Last weekend, Judy and Liza—Once in a Lifetime: The London Palladium Concert—A Tribute became the first indoor theater production in Chicago to open in phase four (or reopen, more accurately, since it originally ran for one weekend in March before the COVID-19 shutdown). That experiment in bringing back live indoor theater backfired in the light of widespread criticism on social media even before the first performance, including a very public resignation from Greenhouse Theater Center general manager Derek Rienzi Van Tassel on July 18....

Perfume have been at the top of the Japanese pop scene for more than a decade, so it’s easy to forget that the trio, which formed in Hiroshima in 2000, had been on the verge of quitting after a number of their mid-aughts singles didn’t perform up to the expectations of their record label. But in 2007, they caught a lucky break when they were selected by Japan’s public broadcasting network (NHK) to perform in a high-profile public service announcement for a national recycling campaign....

Second City e.t.c.’s 43rd revue begins with the cast paddling through the audience in a faux water ballet. It spends the next hour trying to find its footing. Written and performed by Atra Asdou, E.J. Cameron, Mark Campbell, Andrew Knox, Laurel Krabacher, and Chuck Norment and directed by Anneliese Toft, the two-hour production finishes strong, but is hobbled by too many tired jokes and sketches that trail off when they should end with a comic kapow....

The question was inevitable. For the purposes of Guns N’ Roses on Friday evening, “the jungle” was a football stadium filled to capacity with middle-aged suburbanites in conspicuously crisp Appetite for Destruction T-shirts whose appetite for GNR hits was eclipsed only by their thirst for domestic beer. This was just the fourth date of the much-anticipated Not in This Lifetime . . . tour, which represents a hard rock hell-freezes-over moment: the classic GNR lineup reunited....

Dave Zuchowski Chicago Reed Quartet Last year the Chicago Reed Quartet, one of the city’s most potent and promising new improvised-music ensembles, disbanded suddenly after Ken Vandermark quit in the fall; he also shut down his spectacular Audio One at the same time, essentially withdrawing from his two main Chicago-based projects. Before the group fell apart it had been rehearsing and developing its repertoire, and last August it spent an afternoon recording at the Hungry Brain for a debut album....

Sameena Mustafa has had a successful career as a real estate broker working with nonprofits and small businesses in addition to a rising profile in the city’s comedy scene. In 2015 she cofounded Simmer Brown, a South Asian comedy collective. But the 2016 election made her take a hard look at the local political arena and decide to get involved. Now Mustafa, 47, is one of three Democratic primary challengers to incumbent Fifth District U....

The Chicago Public Schools will be on Spring Break next week, and while we’re still not out of the woods in terms of unfettered travel, many of us are craving some adventure. Here are a few ideas for road trips that will keep you within Illinois, followed by some online recommendations so you can check out the world from the comfort of that Meister Bräu-themed cabana that you built for your backyard....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, October 14, 2016. Have a great weekend! Rahm looks ahead to a possible third term Mayor Rahm Emanuel is only a year into his second term as mayor, but there are signs that he’s preparing for another run in February 2019. Emanuel told the Tribune that he has “every intention of running again” but he’ll have to discuss a final decision with his wife, Amy Rule....

Since November, the Harold Washington Library Center has hosted an excellent free exhibit on the life and career of Reverend Clay Evans, corresponding with the establishment of a permanent archive devoted to him. The 92-year-old retired in 2000, after serving as an anchor for the city’s faithful for decades: among his countless achievements, the pastor and activist founded the famed Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church, cofounded Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH, hosted the What a Fellowship Hour on radio and TV, and released a series of seriously smoking gospel recordings (which is why he’s in this music column)....

There is an actual “Chicago” typeface—that sans-serif abomination designed for Apple computers in 1984. Remember your first-gen iPod? That 50 Cent song you listened to on repeat was rendered in Chicago. The first newspaper mention of typography found by the History Museum staff wasn’t until 1949, and apparently it didn’t take long for the city suits of old to start bickering publicly over a “standard design for all civic lettering,” including slant strokes, line thickness, and whether the n and d in “Randolph” ran too closely together....

Start August off strong with some of our recommended events: Mon 8/1: Live storytelling show the Moth hosts its GrandSLAM Championship at the Athenaeum Theatre (2936 N. Southport), which brings together the winners of Chicago’s past ten StorySLAMS to compete for the GrandSLAM Champion title. 8 PM Mon 8/1: See avant-garde rock collective Lovely Little Girls—along with Bobby Conn, Walking Bicycles, and Chorus of Shadows—at the Empty Bottle (1035 N....

