In recent interviews Leslie Feist has said that since her 2011 album Metals she’s been engaged in quiet introspection about whether making music is really what her soul aches to do. As she told Joe Coscarelli of the New York Times in April, “I wanted to make sure it was a legitimate drive, coming from a really honest and humble place, not because it’s what I do.” Her terrific, complicated new album Pleasure (Interscope) provides an answer....

The Girl in the Spider’s Web isn’t so much meant to tell a story as it is designed to launch a new property. Stieg Larsson’s posthumously published 2005 novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was essentially a cozy mystery. The 2011 American film version was distinguished by its thoughtful character sketches and its moments of unexpected intimacy. But Girl in the Spider’s Web shoots for a broader, more explosive canvas....

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago rarely plays for laughs, but when it does it can be a lot of fun. (Case in point: 2014’s The Art of Falling, the company’s megapopular collaboration with Second City, which was reprised last year.) Hubbard Street’s latest crack at humor comes courtesy of Julia Rhoads, founding artistic director of Chicago’s Lucky Plush Productions. Rhoads is one of four female choreographers featured in Hubbard Street’s Danc(e)volve: New Works Festival this week at the MCA, and if history is any indication, her first foray with the company—a world premiere titled Cadence—promises to be a delightfully witty affair....

In the six years between this summer, when Fleet Foxes dropped its third studio album, Crack-Up (Nonesuch), and its 2011 predecessor, Helplessness Blues (Sub Pop), the band seems to have been blamed for the trend of countless lamentable rock bands that present monochromatic gang shouting as some kind of campfire-grade profundity (does anyone even remember Mumford & Sons or Lumineers?). Of course, that’s not fair or accurate; at its best, the Northwest five-piece brought gorgeous, stark vocal harmonies to the songs of lead vocalist and songwriter Robin Pecknold with the precision and soul missing from the shitty bands to emerge in their wake....

“One truism about contemporary life is that there are no more secrets,” a New York Times article declared in January. “In the age of selfies, sexting, Twitter, and Facebook, people are constantly spilling every intimate detail of their lives. Video cameras trace our every move; our cellphones know where we are at all times; Google tracks our innermost thoughts; the N.S.A. listens in when we dream.” Add to that a crop of new social networks—among them the much-hyped apps Whisper and Secret—upping the collective threshold of oversharing by encouraging users to anonymously and without discretion broadcast their most intimate, unfiltered thoughts to their friend groups....

Rosalie Schultz was just two years old when she began helping out with her family’s business, which printed and mailed industrial parts and price catalogs. Onlookers were awed as the collating wunderkind stuffed envelopes in a flash. The home business was a hike from Irving Park’s post office, so her father would hire neighborhood boys to haul mail in Radio Flyer wagons. When a large storefront in the ideal location—right next to the post office—was listed for sale, Schultz’s father jumped at the chance to make it the base for both his business and his family....

If there’s one place in town where it might be safe to choke on a chicken oyster it ought to be GreenRiver. That’s on the 18th floor of Northwestern Medicine’s Lavin Family Pavilion on the Gold Coast. And as you pass the hand sanitizer on your way to the elevator and up past the sterilized habitats of phlebotomists and electrocardiogram techs, radiologists, and ultrasound specialists, you’ll probably wonder what in the name of General Hospital was New York restaurateur Danny Meyer thinking by positioning his first midwestern upscale barstaurant—a collaboration with the fellows behind NYC’s celebrated cocktail bar Dead Rabbit—high up in a medical center....

In a little more than four years, Bric-a-Brac Records, which occupies a cozy storefront on the border between Logan Square and Avondale, has become a crucial part of the local creative community. Owners Nick Mayor and Jen Lemasters have accomplished this in part by hosting a bevy of all-ages shows featuring vital underground rock, punk, garage, and hip-hop acts from across the country and abroad. If for some reason you’ve yet to make it to one (and if you’ve missed Bric-a-Brac’s off-site shows too), the second-annual Scummer Slam is a great way to sample the types of sounds the store traffics in....

On Wednesday, I filed suit against the Chicago Police Department because of its refusal to release the police car dashboard camera video that shows an officer fatally shooting Laquan McDonald on the city’s southwest side last fall. The 17-year-old was shot 16 times, according to an autopsy conducted by the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. The officer who pulled the trigger—his name hasn’t been released—has been assigned to paid desk duty....

Sometimes even George Orwell had to take a break from writing about injustice, oppression, and totalitarianism and turn his attention to his immediate personal happiness and comfort. In his 1946 essay “The Moon Under Water,” he describes in rhapsodic detail his favorite London pub, a quiet, old-fashioned sort of place where the barmaids call you “dear” (more high-class than “ducky”) and where you can get a creamy draft stout in a china mug along with a good, inexpensive lunch, which you can enjoy, depending on the season, in a comfortable chair by the fire or under a tree in the back garden with your family....

