A Comedical Tragedy for Mister Punch Punch, the vindictive wife-beating hand puppet, comes to life as a masked, strutting scoundrel in the House Theatre’s A Comedical Tragedy for Mister Punch. So do his traditional friends: not just Judy but the dog, the baby, the clown, the crocodile, and the prostitute Pretty Polly (Echaka Agba). Kara Silverman has set her play in 18th-century London, where Pietro (Adrian Danzig), an immigrant puppeteer, must flee the swinging cudgel of a towering constable (the delightful Will Casey) just to eke out daily bread for himself and his sidekick, the urchin Charlotte....

Recently, I interviewed the writer Nathan Englander about his novel Kaddish.com, whose protagonist is a lapsed Orthodox Jew who lapses back. Englander finds this religious back-and-forthing eminently understandable. “I don’t think I was born to be Orthodox,” he said, “but I don’t think I was born to be secular. I struggle on my nonfaith the way other people struggle on their faith.” To Leo, loving God is abstract, and thus impossible....

This unholy year is winding down (or so we’re told), and as we veer between images of poop emojis and dumpster fires to do it visual justice, it’s hard to remember that there are in fact things for which to be grateful. For me, that gratitude comes in the form of recognizing how many theater, dance, and performance companies have continued to create in the digital world—one that wasn’t a familiar home for many of them before COVID-19....

ARTISTS: Colin Fox and Joey Hooson SHOW: Peel, Harvey Fox, and Strange Lovelies at the Empty Bottle on Mon 1/21

A cavernous lyricism gives Will Eno’s wry, deadpan, seemingly inconsequential plays their near debilitating resonance and often gets the Brooklyn-based playwright anointed the Next Beckett. And this coy, static backyard drama, which marked Eno’s Broadway debut in 2014, certainly has a Beckettian flavor. Two married couples named Jones—one a decade or so younger than the other—mostly dither and stall and circumvent their way through several banal days, always peculiarly on edge as though some undefinable, momentous threat is perpetually in the offing....

Farmhouse Tavern This chic tavern hosts a family-style Thanksgiving dinner with three courses and side dishes for the entire table. 11 AM-6:45 PM, 703 Church Street, Evanston, farmhouseevanston.com, $48. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Moonlight Loving Allied Doctor Strange Arrival Bleed For This McCormick Tribune Ice Rink Work your way down to Millennium Park and strap on your skates for hours of fun at this ice rink sitting under the iconic Bean....

LGBTQ people are anxious about their vulnerability under the coming Donald Trump presidency, due in part to the confusing patchwork of state and federal laws that protect them. Illinois is one of 19 states that explicitly bar discrimination based on both sexual orientation and gender identity, while Wisconsin law protects gays but not trans people, and Indiana—home state of vice president-elect Mike Pence—offers none of the above. Kim Hively had been teaching at Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana and had been denied promotions and eventually was denied renewal of her contract because she’s a lesbian....

There was a shooting in my neighborhood, Rogers Park, in October. There were probably shootings in every neighborhood sometime this year, but this one attracted extra notice because the victim, Cynthia Trevillion, was a teacher at the local Waldorf School—she was on her way out to a Friday-night dinner with her husband and was unlucky enough to get caught in gang-related cross fire. The bullets hit her in the head and neck and she died immediately....

After quarantine took away live concerts, all you had to do was scroll Twitter for a minute to see just how much people missed live venues and enjoying their favorite tunes with like minds. In February 2020, Chicago streets bustled with activity in celebration of the NBA All-Star Weekend. It was the first time the city had hosted the event since 1988, and in addition to the usual attractions—including the celebrity game, the dunk contest, and of course the main event—the weekend featured WGCI’s Big Jam 2: Rappers and Ballers Edition at Credit Union 1 Arena on Saturday, February 15....

On a steamy summer evening in 1933, a group of young black dancers readied themselves into position behind the plush curtains of Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre. They were the last act on a program of music and dance, a lineup that had been full of Chopin and orchestral favorites. Theirs was a new ballet, La Guiablesse, the story of a “she-devil” from the island of Martinique who lures a young lover away from his beloved, pushes him over a cliff, and disappears in a puff of smoke....

My peers and I spent our formative years seeking out the hardest, heaviest, fastest music we could find. We considered it a rite of passage, a way to rebel against the bloated arena rock and pillowy AM gold of our parents’ generation, much like they rebelled against their own folks’ Pat Boone with the Beatles and Stones. It’s because of this tradition, seemingly ingrained within American culture, that the phenomenon of Whitney confounds me....

