Mary Zimmerman likes to adapt old stories.” That’s what it says in the playbill for her latest, a new stage version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. And it’s true, to a point. She likes to take old chestnuts (Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Kipling’s The Jungle Book) and turn them into theater. But when I say true to a point, it understates, with true midwestern effacement, what she really does. Ask someone to describe a pirate and that person will probably come up with variation of the book’s fictional one-legged, parrot-toting trickster-villain, Long John Silver....

Autumn de Wilde Secret Sisters One of the most off-putting elements of what’s usually dubbed Americana music is the self-awareness of many artists plying their trade to one particular sound or another that ceased to have any contemporary resonance five, six, or seven decades ago. Embracing that sound often involves bald imitation if not a game of dress-up. On the surface Alabama’s Secret Sisters fit that description to a T: the cover of their new album, Put Your Needle Down (Republic), looks like a relic of the late 30s, with Laura and Lydia Rogers dressed like a couple of dust-bowl ingenues gate-crashing a funeral, in vintage black dresses, posing in front of an old buggy....

If you’ve ever doubted whether there are terrible people in the world, the following information may help you lay to rest those doubts. Last year, vandals smashed the fiberglass feline that sat atop the Acro-Cats’ “Catmobile,” the tour vehicle for the Chicago-based troupe of trained circus cats and its sister act, the Rock Cats, a cat band, replete with tiny instruments and a chicken that plays tambourine. The incident occurred while the kitty crew and its devoted trainer, Samantha Martin, were in Los Angeles for a performance....

It’s not very often that you see local dance ensembles share a bill with visiting companies, which is why I’m so intrigued by the debut program of the Auditorium Theatre’s “Made in Chicago” 312 Dance Series on November 16. I’m delighted to see the Auditorium offer its magnificent space to Chicago groups that probably wouldn’t be able to afford a venue of that caliber on their own. Prime downtown theater real estate should be used to spotlight what the city has to offer....

The Best of Times vs. The Worst of Times As you file in off Halsted, through the noisy main floor of the Haymarket Pub and Brewery, you see a quote by Brecht printed on the wall: “A theater without beer is just a museum.” This is the principle that governs the little performance space on the other side of the black felt curtain, home to Drinking and Writing Theater, which continues its “vs....

This bum-out extravaganza organized by Nate Young of Wolf Eyes suggests that if you stay focused within the underground long enough there’s a good chance you’ll ascend—at least enough to headline Metro. The Trip Metal Fest features a crew of like-minded outsiders who’ve achieved a modicum of success without doing anything to curry favors; the work of each artist has gotten better over time, but certainly not any friendlier—it’s been carried out with uncompromising purity....

Striding Lion‘s Annie Arnoult Beserra can tuck a manifesto into a dance so it’s visible just under the surface, like a hand in a hand puppet. In the evening-length Dada Gert, she and her dancers slip into readymade roles—whore, wet nurse, witch, pimp, angel, waiter—and spin them into kaleidoscopic combinations. The readymades are inspired by the show’s muse, Valeska Gert, a transgressive Jewish dancer/performance artist/film star in Weimar-era Berlin who epitomized Dada’s anarchic gravitas....

Fox Haven’t you always dreamt of this moment? No? I’d like to know exactly who was clamoring for the Family Guy/The Simpsons crossover that Fox aired on Sunday night. By all accounts (my social-media feeds), there isn’t a ton of overlap in their current audiences: if you are still into either show’s shtick, you hate the other show’s shtick. That is, you are either “over” The Simpsons or you never got into Family Guy....

On July 5, the day before the Illinois house at last ended the state’s historically protracted fiscal stalemate by voting to override Governor Bruce Rauner’s budget veto, Rauner came to the far southeast side to play populist in the manner of Donald Trump. Sounding off like a regular guy—droppin’ g‘s left and right—the billionaire governor made like his unwillingness to compromise with Democrats on a budget was about taking a stand for the little guy....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, February 21, 2017. Public schools struggling with finances, closures in Gary A serious financial crisis has hit the the public school system in Gary, Indiana. The district has had to close six buildings in the last two years and it’s a challenge to meet payroll every month and pay vendors, including health insurance and buses, according to WBEZ. On top of that, the school board approved closing Jefferson Elementary School and two other facilities at the end of the school year....

Q: My husband and I are currently separated on a trial basis. He took all our condoms when he moved out, and I want to ask him if he plans on having sex with other women. I don’t have any intention of sleeping with other people while separated, but I think he may be interested in doing so, in part since we have been sexually active only with each other and he is trying to “find himself....

