Evil women, mind pickers, Fred Hampton, one spectacularly overdue library book, and, of course, the usual sex and death: the Chicago Fringe Festival is back for its eighth go-round, filling nine Jefferson Park venues with “the untried and the weird.” Below please find our collected short reviews of 12 shows that run into the festival’s second weekend. It’s all over September 10. —Tony Adler Jeff Fort and Fred Hampton: A Revolutionary Love Story A timely and intriguing exploration of the relationship between the leaders of the Blackstone Rangers gang and the Chicago branch of the Black Panther Party, this play captures the spirit of what these two ambitious young men aspired to and the ways they were undermined by both internal and external forces....

As you read No One Cares About Crazy People you might think it’s two books or you might think it’s one. There’s the book author Ron Powers tells us that he set out to write—a critical history of societal responses to mental illness—and there’s the personal story that compelled him to write this book—the raising of two sons who became schizophrenic, one of whom killed himself. An agent told Powers that to write one he must write the other....

Q: A couple of months ago, I got candida (a fungal infection) under my foreskin. I went to the doctor, picked up some cream, and used the cream as directed. The infection went away for about a week and then returned. I got this idea that maybe the cream didn’t work the first time because it’s so naturally moist under the foreskin. So I used the cream a second time—but this time, after each application I would “air out” my penis, i....

Michael Leviton Matt Bauder Reedist Matt Bauder spent just a few years in Chicago, between 1999 and 2001, but he made a strong mark—and the city’s improvised music scene left its imprint on him in return. He’s a no-nonsense musician with an abiding curiosity. He has forged a deliberately mercurial musical personality over the years. There’s nothing mysterious about his ideas or interests, but their nonchalant diversity and range have made it hard to pin him down as this or that....

No fucking around, that’s the ticket. So even while the debut album from fledgling noise-rock powerhouse Lowhangers, September’s eight-track Ulterior Motives (To Live a Lie), is choked by a thick smog of busted distortion and sliced and diced by stabs of flailing feedback, its primary objective is simply to spread a path of scorched earth over its barely 15 minutes. Fleeting moments of contemplative loathing aside, vocalist and leader Cassandra Mukahirn is at a high-strung full tilt, punishing her voice to stay in step with a subterrestrial bass rumble that’s so drowned in its own muck you can barely make out note changes....

I’m still dragging myself out of the fog that descended upon me after three days of running around the muddy fields of Douglas Park for Riot Fest, and since then I’ve found myself seeking out contemplative, quietly alluring music more often than I usually do. Grouper’s Ruins and HVOB’s self-titled helped prod me back to reality, but I’m still scanning my brain for hearthlike, mellow music. Yesterday I recalled the twilight melancholy of a song I’d found on music blog Midwest Action earlier this summer: “Liquor” by Wisconsin singer-producer Eric Charles Christenson, aka Two Castles....

This impressive double bill features gorgeously patient ambient sounds created by a group of musicians long faithful to influential Chicago indie label Kranky Records, where minimalism, new age, and gentle noise have combined in shifting timbres for nearly 25 years. Headlining the evening is High Plains, a duo featuring Vancouver’s Scott Morgan—who’s frequently recorded solo records for the label under the moniker Locsil—and Madison cellist Mark Bridges. The pair first met in 2014 when they were both in residence at the prestigious Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta....

Mos Def and Jack Black preparing to remake Driving Miss Daisy in Be Kind Rewind. Like most people, I’m a fan of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s recent music video for “Handy,” his spoof of Iggy Azalea’s pop hit “Fancy.” The video contains as many good sight gags and one-liners as any feature-length comedy I’ve seen all year, which is especially impressive given that it’s not even three minutes long. Eddie Pepitone, the bald, dyspeptic stand-up comic profiled in the recent doc The Bitter Buddha, deserves much credit for its success....

Moments after the guy at the bar opened his mouth, I feared my infatuation with Nico might shatter. Whatever happened next would have an irreversible effect on the meal to come. No amount of revelatory ragu or beatific branzino would be able to undo the potential damage. Except . . . can rusticity survive in such close proximity to Prada and Hermès, on the ground floor of the Thompson Hotel? It’s a tenuous proposition....

What’s a suburban American housewife living in 1960 with a philandering husband, two needy kids, a tortured past, and a millennia-old curse to do? Well, it depends which housewife you ask in Jami Brandli’s new, too-cute-by-exactly-half play, currently staged by Promethean Theatre Ensemble. Brandli tries to imbue everything else in the play with mythic resonance. Cassandra is, well, Cassandra, cursed by Apollo (a vainglorious, toga-clad prick) to speak true prophecies no one believes....

