[image-1]UPDATE [6/6]: The Goodman Theatre announced today that actor Stacy Keach suffered “a mild heart attack” during the opening night performance of his solo Hemingway show, Pamplona, May 30. The show was halted and the run subsequently canceled, but Goodman now says Keach is expected to recover, and that plans are under way to reschedule the production. The stunned audience applauded before it filed out. “Goodman Theatre had to unexpectedly halt this evening’s performance of Pamplona by Jim McGrath....

Six months ago a community meeting about affordable housing in Jefferson Park erupted in angry, racist protests. At issue was a seven-story, 100-unit building that would house low-income veterans, families, and people with disabilities going up on the corner of Northwest Highway and Milwaukee Avenue. The backlash against a development seen as a possible conduit for African-Americans into the predominately white neighborhood was nothing new for Chicago—and it turns out that the backlash to the backlash also has historical precedent....

I have to admit that I was dreading having to sit through another version of Peter Pan. J.M. Barrie’s chestnut about the boy who refused to grow up hasn’t aged well—it’s hard to suspend one’s disbelief and hold one’s nose enough to pretend to be back in 19th-century England while one is in 2018 America. Though it takes a while to get going, this new take, devised by the Prop Thtr ensemble and directed by Olivia Lilley, managed to win this skeptic over by turning a well-worn story on its head and giving it a ripped-from-the-headlines urgency....

Dwight is in the cut sipping whiskey. Rhonda figures you can’t win the lottery if you don’t play. Young Theo has a new gospel record out that they’ve been spinning a lot on the radio, “especially in the south.” Sure, Theo. Tell it to your girlfriend nobody’s ever met. These are the regulars at Ricky’s Place. They’ll take turns singing later on because they feel like it, as good a reason as any, and because they’re in a play about people at a decadent blues bar who do nothing but sing old songs all night and sit around wearing satin, a reason that’s not so great....

“Oftentimes,” says Henry Godinez, the Goodman’s resident artistic associate, “corporal work in Latin American theater tends to be stylized and graceful and elegant and metaphorical.” Not so the blood-soaked production of Mendoza he witnessed two years ago in Mexico City: “I was blown away by it . . . This is just outright friggin’ visceral as all heck,” he says. “I always think that’s a good cautionary tale for us as a country here,” says Godinez, “because we’re not immune from that sort of obsession with power....

The narrator’s study has a hatchet hanging from a nail on the wall next to the kitchen door. Hardly any narrator needs a hatchet. Then again, hardly any play needs a narrator. It’s lucky for Kevin Webb that he gets to spend so much of his night in violet silk pajamas, heaping cigarettes into a crammed ashtray as a series of frothy vignettes about diabolism and henpecked husbands plays out before him....

“If we’re doing a play about Mao, to a 21st-century American audience,” says Mike, a character in Christopher Chen’s The Hundred Flowers Project, “then we should assume they don’t know any Chinese history.” OK, let’s assume that. Here are three events you’ll need to know about if you’re going to keep up with Chen’s frantic, flawed, wildly ambitious piece of work, running now at Silk Road Rising in a version directed by Joanie Schultz:...

In a recent feature published in the New York Times Lindsey Jordan, who makes music under the name Snail Mail, said of the material she wrote for her debut full-length Lush (Matador), “The songs all had to have that moment for me where I feel like when I was playing live I could cry.” Though she’s only 18, her musical prepossession and clarity, cool precision, and depth as a singer would suggest someone older....

It’s been two years since Gossip Wolf mentioned an event by the Black and Brown Punk Show Collective, which advocates for POC in the DIY scene—but it would’ve been flat-out negligent to overlook this weekend’s two-day festival at ChiTown Futbol, entitled Or Does It Explode. The fest’s 21 acts include more than punk—Saturday’s bill features local rapper and self-described “gender abolitionist” Sol Patches, for instance. Both nights’ headliners are Chicago hardcore heroes: Los Crudos on Saturday and La Armada on Sunday....

Tommy Murphy’s 2006 adaptation of Australian actor and writer Timothy Conigrave’s 1995 coming-of-age memoir is a difficult pill to swallow, for reasons that shift halfway through this two-and-a-half-hour show. For most of the first act, the difficulty arises largely from the surface-skipping breeziness that turns Conigrave’s first two decades of life-discovering he’s gay in his prepubescent years, falling head over heels for the class jock in high school, stumbling upon gay rights activism in college—into a scattershot, oddly impersonal, and at time credulity-straining highlights reel (did none of Conigrave’s mid-1970s high school classmates, including his putative girlfriend, display even the tiniest unease with his open homosexuality?...