The proud and ancient lobstering traditions of Minnesota have until now remained relatively obscure. But from the Chippewa pulling bugs out of Lake Superior to the Minnesota food truck sourcing certified Lake Calhoun crustaceans, it’s been one of the state’s best-kept secrets. This 100-gallon stockpot produces one of two main signatures at Smack Shack: a straightforward lobster boil with the arthropods scalded red and sold by the pound, served on a metal tray with corn on the cob, red potatoes, slaw, a Leon’s Polish sausage, toasted milk bread, drawn butter, and a cup of the brew in which the beast was boiled....

Paris based, second-generation electronic musician James Kent has a background in black metal (check out his other project, L’Enfant de la Forêt, for a more primeval dark-fantasy ambience), but his synthwave projects evoke a much colder and more subtle form of uneasiness. His releases as Perturbator are steeped in a neo-cyberpunk aesthetic that gradually gets under one’s skin with a sense of oncoming doom befitting a dark sci-fi film. His fifth full-length, New Model (Blood Music), is a loose concept album inspired by Roko’s basilisk—a concept proposed on a “rationalist” Internet forum in 2010 that posited the idea of a theoretical future, godlike AI that would torture everyone who didn’t help bring it into being (it might be doing so even now, in fact)....

Loy A. Webb’s His Shadow: A Parable, enjoyed an enviable premiere run at Berwyn’s 16th Street Theater this fall. The play, about a Black football player torn between his own ambition and a call to social activism, won strong reviews for the story, the three-member cast, the direction, and every other element of the production. It wasn’t until October 20, a day after closing, that the show’s behind-the-scenes drama erupted on social media....

All the beer served at Pitchfork Music Festival is from Goose Island, but there’s one that will probably be unfamiliar to most festgoers: Natural Villain. As has been the custom for the past three years, the brewery has collaborated with one of the acts on the bill to create a beer that’s more or less exclusive to the festival. This year it was Chicago rock band Twin Peaks, who play Union Park on Friday at 5:30 PM and are one of the record-breaking nine local acts on the lineup....

Promoter Peter Jideonwo of Pete’s House says that on Friday night, when G Herbo was supposed to headline the Vic, the Chicago rapper had planned to present Chance the Rapper’s nonprofit Social Works with a check for $20,000. But earlier this week the venue canceled the performance, which Jideonwo had booked, after the Chicago Police Department and the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection contacted Jam Productions (owners of the Vic) and expressed concerns about “safety....

Check out festivals, films, art exhibits, and shows in Chicago this week as August comes to an end. 8/23-8/27: The tenth annual Chicago Dancing Festival showcases local and national companies over five days of public performances at Millennium Park, Navy Pier, and the Museum of Contemporary Art. 6 PM Wed 8/24: The Great Love Debate tour ends its Chicago run at the Apollo Theater (2540 N. Lincoln) tonight, bringing together local personalities for a battle of the sexes in an attempt to answer the question: “Why is everyone still single?...

Update: This story has been corrected to say that S.H. Bell no longer stores manganese in open piles on site and that very high levels of manganese were detected in tests taken at three nearby homes, not four. Dangerously high levels of manganese, a heavy metal that can cause brain damage, were found at southeast-side homes near an industrial storage facility, results of soil testing released last week week by the Chicago Department of Public Health revealed....

Chicago rapper Semiratruth impressed me with her 2019 EP I Don’t Wanna Have to Yell for You to Listen, where her sly lines springboard off rickety underground-style instrumentals and her expressive joy makes the grimiest beat shine like a diamond. On this month’s EP Yes! (Layaway), she’s found a great foil in Tre Johnson, whose languorous flow belies his surprisingly vigorous playful streak. On the dilapidated, modern-funk-infused “Face,” the two rappers absorb each other’s energies: they leave so little daylight between their turns on the mike that it sounds like they’re deliberately giving each other the chance to show off by casually picking up the thread without missing a stitch....

Drew Daniel, a member of the electronica duo Matmos, a gay man, and a favorite contemporary philosopher of mine, posits in his essay “All Sound Is Queer” that sound itself is a connection we have to the multiverse, where our beings themselves exist to cocreate our identities and worlds—but because sound can live both above and below the limits of human frequency, sound lives both with us and in realms we cannot know....