I’ve always had a certain fascination with Dwarf Fortress. I haven’t played it before now, but I’d always stumble across stories of dwarven madness, or those that dug too deep […]

The Chicago Jazz Orchestra gave this child of the sixties a wonderful chance to reminisce with A Musical Tribute to A Charlie Brown Christmas. They brought some nostalgia to the […]

My interest in classical music was weaned on Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker ballet. So I leapt at the opportunity to do a Nutcracker relay last Saturday: the matinee opening […]

Although some may not have considered the arts an essential function during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the city of New York, the theater industry employs nearly 100,000 artists and craftspeople. […]

Singer and songwriter Beabadoobee, the musical pseudonym of Beatrice Kristi Laus, brought her imaginative universe of Beatopia to the Riviera Theatre this past Tuesday evening. After finding viral success with […]

Tabletop party games are everywhere these days. A simple trip to Target will turn up dozens and dozens of them. And many of them follow a familiar formula, at least […]

William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is a mistaken-identity rom-com designed as a frolic to entertain at the end of the holiday season (there is nothing about Christmas in this play itself). […]

I heard that there was some Grinch behavior spreading around Chicago. Even I have mandated that my office shalt not play that one station that starts with the fa-la-la business […]

The Buttcracker (playing at the Greenhouse Theater Center through December 31) is a Nutcracker Burlesque, a Yule pantomime with elements of comedy, magic and circus that blends all the qualities […]

Filmmaker Noah Baumbach has made a career out of films that explore the absurdity of humanity, the seemingly arbitrary connections we forge and the ways we exhaust ourselves trying to […]

After truly enjoying his previous few films (The Queen of Spain, The Artist and the Model, and the Oscar-nominated animated feature Chico & Rita), director Fernando Trueba’s latest, Memories of […]

Set about 100 years apart, there are two films out right now built around real-life photographs of brutalized Black bodies that resulted in public outrage and instigated change in American […]