EDM has only been a serious contender on the American pop playing field for a short time, but there seem to be a few rules for the genre as it pertains to chart success. One is that unlike the majority of the dance music that EDM grew out of, a track generally requires a vocalist to break with a pop audience. EDM producers being more beat-focused musicians, this usually means bringing in a guest singer, like Aloe Blacc on Avicii’s folksy “Wake Me Up!...

Duck and Cover Classroom I can’t vouch for Escape Artistry’s trumpeted dedication to “equality, environment, and education,” but I can attest to the aesthetic and cryptological rigor of this tantalizing, exasperating, and ingenious escape-room game. After a cheeky introductory video instructing us newly deputized agents in the nuances of time travel (here walking down a hallway), we’re locked in a drearily appointed 1950s schoolroom and given 60 minutes to decipher combinations to multiple locks in hopes of finding some missing uranium....

This past weekend saw the commercial release of two solid, old-fashioned genre films, the gangster picture Black Mass and the man-versus-nature saga Everest. Each one is a measured ensemble drama that contains at least a dozen good-to-very-good performances, most of them underplayed, from a roster of respected actors. And each one revolves around a central, attention-grabbing spectacle that deserves to be seen on a big screen. The spectacle of Everest is, of course, Mount Everest, which the characters ascend over the course of the story....

In the 1960s, a new creative discipline emerged when English and European jazz fans realized that no matter how much they liked the distinctively American form of music, they lacked the cultural experiences to play it with all the nuance of their idols. As they looked to their own roots for inspiration, European Free Improvisation was born. In recent years, Brooklyn-based baritone saxophone and synthesizer player Jonah Parzen-Johnson had an epiphany similar to those European jazz musicians that came before him....

Over the last couple of years Daniel Romano, a fickle but talented singer-songwriter from Welland, Ontario, has seemed to detach from his early infatuation with country music, an ardor that led him to race from honky-tonk to psychedelic countrypolitan over a pair of albums. Romano’s melodic wooziness remains intact on his new Modern Pressure (New West), but with his move from the sound of Nashville to that of Los Angeles he’s created a detail-rich studio concoction marked by shifting, kaleidoscopic arrangements that cushion his sweet, slightly hyperactive, helium-sucking voice with impressive authority and style....

QI entered into a civil union with another woman in Vermont in 2000. My ex and I were together until 2003, when we decided to go our separate ways. It is now 2015, and my new partner (who happens to be male) and I are expecting a baby and talking about getting married. We live in Texas. I know that there are ways to dissolve my civil union in Vermont, but I can’t get ahold of my ex (ex-wife?...

Like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) or Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999), the Brazilian feature Good Manners (which plays this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center) begins as one type of movie before transforming into something very different. Seeing the film without any foreknowledge of what will happen is to experience one of the greatest jolts in recent cinema, so if you want to get the most out of the movie’s narrative turns, I encourage you to avoid reading any reviews (including this one) before watching it....

If you’re at all like Gossip Wolf, the wrongheaded dummies in the Trump administration have you feeling nostalgic for a time before this new national nightmare—maybe the early 2010s, when witch house was still a thing. This wolf ripped on a few sorta midwestern practitioners of the form (remember Salem?) but actually has a soft spot for the much-maligned, short-lived genre. (It comes with the territory when you really like goth wear and chopped-and-screwed dance music!...

Probably the cleverest thing about this Annoyance show, which promises to deliver eight minimusicals, is its title. The second cleverest thing is its opening number, choreographed by Lily Staski and packed with tongue-in-cheek renditions of various Broadway dance clichés and references, in both lyrics and tune, to Bob Fosse and the song “All That Jazz,” from the musical Chicago. After that, it’s all downhill. The premise of the show is that we are watching the work of an as yet unknown writer of musicals, identified in the program as “Ruth Lloyd Webber (no relation),” but referred to the night I saw the show as “Bobby Lloyd Webber,” and played rather stiffly by an understudy, Ryan Livingston....

Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski’s first book, a collection of stories, concerns itself with life in Pilsen, where he grew up. The stories are narrated by neighborhood guys—ranging from elementary school kids to young husbands and fathers—and they touch on violence, graffiti, gang boundaries, drugs, weddings, tenement fires, and the garlic-and-onion smell of the neighborhood on Sundays, when everybody’s mom makes frijoles. But many of the stories show how the people of Pilsen redefine their environment—and explore it in new ways....