I had an emotional reaction to advance publicity for the new Disney-Pixar movie Inside Out. There’s Fear, a strung-out Seuss-like guy with an elongated purple body and golf-ball eyes (voiced by Bill Hader); Disgust, a trendy, mouthy, green know-it-all (Mindy Kaling); Anger, bright red and built like a cross between Sponge Bob and a volcano (Lewis Black); Sadness, sweetly blue, and too predictably a bespectacled bit of a blimp (Phyllis Smith); and Joy, a golden-skinned sprite reminiscent of Tinkerbell (Amy Poehler)....

Kate Hamill describes her version of Jane Austen’s 1814 novel about poor but amiable Fanny Price and her coming of age among her wealthy relatives at the well-appointed Mansfield Park as more than an adaptation. She calls it a “collaboration between myself and the author.” This is not mere Austenophilia. Hamill (who also plays three roles in the production) keeps Austen’s characters, and her basic plot, more or less intact—Fanny remains steadfast and true, despite all distractions and temptations to do otherwise....

Humor me for a moment. Picture yourself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. Now, I know that’s a lyric from “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”—but does that sound like an image that existed in the acerbic mind of John Lennon, or the whimsical wonderland of Peter Max’s artwork? In the 70s Max shuttered his design studio to focus exclusively on painting. One might surmise that another reason was that the style Peter Max Studio popularized had become passe....

Nadya “Tolokno” Tolokonnikova and the rest of the 14-member Pussy Riot posse marched onstage Friday at Riot Fest wearing frilly white blouses, athletic pants, and DayGlo green balaclavas, holding up a huge sign demanding justice for a fallen comrade: “We will punish those who poisoned Peter Verzilov.” Aside from the group’s DJ, only Tolokonnikova wasn’t wearing the signature Pussy Riot mask—hers sat on top of her head. As such you could call Tolokonnikova the face of the group, but its members clearly included different races, genders, body types, and levels of ability (one woman had come out in a wheelchair)....

“Take a moment for yourself, there is no better place than here.” That bit of Zen hubris is brought to you by the men’s room wall at Son of a Butcher, a closely packed tavern that has adopted the familiar veneer of hipster meat-cutter chic that’s been orthodox in Logan Square and other old-fangled zip codes for nearly a half decade. Signaled by taxidermy, ornately framed vintage photos, and old-timey signage, this well-worn shtick comes from owner Adolpho Garcia (Pearl Tavern, Heating & Cooling), whose grandparents actually worked the trade....

What is lovelier than Shakespeare in the park on a day in midsummer? What could be more meet for an afternoon of leisure than a comedy briefer than As You Like It, simpler than Twelfth Night, that gives you song and women for your wine and speaks as much of friendship as of love? Plus you get a puppy for your pains. Midsommer Flight delivers an interlude of fun with its production of Two Gentlemen of Verona, which follows the mishaps of young Valentine and Proteus as they stumble along the rocky course between Verona, Milan, and Mantua in pursuit of position and passion....

Unless you place a premium on melding disparate approaches within a single song, the ever-prolific Ty Segall doesn’t pull any genuinely new tricks on his most recent self-titled Drag City album, but he still sounds better than ever. Working with the most efficient band of his career—featuring fellow guitarist Emmett Kelly, bassist Mikal Cronin, drummer Charles Moothart, and keyboardist Ben Boye—Segall rips through and surveys his various modes with hook-fueled precision....

As a performer, Dael Orlandersmith, who wrote and starred in the Obie-winning 1995 one-person show Beauty’s Daughter, is pure empathic gravitas. Her chopping-block physique, orotund voice, and stately bearing give her a monumental presence, while her uncanny ability to conjure exquisitely damaged and pathetic characters lends a disarming warmth to everything she does. And she captivates through the most modest of means; a slight shift of her head, lowering of her voice, or adjustment of her posture is all she needs to transform convincingly from one persona to another....

Shabazz Palaces World Music Festival starts today. Riot Fest kicks off tomorrow. The Reader put together comprehensive guides for both eye-grabbing musical bashes, so read our previews for World Music Festival and Riot Fest if you plan on attending either (or both). Besides those two big events are a mess of other concerts worthy of your time. “Psychedelic garage rock is reaching a saturation point, and not just because Ty Segall releases four records a year and Thee Oh Sees go through so many highly publicized breakups and reunions that it’s no use counting them,” writes Luca Cimarusti....

After a contentious neighborhood meeting that turned into a battle with rival social media accounts and a nasty leaflet campaign, it’s now official: Haymarket Books will be moving into Buena Park after all. The official vote was 50 for issuing Haymarket the permit, 30 against, but unofficially—meaning people who didn’t live within 250 feet—the vote was 322-94. “A very very special thanks to all the folks at Haymarket for their commitment to our neighborhood despite the many trials and tribulations we put them through,” Renner Barsella, the group’s administrator, wrote on its Facebook page....

