Whatever your history with Moby-Dick—even if you were a disgruntled teenager on a forced English-class march through Herman Melville’s dense, digressive, and interminable 19th-century novel—I’m recommending Chicago Opera Theater’s current production of the 2010 opera version of this American classic. It’s a powerful experience, well worth chasing down. Composer Jake Heggie has found the musical equivalent of Melville’s rich prose in his roiling and sparkling orchestral score, while librettist Gene Scheer perfectly captures the book’s original tone and language, even as he drops the first-person narration....

Greg Skidmore Rand Paul takes a stand. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About talks in Washington regarding whether we ought to cut back on group homes for foster kids? —Steve Bogira

Steve Gunn’s new album, The Unseen In Between (Matador), contains the most assertively outgoing music of the Brooklyn-based guitarist’s career. It grabs the listener right out of the gate with the soaring strings, reverberant electric guitar, and swinging upright bass (played by Bob Dylan bandleader Tony Garnier) of “New Moon.” Gunn has never sounded as confident as he does singing the album’s sequence of gracefully winding melodies, and its gorgeous production (from Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist James Elkington, who’s worked with the likes of Jeff Tweedy, Richard Thompson, and Brokeback) delivers one perfectly placed detail after another....

The Yunahon Mixtape, the second full-length by Long Island punk lifer Jade Lilitri, who records and performs as Oso Oso, is about the denizens of a fictional town called Yunahon. It’s also the story of frustration—not necessarily in the creative process, but during the final stages of its birth. After an unsuccessful search for a label, Lilitri uploaded the album to Bandcamp last January as a pay-what-you-want release. Despite its beginnings, the album set a high bar for emo and indie rock that few other 2017 albums have surpassed....

The Book of Will The Bard’s passing is prologue in this quasi-historical drama by Lauren Gunderson about the messy posthumous rush on the part of the surviving King’s Men to secure Shakespeare’s literary legacy. Jacobean-era book publishing and its associated roadblocks—funding, contested rights, diverging editorial visions, piecemeal scripts—aren’t easy bedfellows with compelling stage drama, and Gunderson’s efforts to inflate the stakes with romance and rivalries feel more perfunctory than persuasive. But even if it spends too much time in mourning (four separate characters in two short hours!...

Chicago guitarist-vocalist Kathy Patino launched indie-pop group Girl K as a solo project about two years ago. By the fall of 2017, she’d built a full-fledged band, recruiting drummer Ajay Raghuraman, bassist Alex Pieczynski, and lead guitarist Kevin Sheppard, and they released their debut album, Sunflower Court, that October. In the band’s short lifetime, they’ve found a home among local rockers: Patino told Melted Magazine last year that Varsity showed her there’s a place here for sweetly inviting but solemn rock songs peppered with power-pop hooks....

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. Older strips are archived here.

The city’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability on Thursday released multiple videos detailing the police shooting death of 13-year-old Adam Toledo, offering for the first time a complete look at the Little Village teen’s final moments and confirming that Toledo had his hands raised, without a weapon, when he was killed. As the city prepares for protests in the aftermath of the video’s release, Lightfoot again stands on the side of police, instead of the members of her own communities calling for justice and accountability....

We poke fun at Chicago’s desperate thirst for a celebrity culture, so desperate that anyone remotely notable who was born in the city or started a career here or graduated from an area university is forever celebrated as a local hero. Hannibal Buress, meanwhile, has a legitimate claim to local-boy-done-good status. The 34-year-old comedian, a regular on Comedy Central’s Broad City, previously lived in New York but returned earlier this year to the city of his birth....

Film changed the world with its power to conquer time, but time always gets its revenge. According to a comprehensive survey released by the Library of Congress in 2013, 70 percent of the silent features made in America are completely lost, and of the remaining 30 percent, only about half survive in their original format. Nitrate film, the industry norm for the cinema’s first half century, was highly flammable and, as it decayed, subject to spontaneous combustion, which led to numerous fires at storage facilities....

