If, as the Dalai Lama says, “compassion is the radicalism of our time,” then Samuel D. Hunter’s 2016 one-act, The Harvest, is the most revolutionary play you’re likely to see anytime soon. In this current, angry cultural climate plenty of writers try to catch the zeitgeist by weaponizing empathy: lavishing it on some, withholding it from others in order to shake audiences out of their presumably smug complacency. Not Hunter. The Harvest doles it out to everybody....

This lively Louisiana trio instill classic Cajun sounds with loads of vitality on their latest album, Yesterday’s Gone (Valcour). Accordionist Drew Simon, guitarist Megan Brown, and fiddler Kelli Jones-Savoy—wife to Joel Savoy, the record producer, musician, and scion of the famous Cajun musical family—percolate with energy, swapping vocal responsibilities from song to song and harmonizing with one another in casual fashion. Following in the footsteps of the great D.L. Menard, T’Monde tease out the connections between Cajun tradition and old-school honky-tonk, whether covering Hank Williams or Webb Pierce or deftly adding steel guitar to a Cajun French-language cover of George Strait’s “When Did You Stop Loving Me....

Once upon a time (two years ago), there were four siblings, all artists. One wanted to host a family reunion, another wanted to make a horror film, and a third was down for whatever so long so he’d get to compose the R&B soundtrack. The result is Sister, a “film conceived as dance” featuring dancers Sarah, Isabel, and Ligia Manuela Lewis, with live music from their brother, George Lewis Jr. of Twin Shadow....

The premise for Robert Longden and Hereward Kaye’s 1990 musical sounds like a parody of bad musicals—like Elephant!, the intentionally bad musical adaptation of The Elephant Man featured in the 1989 movie The Tall Guy: take Herman Melville’s much-praised, less often read masterpiece about a monomaniacal sea captain bent on killing the albino whale that bit off his leg—and musicalize it. The great British producer Cameron Mackintosh (Les Misérables, Phantom of the Opera) bankrolled the original production at Oxford’s Old Firehouse Theatre in 1990....

One of the recurring tricks in the tool kit of extraordinary Chicago sound artist Olivia Block is to toy with the listener’s perception by playing with the boundaries between natural and artificial sound. Back in 2003, as part of the long-running Florasonic series in the Fern Room at the Lincoln Park Conservatory, she created a purely electronic installation that meticulously mirrored the space’s babbling water sounds before zooming into white-noise abstraction, prompting attendees to think about what was real and what wasn’t....

Queer film fans, rejoice. The Reeling Film Fest returns this Friday with 31 feature films and 19 short film programs. Now in its 36th year, Reeling is the second-longest-running LGBTQ+ film festival in the world, premiering queer-centric films that can’t be found anywhere else. “Oh, the Horror!,” one of the festival’s short film blocks, examines horror tropes and stories through a queer lens. In Little Bill’s Peep Show, the monster is homophobia....

Q: I’m a 26-year-old single bi woman. Sometimes my roommate/best friend and I have drunken threesomes with men. We’ve had some great one-night stands (less scary with a friend!), but recently we slept with a man I’ve been (drunkenly) sleeping with over a period of months, my “friend with benefits.” I shared my FWB with my roommate because she wanted to have sex, and I shared my roommate with my FWB because he wanted to experience a threesome....

The quarterly Mayor’s Bicycle Advisory Council meeting is usually a tightly scheduled show-and-tell, with staff from the Chicago Department of Transportation and other city agencies giving presentations on what they’re doing to improve cycling. Shaken by the events, Kristen Green of Ghost Bikes Chicago reached out to ask CDOT for time at the MBAC meeting to discuss the hazards for cyclists that she views as a public health crisis. Ghost Bikes installs white-painted bicycles at crash sites to honor fallen cyclists, and Green has known more than her fair share of people killed in bike crashes....

Illustrations by Ben Chlapek Election season Following the Van Dyke trial through the WBEZ podcast 16 Shots Closed toes, bare ankles Visiting Jackson Park before it’s too late Less pressure to go out every night Mid-Autumn Festival September on the beach Bowling season The perfect storm, or the two weeks in October when sports are king Four Frankensteins (and a panel discussion) Indecent and Downstate, two plays with a better-than-even chance of being great...

Avery R. Young & De Deacon Board are in the business of saving souls. Through what he calls “sousefunk”—an intersection of blues, funk, and gospel—Young taps into the raw emotions of a pastor whooping at the end of his sermon to, as he puts it, “Call up some spirits and bring in some sheep.” But his sets stray far from Sunday church service— “The pastor cusses, though,” Young says, referring to himself....

