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The pianist Paul Giallorenzo is an under-the-radar presence within Chicago’s deep improvised music scene, but over the years he’s become a significant force both on and off the bandstand. He’s a crucial figure behind Elastic Arts, the invaluable, diverse performing arts space at the northern end of Logan Square, as he was for its Humboldt Park predecessor 3030. He’s also built an increasingly impressive reputation as a musician, forging a distinctive strain of spaced-out post-Sun Ra grooves with the trio Hearts & Minds and writing brisk, angular postbop vehicles for his quintet GitGo....

This year’s Chicago Blues Festival has an autumnal feel, or least much of the Petrillo lineup does. To close the fest on Sunday night, the city has booked centennial tributes to departed legends Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon (though recent research has raised doubts about whether Muddy was born in 1915). Most of the other acts scheduled for the big stage are veterans whose glory days were decades ago or younger artists rooted in styles at least that old....

Attention S-Mart shoppers! Grab your Boomstick and journey to a cabin in the woods with a group of college kids who are in for a hell of a time in this enjoyable musical comedy homage. Few film franchises have spawned such a rabid cult following as Sam Raimi’s eminently quotable classic B-movie horror film Evil Dead and its subsequent sequels. Black Button Eyes’ production has everything an uberfan could expect, including inside jokes, over-the-top gore, campy dialogue taken straight from the films, 1980s political incorrectness, and a well-defined splatter zone....

Harvey rapper Ty Money dropped the sequel to last year’s fantastic Cinco de Money last week—it came out May 5, turning the first mixtape’s release date into a tradition. There wasn’t much premeditation behind the name or the date, at least not the first time around—in January, Money told me that he didn’t decide to riff on Cinco de Mayo till the day before he dropped Cinco de Money, when he was spitballing ideas at DJ Victoriouz’s house....

Eugène Ionesco’s loud, absurdist farce about an everyman desperately attempting to escape his gray existence while tracking a mysterious killer gets a spirited, fully committed treatment at Trap Door. Bérenger (a sweaty, desperate Dennis Bisto) blunders upon a beautiful neighborhood he’s never seen before. The area is overseen by a sinister, leering architect (Michael Mejia), who gives Bérenger a tour but keeps disappearing to put out bureaucratic fires. All is not as rosy as it seems here, but Bérenger is convinced that a move to this district will cure all that ails him....

Professional baker Della, a southern evangelical trapped in a sterile, repressive marriage, puts all her passion into making cakes according to traditional, gospellike recipes. When long-absent Jen, the grown daughter of her deceased best friend, shows up unannounced in her North Carolina bakery, Della gushes with affection—until Jen asks if she’ll provide the cake for her upcoming marriage to a woman. Despite the predictable ripped-from-the-headlines setup, playwright Bekah Brunstetter gets the two lead characters in this 2017 drama to exquisitely complicated places....

White God Aside from David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, the only movie I’ve seen this year that really made me jump out of my seat was White God, a Hungarian drama about man’s inhumanity to mutt that played in last month’s European Union Film Festival and opens Friday at Music Box. Downtown at the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Asian American Showcase kicks off that same night with Man From Reno, a genial whodunit from director Dave Boyle (Surrogate Valentine, Daylight Savings)....

After dropping three albums in little more than a year with the terrific psych-rock band Wand, Cory Hanson has been uncharacteristically quiet in 2016—but that silence ends November 11, when he releases his first solo record, The Unborn Capitalist From Limbo (Drag City). With Wand Hanson has displayed an expansive vision, balancing warped psychedelic impulses with a strong pop sensibility and using his nasal singing, often pushed into a quavering falsetto, to provide a common thread even as the general sound of the group changes significantly from record to record....

Casimir Pulaski is getting a coming-out party almost three centuries late. The Polish nobleman and Revolutionary War hero who saved George Washington’s life was intersex, according to a soon-to-air documentary. Although CAH is among the most common causes of intersex variations, it’s not the sole determinant of whether a child will be born intersex. Overall, estimates suggest there are up to 5.5 million intersex people in the United States today—a population that’s roughly the size of Minnesota’s....