It’s another busy week for the Noble Square microcinema the Nightingale, with four separate events planned between tonight and next Friday. This evening at 8 PM Tim Kinsella will commemorate the release of his new novel by presenting a collage of scenes from the movies that inspired it: Two Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter, Annie Hall, and Bad Timing. Tomorrow at 7 PM the venue will host Persistence of Motion, a multimedia exhibition (co-organized by recent Reader contributor Lori Felker) that combines “moving images and bodies [and] activates audience engagement....

I spent a couple of years in the late 80s working at a Lincoln Park music shop called the Inside Track, one of the first stores in the area to focus on the then-burgeoning CD market. In some ways it was a depressing experience. I was thrilled to finally work in a record shop, but for many of the customers the CD was nothing more than a novel status symbol. Some customers were only interested in albums that could show of their new stereo systems were buying execrable electronic music like the teeth-chattering and awful Deep Breakfast by Ray Lynch and other post-new age crap issued on labels like Private Music and Narada, the late-80s equivalent of late-50s stereo-demonstration records released by Audio Fidelity....

Rachel Bonds’s family drama concerns three generations of prickly, difficult people—an aged father, his long-suffering daughter-in-law, her fairly well-adjusted son, and his way-too-understanding partner—who have gathered together for the funeral of a man none of them liked. It’s not a particularly witty play. Nor does Bonds reveal many deep truths about life and love and all that. Nor is the slice-of-life story she tells particularly compelling. But her characters are well drawn....

Between the 1960s and the mid-1980s photojournalist Dorrell Creightney made pictures of Chicago street scenes, products for ads, beautiful models, everyday people, and musicians including jazz legends John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie. He left behind between 300,000 and 500,000 images of his work. Even Creightney’s daughter Vanessa says, “He was kind of a recluse.” Among the stockpiles are photos of Aretha Franklin in concert in Stockholm and negatives of the English model Twiggy....

This spring Chicago is offering lots of great opportunities to see movies directed by women. The Gene Siskel Film Center is almost done with its series devoted to pioneering American filmmaker Lois Weber, and next month it’ll present a retrospective of films by Lina Wertmuller; Block Cinema wraps up a Chantal Akerman series this week with a screening of From the Other Side on Thursday and a symposium about the director’s work on Friday; Doc Films is in the middle of a series called “Women by Women: Portraits by Contemporary Directors,” which has included such great films as Vagabond, Madeinusa, and Wendy and Lucy; and at the Chicago Latino Film Festival (which started last weekend at the AMC River East), almost a quarter of the narrative features showing were directed or codirected by women....

Mark Steuer’s new German restaurant isn’t named for his teenage all-accordion Krautrock cover band—though I wouldn’t be surprised if he could pull something like that off. It is, however, a long-awaited return to the main stage by a chef who’s veered all over the culinary map since his first days in Chicago, handling the savory side of things at Hot Chocolate, and then moving on to the Gage. Since leaving behind the nominally “midwestern” Bedford and then the South Carolina low-country wingding at Carriage House, he hasn’t been idle....

The first half of the menu at Apogee, the Dana Hotel’s luxe rooftop bar, looks more like a high-end magazine than a drinks list. Printed on glossy paper, it shows strikingly beautiful cocktails set against a black backdrop that highlights the drinks’ myriad colors. Knowing what the options look like can be useful for ordering, but Apogee approaches aesthetic gratification as an end in itself. Their frilly appearance doesn’t mean the drinks lack substance....

When Next last did big meat with its 2013 menu the Hunt, the result was an edible survey of dining best described as red in tooth and claw, from a Michigan hunter’s game jerky to a lushly barbaric squab course on French china. So it was a bit of a letdown by comparison that three menus later, Chicago Steakhouse was pretty straightforwardly what it said it was—some old steak-house-style appetizers and sides and just one red meat course....

I don’t think anyone could successfully argue that hairstyling isn’t an art, especially after seeing “Sportin’ Waves,” an exhibit of Ghanaian barbershop signs that Strange Beauty Show hosted earlier this year. Besides being artfully done in their sort of folksy, outsider-art way, the works featured amazing late-80s/ early-90s haircuts, like sweet fades with lines shaved in them and braids doing things that don’t look possible. The stylists at Strange Beauty Show can be similarly adventurous, especially with color....