The Red Line conductor known for his uplifting, unorthodox announcements—”Cheer up, it’s only Monday,” “Don’t forget your coffee,” “May the force be with you”—retired last December after nearly 36 years driving CTA trains. During the 59-year-old’s final run, on New Year’s Eve, fans rode the entirety of the Red Line, passing out doughnuts and encouraging other riders to write Powell thank-you notes. Devotees doled out high fives, fist bumps, and hugs to Powell at each stop....

Spring 1988. The Spanish puppet company Comediants is onstage at Park West and a 26-year-old Blair Thomas is in the audience having a revelation. “I saw that show and I was like—I had never seen anything like that in my life,” he remembers. “It just cracked open a window for me as a young artist.” Thomas climbed through that window to start the late, great Redmoon Theater and, more recently, Blair Thomas & Co....

Gypsy “Gypsy has long been regarded by many as the greatest book musical of all time,” Music Theater Works artistic director Rudy Hogenmiller writes in the program notes for his company’s production of the classic show. Count me among those many. With a crackling book by Arthur Laurents and tuneful, witty songs by veteran composer Jule Styne and up-and-coming lyricist Stephen Sondheim—fused into a seamless whole under the genius guidance of original director Jerome Robbins—Gypsy is the fact-based (but highly fictionalized) story of how Seattle single mom Rose Hovick tried to turn her daughters into vaudeville stars, refusing to realize that vaudeville was in its Depression-era death throes....

At a quarter to noon today, Riviera Theatre stagehands fired by Jam Productions earlier this fall inflated a giant rat outside the Old Town offices of one of the country’s last remaining big independent concert promoters. The workers hung a sign around its neck: “I was knifed by a ‘Jerry Mickelson’ slacker for being a union backer.” The stagehands say the 40 employees that Jam CEO Jerry Mickelson fired in September were let go illegally—they claim he was retaliating because they’d signed cards to authorize a union election....

Local band Stomatopod—named after the superpowered-punching mantis shrimp—will be celebrating the release of their debut LP, Air by the Ton, with a couple shows around town this weekend: tonight at the Hideout and Sunday, October 4, with a free in-store at Reckless Records’ Wicker Park location. Made up of Chicago punk staples, this trio, formed in 2013, features former Nerves drummer and soundman-about-town Elliot Dicks on drums, audio engineer Liz Bustamante on bass, and Pawner’s Society member John Huston on vocals and guitar, and together they hammer out an homage to the moody sounds of their 90s postpunk histories....

Vittoria Scognamigilio and Jacques Nolot in Porn Theatre One of the interesting things about Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, opening at the Music Box this Friday, is that it’s not just a movie about gay cruising, but a movie that seems to take its structure from rituals associated with gay cruising. The film proceeds as a sensuous flow of events, where characters enter and exit the story with surprising casualness....

With Donald Trump laying siege to America, Americans are scrambling to find creative ways to resist—in addition to marching in the streets, converging on airports, or thundering in rage till they turn blue in the face. Yes, abortion is currently legal. But if Roe v. Wade is ever reversed, Illinois is one of four states where it would immediately become illegal. State rep Sara Feigenholtz introduced a bill (HB 40) that eliminates the trigger language....

Woman, Demon, Human In a season of impressive retrospectives (of films by Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Alain Resnais), the most eye-opening may be the series of Chinese opera films currently underway at the U. of C. Film Studies Center. Chinese opera remains relatively unknown to American audiences, the popularity of Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine and Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues notwithstanding, making the series a worthy cultural lesson....

The first act of Lyric Opera’s new production of Siegfried is a triumph for director David Pountney, who’s put the four operas of Richard Wagner’s mythic, fairy-tale-like Ring Cycle into a self-consciously theatrical steampunk setting. There’s a big backstory. The Ring Cycle is a family drama, and its patriarch is Wotan, chief of the gods, sung (royally and on stilts) by bass-baritone Eric Owens. Years earlier, Wotan got it on with the earth goddess, Erda (mezzo-soprano Ronnita Miller); they had a child, the maiden-warrior Brünnhilde (she of the horned helmet and flying steed), who became his favorite daughter....

In press materials for his band’s new album, Whiteout Conditions (Collected Works), primary New Pornographers songwriter A.C. Newman refers to the cohesive sound of the record—for the first time since this Vancouver outfit formed in 1999, he’s responsible for all the material, not just most of it. Cofounder Dan Bejar typically contributes a few tunes to each release, his post-Bowie vocal style helping to vary the overall complexion, but when it came time to make Whiteout Conditions, he temporarily stepped down, preoccupied with recording a new album with his long-running project Destroyer....