Have you ever wanted to witness a Muppet make the beast with two backs? Do a deep dive into getting “felt up”? Learn the history of the monster race? Then Avenue Q is your ticket. The Tony Award-winning, occasionally bawdy, musical comedy…
Brave drag queens and cowardly Russian oligarchs dominate the news these days. These fabulous queens are often incorrectly labeled as subversive while the Slavic autocrats aren’t receiving enough comeuppance for their crimes against humanity. For almost 50 years, Les Ballets Trockadero…
Barbershops and beauty salons are important cultural hubs for communities of color. “In my day, a barber was more than just somebody who sit around in a FUBU shirt with his drawers hanging all out. A barber was a counselor,…
What do theater artists do when creative offerings morph post-COVID? What do theatrical spaces become in this life-after-coronavirus reset? Creators gonna create, here with a new experience called Whim Chicago, an immersive “art on top of art” experience, kinda like a…
The Chicago Humanities Festival presented a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s hour-long masterpiece The Kid, at the Music Box Theater on November 5, with whimsical, period intertitles (handwritten, but similar to Kumlien or Goldenbook typefaces) and soulful, live musical accompaniment by…
Oak Forest native to the “political left of Gandhi,” essayist and award-winning author George Saunders returned to Chicagoland to talk about writing with Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me host Peter Sagal. “The Art of the Short Story” hour-long discussion was held in front of a full,…
On July 27, 1919, 17-year-old Eugene Williams went swimming near Chicago’s 29th Street beach. The raft he and his other Black friends had constructed drifted into a whites-only swimming area, where he was stoned and drowned by white beachgoers. The murder…
Last spring, the Chicago Humanities Festival offered a bus tour of Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, and this September, offered a tour of the nearby South Shore neighborhood. South Shore is a mostly African American community these days, replete with colorful community culture murals,…
National Hispanic American Heritage Month (September 15-October 15) started off strong with the Chicago Humanities Fest’s Pilsen Mural Tour, following last spring’s other insightful, invigorating neighborhood tours. Local muralist Sam Kirk walked a lively group of enthusiasts for a stroll around Pilsen during one…
Jill Lepore wrote about America’s first political spin doctors ten years ago in The New Yorker. She called the California political consulting team of Leone Baxter and Clem Whittaker “The Lie Factory.” TimeLine Theatre Company member Will Allan calls his play…
Chicago’s Physical Theater Festival returns for the ninth year with in-person, indoor and outdoor performances, plus four workshops by festival artists, July 16-24, following the 2020 virtual festival. The week features performances by Windy City artists, along with those from the United Kingdom…
“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of…
On paper, the Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved Americans on January 1, 1863, during the middle of the Civil War. But not all chattel slaves were immediately manumitted. Union General Gordon Granger’s regiment went to Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865,…
Politics are exhausting, but inevitable and important. People are exhausted, but continue to seek normalcy via social interactions. The Second City’s 110th mainstage show’s bifurcated title reflects those two realities: Do The Right Thing, But No Worries If Not. The heightened…
The Chicago Humanities Festival sponsored a bus tour of Chicago’s South Side, the “Black Belt,” for the spring Public-themed series. Hosted by “TikTok historian” Shermann “Dilla” Thomas, the two-hour tour began and ended at the DuSable Museum of African American History, and…
The Music Box Theatre hosted music royalty as part of the spring Chicago Humanities Festival: Sonic Youth’s frontwoman Kim Gordon, her co-author, music journalist Sinead Gleeson, along with feminist electronica pioneer Laurie Anderson, held an hour-long conversation in front of an appreciative…
The Chicago Humanities Festival has been offering in-person programs under the spring theme of “Public.” Two programs on May 7 at the UIC Dorin Center featured law professor Anita Hill talking about her new book Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End…
In the midst of war and plague, a good dose of literate snark is required. Noted curmudgeon and raconteur Fran Lebowitz visited the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago, one of only two places she considers a city (watch her take on…
Life’s been a circus over the last two years, so we might as well lean into it. Welcome to the Chicago Circus & Performing Arts Festival, the Windy City’s newest multidisciplinary fest, running April 21-24 at the Den Theatre at 1331…
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