First curated by Upended Productions artistic director Noelle Krim in 2004 during her time with the Neo-Futurists, this magical ambulatory experience is back. Audience members, in groups of 15, are Alice, following a harried white rabbit (a boisterous Caitlin Savage on my tour) throughout Wonderland—otherwise known as Evanston’s Main-Dempster Mile neighborhood. Be forewarned, there’s quite a bit of walking and stair-climbing involved in this 90-minute production, but your rabbit guide uses a buddy system to ensure nobody gets left behind....

“One death is a tragedy,” Josef Stalin is reputed to have said. “A million deaths is a statistic.” Psychologists call this phenomenon the “collapse of compassion,” confirming in numerous studies that a person’s capacity to feel for others diminishes as the number of victims increases. Of course the reverse is also true: people respond most strongly to the suffering of a single person, which is why the Muscular Dystrophy Association began using the “poster child” as a fund-raising tool in the 1950s....

COURTESY OF BILLIONS CORPORATION Man or Astro-man? September is here and music-festival season is still going strong. The Hideout Block Party & A.V. Fest starts Friday night with a headlining set from Death Cab for Cutie—it will be one of their final shows with cofounder Chris Walla, who recently announced he’s leaving the band after a 17-year run. “Canadian songwriter Owen Pallett can devastate a festival crowd with just a violin and a string of loop pedals, but he’s done plenty more than that in 2014,” writes Sasha Geffen....

The Purge, a surprise hit last year, takes place in a futuristic U.S. whose totalitarian government, hoping to exorcise homicidal impulses in the populace, has instituted an annual holiday during which all laws are suspended for one night. The premise of Americans celebrating their national identity through rape, murder, and robbery inspires all sorts of associations, from the genocide of Native Americans to more recent hate crimes, yet writer-director James DeMonaco shrewdly avoided any clear-cut allegory....

The American Music Festival at Berwyn roots club FitzGerald’s is more reliable than most summer music events—in fact, it can be reliable to a fault. Its 33rd installment, which runs from Wednesday through Saturday, features many artists familiar from previous lineups—Alejandro Escovedo, Boston’s Sarah Borges (Saturday at 7:15 PM in the club) sharpens her hooks on the new Radio Sweetheart (Lonesome Bay), broadening her stylistic palette with rockabilly sass, concise power pop, and even a dash of soul (on “Big Bright Sun”)....

Captive is an understated story of addiction and recovery framed as a hostage thriller. Based on Ashley Smith and Stacy Mattingly’s nonfiction book Unlikely Angel, it tells the story of a young meth addict in Atlanta who gets taken captive by an escaped convict, establishes a rapport with him, and manages to stay safe until she can contact law enforcement officials. In finding the inner strength to navigate the experience, she realizes she can get through life without drugs....

Muscular quintet Kneebody have spent more than a decade pushing against the limitations of jazz, forging an instrumental approach distinguished by high-level improvisation and a bruising ensemble attack. The band’s strong new album Anti-Hero (Motema) builds on that tradition: it’s essentially jazz-rock fusion, though their sound underlines the uselessness of that coinage. Drummer Nate Wood, electric bassist Kaveh Rastegar, and keyboardist Adam Benjamin combine to create huge, swaggering grooves, while front-line melodies are deftly shaped by the powerful alloy of trumpeter Shane Endsley and saxophonist Ben Wendel....

Tonight’s Weatherman performance is bittersweet. The Chicago-born minimal electronic trio celebrate their new self-titled, self-released EP, but it’s the last time they’ll perform as locals: pianist-vocalist Annie Toth and her husband, drummer Jason Toth (who collaborates with rambunctious singer-songwriter Daniel Knox), are preparing to move to France, and electronics programmer Joshua Dumas spends most of his time these days in New York. The somber, light-­footed songs on Weatherman evoke the mist over Lake Michigan at dawn, with Annie Toth’s whispered vocals cutting like the morning sun through the skittering electronics and sturdy percussive loops—she gives strong performances without overpowering the mood....

If you’ve ever watched cable-­access dance party Chic-a-Go-Go, you’ve probably seen puppet cohost Ratso goof around with his 100 percent human partner, Mia Park—which means you know her infectious 10,000-watt smile. Unfortunately, Park needs more than $20,000 in dental work, including a sinus lift and bone graft—she’ll have 20 teeth removed, replaced, or crowned. This wolf hopes you can help Miss Mia’s smile keep shining! You can donate to her online fund-raiser at youcaring....

