs and producers throughout the […]
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