500 CLOWN MACBETH | 500 CLOWN at steppenwolf WHEN Through 7/28 (Macbeth) and 7/29 (Frankenstein); see listings for schedules Murder and mayhem get the comic treatment in 500 Clown’s interpretations of Shakespeare and Shelley, but recent horrific events lend a dark, bitter edge to the hilarious 500 Clown Macbeth (2000) and the loopy 500 Clown Frankenstein (2003), both revived at Steppenwolf as part of its Visiting Company Initiative. The first was created before the Iraq war, the second before the torture at Abu Ghraib was made public, and neither work has been substantially changed since its debut....

For a while in 2007 it looked like Freddie Gibbs might become a rap star. He had a development deal with Interscope and a recording budget big enough to buy beats from proven hit makers like Polow da Don, Just Blaze, and the Alchemist. Raised in Gary, Indiana, he’d moved to LA to take his shot, and at 22, Gibbs was by all appearances living every young rapper’s dream. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ll admit that I had certain negative expectations of LA’s Whispertown 2000, the first act to release something on Acony Records besides owners Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. But can you blame me? The name is awful close to Whiskeytown, and bassist Carey Wisenbaker was sporting overalls and a straw hat on the album cover, and so I approached Swim with trepidation....

Lee Blessing’s engrossing character study-cum-murder mystery chronicles the 60-year relationship of two small-town gay men, which is fatefully changed by an incident of horrifying violence. Jumping back and forth in time, the drama requires three pairs of actors to play the central characters at different ages–as teenagers in 1948, middle-aged guys in 1973, and old men today. Blessing’s unusual narrative structure demands performances of unrelenting honesty, and director Jarrett Dapier’s wonderful cast rises to the challenge....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s hard not to like Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar; his excellent 2012 album, Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City, made the man one of the few big sticks by which everything else in hip-hop has since been measured, and in August his rap-game hydrogen-bomb contribution to Big Sean’s “Control” made the tune the focus of more passionate conversations about the state of the genre than any Big Sean song has any right to be....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tomorrow night’s program of Georges Melies silent featurettes at Sonotheque, screening (presumably from DVD) as part of Gabe Klinger and Joe Bryl‘s “Magic in Cinema” showcase, seems as close to film nirvana as anything this curmudgeonly seeker could ever hope to find, format be damned. Melies invariably blows me away—maybe because the imagination’s so transparent, the ideas so ingenuous and raw, with all the technical seams showing....

In mid-April the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation organized an unusual field trip. The nonprofit bike-advocacy group flew community leaders and a couple city officials to Guadalajara, Mexico, for the weekend to see the Via Recreativa, seven miles of major thoroughfares that are closed every Sunday morning to let bikers, joggers, skaters–anyone on the move without a motor–take over the streets. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sadowsky says the idea was easy to sell to the mayor’s office, the Park District, the Department of Transportation, 35th Ward alderman Rey Colon (whose ward, encompassing much of Logan Square, ranked second to last in an audit of neighborhood open space in 2004), and the Logan Square Chamber of Commerce, whose executive director, Josh Deth, owns the bike-themed Handlebar restaurant, where bar stools are constructed from old rims and bike messengers get a discount....

Thunder only happens when it’s raining. Today I’m going to Los Angeles for a six-day vacation. People associate cities with all sorts of things—memories, dreams, or pieces of art. For whatever reason, I think of Fleetwood Mac when I think of LA. The sound of the music and my impression of LA are inseparable. Like LA, Fleetwood Mac initially gives off a tacky and artificial impression. Their music has glossy surfaces and breezy instrumentation—cleanly recorded acoustic guitars, brushed drums, and silky keyboard parts—it’s the kind of music you expect to play in stores where you buy candles and bath products....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Well before (illegal) file sharing and the era of everything reissued always, if you wanted to rip music from a friend you had to dub it with, say, a mid-80s Sansui dual casette deck from Kmart. My copy of Butt Trumpet’s 1994 masterpiece, Primitive Enema, was a dub of a dubbed cassette dubbed from a dubbed cassette and sounded like a mound of garbage bludgeoned with a sewer lid....