On the new Not Dark Yet (Silver Cross/Thirty Tigers), their first collaborative album, sisters Shelby Lynne and Allison Moorer don’t harmonize in the manner of other famous country siblings, such as the Delmore or Louvin Brothers. Though the two of them grew up singing together, their approach is intuitive, so at certain moments emotion supplants technique (including on an intimately ragged cover of Nirvana’s “Lithium”). Produced by Teddy Thompson, Not Dark Yet was recorded in Los Angeles with a top-notch cast of players, and though it feels loose, it’s not a tossed-off effort....

Masterful composer, conductor, and thinker Pierre Boulez died in January 2016 at the age of 91 after decades of revolutionizing classical music and propelling it to radical new extremes. As a conductor he had a long, fruitful relationship with Chicago, beginning with a two-week subscription series leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1969, during which his piece Livre Pour Cordes received its U.S. premiere. Nineteen years passed before he conducted the CSO again, but beginning in 1993 Boulez began making annual visits that continued until 2010, displaying his sophisticated aesthetic with programs that balanced new work with 19th- and 20th-century staples....

When Pitchfork curated the Intonation Music Festival in 2005, the concept was relatively novel: a big, multiday outdoor festival dedicated to indie music. But in 2018, outdoor fests of all stripes (a few of them significantly more esoteric than Pitchfork) clog concert calendars all over the country. Some similar events have gone belly-up—this summer’s FYF Fest, for example, was canceled in May—but Pitchfork has continued to evolve and thrive, becoming one of the most respected festivals in the country....

Whitney Johnson has been ubiquitous on Chicago’s underground music scene for more than a decade. The violist, singer, and keyboardist thrives on collaboration, and she’s worked in a long list of rock bands and experimental projects—though in those roles, rather than emphasize her own talents as a musician and arranger, she focuses on filling out the sound of a group. She played in the 1900s, Via Tania, and the Notes & Scratches before starting the atmospheric, psychedelic band Verma in 2009....

See our roundup of musical events at the Chicago Humanities Festival. When you started out, how was it writing for groups that play contemporary classical, dealing mostly with notated music? Was it difficult for someone who’s essentially self-taught? And how do you feel about that—when you send something out, like to the Silk Road Ensemble, and your hands are no longer on it? I don’t have a lot of time to make what Ligeti called desk-drawer music....

Many filmmakers adapt books, but relatively few make movies that actually feel like books—that is, they achieve the sort of patience and interiority that come with reading. Judging from their second feature, Araby (which screens this week at the Film Center), Brazilian writer-directors João Dumans and Affonso Uchoa belong to this select group. Araby is literary through and through, from its ample voice-over narration to its self-conscious dramatic structure to its perceptive observations of time’s passing....

Jake Malooley: We’re now two episodes into The Bachelor, season eleventy-thousand. Our bachelor is Nick Viall, a Wisconsin native who recently resided in Chicago before heading off to LA to become a career reality-show contestant. But in episode one the show made a desperate attempt to make it look like Nick still lives in Chicago, with shots of him walking around Michigan Avenue. What do you think? Is he trying to be the star of The Bachelor or is he really “trusting the process”?...

Before I started working for newspapers, I thought that being a food critic conferred upon one a certain kind of power: the ability to strike fear into the hearts of restaurant employees and send them scurrying to do one’s bidding, like in the scene in Ratatouille when Anton Ego finally comes to the restaurant, or the part in Ruth Reichl’s critic-in-disguise memoir Garlic and Sapphires when she finally gets so disgusted with a restaurant’s snooty service and terrible food that she pulls off her wig and unleashes her famous long, dark mane —and mythic New York Times-enhanced superpowers....

Ryne San Hamel, the motorist who killed cyclist Bobby Cann in a May 2013 crash while driving roughly twice the speed limit with a blood-alcohol level also about double the legal limit, was sentenced at a hearing in late January. After pleading guilty to reckless homicide and aggravated DUI but before being sentenced, San Hamel addressed Cann’s family to provide a tearful—and graphic—account of trying to save the cyclist’s life....

Garry McCarthy for Mayor files paperwork for exploratory committee Over the summer buttons reading “GMFM”—Garry McCarthy for mayor—began circulating. Now the former Chicago Police Department superintendent Garry McCarthy has an exploratory committee for a 2019 mayoral run. Paperwork for the committee, which plans “to explore the prospect of the candidacy of Garry McCarthy for Mayor of Chicago,” has been filed with the Illinois State Board of Elections, according to the Tribune....

A stark tenderness marks the opening moments of Cross My Palm With Silver (ECM), the ravishing new album by Israeli trumpeter Avishai Cohen. Over gauzy piano chords played by longtime collaborator Yonathan Avishai, Cohen unfurls lines of exquisite beauty—but there’s no missing the sorrow, and perhaps the feeling of helplessness, that creep in once bassist Barak Mori and drummer Nasheet Waits start playing. The tune is called “Will I Die, Miss?...