Massachusetts-based sound artist and instrument maker Victoria Shen, who performs as Evicshen, makes music that rattles your brain. Her debut LP, Hair Birth (American Dreams), is a master class in explosive cacophony driven by blaring modular synthesizers. This isn’t just unregulated noise: Shen puts thought into her songcraft, and it’s immediately apparent right from the opening track, “Current Affair,” which begins innocuously with a bit of rumbling and a tiny beep before ramping up into an unrepentant yet intricately textured roar....

Hear from some pretty accomplished women (including one from the 1800s) at this week’s events. Here’s some of what we recommend: Wed 2/28: The Moth is the famous outlet where storytellers present personal tales that are funny, heartbreaking, or both. Competitors battle it out during The Chicago Moth GrandSlam XVII at The Athenaeum Theatre (2936 N. Southport) for the title of “GrandSlam champion.” 8-10 PM, $27

Eminently engaging and candid, Too Heavy for Your Pocket, now at TimeLine and directed by Ron OJ Parson, is an intimate look at two working-class African American couples living on the fringes of the civil rights movement in Tennessee. Full of joy and humor, singing and crying, this multifaceted story opens in 1961 as Sally Mae (Jennifer Latimore) is about to graduate from college. Her husband, Tony (Cage Sebastian Pierre), and best friends Bowzie (Jalen Gilbert) and Evelyn (Ayanna Bria Bakari) have come to share the celebration....

Correction: The entry for the Magic Parlour has been emended to correctly reflect the current running time, which is 90 minutes. Drinks (wine, beer, and soda) are included in the price of admission. CHICAGO MAGIC LOUNGE The Chicago Magic Lounge takes inspiration from the historic bars specializing in close-up or tableside magic that prospered alongside the city’s trick shops in the 1940s. Magicians work the crowd from the floor, moving from table to table to perform their tricks as opposed to sweating alone beneath a spotlight onstage....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, August 24, 2016. Data analysis: Crime is on the rise in Lakeview, but it’s not as high as ten years ago Crime is on the rise in Lakeview, but it’s still not as dangerous as it was ten years ago, according to Chicago Police Department data. The neighborhood saw a 30 percent drop in robberies in 2015 compared to 2005 and a 60 percent drop in burglaries, but crime has surged in 2016....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, March 11, 2016. Have a great weekend! Minnesota Vikings ask to rename Minneapolis’s Chicago Avenue The Minnesota Vikings are building a new $1.1 billion stadium in downtown Minneapolis, but there’s a problem: the street next to the state-of-the-art stadium is Chicago Avenue, which the football team strongly objects to because of the rival Chicago Bears. They’ve even asked the city’s planning commission to rename the part of Chicago Avenue previously known as Kirby Puckett Place “Vikings Way” [Minneapolis Star-Tribune]

Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times Chuy Garcia pictured not too far behind Rahm Emanuel. Next month Chicago chooses a mayor who will be either a Latino former right-hand man of Chicago’s first black mayor or a Jewish former right-hand man of America’s first black president. Where’s the Irish candidate from Bridgeport, the Slav with headquarters on Archer Avenue or Milwaukee? Nowhere to be found. Ask the comrades of old who they’re voting for this time around and, in the best tradition of internecine combat, you’re met with not only disagreement but exasperated anger....

Amid Chicago’s vast pool of talent are a handful of jazz-related percussionists subject to some combination of local renown and international attention. They include Hamid Drake and Avreeayl Ra—each an integral part of the city’s most adventurous wing of astral-reaching jazz—as well as drummer Kahil El’Zabar, who’s been performing and recording since the early 70s and has counted saxophonist David Murray and violinist Billy Bang as collaborators. With his Ethnic Heritage Ensemble (just one of his enduring troupes), El’Zabar has been able to take on various sonic personas over the years....

Setting Romeo and Juliet in a contemporary urban setting inevitably draws comparisons to West Side Story, even though Barbara Gaines’s current staging for Chicago Shakes (the first time she’s ever directed the play) resists that interpretation by casting the warring Montague and Capulet families across racial and ethnic lines. Mr. Capulet (James Newcomb) is a soused WASP, while Mrs. Capulet (Lia D. Mortensen) is in MILF mode, hooking up with Nate Burger’s Mercutio at the party where their Black daughter first sees the Latinx Romeo....

