Newcity

Some of July's Chicago theater highlights.

Summer. I love virtually everything associated with the season.

Stepping off, I kept my eyes open all the way down. It was a fast, exciting ride, lasting just seconds. I glanced down just once to see the water rushing up to swallow me, the underwater lights illuminating the depths into which I was descending. Never felt anything like it. After I hit water and swam to the side, I watched my dad step off, letting out a kind of “wahoo” as he went down.

I can tell you one thing: falling in love—and in our beloved city—is worth the gamble.

We’d go when we had been ripped off, or when someone’s parents got divorced, or someone’s grandma died, or when we were all just having a shitty day.

they took your 93rd summer, the way war took your 18th

On the rocks and grass women in flowered bikinis and guys in cut-off jeans would dance, play guitar and talk about cosmic happenings.

I imagined the girl who appeared to me that summer was killed in the yard.

Last year, the Whitney Museum of American Art unceremoniously postponed an exhibition of the queer American artist David Wojnarowicz, a key figure of the New York avant-garde of the 1970s and eighties and a member of the ART+Positive affinity group that was a major voice in AIDS activism at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. In response, Chicago physician and art collector Daniel Berger galvanized a circle of friends to organize a Wojnarowicz show at

Four artists of Japan's Creative Print Movement who sought to make fine art from the reproducible medium in the first half of the twentieth century.

Cancer: Be more of a hero and champion yourself.

The first major survey of the influential artist and teacher Charles White in thirty-five years, this exhibition reveals White's optimism and frames the dignity of his often-disenfranchized subjects.

A commercial flop in its day, “Young Loud and Snotty” has won an increasing share of devotees, regularly showing up on critics’ and fans’ lists of essential punk records. This past year, to mark the record’s fortieth anniversary, founding band member Cheetah Chrome decided to rerecord it.

The band makes what they call “gloom pop"—upbeat, catchy tunes that make you want to dance paired with lyrics about heartache and loss.

Bedford's paintings electrify crashing waves and bone-dry deserts with ekphrastic energy.

Making power pop usually means consigning one’s career to a specific corner of the pop landscape, and a comparatively small piece of the commercial pie. Sloan ignores the labels and simply goes about the business of writing catchy songs with sharp hooks.

Goodness and kindness and even love in a pair of crowd-wowing bio-docs: "RBG" and "Won't You Be My Neighbor?"

Intimacy rushes into the story with cool command: Haley is increasingly masterful with domestic tempos.

The hectic or harried pursuit of heights is more in evidence than majesty.

Lifeline Theatre's remount of their adaptation of Neil Gaiman's novel is inventive in design and powerful in its representation.

Monty Cole's unapologetically irreverent adaptation of Shakespeare's classic at The Gift Theatre focuses on grief instead of madness.

These four stories of women and their bodies at Theatre Y make the public private and vice versa.

An ode to self-invention.

This justice-charged work from For Youth Inquiry proves that art for change and art for joy are not mutually exclusive.

Broken Nose Theatre's production of Sam Chanse's play captures the absurd melancholy of life in the sixth mass extinction.

A romance that follows an immigrant girl and her suitor on a journey through Chicago neighborhoods.

Those who are gone ensure that they are not forgotten in the world premiere of Isaac Gomez's thriller at Haven Theatre.

Thai and Danielle Dang were treated poorly at Embeya, and now the injustice they suffered has fired them up to do better, and do the right thing, at the critically acclaimed HaiSous in Pilsen, a restaurant they run with heart and a sense of fairness.

There’s a reason why lo-fi bedroom pop is the go-to mode for music like this. It’s a solitary genre, free of producers, engineers and bandmates. And when the vocals recede in the mix, as they do on Ruins' debut EP, it seems not even to need a listener.

Fairy Town—areas in Chicago where queer men felt safe to be themselves in an era of repression and discrimination.

The criminal justice system is broken, diminishes public safety and causes untold misery and death. Transformation is needed.

All four Monkees had some background in music. All but Tork had, in fact, released solo singles. Nesmith was, and remains, a songwriter of merit, and if Dolenz couldn't at first play drums like his fictional TV counterpart (he was a guitarist), he took lessons and learned how.

A restoration of Olivier Assayas' 1994 debut, freed from the bonds of music rights, materializes as at least a minor masterpiece.

A long-shelved Jules Feiffer script brought to the screen in his eighty-ninth year to dark comic result.

Layton’s sweetly enveloping visual palette is marzipan-meets-Mars-light, with colors upon colors and hue upon chroma in aromatic profusion.

Omar Kholeif, Manilow Senior Curator and Director of Global Initiatives at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, has departed from the museum. His brief tenure was marked by an expansive global vision and increased visibility for the MCA.

Considered as a whole, “Address” presents a remarkably cohesive corpus.

An enchanting story of Maisie’s quest, the tale of her curse and an unsettling look at the ordeals women face.

I had done a decent job over the past few years spending time in neighborhoods other than my own, but with more than 7,300 restaurants and hundreds of galleries and museums, there were inevitably places I’d never heard of until I put out a poll asking people for their favorite spots in their area. Guess what? Many of them aren’t on most lists about Chicago, and some of them turned out to be fantastic.