ARTIST: John Vernon Forbes SHOW: Tijuana Hercules at Flatts & Sharpe Music Company on Sat 3/7 MORE INFO: Black Pisces Prints

Chicago in Tune is a difficult festival to describe, since it includes basically all live music happening in the city from August 19 till September 19. How that looks to you depends heavily on which shows are on your radar. The Reader has provided you with a number of assists: a show calendar spanning the entire month; lists of gospel, jazz, house, and blues concerts; and these roundups by genre, compiled by Reader staff and freelancers with special expertise in each area....

Sixteen months ago off-duty Chicago police officer Joseph Treacy and police sergeant Thomas Derouin shot and killed 25-year-old Joshua Beal on the corner of 111th and Troy in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood. The shooting was the culmination of a chaotic confrontation between officers and members of Beal’s family who were in a motorcade leaving Mount Hope Cemetery after a funeral for Beal’s cousin. The shooting—which happened in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses—immediately became a lightning rod for the rancor over police misconduct that had enveloped the city since the release of the Laquan McDonald video just a year prior....

When the Obama presidency was young I used to get email almost every day on behalf of Terry Lakin and his quest. The link to the Maryland lawyer, Tracy Fair, leads to a belt-and-suspenders case for declaring the Obama presidency completely bogus. On the one hand, he was born in Kenya. On the other, it doesn’t matter where he was born because he’s not a “natural born citizen”—thanks to his Kenyan father....

There are many ways to honor great writers—award them prizes, name streets for them, or best of all, buy and read their books. The dude’s a little, oh, I wouldn’t say kooky. More like obsessive. And I say this with all due respect as someone kooky enough to spend 15 years (and counting) writing about TIFs. As I said, I’ve spent the better part of several nights reading through them, and I got a little dizzy from staring at the screen....

At the southeast corner of 43rd Street and Langley Avenue, the ghosts are still trying to speak. It’s an unremarkable corner in a rebounding niche of Bronzeville, occupied by a blandly newish subsidized town-house apartment building. But in the late 1960s this corner was the site of the nation’s most renowned African-American mural. Over the years, I’ve heard stories about people coming to the corner to visit, thinking that there’s a plaque or a marker there....

UPDATE Friday, March 13: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. Diamond’s writing works against the grain of the potentially soapy plotlines, and each character gets at least one moment to burst through social constraints to reveal what they’re really thinking. (Latimore’s Taylor more than the rest.) Old history (familial and otherwise) collides with present-day realities, and by the end of Diamond’s wise and funny play (well acted across the board here), everyone’s wings have been clipped by reality....

Twin sisters—an academic with a Fulbright and a struggling songwriter—return from New York to their small Tennessee hometown after their divorced father gets suspended from his teaching job. But it soon becomes clear that the women need their own reckoning with their personal problems. And what the family can’t say to each other clearly, they try to say in songs. In Sundown, Yellow Moon, Rachel Bonds follows a familiar blueprint, but the play, now in a local premiere at Raven directed by Cody Estle, doesn’t coalesce....

Zac Efron: two-time winner of the MTV Movie Award for “best shirtless performance,” four-time nominee and two-time Teen Choice “Male Hottie” winner, CinemaCon Comedy Star of the Year, and Golden Raspberry nominee for Worst Actor of 2018: what does he have to do with Asians? (Or Gaysians?) Rhee initially resisted. He was dead set on producing an all-Asian Our Town as Token’s first play. “I am a classics/canon fiend,” he says....

As the coronavirus pandemic overshadowed this week’s primary election in Illinois, depressing turnout and delivering the state’s delegates to Joe Biden, Cook County voters also had a choice to make about their next clerk of the Circuit Court. The clerk of the Circuit Court is an unfamiliar office for many voters. As a record-keeping body, its role is essential but mostly invisible unless one works in the courts or has to deal with a case....

Adoration of the Old Woman As with his mentor Gabriel García Márquez, the best of work José Rivera (see also the Goodman’s Another Word for Beauty) is at once realistic and magical, intensely political and deeply personal. Rivera doesn’t quite achieve this perfect balance in Adoration of the Old Woman; here the political issue at stake, Puerto Rican independence, is considerably more compelling than the various half-developed stories of love and loss that fill out the play....

It’s been a rough few days for race relations in our country—Donald Trump’s still the president, and Michael Flug died. Among other things, he told them to “go back to the countries” they came from. Even though three of the four were born in the U.S. In fact, Congresswomen Ayana Pressley of Massachusetts was born in Cincinnati, was raised right here in Chicago, and graduated from Francis W. Parker School on the north side....

Let’s say things start turning around for the better. Say the president takes a perp walk, and the oft-foretold Chicago restaurant bubble never pops. If things stay on that trajectory, soon you’ll be able to eat at a different Boka Restaurant Group restaurant every day of the month. First, at the very top, there’s a wooden trencher set with burnished Hawaiian rolls, so light and risen they seem to sway, served with a little dish of soft, country-ham-infused cultured butter mixed with tiny, salty bits of fried ham and topped with soft pumpkin stewed in sweet saba, the grape syrup that’s a clever chef’s stand-in for good balsamic vinegar....

Filmmaker April Wright sees movie palaces as places that give audiences a complete experience. “In our country in particular, we have this magical relationship with movies,” Wright says, “and that’s built on the idea that we’re seeing this stuff that’s larger than life and on the big screen.” “When the movie palace closes, the community loses a hub,” she says. “What’s lost the most is the community experience, having that shared experience with your neighbors....

At 5 PM Saturday, March 21, Governor J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 Executive Order No. 8, aka the Stay at Home order, took effect. Here’s a daily-ish journal of how Reader staff, our friends, family—and our pets—are spending our time. This playlist I learned about from The Quarantine Times La Armada’s Songs of the Exiled I: Chicago (inspired by Jamie Ludwig’s latest) Doja Cat’s “Cybersex” because some of us need that right now What we’re playing:

David Cerda’s camp parody of Mervyn LeRoy’s 1956 film The Bad Seed, about a murderous, extremely narcissistic child, takes drag to a new level, working as both a hilarious send-up of a creaky but beloved old movie (itself adapted from Maxwell Anderson’s 1954 Broadway hit and William March’s award-winning novel) and as an engrossing, entertaining story on its own. Cerda transfers the setting from mid-20th-century America to today, and transforms the dramatis personae from a bunch of stiff upper-middle-class cis squares (plus a few on the fringe) to a panoply of LGTBQ+ characters, some in drag, some not....

When Tracy Morgan hosted Saturday Night Live in October 2015, the former cast member slowly walked onstage with a straight face and started talking with a lisp. It was a jarring sight—this was one of Morgan’s first performances since he’d been hospitalized in critical condition after a six-car crash in June 2014. But with a charming smile he relaxed and eased back into his familiar persona with a lighthearted, “Nah, I’m just playing....