courtesy Goodman Theatre Director Eric Ting and playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig in rehearsal for The World of Extreme Happiness “The world of extreme happiness” is a literal translation of the Chinese term for “heaven.” It is also the title of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s new play, which opens at the Goodman Theatre on September 13. It’s the story of Sunny, a girl from rural China who, as a newborn, was thrown into a pig slop bucket to die by parents who were disappointed she wasn’t a boy....

Nathan Schenck Milwaukee’s Temple performing at Arby’s If you’ve lived in Chicago for more than a few years and go to DIY shows with any regularity there’s a good chance you’ve seen at least a few venues close up shop just as quickly as they popped up. This weekend another underground space is shuttering—Arby’s in Rogers Park. The venue has been hosting shows for close to a year and on Saturday night it’ll host its last, with Anthony Sanders, Churchkey, Marcy, Flesh Seeds, Hot Bagels, and Philadelphia’s Mike Bell & the Movies helping say good-bye....

How hot is William Bell these days? At least as hot as he was in 1977, when his single “Tryin’ to Love Two” reached the top of the Billboard R&B chart, eventually selling more than a million copies. The Atlanta-based soul singer has been basking in critical acclaim for This Is Where I Live, his 2016 album for the reactivated Stax Records (now an imprint of Concord Music). It won a Grammy for Best Americana Album and earned three Blues Music Awards nominations, including two in soul-blues categories....

Perhaps the most audacious touch of A Ghost Story, which opens today at the Landmark Century and the River East 21, is writer-director David Lowery’s decision to forgo the use of special effects in portraying the movie’s ghosts. Lowery depicts ghosts with actors standing under bedsheets, bringing to mind cheap Halloween costumes from childhood. The ghosts aren’t at all scary—rather, they seem ordinary, even a little pathetic. One can’t recognize the ghosts’ emotions, since their only facial features are provided by eyeholes in the sheets....

On the wall of the Lakeview hot dog joint Flub a Dub Chubs, there is a Polaroid of me looking sad and confused. At least I think it’s still there—I’m not sure because in the seven years since it was taken I’ve been too traumatized to make a return visit. You see, I made the “mistake” of ordering ketchup on my hot dog and was promptly added to the restaurant’s “wall of shame” for all who dare choose the red vinegary condiment over the city-sanctioned yellow one....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, January 4, 2016. Eli’s Cheesecake has been hiring war refugees for years Refugees from Iraq, Congo, and many other war-torn countries make up about 15 percent of the employees at Eli’s Cheesecake. “People who come as refugees have great skills,” Marc Schulman, the president of Chicago’s most famous cheesecake company, told NPR. “These are great performers, great people.” Hiring refugees who have resettled in Chicago is not a new practice for Eli’s....

The experimental production Confidential Musical Theatre Project makes its Chicago debut with, well, no one knows exactly. Avra Fainer and Steve Lavoie cast the top-secret musical, but even the performers won’t meet each other until an hour before the show; everyone involved rehearses on their own time and just prays that everything comes together. “You want to put a show on, and there’s so many logistics you have to deal with,” Fainer says....

For the past decade, Bethany Thomas has been a fixture in the Chicago music and theater scenes. She’s appeared at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Second City, Court Theatre, and Writers Theatre, among others, and she won a 2013 Jeff Award for a role in South Pacific. As a musician she’s played almost every major venue in the city (including shows with Robbie Fulks and Jon Langford), and she’s also a regularly featured artist at the Paper Machete and Salonathon....

Last year Hubbard Street Dance Chicago won kudos and a bunch of new fans with The Art of Falling, a collaboration with Second City. I liked the show, though I found it a bit corny, and thought the dancers more than held their own. But Hubbard Street’s fall series, “An Evening of Work by William Forsythe,” has me raving as much now as the critics were then. Even more fiendishly difficult than Quintett is the show’s closer, One Flat Thing, Reproduced, which introduces a phalanx of stark metal tables the dancers push in a dynamic rush to the front of the stage, then leap upon, balance against, lie on, and hurl themselves at, among other phenomenally athletic and gymnastic moves....

This show has been canceled. In May, Kickback front man Billy Yost told Billboard that he wrote part of “Will T,” the first single from the band’s recent Weddings & Funerals (Jullian), at age 18; Yost wound up completing the tune, which explores romantic friction and relationship anxiety, on the verge of 30, when he was working his way through a divorce. “It seemed funny to me to revisit that song from such a different place in my life and the sheer brute ugly it could relay,” Yost said....