Experimental indie duo Wye Oak make their commitment to reinventing their music feel like an integral part of their art: whether they’re incorporating shades of folk rock or R&B or even scraps of their earliest songs (as they did on 2016’s Tween), it always comes across like a natural progression. On their new five-track EP, No Horizon, they embrace their most avant-pop side by recording with the Grammy-winning Brooklyn Youth Chorus....

On the evening of Saturday, October 22, fresh off his weekly Wake-Up Club radio show and just hours before heading back downtown to do his Sunday-afternoon program on WVAZ, the immortal Herb Kent proved to be mortal. Mr. Kent never demonstrated that purity better than the last time I encountered him. I’ve enjoyed a number of run-ins with my hero over the decades: he DJed my wedding; he was a guest a number of times on my cable-access kids’ show, Chic-a-Go-Go; my mother-in-law helped him get his honorary Stony Island street sign; and when I located the rarest and earliest Michael Jackson studio recording for a Reader story in 2009, the tape was on the same property as Dusty Stepper, Herb’s famed horse....

In our modern world, the political, environmental, and social landscape often feels increasingly isolating. What, if anything, connects us to each other anymore? The 2020 Oscar-Nominated Documentary Short Films program attempts to address this question by telling stories about the ways in which we are interconnected across boundaries of kin, age, race, and nation through experiences of struggle, love, grief, and laughter. Though multiple documentaries have been made about the sinking of the MV Sewol ferry in 2014, In the Absence, directed by Yi Seung-Jun and Gary Byung-Seok Kam, relies almost exclusively on actual footage and audio from the incident, creating an eerie and irrevocably damning effect....

Nora Chin thinks about rugs all of the time. “I fall asleep at night thinking about rugs [that] I want to make and new things I want to try,” she says. The lifelong Chicagoan was raised by artists. Spending her childhood figure skating and some of her early 20s skating professionally for Disney On Ice, she’s dipped her hands in various mediums after attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago....

A few years ago, percussionist Mike Weis recorded the sounds of the Rockefeller Chapel’s carillon and then slowed down the tape he’d used to capture them. Entranced with the result, he named a new project after the endeavor. The Slow Bell Trio includes Weis and two fellow Chicago experimentalists, woodwind player Keefe Jackson and drummer Steven Hess. Each of the musicians has played in a slew of adventurous groups (Weis in Zelienople and Kwaidan, Hess in Locrian and Haptic, Jackson in his own projects and Urge Trio), and between them they’ve worked in contexts as diverse as free jazz, slowcore, field recordings, and metal....

UPDATE Friday, March 13: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. As it follows bandmates Jason, Zack (Jeff Kurysz), Tracey (Krystal Ortiz), and Chris (Matthew Lunt), Verböten shows how music provides an outlet and a sense of belonging for teens struggling to find their places in the world. The problem is their behind-the-music struggles. If you’re going to write about yourself, you need a ruthless editor to tell you when you’re boring and navel-gazing....

Q: All lucrative plants are grown in multiple locations, as far as I know. So why is coca only cultivated in South America? —Pardel Lux Cecil responds: Thinking about buying a hillside in Sonoma County and getting into the biz, Pardel? Legal niceties notwithstanding, it could probably be done—with a sufficiently green thumb you could grow it in a variety of climes. As to why it’s not, well, you’re looking at the usual historical contingencies: colonialism, drug panics, international conventions, world wars, yada yada....

The Dominican Republic is famous for merengue and bachata, but Yasser Tejeda prefers to focus on lesser-known varieties of Dominican roots music. He reimagines centuries-old Afro-Dominican styles, especially palo, a form of music traditionally played in the countryside that involves complex call-and-response rhythms created by drums called palos and voices. His elegantly polished compositions contain a fascinating, delicate interplay of past and present, and they’re underlain by raw ancestral music meant to move bodies and bring about communion....

Lena Horne and Nancy Wilson were two iconic voices, separated by a generation, divergent upbringings, and dramatically different perceptions of their own talent and self-worth. What ties them together are their soulful style, deep connection with their audiences, and strength in the face of an industry that didn’t evolve quickly enough to give them the respect and compensation they deserved. This rousing production is Black Ensemble Theater’s new associate director Kylah Frye’s debut as writer and director, and it packs a musical punch, going heavy on music and lighter on story and historical facts....