Sean Graney directs a revival of the most commercially successful play ever. Since Agatha Christie’s comic whodunit The Mousetrap premiered in 1952 in London, it has never stopped running. So what can a new production add? For the very few theatergoers (like me) who have never seen the play before: A group of guests arrive at a newly opened inn while a murderer is loose in the countryside. A snowstorm leaves them isolated and one of them may be the murderer....

Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beeholder In a postapocalyptic world, nothing will grow except honey, and the best and brightest are trained to become beekeepers. That’s the premise of Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beeholder at the Annoyance Theatre & Bar. The nemesis in this screwy tale is a giant mutant hornet that wants to kill scientists offstage with its big stinger. If this sounds hokey, that’s because it is....

Rosalind Ramsey-Goldman, MD, DrPH, a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project, is the Solovy Arthritis Research Professor of Medicine (Rheumatology) at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. What does weathering look like? But first, we must gain trust.

QYesterday I found my five-year-old son putting things up his butt in the bath. This isn’t the first time—and it’s not just a “Hey! There’s a hole here! Let’s put things in there!” kind of thing. The little dude was rocking quite the stiffy while he did it. I’m well aware of how sexual kids can be (I freaking was!), although I wasn’t quite expecting to be catching him exploring anal at this young age....

There are plenty of shows, films, and concerts happening this weekend. Here’s some of what we recommend. Sun 7/1: The Train of Salt and Sugar. “An impressive product of Mozambique’s emerging film industry, this drama from writer-director Licínio Azevedo explores the fraught relationship between civilians and the military during the civil war that divided Mozambique from the late 1970s to the early ’90s,” writes the Reader’s Leah Pickett. NR. 88 minutes....

When we last checked in with Alpana Singh, shortly after the 2012 opening of her first restaurant, the Boarding House, she’d built a wonderful space with an inclusive and populist wine list but not much of a menu to match. At the time the former Check, Please! host and master sommelier vowed to do better—and she did. The Boarding House’s current chef, Tanya Baker, is in contention for a James Beard Award for Rising Star Chef of the Year....

Santina Croniser An actual sushi roll at Shiawase Shiawase means “happiness” in Japanese, according to the Lakeview restaurant’s website. The fact that the place is BYO and I could get a table without a reservation at around 7 on a Saturday made me happy. The food, though, which ranged from excellent to baffling, produced varying levels of happiness. And I still don’t know how to feel about the sushi roll that was arranged around a battery-operated plastic ice cube flashing red, blue, and green lights (the shredded radish mounded on top of it completed the look)....

More proof that the zeitgeist has shifted: at an earlier historical moment than the one we’re living through now, Stephen Fedo and Tim Rhoze’s new based-on-fact play, A Home on the Lake, might’ve been presented as the story of a brave and canny businessman—a sort of African-American George Bailey—who makes huge sacrifices and absorbs terrible insults to help an expanding black population buy homes in Evanston during the 1920s. But that was an earlier historical moment....

My brother Keegan shrugged when I asked if he’s a Trump supporter. I began interviewing my brother about politics during the Thanksgiving weekend, for one, because I was interested in deflating the myth that having a civil conversation with relatives who supported a different presidential candidate than you was an impossibility, a risky feat akin to dismantling a bomb. “We are all afraid—of trends beyond our control, of neighbors and loved ones who suddenly seem grotesquely alien,” opined a Slate columnist in a post called “The Post-Trump Thanksgiving....

As soon as I walked through the door, Saint Lou’s Assembly felt familiar. I’d never been to a meat-and-three cafeteria, a once-beloved, now mostly extinct institution that offers a choice of entree and three sides for one low price. But there was something about the vinyl booths, Formica tables, and wood paneling, not to mention the candy counter and the bowling trophies, that made me feel like I’d seen them before....

Ever since Frankie Knuckles died in 2014, Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) has ramped up efforts to commemorate the sound and culture that the famous house DJ and producer helped birth. Over Memorial Day weekend in 2016, DCASE threw a six-hour “Chicago House Party” at Pritzker Pavilion, and its success inspired the department to develop the concept into a more robust event that includes a conference. In 2018, it finally became a full-fledged festival, with four stages spread throughout Millennium Park and a small army of record dealers selling dance 12-inches right by Cloud Gate....

The very cool, really dope, first-ever Obama Foundation Summit, held at the glassy new McCormick Place Marriott earlier this week, made one thing clear: the foundation has picked a worthy mission for itself. The summit drew 19,500 applications, and 450 young people from 60 countries were selected to attend. A global audience watched online at Obama.org, where some of the proceedings can still be viewed. So, although speakers like Glass House author Brian Alexander and public policy expert Heather McGhee pointed to root issues with the financial system (“What is capitalism for?...

Of all the producers who emerged during vaporwave’s early years, few captured my interest like Yyu. Bicoastal label Beer on the Rug, which doesn’t focus on vaporwave but enjoys the distinction of having released some of the genre’s touchstones, put out Yyu’s TimeTimeTime&Time as vaporwave’s bubble grew in 2012. On that album Yyu (the production alias of a nonbinary artist who goes by “B” and uses they/them pronouns) eschews the retro kitsch common to most Bandcamp tracks filed under “vaporwave,” but the loops of stumbling samples and textured blurs of melody nonetheless fit into the emerging style’s vibe....

“I’m a good Irish girl who has meat and two veg for most meals,” says Sarah Jordan, the chef at Johnny’s Grill. Vital wheat gluten, a staple for vegetarians and the main component in seitan—often used as a meat substitute—wasn’t exactly in her wheelhouse. But when Christine Cikowski and Joshua Kulp of Honey Butter Fried Chicken challenged her to create a dish with the protein found in wheat (also called “wheat meat” or just “gluten”), Jordan, who’d never worked with the ingredient before, rose to the occasion....

Warning: This review contains spoilers. From there the film presents a dramatic prologue, set in 1986, in which the heroine, Adelaide (played effectively by newcomer Madison Curry), gets separated from her parents at a beachfront carnival in Santa Cruz, California. Adelaide wanders near the ocean, then comes upon a fun house. Inside, she explores the hall of mirrors and encounters another little girl who looks exactly like herself. (Peele creates a nice surprise by making the stranger appear to be a reflection at first; some people in the audience when I saw the film jumped when the stranger turned around....

Paul Krugman warns against “false equivalence” in the coverage of the presidential race between Trump and Clinton. I agree—with a stipulation. False equivalence is something the media should avoid yet pay close attention to: it could be Donald Trump’s ticket to the White House. “Trump could commit a gaffe so outrageous that many of his followers would abandon him and the Republican Party would be forced to find a way to deny him its nomination....

Great DJs keep their ears open to the world, and Duane Powell knows how to listen. He’s been plugged into local music since 1983, when he went to his first party at Mendel High School, a famed incubator for the city’s house scene. Within a couple years, he’d landed a street-promotions gig for house DJ Lil Louis, and in 1990 he worked for the Reactor, a short-lived nightclub where techno luminary DJ Rush and house producer Ron Trent helped kick off a new era in local dance music....