For a good chunk of its 90-minute length, David Cale’s autobiographical monologue looks exactly like your typical boom-generation gay coming-of-age story. Young David is the sensitive product of a dysfunctional marriage. His mom, Barbara, is a creative soul living the “wrong life.” Dad Ron drinks away his waking hours, trying to self-medicate an adulthood spent under the thumb of his own thuggish, successful father. Along with little brother Simon, they live 30 miles and a world away from London, in the declining industrial city of Luton, known condescendingly as “the only northern town in the south” of England....

Leor Galil, Reader staff writer Doleful Lions, Song Cyclops Volume One I ran into 1980 Records honcho Bill Tucker at the CHIRP Record Fair, and he couldn’t wait to tell me about his label’s recent cassette reissue of Song Cyclops Volume One, a lo-fi pop album originally released in 2000 by Doleful Lions, aka singer-­songwriter Jonathan Scott. (Scott was living in Chapel Hill when it first came out, but he’s a Chicagoan now....

Portland guitarist Ryan Francesconi has become a trusted collaborator of Joanna Newsom, who headlines the Chicago Theatre tomorrow evening. Over the years he’s not only played on her recordings but also contributed arrangements to them. When she performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, he served as conductor. On her current tour he’s part of her modest four-piece band, where he’ll be juggling guitar, banjo, and a couple of Balkan instruments (the end-blown flute called the kaval and the lute known as the tambura)....

When Kaew Saengsom was a little girl in her home province of Nakhon Phanom in far-northeastern Thailand, she paid her way through grammar school by working at a papaya salad stand. She got really good at whacking away at the hard unripe fruit with a large knife, and that’s part of the reason why the som tam she serves at her tiny Burbank strip-mall storefront, Spicy Thai Lao, is so exceptional....

No story is as deserving of an oral history as the immigrant’s tale; even the quietest one is, in its own way, epic. Something drives a family or individual out of the country they know, they make a sometimes-perilous journey to an unfamiliar land, and upon arriving the dangers—both real and imagined—seem even more insurmountable. Leo Tolstoy famously said, “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town....

In the “Utopia” episode of Easy, the Joe Swanberg-directed series for Netflix, Malin Akerman plays a woman in charge of renovating the nearly 100-year-old Davis Theater in Lincoln Square, which began as a vaudeville house in 1918. The actual owner of the Davis, Tom Fencl, appears in a walk-through of the grand auditorium that Swanberg shot midrenovation; in the scene, Fencl wears a pink hard hat and asks Akerman how many seats the auditorium will hold....

Julian Lage and Chris Eldridge are both virtuosic guitarists in their chosen milieus—jazz and bluegrass, respectively—but they’ve long demonstrated a broad curiosity about other styles. Their desire to collaborate felt natural enough, and on 2014’s Avalon (Modern Lore) each player gently crossed the proverbial aisle—some denatured jazz manouche here, some spry pop bluegrass there, with Eldridge singing in a pretty yet bland conversational tone. The playing ended up being too polite, as if the pair were tentatively feeling each other out, but thanks to subsequent tours and further collaboration, that restraint has since vanished....

My dog, Abby, lives an orderly life that hews to a regular routine. She gets up at the same time, takes the same walk most days, eats the same kibbles for breakfast and dinner. I don’t think she minds it, but I’ve also observed that, like anybody, she enjoys variations. Why else would she squeal like a teenybopper the second she realizes we’re on our way to Montrose Dog Beach? Fido to Go, Chicago’s first food truck for dogs, is the best sort of variation, a mix of serendipity and a reminder to live in the moment (like a dog)....

It’s possible that the food writers of Chicago are running out of ways to heckle Billy Dec, who serves as carnival barker and C.E.Bro of Rockit Ranch Productions. That won’t stop us from trying, but with Bottlefork, the new restaurant that rose from the ashes of Dragon Ranch, he’s bought himself some credibility. That would come in the form of chef Kevin Hickey, who previously took the stuffy fine-dining restaurant at the Four Seasons and transformed it into Allium, a very good, casual, creative, and personal restaurant that was just a bit hamstrung by its institutional environment....

Rabble-rousing rapper Warhol.SS is one of a small clutch of locals tied to Lyrical Lemonade, a Chicago hip-hop blog that’s also known for presenting concerts, selling clothes, and making music videos (directed by site founder Cole Bennett). As I wrote in a recent Reader feature, Lyrical Lemonade’s renown has grown in the past year because Bennett has started collaborating with so-called Soundcloud rappers from around the country—usually underground, sometimes rowdy, and often lo-fi, they’re unified more by their choice of online platform than by a common musical style....