The Blues, a 1973 documentary by Samuel Charters, screens this Friday. On Friday night around 8:15 PM the south side arts organization Black Cinema House will host the first program in a summer-long series called “Movies Under Stars.” Copresented by Chicago Film Archives, the outdoor series centers on documentary shorts about jazz and blues musicians, with other rare nonfiction works rounding out the lineup. This week’s program consists of: The Blues, a 1973 doc by music historian Samuel Charters depicting southern bluesmen performing at home; Give My Poor Heart Ease (produced by the Center for Southern Folklore in 1975), which focuses on blues from the Mississippi Delta; and American Shoeshine, a 1976 doc in the direct-cinema mode about shoeshiners....

A Better Life Guillaume Canet (best known here as the writer-director of Tell No One) plays a solitary, working-class Parisian who tries to better his lot after falling for a tough single mother from Lebanon (Leila Bekhti). The two risk everything to open a bed-and-breakfast, only to be overwhelmed by debts and forced into poverty. Director Cedric Kahn (L’Ennui) situates this melodramatic story within a precisely observed social reality, thoroughly detailing the business of loan applications, restaurant management, and living on 200 euros a month....

Chicago Tap Theatre’s “operas” have always been charmingly, and sometimes literally, cartoonish. Think Factory Theater minus the obscenity. But with Mama’s Boy, the 11th in the series, CTT grows up—a little. One classy first-time-ever touch: four onstage musicians play a score composed or arranged by two of them, Arne Parrott and Kurt Schweitz. And this shit is good. Mama’s Boy is set in the primordial ooze of Maxwell Street in the 20s and 30s, just as the Depression hits, and the tunes suggest jazz, blues, a little klezmer, and some tango, without ever overwhelming the story or the tap dancing, which establishes character and feeling....

Chicago actor David Shapiro’s performance of Wallace Shawn’s monologue The Fever was one of the most memorable off-Loop theater experiences of the 1990s. Reader critic Justin Hayford wrote of the show’s original run in 1992, “It’s a wickedly difficult monologue in which a man of privileged upbringing stands onstage for an hour and a half, explaining how he’s confronted the atrocities perpetrated in ‘poor countries’ but remaining unable to process the experience....

Lyric Opera’s production of Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites is one of those rare theatrical events where all the elements–music, text, sets, costumes, choreography–combine brilliantly. Composed in 1957, the score is as haunting and poetic as Poulenc’s libretto, adapted from a play based on a novella about a (real-life) group of Carmelite nuns during the French Revolution who martyred themselves after the revolutionaries declared communal religious life illegal. Their conversations range from the seemingly simple but profound musings of Sister Constance (sung with crystalline purity by Anna Christy) to the monumental offerings of love and support of the new mother superior (sung with tremendous warmth and depth by Patricia Racette) after the agonizing death of her predecessor (depicted with distressing reality by Felicity Palmer)....

1 There’s nothing like a summer fantasy to get you through the winter, so how about giving a June weekend in a lakeside tent at Wandawega Lake Resort in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, about 90 miles northwest? Built in the late 1920s as a “lakeside development for Chicagoans looking for weekend cottages,” it’s been restored and upgraded by a Chicago couple; you can rent out the original cottages ($200-$300/night, two-night minimum) or a trio of old Boy Scouts platform tents ($240/night for all three, two-night minimum) between May and October....

On Tuesday Chief Keef dropped Nobody, the latest in a string of full-length projects he’s released since his public breakup with Interscope at the end of October. A day before it came out Keef released the title track, an Auto-Tune-splattered collaboration with Kanye West that’s built on a sample of Willie Hutch’s “Brother’s Gonna Work It Out.” The looped sounds of a lilting guitar and feathery flute should be familiar to anyone who burned Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap in their brains, as the song “Lost” samples the very same elements from Hutch’s song (Dr....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is the time of year when the anticipation of local summer fruits weakens the resistance to ones flown in from the southern hemisphere. Chilean muscatel (or muscat) grapes are in season. These delicate spheres of sweetness, commonly used in dessert wines like Moscato d’Asti, are fragile, and in the mouth they gush clean, liquid sweetness. But you pay the price in seeds and skin that is slightly thicker and more tannic than your average red seedless....

Martin Kobylarz Rollin Hunt Rollin Hunt’s name should be familiar to readers who love Chicago musicians with a flair for experimenting with pop. His name first appeared in the Reader in 2007 when Jessica Hopper decided to forgo attending the massive summer festivals that fill Chicago’s summers in favor of checking out a few underground acts; Hopper’s take on Hunt’s “savant-garde doo-wop” sound and raw self-released demo, Dearly Honorable Listener, kept the singer-songwriter on the Reader‘s radar through the years....

