Baritones Unbound Noted singers Nathan Gunn, Mark Delavan, and Marc Kudisch star in this informal celebration of the baritone in classical and popular music. The baritone range is located between tenor and bass—”between heaven and earth,” as Kudisch (who conceived and cocreated the show) notes. In story and song, the men trace the evolution of “the uncommon voice of the common man” in selections from opera (Mozart, Verdi, Wagner), operetta (Gilbert and Sullivan), American musical theater (Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Porter, Sondheim, Jerry Herman), and the Great American Songbook (Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas”)....

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s aphorism “Tell me what you eat and I shall tell you what you are” is one of the most overused cliches in food culture, appearing everywhere from the opening sequence of Iron Chef to T-shirts and coffee mugs. But to the culinary historian Laura Shapiro, learning what someone ate is just the beginning of unlocking his or her identity. Naturally, after spending so much time with people, even people who are dead, you tend to feel close to them (as Shapiro, a former alt-weekly journalist, points out, dead people never hang up on you)....

There’s no need to give in to Thanksgiving-induced cabin fever; the city has hardly shut down. There are still plenty of places to eat, movies to see, and markets to shop. Whether you need to occupy your family, escape your family, or just want to get out of the house on the day off from work, there’s lots to do. Here are some of our recommendations: Longman & Eagle The holiday menu includes roasted turkey, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce, and chestnut foie gras stuffing, with vegetarian options available....

The couple: Aay Preston-Myint, 32, and Colin Dickson, 28Years together: Nearly two and a half Occupations: Colin’s a metal fabricator and woodworker; Aay’s an artist, SAIC instructor, bartender/server (Analogue and the Charleston), and an organizer of the queer dance party Chances Dances. Aay: Two and a half years, almost. We technically are not legally entitled to marriage until June, but I wouldn’t consider marriage a demarcation of when our relationship became deeper, more committed, or “official....

QI am a straight male, married to a woman for 25 years. Our marriage started to go sour about 14 years ago. Sex was infrequent and stultifying. Finally, when the kids were old enough, I made plans to separate. When my wife got wind of these plans, she finally agreed to work on our relationship. We had long and heartfelt conversations. Things got better. Sex got more frequent, if not more exciting....

Even when the weather doesn’t behave, Chicago rock fans can always tell that spring has sprung when a new album arrives from Gossip Wolf‘s favorite flame-haired sibling garage duo, White Mystery. When Alex and Francis White drop the new F.Y.M.S. (aka Fuck Your Mouth Shut), it’ll make 2017 the eighth year in a row they’ve put out a record (or in one case a movie soundtrack) on April 20. (That’s 4/20—as in pot o’clock—for all you nonjokers, nonsmokers, and non-midnight tokers out there....

Open run: Fridays 8 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, thelincolnlodge.com, $10 When the Lincoln Restaurant abruptly shut its doors in December 2013, we didn’t lose just the old-school Civil War-themed diner; stand-up showcase the Lincoln Lodge was suddenly without a home, and the 14-year-old institution—which boasts such alumni as Hannibal Buress, Natasha Leggero, and Kyle Kinane—was put in jeopardy. Wicker Park’s Subterranean came to the rescue, and in February the comedians got right back to it in the rock club’s lounge....

Feral Light began life as an aggressive crusty blackened hardcore act with harrowing stories to tell of war and cruelty—on thire 2015 self-titled demo, the Minneapolis-based band threw down a bloodstained gauntlet. But starting with their 2016 EP A Sound of Moving Shadows, they started to expand and stretch out aurally and thematically, and by the time of last year’s Void/Sanctify, the group had developed a more mystical, philosophical, and abstract bent....

Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart are only in their 20s, but both of them have already become stalwart figures on Chicago’s music scene, nonchalantly cutting across disparate communities. Cunningham largely sticks to Americana and indie, touring or collaborating with artists such as Jeff Tweedy and Twin Peaks, while Stewart is just as comfortable playing free jazz in the Few and Marker as she is working alongside Chance the Rapper, but the duo find common cause in Ohmme....

If 2016 was a year when most of us were accused of keeping cozy in our partisan bubbles, then the New Year is as good a time as any to reflect upon how we can reengage in politics. It’s prompted my own reflection too. Follow social media accounts across the political spectrum Look. Trump and his surrogates have launched an all-out assault on any news outlet that’s dared to report on him in an honest and/or critical way—from the Gray Lady to the likes of Teen Vogue....