Bassist Christopher Dammann may have spent the last eight years in Charlottesville, Virginia, but musically he’s a Chicagoan. He got his schooling at Northwestern University and on the bandstand of the Velvet Lounge, and subsequently founded two bands he’s kept in play even when he’s had to commute across state lines in order to join them. Both his groups Restroy—whose self-titled second album was just released by local 1980 label—and 3....

Gwynedd Stuart All of the bao When it comes to franchising, frozen yogurt has proven to be a pretty safe bet. It’s cold, it’s delicious, and you can top it with shit like gummy bears and crushed-up Heath bars and still not feel like you’re doing something as bad as eating ice cream. And it contains probiotics, which Jamie Lee Curtis says are good for our butts. Forever Yogurt, the brightly colored, serve-yourself yogurt franchise started in 2010 by young entrepreneur (and former professional poker player) Mandy Calara, has been a runaway success....

Young Fathers If you’re looking for something fun to do with your mom this Mother’s Day weekend and she’s a fan of live music you’re in luck, cause there are plenty of shows to see through Sunday. “When Off! debuted in 2009, they were the most exciting band on the planet: the greatest front man in the history of Los Angeles hardcore, channeling the glory days of 80s west-coast DIY punk-house culture with three of the sharpest rock musicians around,” writes Luca Cimarusti....

Late last week, Chicago rappers Chris Crack and Vic Spencer released their second collaborative full-length as Chris Spencer, Blessed. These hardscrabble MCs continue down the path they set with last year’s Who the Fuck Is Chris Spencer?, which is as much about the intersection of their distinctive personas as it is about what makes each one unique. Spencer is rough around the edges, with a gruff voice whose power can make a rich instrumental sound brittle by comparison, while the flamboyant Crack doles out colorful hyperbole with a nasal bite....

Time and global communication are among the elements threatening ancient musical traditions, especially in politically turbulent nations under autocratic rule. American access to these riches is being further imperiled by our current administration, though Egyptians aren’t currently banned from entering the U.S. (yet). Still, the opportunity to encounter the music of oud master and composer Tarek Abdallah is nothing to trifle with. He’s a scholar of traditional Arabic music, and as heard on his 2015 album Wasla (Buda), he’s meticulously written a pair of extended suites in the tradition commonly performed in Egypt during the late 19th century into the first half of the 20th century—during a time of Arabic cultural renaissance called the Nahda era....

Based on a true story, Welcome to Marwen starts where the life of Mark Hogancamp (Steve Carell) nearly ended, or rather where it began again. On April 8, 2000, outside a bar in upstate New York, five men attacked a drunk Hogancamp after they learned of his penchant for wearing women’s shoes and left him for dead. Now, several years later, Hogancamp has lost all memories of his past life due to the resultant brain damage and is racked by chronic pain....

French director Jean-Pierre Melville is featured this week on the streaming channel FilmStruck. Beginning in the 1940s, he created a body of work that furthers the brooding quality of American film noir, and his films influenced everyone from the French New Wave directors to Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino. Check out these five key Melville features: The Silence of the SeaMelville made this film, his first, in 1948 on a minuscule budget and without securing the rights to the famous resistance novel (by Vercors) it was based on....

Lyft is built on the power of community. That community is not vanilla — it is comprised of people from diverse backgrounds and beliefs. While Lyft’s goal is to support everyone in its community, that cannot translate into being all things to all people. It means taking a stand behind its values and backing up talk with concrete actions in Chicago and across the U.S. “Each day we bring thousands of people from diverse backgrounds together to share the ride,” said David Katcher, Lyft’s Midwest General Manager....

When progressive Catholic nuns, eager to protest federal cuts in social spending, staged three separate “Nuns on the Bus” tours during the 2012 presidential race, they were greeted in Marietta, Ohio, by Tea Party protesters hoisting such placards as “Bums on the Bus” and “Romney-Ryan Yes, Fake Nuns No.” The “fake nuns” taunt referred indirectly to a Vatican statement, issued six months earlier, that had censured the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which represents 80 percent of American nuns, for “serious doctrinal problems” in its positions on homosexuality and women priests, and for its “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith....

The loss prevention office at Brady’s, a Michigan Avenue department store that looks and sounds a lot like Macy’s, has been catching and prosecuting a lot of BMYs (black male youths) lately, and the corporate headquarters is starting to catch wind of an what looks like a definite pattern. The staff, comprised mostly of people of color, is incredulous, but after a confrontation with a shoplifter becomes violent, the group of coworkers must examine their own practices, which inevitably leads to larger questions about the corporate and socioeconomic hierarchy of who gets to watch whom....