“Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning. Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job […]

  I had to borrow a kid to go see Matilda. I also had to put aside my usual prejudice towards musicals. But no one was forcing Matilda on me. […]

   Michael Patrick Thornton in The Gift Theatre’s Richard III. Photo by Claire Demos. The real Richard III perhaps wasn’t such a bad chap, not the “bottled spider” Shakespeare would have […]

[soliloquy id=”3199″] 1809–Thomasina and Septimus. Present–Valentine, Bernard, Chloe and Hannah. Photos by Michael Brosilow.  Writers Theatre opened its spectacular new theater in Glencoe this week with an appropriately spectacular production […]

I’ve never been quite sure how to characterize CHON‘s music. Is it instrumental metal with jazz and classical tendencies? Is it lounge music played on electric guitars, backed by ferocious […]

When I looked at the gathering again, almost all of the heads were turned toward me. Nearly two hundred pairs of eyes stared at me. The band stopped playing suddenly. […]

The Chicago European Union Film Festival concludes this week, so if you love watching films with subtitles, this is your chance. See some of the best of European films at […]

BATMAN v SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE I’ll admit I had a tough time starting to write this one. It wasn’t any type of writer’s block or uncertainty about my option […]

Upon entering The Mission’s current show, Structural Adjustment, visitors are immersed in the orange and yellow glow from the front window collage, which serves as the most literal translation of […]

Gogol Bordello transformed the Metro Chicago stage Wednesday night into a street performance, as my preview for this concert predicted. Each band member had his or her own bottomless tank of […]

I love seeing how food and beverages are made. Sadly, the M&M Mars facility on Oak Park Avenue is locked up tighter than Willy Wonka’s and the Vienna Beef factory […]

Before we get to this weekend’s awesome events, a note on some changes I’ll be making to the Curated Chicago Weekend feature. As you may or may not have read, […]