The Assembled Parties In this Raven Theatre production Cody Estle directs Richard Greenberg’s Tony-nominated dramedy, which follows an Upper West Side family across a 20-year time period. In act one the Bascov clan converge at their 1980 holiday gathering, where the audience is introduced to a family focused on assimilation and upward mobility. Charismatic matriarchs Julie (Loretta Rezos), the Christmas-loving German Jew, and her sister-in-law Faye (JoAnn Montemurro), a Woody Allen stock character full of Yiddish quips and Jewish anxiety, share a familial bond and love for Julie’s son Scotty (Niko Kourtis), on whom they’ve pinned the family’s future....

I refused to watch the inauguration this afternoon,” Ricardo Gamboa said in the monologue of the very first episode of The Hoodoisie back on January 20, 2017. “Not to protest, but fear of lack of self-control. Donald Trump talks so much shit out of his puckered lips that look like a rectum, I was afraid I’d charge the television and try to fuck it.” Gamboa and their team took a break from the show this summer to reassess what topics to focus on in the future and to apply for funding to continue growing their vision....

Last month Louisville singer-songwriter Joan Shelley released her fifth album, the eponymous Joan Shelley, the first she’s made outside of Kentucky. She cut the record in Chicago at the Wilco Loft with Jeff Tweedy as producer, but his presence is barely felt, which says something about her quiet confidence in her delicate and poetic folk rock. It’s the leanest, most restrained record of her career so far—the tracks feel intuitive, following a path that’s both spontaneous and intimate, with melodic shapes reflecting the empathetic rumination of her lyrics....

Fortunately for Writers Theatre, the highly implausible claim on its website that Twelfth Night “has never felt more relevant” isn’t the funniest thing about the production. However, what it lacks in relevance, it makes up for in actual humor, with a blend of broad slapstick and dry wit. Scott Parkinson steals the entire show as the hilariously affected Sir Andrew Aguecheek, often commanding full belly laughs. He flounces and flops around the stage, playing the audience like a fiddle....

I await few albums in 2014 with as much anticipation as I do Todd Terje’s forthcoming, cheekily titled It’s Album Time. Terje’s singles and EPs over the past couple years comprise some of the best electronic music of this unfinished decade, and his mix for the BBC’s Essential Mix series was one of my ten favorite long-playing releases of last year. Yesterday “Delorean Dynamite,” one of the dozen cuts on It’s Album Time, leaked on the wacky ol’ Internet, and the track augurs a celebrated debut LP for the Norwegian producer and DJ....

Courtesy TransTech Social Enterprises TransTech CEO Angelica Ross (right) works with an apprentice. “Why do most people use the internet?” asks Angelica Ross as she begins a presentation on freelancing. Outreach is a vital part of TransTech’s mission, as well: “It’s important just for us to be visible,” says Aubrey Schuster, administrative assistant and a longtime business management professional. “Visible to the world, and each other.” “Trans people are constantly receiving messages that they are not valuable, that there are very limited possibilities for them—that things are going to be hard,” Ross says....

Going to Alice’s Lounge in Avondale always seems like a pretty good idea. It’s close to my house, the bartender—also the bar’s owner and namesake—is a sweetheart, and the endearingly gruff Fred Wood hosts karaoke (while you shine like the diamond you are, he pretends to play a cardboard guitar or plastic saxophone behind you). The problem is that you won’t be the only one singing. Half of Lakeview will have migrated west for the evening, ready to warble Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” into the microphone or spill draft beer on your shoes....

When you walk beneath the reared-up fiberglass horse that’s attached to Alcala’s glitzy sign, it takes no more than a couple seconds for the smell of leather to slap you across the face. The feeble glass doors fronting the 42-year-old western-wear palace just don’t stand a chance against the cumulative scent of thousands upon thousands of boots—ranging from alligator to snakeskin to motorcycle. Levi’s and Wranglers are meticulously folded and packed in rows of cubbies as far as the eye can see, available in every size and style imaginable....

Sooo, it’s been a long, hard week, and you want to go out and be treated like a dead movie star. The chef initially was Ross Mendoza, who came from Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s restaurant group, most recently at the late Pump Room, the storied boite in the former Ambassador East—a place that in its prime was somewhere that movie stars and aging idols actually would hang out. Maybe Mendoza picked up some of that long-gone mojo....

Footwork collective the Era bring their adrenalized dance moves to the big screen this weekend at the Era Footwork Film Festival 2015. Among the screenings at the one-night event are an RP Boo music video that uses footage from the Bud Billiken Parade, the world premiere of a Vice short film on the Era, and a excerpt from an in-­progress feature-length documentary called Enter the Circle. The films start rolling at 8 PM on Friday, October 9, at Mana Contemporary....