Puesto Sandwich Stand is two blocks south of Wrigley Field, but it might as well be in another city. It remains pleasantly indifferent to both the Cubs madness that takes over the rest of the neighborhood—on game day, jazz plays over the sound system and a Nina Simone documentary runs on the TV—and the fierce battles over tacos that have recently preoccupied Chicago’s Latin American-food aficionados. The menu, in fact, ignores tortillas altogether....

Poutine is having a moment in Chicago—a long one that doesn’t appear to be waning. Dozens of restaurants offer some amalgamation of fries, cheese curds, and gravy, Poutine Fest celebrated its third anniversary earlier this year, and we’ve seen three restaurants dedicated to poutine appear—and two of them disappear. BadHappy Poutine Shop, which was around for nearly two years before it closed in early 2014, seemed plenty popular; the owner told Eater Chicago at the time that the closing was due to a dispute with his landlord and he was considering reopening in another location....

We all know about how absence makes the heart grow fonder, but I think with music sometimes absence makes the ears grow sharper. A few weeks ago I stumbled across live footage of the B-52s playing “Private Idaho,” and I couldn’t tear myself away. In my teenage years, the B-52s were my gateway into nonmainstream music, opening the floodgates for every weird, outsider, and experimental act I’ve sought out in the decades since....

Chicago’s influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Many of the organization’s surviving founders have spread out across the U.S., and its influence spans the globe, but our city’s importance to its formation is indisputable. Throughout the year, musicians from every chapter of the AACM’s history have been playing celebratory concerts around town, and the 2015 Chicago Jazz Festival will close with a performance of the Experimental Band, led by pianist and AACM cofounder Muhal Richard Abrams and featuring key early members such as Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, Wadada Leo Smith, Amina Claudine Meyers, and George Lewis....

“What if American slaves had embraced Satan instead of Jesus?” That’s the question used to describe the style of Zeal & Ardor, an audacious mix of black metal, Negro spirituals, electronic accents, and synth interludes created by Swiss-American singer and multi-instrumentalist Manuel Gagneux. The closest analog might be the soulful, political, gospel-infused postpunk of Algiers, but Zeal & Ardor ratchets up the sonic animosity by an order of magnitude. It’s a genuinely moving amalgamation that channels the darkest chapter of American history while leaving ample opportunity to head-bang....

African-American Designers in Chicago: Art, Commerce and the Politics of Race” at the Chicago Cultural Center is a show that serves as a much-needed corrective to design history: it covers a century’s worth of fine art, commercial, and industrial design by black creators in Chicago, some of whom first came here during the Great Migration. Another cabinet nearby contains the work of Miller, a designer from Virginia who settled in Chicago after World War II....

Alfred A. Knopf There’s one small subgenre of literature that I find particularly endearing: the young woman working in publishing book. When I was younger, I viewed those books as guides to life. Even after they stopped being useful, at least to me since my own career as a young woman in publishing was more or less a disaster, I still enjoy them as wish fulfillment. How nice it would be to be young and living in New York and surrounded by books all day (but without having to live in the crappy apartment and deal with the pretentious young men and condescending bosses and the horrible, soul-crushing boredom of being an administrative assistant)!...

Late last fall, right-wing nonprofit Turning Point USA started a website called the Professor Watchlist, which singles out college professors who “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda,” according to a mission statement on its home page. Curator Ruslana Lichtzier was appalled by the site, so she decided to organize an exhibition in response. She personally asked more than 300 friends and acquaintances to submit works as a counteraction to Professor Watchlist’s directives....

Raveonettes With the cold weather setting in most music events are heading back indoors. Although the majority of the big outdoor music festivals are over the Owl’s hosting a weeklong minifest that wraps up on Sunday. Of course there are plenty of opportunities to catch great live music that isn’t in conjunction with any kind of festival, though there are some additional fests out there as well. “On their lyrical, meditative new album, Slant of Light (Thrill Jockey), the Philadelphia duo of harpist Mary Lattimore and keyboardist-guitarist Jeff Zeigler create the sonic equivalent of a dimly lit sauna, with all the enveloping warmth and permeating calm that implies,” writes Peter Margasak....

With the annual Chicago Jazz Festival stealing all of the attention this weekend I think it’s important to remember that jazz shows happen in Chicago every day, and once the fest shuts down Sunday the music doesn’t go anywhere. For example, in this week’s paper I wrote about the local debut on Wednesday of LA sax phenomenon Kamasi Washington at Bottom Lounge, and on that same night one of the best bands in Norway returns to Chicago when Cortex plays Constellation....