The way Chicagoans dance is big and wide, fearlessly filling the amplitude of space in the midwest. The way Chicagoans dance has brashness and grit that doesn’t look for compromises. It is muscular, bold, and quite upright. They don’t call it the City of Broad Shoulders for nothing. A founding dancer of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago who also taught in and directed its studio for nearly 40 years, Claire Bataille made us see it that way, working in the studio she loved almost to her final days before succumbing to pancreatic cancer on December 30, 2018....

Hollywood is changing. With the rise of streaming, there’s more room for more productions, and now more diverse voices are forcing their way into those spots by virtue of the distinctive stories they have to tell. Code-SwitchedPremiering spring 2018 Kappa ForcePremiering March 2018 The TPremiering summer 2018

In September prolific Chicago musician Seth Engel dropped Maxed Out, a full-length of woeful but ebullient power pop by his long-running solo project, Options. And when Engel turned 27 on Monday, he released Besides, which consists of tracks he’d intended to include on two Options tour EPs. He opens the glum, mellifluous “Milk” with the lines “I am afraid / Of what I’ll say / If I would just let it out of my head”—which to me sounds like a reference to the anxiety plenty of folks felt about sharing Thanksgiving dinner with relatives who supported the president-elect....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, August 3, 2016. The Vista Tower gets closer to reality The site for Studio Gang’s Vista Tower—which will be the city’s third-tallest skyscraper behind the Willis and Trump Towers—is being prepared for three and a half to four years of construction. Street closures on Wacker Drive could start soon, and crews will be working for 12 hours a day on the 93-story hotel and condominium building....

AP Photo/Pat Sullivan Robert Durst is eligible for the death penalty. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About presidential libraries and land disputes? —John Dunlevy • About the Saint Louis Browns, the most hapless franchise in 20th century baseball history? (“The Browns had to wear brown. A rich color, brown, but not a heroic color.”) —Aimee Levitt

July 2001 I work at a record store in Chicago, where I am paid six dollars an hour (I take my day’s pay right from the register at the end of my shift) and can have any used CD in the store I want so long as I clean it. On my last day at the store, two albums come into the shop that I’ve never heard before: Hunky Dory and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars....

On a March episode of Roy French’s Chicago rap YouTube series 106 & Clark (a riff on defunct BET show 106 & Park), HeffyRaps talked about focusing on a specific sound on his latest self-released EP, February’s Dead by V-Day. “I’ve been only rapping for a year, so I’ve just been kinda fuckin’ around trying everything,” he said. “I really started getting my shit together for this EP and figuring out what I wanted to do—and I started embracing that vulnerability inside....

Beer has a long history. Recently there was an entire exhibit dedicated to the history of beer at the Field Museum in partnership with the Chicago Brewseum that ran from November 2, 2018 to September 27, 2020. It revolved around the idea that beer transformed Chicago—Conrad Seipp is a big part of that story. In resurrecting the Seipp brand, Mack has an eye towards what beer means for community, history, and the story we tell about the places we’re from....

I know I’m not alone when I say this—but those damn, dirty Republicans have made it almost impossible to properly mourn the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And almost immediately thereafter President Donnie will announce his nominee to fill her vacancy—undoubtedly some far-right, anti-choice, union-busting Federalist Society soldier of fortune, whose assignment will be to undo all the good that RBG managed to accomplish during her long and productive legal career....

For the legions of Chicago bacon-lovers, Baconfest has become one of the city’s most glorious rites of spring, a weekend-long bacchanal of smoked pork belly in all its multifarious forms, limited only by the imaginations of the local chefs who take on the awesome responsibility of producing small plates for the thousands of guests who stream through the UIC Forum. Fourteen chefs have tentatively agreed to be part of the inaugural Dumpling Fest and compete for the coveted Dumpling D’Or, though, given the unpredictability of the restaurant business, Zurer says, the final roster may change....