Chicago’s Murder City Promotions and Temple of the Old Serpent have scored some massive metal energy for their Gospel of the Serpent III, a ritualistic multiband blowout. (Gospel of the Serpent II will take place August 25 in Hamtramck, Michigan, and next year’s fest has already been booked for July 2018, per the Facebook page.) From “Satantonio,” Texas, come headliners Hod (short for the Norse god Hodur), the fiercely rhythmic and riffing blast machine who dropped the mike straight through to the void on 2014’s Book of the Worm....

Detroit transplant Grant Forshee (General Manager), and Hyde Park local Tiffani Everett (Manager), are in charge of keeping the Jolly Pumpkin Brewery & Pizzeria in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood welcoming and running smoothly. It’s the first Chicago location for the Dexter, Michigan-based brewery, known for its award-winning sour beers aged in oak barrels that have inspired a passionate following, and it’s landed on the Chicago Tribune’s list of best new city breweries and brewpubs....

Michael Gebert Nathan Sears and Paul Virant at Vie in 2010 It’s arguable which restaurant has been the city’s most influential over the past 25 years—Trotter’s, Alinea, Frontera, Blackbird—but there’s no doubt what restaurant has been most important for the suburbs for the past decade: Vie in Western Springs. One time I interviewed Virant and made an offhand reference to him learning his stuff under Kahan. He gently reminded me (Virant is the nicest, most midwestern guy; the Jimmy Stewart of chefs) that it wasn’t so much a matter of Kahan being his master—they were both kids then, learning as they went....

John Preus had a detailed plan for The Beast, his installation that opens this week as part of the Hyde Park Art Center’s 75th birthday celebration, but he threw it away. “A plan with no room for intuitive decision-making becomes boring to me,” says Preus, who was one of the cofounders of SHOP, the Hyde Park artist/educator/community outreach collective, and has worked as lead fabricator for the artist Theaster Gates. As of two weeks ago, all he knew was that The Beast was going to be a large (30 by 60 feet) structure, built from two-by-fours, that would use up most of the space in the HPAC’s main gallery, including the catwalk above the first floor and the five garage doors that open the gallery to the outside, and contain within it furniture repurposed from some of the Chicago public schools that were shut down last year....

Grime—the phenomenon that borrows its hard edges from jungle and UK garage and has the baddest MCs rap over them—exudes an alluring nastiness right down to its name, which suggests the culture proliferated in dank corners far from sunlight. Still, in recent years Britain’s pop charts have taken a shine to the sound. Amid all of this is London producer Miles Mitchell, better known as Mr. Mitch, who runs the underground label Gobstopper and cofounded an experimental-grime night called Boxed....

Six Reader critics fanned out across the Chicago Fringe Festival performance sites in Jefferson Park last weekend to see what we could see. The result is this selective guide to shows that will be continuing on through the fest’s second and final weekend. For times, tickets, and other info, go to chicagofringe.org. —Tony Adler Betwixt Between This show, about a young girl who’s initiated into a magical world, is enhanced by Nathan Fivecoate’s original score and Cindy Henkin’s marionette-like moves....

We’re now five um, three days into January, so all of the backward glancing and assessing of 2013 is supposed to be over with—but I’m perpetually behind in such matters. Next week I’ll finally post my 40 favorite albums, regardless of genre, of 2013. (You can all exhale!) But before I get to that I thought I’d go ahead and list my ten favorite albums of jazz and improvised music led by Chicagoans....

Trumpeter Jaimie Branch was raised in Wilmette and moved to Chicago in summer 2001, just before moving to Boston to attend the New England Conservatory of Music—but she didn’t make her debut on the jazz scene here till she took a semester off after her third year to recover from a gallbladder issue. The 21-year-old spent the last half of 2004 in Chicago, and in short order she established herself as a force to be reckoned with, her knowledge and chops impressing musicians many years her senior....

You can, if you stand at the end of my street and turn your ear to the south and east, catch the roar of the crowd more than a mile away from Wrigley. It’s a gathering force, a collective sound, equal parts ecstasy, anguish, relief, and longing. Team sport, biologist E.O. Wilson says, is tribalism, “the profound identity we can feel with the group as it competes with another group.” Are the Cubs my tribe?...

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Media Authorities say Jason Austin murdered a cop and a social worker on the west side in 2008, though witness accounts have shifted repeatedly. Terrance Scott said he was ready to talk. He had to—he couldn’t sleep, and the events of the previous few days kept flashing through his mind. The shooter, Scott said, was Jason Austin, the boss of a heroin and cocaine organization at Kedzie and Ohio where Scott worked....