Long before Chicago gangs took to social media to stoke violent feuds, the street crews of the 1970s and ’80s—from Thee Almighty Gaylords to the Insane Spanish Cobras—gilded their reputations and recruited new members in the customary manner of the professional class: by handing out business cards, known more commonly as “compliment cards,” that displayed cryptic symbols of pride, lists of members’ nicknames, clues about controlled turf, and no shortage of emblems of disrespect to enemies....

Nothing makes an artwork more irresistible than censorship. Pull a painting off the wall because someone finds it intolerably offensive, and everyone else will lust to see it, immediately. But the Internet’s not such a great way to see banned installation art. Sell wasn’t there when a Fishman employee took her work down, stashed it in a plastic bag, and locked it in an adjacent empty space. Sell says I AM Logan Square board chair Geary Yonker told her that Mark Fishman had threatened to close the space if her installation stayed, which would have meant that the group show wouldn’t be seen either....

Beer gardens and street festivals may have long-running and well-established relationships with Chicago this time of year, but summer is also stripping season. Thank Debonair Social Club for helping thaw out this fair city, as its weekly No Tell Motel burlesque adventure continues to heat up Wednesday nights. Expect plenty of feathers, tassels, and nylon stockings in a lair that might not quite be the Admiral but isn’t that far off, either....

When the AIDS epidemic became a seemingly inescapable menace to gay men in the early 1980s, lovers Oscar and Dennis fled New York City for their vacation home on the Florida gulf coast, imagining the storm would soon blow over. Three decades later they’re still there, clutching their way through what may be the despairing final gasps of their self-imposed exile, with only the blinkered good nature of their young, hunky, live-in handyman Ford Angel to inject a bit of life into the sepulchral manse—which has been freshly ravaged by a more literal kind of storm....

In her 1973 novel Fear of Flying Erica Jong presented us with the idea of the “zipless fuck,” a brand of no-strings-attached sex that leads heroine Isadora Wing on an epic journey of self-discovery. “The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is,” Isadora explains. “And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.” Dying might not be as entertaining as Flying, but, despite its somewhat hokey setup and stale takedown of Internet culture, it feels like a more substantial book....

Regardless of any supernatural elements, the richest horror films tend to be ones that tap into more earth-bound fears. Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943) hinge on their heroines’ dread of being vulnerable to sexual predators. George Romero’s “Living Dead” cycle plays on the fear that such established social institutions as the nuclear family, the military, and capitalism will prove meaningless in the event of catastrophe....

You may not know Josh Tsui by name, but if you’re a gamer, there’s a good chance you’ve seen his face before—a pixelated version at least. Tsui said he’s honored by the award, even if receiving the closest thing video games has to a lifetime achievement award makes him feel old. “It was part of a culture that Ernest Cline (author of Ready Player One) called punk rock,” says Kinkley. “There were no rules....

George Lewis initially made his mark as one of the greatest trombonists in the history of jazz, but as he gravitated toward more compositional work, his use of improvisation grew more abstract and elemental. Now, he brings improvisation to the act of living itself, a notion he’s long espoused in his writings and talks. The pieces on Assemblage (New World)—a fantastic new CD of some of his recent work, beautifully rendered by Chicago’s Ensemble dal Niente—magnificently illustrate a few manifestations of this thinking....

Julia Thiel Pineapple margarita (left) and the Turning Point (right) Motivated by the fact that I had a pineapple that was about to go bad, I started looking for cocktail recipes using fresh pineapple earlier this week. In the process, I unexpectedly discovered a vodka cocktail that I actually enjoyed. While I don’t like vodka, I don’t really mind it in cocktails since it doesn’t taste like much of anything....

Jim Newberry Fletcher Weatherspoon (left) in spring 2012, shaking hands with his son Ron I just heard from Jake Austen (of Roctober and Chic-a-Go-Go fame) that Fletcher Weatherspoon, the subject of his 2012 Reader story “Spoon’s last dance,” died this morning. Born in 1932, Weatherspoon was a beloved keystone of Chicago’s thriving African-American social-club scene for six decades; in 1973 he founded entertainment and promotions company Dove Productions. Austen heard the news of his passing from one of Weatherspoon’s four sons, ElWarren, who continues to run Dove with his brothers....