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The Chicago Reader is Chicago's largest free weekly newspaper, nationally recognized as a leader in the alternative press. Since 1971, the Reader has served as Chicago's political conscience, cultural guide and music authority.
Chicago Reader
15h ago
Abscissor, Metanoia With its combination of brooding postmetal, triumphant postrock, and serene piano and saxophone, Abscissor’s ambitious debut full-length feels like a Choose Your Own Adventure book where every option is satisfying. Hannah Frances, Keeper of the Shepherd Chicago singer and guitarist Hannah Frances uses her rich, powerful voice and a palette of avant-folk, rock, […]
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Chicago Reader
2d ago
Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire is an iconic play that lives up to its reputation. Solidly written, packed with vivid characters and terrific dialogue, the play may run nearly three hours long, but it still crackles with life 77 years after it first premiered in 1947. It would be hard to imagine a production—no […]
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Chicago Reader
2d ago
Steppenwolf has long had a way with wildly dysfunctional family dramas. From Anton Chekhov’s Seagull to Sam Shepard’s True West to Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County, the off-Loop institution has shown time and again it can deliver the bloody red meat of multigenerational dramas peopled by characters who are brutalized and broken by the weight […]
The post <i>Purpose</i> adds to Steppenwolf’s collection of domestic-dysfunction classics appeared first on Chicago Reader ..read more
Chicago Reader
2d ago
I can’t remember the last time I left a theater a little teary and a lot inspired, with a carpe diem spring in my step. Remy Bumppo’s production of John Kolvenbach’s one-act rom-com, helmed by artistic director Marti Lyons, is dynamic and delicious, from its easy laughs to a style of linguistic interplay that you […]
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Chicago Reader
2d ago
The early moments of Leah Nanako Winkler’s The Brightest Thing in the World, now in a heartfelt midwest premiere with About Face Theatre under Keira Fromm’s direction, reminded me a bit of Guinevere Turner and Rose Troche’s enchanting made-in-Chicago 1994 lesbian romance film, Go Fish. As in the film, the two women who become lovers […]
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Chicago Reader
2d ago
The sweet scent of kielbasa swojska drifting up from Kurowski Sausage Shop is like a bat signal to Max Glassman. “When the wind blows my way during their smoking times,” he says, “I can smell it perfectly on my second-floor balcony overlooking Saint Hyacinth.” That’s when he whips off his figurative horned rims, throws on […]
The post Pierogi Papi raids the sausage shop for the next Monday Night Foodball appeared first on Chicago Reader ..read more
Chicago Reader
2d ago
On Sunday, March 31, Chicago hip-hop luminaries will gather at the Promontory to throw a benefit show for veteran scene promoter and former rapper Gq tha Teacha. As Gq told Illanoize Radio in January, he’s managing kidney and heart failure and undergoing dialysis. Poet, radio personality, and Promontory box office manager Mario Smith says the […]
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Chicago Reader
2d ago
After Nicki Cherry began to struggle with chronic back pain, she started exploring the meaning of restraint, dependence, and repression and how they’ve contributed to a fragmented body and a lack of control. In her new exhibition at Slow Dance gallery, “I can be a woman for you,” casts of Cherry’s body are attached to […]
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Chicago Reader
2d ago
A brief list of scary phrases written on the walls in crayon throughout Imaginary, PG-13 horror auteur Jeff Wadlow’s newest Blumhouse movie: “We love 2 play”; “a peez ov you”; “Chauncey’s super fun!” The Chauncey in question is technically a teddy bear, in the same sense that Imaginary is technically a movie, but more accurately […]
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Chicago Reader
2d ago
Simon Cellan Jones’s Arthur the King (based on a nonfiction book by Mikael Lindnord) is a standard Hollywood sports drama, with one exception. Halfway through, we learn that the main character is a dog. The challenge/competition in this iteration of the familiar story is an extreme sports Iron Man race over 400 miles through the […]
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