UPDATE Tuesday March 17: this event is on hiatus. Refunds available at point of purchase. Teatro ZinZanni’s Chicago premiere of Love, Chaos & Dinner is a delightfully schizophrenic extravaganza. Occupying an entire floor of the Cambria Hotel with a giant big-top tent that glitters with mirrors and chandeliers, this show is three hours of madcap high jinks and stunning feats of awe. Guests are guided through the pandemonium by two cohosts....

The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Conroy’s story is remarkable not just because of the nature of this particular situation, but because it traces the way that people who were complicit in CPD torture made their way up into the ranks of the judiciary. He detailed the attempts of a group of torture victims to get their cases permanently removed from the grips of the Cook County judiciary:

Todd Rosenberg The giddy beginning: Laura Osnes and Steven Pasquale as Julie Jordan and Billy Bigelow The other night, I decided to take advantage of the Lyric’s rush ticket program and go see Carousel. This would be my first Carousel, but I’d heard a lot recently about its greatness and that it was darker and more complex than the other Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, which I sometimes find a little hard to take....

This operetta by composer Paul Abrahám and librettists Alfred Grünwald, Fritz Löhner-Beda, and Emmerich Földes (translated here by Gerald Frantzen) was a big hit in 1931 Berlin. The far-fetched story, set in Hawaii, then a U.S. territory, concerns a romantic triangle tinged with political tension. A plan to restore Hawaiian sovereignty revolves around the imminent arrival of Princess Laya, heir to the Hawaiian throne, who has been living in exile in Paris....

We write plays in order to organize despair and chaos. —José Rivera, in “36 Assumptions About Writing Plays” Director Steve Cosson, playwright José Rivera, and composer Héctor Buitrago obviously recognized the potential. Receiving its world premiere now at Goodman Theatre, their musical, Another Word for Beauty, takes on all of the above in two and a half hours. And conscientiously too: according to a program essay by dramaturge Neena Arndt, Cosson recruited a cadre of Colombian theater artists to conduct interviews with inmates and officials alike, and the entire team was present for the 2012 pageant....

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. No, but really, perhaps we’re witnessing what will be a new era of how we can relate to both performance and essentially each other. I’m watching a televised morning program as I write this that is running a segment where the reporter is interviewing her husband, who is just showing us records from his record collection....

Last fall Victoria Pope landed her latest dream job. This is good news. Who knew dream jobs in print journalism still existed? As an aside, let me comment here that there’s little room for false dignity in print journalism. (The TV anchor desk is different.) The job is undignified: it means asking questions that can sound very stupid, snooping around and getting dirt under your fingernails, sticking it to people who probably deserve it but were nice to you....

Here are some of our picks for the best events to check out this weekend—many of which promise to be tasty: Sat 11/4: Live the life of pie for the sixth year in a row at the South Side Pie Challenge. Amateur bakers from across the city bring their goods to the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club (5480 S. Kenwood) in the form of fruit, cream, nut, and sweet potato/pumpkin pies, judged on presentation, crust, and the actual pie part....

I n the category of do as I say not as I do, President Trump recently proposed cuts in the federal food stamp program right around the same time his family and business partners maneuvered to win a healthy handout from taxpayers in Mississippi to build a hotel. Which is much the same argument Mayor Rahm made when he closed six mental health clinics in high-crime areas on the grounds that somehow fewer mental health services would be a benefit to those who desperately need it....

Science plays like this one by British playwright Lucy Kirkwood often hinge on the idea that the most staggeringly powerful technology in the history of the world—life-giving, life-cheapening, life-threatening—maybe shouldn’t be overseen by people incapable of understanding morality or human emotions. The action of the play is essentially these three individuals contending with their mutual inability to understand one another’s pain. Alice’s son Luke (Alexander Stuart) comes out as collateral damage....

The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Also clutch: The detail about Public Enemy enemy Flavor Flav flying into Midway but realizing his stage props arrived at O’Hare.

UPDATE Friday, March 13: this event has been canceled. Contact the box office for refunds. Along the way, we learn about Heidi’s mother and grandmother and great-great-grandmother, about the 19th-century American west practice of purchasing brides from Europe, about domestic violence and sexual abuse and rape, and about Amendments Nine and Fourteen. And at the end, the still-energetic Dizzia engages in a debate with a 15-year-old competitive debater (the earnest Jocelyn Shek at the performance I saw, alternating with Rosdely Ciprian) about whether it’s worth trying to save the document at all....

“The City’s management of residential street resurfacing is an infrastructure version of the ‘two Chicagos’ trend that OIG sees increasingly in its examination of municipal services and programs,” inspector general Joe Ferguson wrote in a statement last week. His office has for years recommended that the city take street resurfacing out of the aldermanic menu program and hand it over to Chicago Department of Transportation. CDOT already has jurisdiction over resurfacing major arterial roadways—thoroughfares like Ashland or Grand Avenues....

Many of the best sounds in music come from pushing a piece of equipment past its limits. Obvious examples include what Jimi Hendrix created with his electric guitar and amplifier and what King Tubby coaxed from a mixing board. Just as mind-blowing are the sonorities that Don Dietrich and Jim Sauter, Dietrich’s partner in the long-running ensemble Borbetomagus (which also includes guitarist Donald Miller), obtain from their saxophones. For 40 years these musicians have combined the overtones and multiphonics first exploited by saxophonists such as Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders with overdriven effects and maxed-out amplification—the results come across like field recordings of the destruction of a city by giant monster-movie insects....

When the big theaters have a changing of the guard in artistic directors, it’s understandably big news. But in a city as dependent on the small-to-midsize storefront theaters for its creative lifeblood as Chicago, succession plans at those companies also have a huge ripple effect. Both Prop Thtr and Haven have acquired new artistic directors within the last two years—Olivia Lilley and Ian Damont Martin, respectively. And both are taking their companies in new directions for new generations, while still staying true to the missions that inspired their formation....

With all the unrest and pain in the U.S. right now, it can feel strange or wrong to listen to an album of calm, airy songs that recall sunnier days, even if those days were sometimes bittersweet. But in a way it’s just like massaging an extremely tense muscle: if you can keep leaning into the bad feeling, you’ll be rewarded with some relief. In that respect, How Much Works, the new album by veteran Melbourne singer-songwriter Ester Edquist, aka Sweet Whirl, feels a bit like a balm—despite the melancholy mixed into its warm, easygoing songs....

Wednesday, August 31 Jazz Institute of Chicago Jazz Club Tour 6 PM till midnight, multiple venues (Andy’s, Green Mill, Jazz Showcase, Constellation, Hungry Brain, Jerry’s Sandwiches Wicker Park, M Lounge, City Life, Old Town School of Folk Music, 50 Yard Line, Drake Hotel, Norman’s Bistro, the Quarry, Rosa’s Lounge, Reggie’s Rock Club roof deck, Red Pepper Lounge), jazzinchicago.org/jazzfest/jazz-club-tour, $50, $40 in advance ($40 and $30 for members), 21+ Thursday, September 1...

As much as 2016 was a hectic year in Chicago (and in America, and throughout the world), I find that the photos that stayed with me the most were the quiet ones. The pictures that aren’t necessarily bombastic, but still capture slices of life throughout the city and tell us what it means to be in and of Chicago and the midwest.

It didn’t take long for Joffrey dancer Jeraldine Mendoza to make an impression on fellow company member Dylan Gutierrez. During one of their first rehearsals together, Mendoza approached her now-beau with some choice words. “I was just like, ‘Ugh, crap, she’s so great!’”