If a 12-year-old version of myself were given free reign over the Marvel creative team, the outcome would absolutely be something along the lines of the brand-new series Weapon H. Not that I’m saying a pre-teen boy has the talent of the brilliant writer Greg Pak or anything, but Weapon H is the type of over-the-top, absurd-as-hell wild ride that makes the comic format so engaging and fun. It completely takes advantage of its limitless disconnect from reality....

With a metropolitan population of 21 million, the largest of any city in the western hemisphere, Mexico City is often associated with overcrowding, air pollution, and traffic jams. But when I visited for the first time last month, I found it to be a place of beautiful Spanish colonial and art deco architecture, intriguing museums, tasty chow, and warmhearted people. The road to full-fledged BRT in Chicago has been anything but smooth....

Since 1985, the Sundance Film Festival has fostered independent voices, and 2020 is notable for having a large number of films celebrating diversity and inclusion, a few with a Chicago connection. This year featured films showcasing a wide range of topics including disability rights, sex work, LGBTQ+ themes, mid-life crisis, politics, #MeToo, artificial intelligence, and murder. Coded Bias While not a horror movie, Coded Bias might be the most terrifying film on this list....

When a playwright’s words define a world as fully as George Bernard Shaw’s, concert readings work just fine. And when an ensemble has been as well trained in the nuances of Shaw’s wit as ShawChicago’s regulars, it’s easy to sit back and enjoy the human badinage. The company’s longtime artistic director, Robert Scogin, died in October 2018, but its current staging of Arms and the Man, directed by Mary Michell, is a solid tribute to his legacy....

Michael Brosilow Sean Fortunato and Sophie Thatcher Though it’s often staged at high schools, The Diary of Anne Frank—with its heavy Holocaust references, clunky diary passages, and complex character dynamics—is actually a difficult trick to turn. Those producing the 1955 drama can easily get bogged down by the gravitas of the material, forgetting the play’s all-too-human inhabitants. That humanity isn’t overlooked in the production at Writers Theatre, but director Kimberly Senior ultimately misses the mark, giving us a happy family in place of the diary’s complicated individuals....

As I sit in the safety of my attic—afraid to leave for fear of catching COVID—the powers that be are ordering grammar-school teachers to return to the classroom. Or else! Meaning? Like . . . smaller classrooms. Everyone in masks. Teachers outfitted with hazmat suits. On the one hand, you have scientists and doctors saying schools are not super-spreader environments. Ugh, oh. Now, I’m really nervous. And it’s pretty obvious that Mayor Rahm and his handpicked school board looked the other way on that contract—even though it reeked of corruption—because they needed Byrd-Bennett to be the public face on the school closings....

It feels a little odd walking out of the May weather and into the macabre Halloween-season atmosphere of Exit 63 Productions’ debut show. But why should the sinister be confined to a single time of year? That’s certainly not the way things work in real life. Steve Yockey’s 2012 Very Still and Hard to See is a cycle of short plays dealing with the uncanny. In the first vignette, a big-time architect named Buck Mason (Scott Olson) falls into a sinkhole near his latest commission, a hotel on which construction has just begun....

ARTIST: Joe Schorgl SHOW: Al Scorch’s Winter Slumber at the Empty Bottle on Sun 3/4

It’s been four years since Ka Baird of Spires That in the Sunset Rise moved from Madison to New York, and while she continues to work with bandmate Taralie Peterson (who’s still in Madison), by necessity they’ve devoted more energy to solo projects lately. Tomorrow night they’re both in Chicago (where Spires came into their own in the aughts as an engagingly odd psych-folk combo) for a concert at the Owl, but they’re not actually performing together....

Q: I’m a 35-year-old bisexual man in a LTR with a man. My question, however, has to do with my parents. As an adolescent/teen, I was a snoop (as I think most of us are, looking for dad’s porn stash, etc). I was probably 12 or so when I found evidence of my dad being a cross-dresser. There were pictures of him in makeup and women’s clothing, and correspondence (under an alias and to a separate PO box) with other men interested in cross-dressing....