Alison Green Tommy Stinson of the Replacements digs into his bass. I saw several acts on Sunday that were clearly contending with fans who wanted the old stuff, even though the artists continue to put out new music. Bob Mould played new material and got into some Husker Du tracks, and the Dismemberment Plan juggled their beloved prebreakup tunes with songs off the forthcoming Uncanney Valley. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

To make a long and stupid story short, I met a guy on Craigslist who said all the right things. We had plans to meet a few times (once I bought a train ticket to visit him; another time I prepared an expensive meal) but he always canceled at the last minute. Should I launch my own campaign against him? I’ve already reached out to a few girls who have been glad to hear the real story....

Q I’m writing to you because I know my boyfriend reads your column religiously. I don’t know what to do. My boyfriend of almost two years broke up with me yesterday over the fact that I used to be an escort. He went through my e-mails and saw that I was answering ads, putting ads up, sending photos. We’d been planning a future together, talking about moving in together, getting married, having kids, etc, and then this happened....

Tickets to WhiskyFest Chicago are sold out, but you can still enjoy free tastings and special events during Whisky Week, which kicks off tomorrow. On Monday, March 31, Delilah’s hosts a whiskies of the world seminar with free samples from 8 to 9 PM. Delilah’s owner Mike Miller and Martin C. Duffy, Master of Whisky for Johnnie Walker & the Classic Malts and newly appointed Diageo Spirits Ambassador for the Republic of Ireland, will lead; seating is on a first come, first served basis....

The law is one thing, common sense another, but we like to think of the two of them as living together in harmony, each the other’s biggest supporter. When the relationship breaks down and the law moves out, most of us should have no trouble taking sides. John Conroy (on WBEZ) and Maurice Possley (in the Tribune) recently reported on two lawyers, Dale Coventry and Jamie Kunz, who have known since 1982 that an innocent man was behind bars for a murder their own client committed....

With this reverent evisceration of Shakespeare’s tragedy, Red Theater presents an inventive, perplexing, and wholly engaging exercise in instability. Director Aaron Sawyer’s blocking is asymmetrical, his actors often teeter on the edges of a sunken stage, and his theatrical rule book changes constantly—one minute we’re in an English music hall, the next a Robert Wilson opera. On a superficial level the exquisitely controlled chaos represents Prince Hamlet’s unsettled state of mind: his father’s irate ghost urges him to avenge his murder while Denmark’s populace shrugs at the regicide....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Portrait of Jason (Music Box Theatre, May) Along with Shohei Imamura’s Karayuki-san: The Making of a Prostitute, this restoration of Shirley Clarke’s cinema verité landmark (1967), about gay hustler and sometime servant Jason Holliday, was one of the year’s major documentary rediscoveries. “Nowadays Portrait of Jason is debated as an example of cinema verite because Clarke so tacitly indulges Holliday’s drama queen instincts, letting him turn a documentary into a one-man show,” J....

In 1969 the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted “Harlem on My Mind,” a collection of photographs, films, and audio recordings that aimed to tell the story of African-Americans in the 20th century, from the Great Migration to the civil rights movement. An outcry accompanied the opening. Critics complained that the show was curated by a white man, Allon Schoener, and designed for white audiences. Twenty-six years later, in an essay titled “Culture and Race: Still on America’s Mind,” the New York Times‘s Michael Kimmelman recalled concerns that the show was “another instance of white voyeurism—the dowager Met slumming at the Cotton Club....

What issue is most important to you in the current election cycle?1. Improving Education in this country–fostering all aspects of learning, including the arts. As an example, my pre-teen nephew had no idea who Shakespeare was. . . .2. Economy and Health Care3. Selection of Supreme Court Justices4. Foreign Policy5. Economy and Health Issues6. Health Care7. Health Care!8. Stop this unjustified war and end America’s policy of preemptive aggression without forfeiting our civil rights....

Leor Galil Kendrick Lamar When I wasn’t watching Christian rappers and counting seapunks during South by Southwest last week, I took time to film some of the bands, musicians, and street dwellers who populated Austin. I wrote about most of the acts I filmed here on the Bleader, but I still wanted to capture some of the things I stumbled upon—like, say, Little Ruckus’s spastic and jubilant one-man party at an unofficial showcase called SXSWendy’s....

Best New Restaurant &Our readers’ choiceThe Publican Alinea doesn’t exist to satisfy hunger. You’ll leave with a full belly, but more significant, you’ll have a lot to think about. Whoever’s picking up the tab, I’d recommend that you forgo the wine pairings and enjoy only a glass or two; otherwise, there’s way too much that’s way too good, and you risk blurring your senses, which—like your memory of this experience—you’ll want to keep sharp....