Famed gonzo music critic Lester Bangs once exclaimed, “I respect Bob Seger as much as almost anybody I can think of in the music business today.” Bangs’s admiration was mostly due to the fact that since the mid-60s, Seger had paid his dues hacking it out in grimy rock bands, most notably Bob Seger & the Last Heard, which by the end of the decade had morphed into the magnificent, swaggering acid-rock group the Bob Seger System....

Friday marks the opening of “Noir City: Chicago,” the weeklong festival of film noir presented by Music Box and the Film Noir Foundation. This is the ninth annual edition, which should give you some idea of the festival’s popularity, and with each passing year the programmers, having already screened most of the classic noirs of the 1940s and ’50s, have to strain a little harder to come up with fresh titles....

If Donald Trump truly wants to be a “friend to the gays,” as he pledged during his presidential campaign, he has a strange way of showing it. Should Pence attempt to chip away at the Ryan White Care Act in his new position, it would have an enormous impact on HIV-positive individuals living in Chicago and Illinois—as well as the LGBTQ organizations that advocate for their care. The state received $88....

On the day he died, a chilly Saturday in March 2013, Jason Molina was alone inside his two-story apartment on Indianapolis’s Musket Street. A skillet’s worth of spinach and garbanzo beans sat on the stove. Guitar-magazine cutouts plastered his empty fridge’s door. A half-filled bottle of cheap vodka lay in the freezer. Cigarette butts littered the floor. A friend stopped by and found the door unlocked but chained from the inside....

On Monday west side party rap duo Sicko Mobb (aka brothers Lil Ceno and Lil Trav) dropped their debut mixtape, Super Saiyan Vol. 1. December is generally considered a dead period for new music—or at least by those releasing year-end lists at the end of November—but Super Saiyan is one of a spate of recent end-of-the-year releases that are out of step with that concept (Beyonce’s surprise “visual album,” anyone?). The artwork and name of Sicko Mobb’s mixtape are obvious hat-tips to Dragon Ball Z, and the hypermelodic synths and watery Auto-Tuned vocals are all made in the name of bop, the fluid and fun dance that took off last year....

LGBTQ rights are likely headed for a showdown at the U.S. Supreme Court after judges in Illinois came to opposite conclusions from courts in Georgia and New York on whether LGBTQ people are protected from discrimination in the workplace. But that will change—locally, at least—after the Seventh Circuit’s ruling, which found that claims of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation are covered under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act....

The members of New York punk group Show Me the Body write barbed, sludgy songs that make it sound like they all woke up on the wrong side of the Dumpster. The band’s work draws on the distorted alt-rock and nasty pigfuck of 20-plus years ago as well as contemporary artists across a broad spectrum: the new mixtape Corpus I (Loma Vista/Concord Music Group) is a collaborative affair featuring snarling Florida rapper Denzel Curry, New York cyborg-folk mystic Eartheater, lo-fi Memphis rapper Cities Aviv, Philly noise poet Moor Mother, and Massachusetts indie hybrid Mal Devisa....

Michael Gebert Stephanie Hart at Brown Sugar Bakery My first thought on meeting Stephanie Hart at her Grand Crossing cake shop, Brown Sugar Bakery, was that if I was casting a reality TV show, I’d put her on TV, no question. This wasn’t a random thought, because she actually is going to be on TV—you can see her starting Sunday on the Food Network’s Holiday Baking Championship, hosted by Bobby (progeny of Paula) Deen....

In the early 60s the ailing Italian countess Amalia Mani Mocenigo was ordered by her doctor to adopt a diet we might today label Paleolithic. In short, she wasn’t to eat cooked meat. So while she was visiting the legendary Harry’s Bar in Venice, proprietor Giuseppe Cipriani did what any resourceful, self-respecting member of the hospitality industry does when confronted with a seemingly wacky dietary restriction. He presented her with a plate of raw, tissue-thin lean prime beef, sprinkled with salt and drizzled with mustard and Worcestershire-spiked mayonnaise....

Aline Lathrop’s deft two-hander, codirected by Ann Filmer and Miguel Nuñez and currently receiving a joint premiere production (with Atlanta’s Synchronicity Theatre) at Berwyn’s 16th Street Theatre, tackles the timeless theme of how war damages soldiers and makes it hard for them to adjust to life after war. But Lathrop makes one simple and less frequently employed adjustment that makes all the difference: she tells the story from the wife’s point of view....