Months after droves of Moody Bible Institute students, parents, and alumni accused the religious college of grossly mishandling sexual violence claims, a group of survivors say the school’s administration has ignored their calls for change and shut them out of a third-party investigation. In an October 2020 petition on Change.org that’s garnered thousands of signatures, a group calling themselves MBI Survivors spoke out against what they and their supporters say is a culture of fear, misogyny, and unchecked sexual abuse at the school—with a majority of the accusations specifically naming Tim Arens, a now former vice president and dean of student life, and Rachel Puente, former Title IX coordinator, for sweeping assault claims under the rug....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Below had played in high school bands and in army ensembles, and he was trained in jazz. He struggled at first to adapt to blues rhythms, but he soon developed a swinging, sophisticated style that helped define the sound of urban blues and popularize the now ubiquitous shuffle beat....

AP photo / file Passengers wait for help after the Eastland capsized in the Chicago River on July 24, 1915. More than 800 others didn’t make it out alive. It happened in plain view—at 7:30 AM in the middle of a city—but the SS Eastland disaster has long been unfathomable. How did a 260-foot-long steamship simply tip over while docked in the Chicago River? I recently sat down with McCarthy, a former reporter and editor in Chicago for the Wall Street Journal, to talk about his fascinating new book, Ashes Under Water: The SS Eastland and the Shipwreck That Shook America (Lyons Press)....

The Grossman Ensemble could be thought of as a new-music incubator. The resident ensemble of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition (CCCC) at the University of Chicago, the 13-piece group—which comprises some of the best contemporary players in the city—rehearses extensively with composers over the course of several weeks. Some of their commissions emerge collaboratively from a nearly blank page, with composers drawing on the group’s input to flesh out their ideas....

As Chapo Trap House co-host Felix Biederman quipped in an interview last summer, Donald Trump’s antiquated vision of Chicago is straight from urban vigilante movies of the early 70s—the Dirty Harry and Death Wish films of the world, in which the streets are ruled by criminals (“all gangs in leather vests and shit,” as Biederman put it) while bourgeois white people live in fear. The lack of punctuation seems intentional, as if the moviemakers aren’t posing a question so much as informing the audience of a frightening inevitability....

The city has announced the lineup for this year’s Millennium Park Summer Music Series, which runs from June 18 till August 16 at Pritzker Pavilion. The concerts happen on Monday and Thursday evenings at 6:30, as usual, with one exception—local indie-rock faves Whitney and Ne-Hi play Sunday, August 12. The schedule consists of ten double-billed shows, a significant reduction from previous seasons—in 2017 there were 15, and before that generally around 20....

The Council on American-Islamic Relations estimates that between 300,000 and 500,000 Chicago residents (11 to 18 percent of the city’s total population) identify as Muslim. But what Muslim identity means is a question rich with storytelling possibilities. There is a duality to the mission, notes Ali. “I would say the number one characteristic of the spirit behind the MWC is always to push boundaries.” She adds that “within the Muslim community, I feel like we really need to push quite a few boundaries that exist....

In the season opener of Abby McEnany’s new Showtime series, Work in Progress, McEnany runs into Julia Sweeney in a bar and recalls how Sweeney’s gender-ambiguous Pat character on Saturday Night Live made her life hell. Watching The Santaland Diaries—the stage show created by Joe Mantello out of David Sedaris’s autobiographical essay that first aired on NPR in 1992—also reminds us that not all comedy from that decade ages equally well....

“So this is what it’s like to be a Yankees fan,” I thought at the beginning of baseball season. There was Kris Bryant, with his Lee Godie eyes and the way his follow-through on a well-executed swing brought him forward on the balls of his feet, as if he were already posing for a bronze statue. (Indeed he may be, having won the National League Rookie of the Year Award last season and moved on to being odds-on Most Valuable Player this season....

Andrew Hickey In the spring of 1989, at the invitation of a local teacher named Irving Zucker, artist Keith Haring came to Chicago to paint a 500-foot-long mural in Grant Park with the help of more than 400 CPS high school students. The project was a PR sensation. WTTW made a short documentary narrated by Dennis Hopper. Rolling Stone came to town to cover the project. Haring, who’d been diagnosed with AIDS in ’87, would die of complications from the disease just nine months later....

Alan Alda and Britt Robertson in The Longest Ride I never would have expected that modern art and the plight of Austria’s secularized Jews factor crucially in a couple of “feel-good” pictures currently in theaters: the docudrama Woman in Gold and the Nicholas Sparks adaptation The Longest Ride. In the first, Helen Mirren plays Maria Altmann, an LA-based Austrian immigrant who successfully sued the Austrian government in the late 1990s to reclaim several Gustav Klimt paintings that the Nazis had taken illegally from her family six decades earlier....