No one lives in a vacuum. That’s the obvious yet infinitely complex fact driving Vital Signs and Until I Connect With Another—the two new pieces choreographer Colleen Halloran is preparing for “Ground Effect,” a concert that also features work by Liz Burritt and Paige Cunningham Caldarella. Halloran says that the trio Vital Signs looks at what happens when you put “damaged people—damaged in the normal way that everybody is—body to body....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “He and Pat like to speculate about a day when whole chunks of English, especially the bits that constitute folk psychology, are replaced by scientific words that call a thing by its proper name rather than some outworn metaphor. Surely this will happen, they think, and as people learn to speak differently they will learn to experience differently, and sooner or later even their most private introspections will be affected....

Courtesy of nexttheatre.org Wesley Daniel The Lyric Opera of Chicago has issued a statement on the condition of Wesley Daniel, the young actor who suffered burns last night at a dress rehearsal for Die Meistersinger, when a fire-breathing “effect” went wrong. It was reported that Daniel had seared the inside of his throat, but the statement contradicts that. Here it is in its entirety: “Wesley Daniel, who was injured yesterday in a rehearsal at Lyric Opera of Chicago, is likely to return home Thursday....

Anthony Suau/Chicago Sun-Times Jane Byrne with Dan Aykroyd and and John Belushi in 1980 When Jane Byrne died last month, the Reader put together a package of articles we’d published on Byrne over the years. They made good reading—better reading, I believe, than the indulgent eulogies other media produced in haste for the occasion. Byrne is easily sentimentalized and we avoided that—by presenting stories written when sentimentality wasn’t a temptation....

FESTIVAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Presented by the Foundation for Asian American Independent Media and the Gene Siskel Film Center, the 16th annual Asian American Showcase runs Friday, April 1, through Thursday, April 14. Among the features screening this week are Chil Kong’s documentary The Mikado Project, about an experimental Asian-American theater company thrown into turmoil by the artistic director’s suggestion that they stage Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (Sat 4/2, 6:30 PM); Miao Wang’s documentary Beijing Taxi, which focuses on three cabdrivers in the Chinese metropolis (Sun 4/3, 6 PM, and Wed 4/6, 8 PM); and Lesley Loksi Chan’s documentary Redress Remix, about the reactions of Canadian Chinese to the official apology of Prime Minister Stephen Harper for the nation’s history of institutionalized racism (Mon 4/4, 6:15 PM)....

Is theater becoming a “lost art”? That’s one of the concerns addressed in Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play, a new book funded and published by the Theatre Development Fund. According to co-author Todd London, a former Chicagoan and artistic director of New Dramatists in New York, the book seeks “to paint the most comprehensive picture possible of how plays get written and produced in America....

Say your parents and in-laws, combined, are 50 percent Italian. Generally speaking, that means they want to eat Italian half the time. It also means they expect it to be good—you know, nonna good—as determined by the preparation of the red sauce (the first topic of conversation raised by my mother upon meeting any other soul with Italian blood) and the authenticity of the meatballs (like, there better be pignolis and raisins in there if your people claim to be from Naples)....

An African-American version of Citizen Kane? Great idea. Even historically valid, since Chicago Defender founder Robert S. Abbott–a clear model for this play’s tragic black newspaper mogul, Ciaphus Julius Caesar–displayed the same combination of high-mindedness and low cunning as William Randolph Hearst, the model for Orson Welles’s Charles Foster Kane. But playwright David Barr III fritters away his great and valid idea, principally by drawing our focus away from Caesar to the alcoholic reporter assigned to write Caesar’s journalistic epitaph, thus gumming up the narrative....

Chicago indie-rock duo Orisun indulge in their lo-fi proclivities without ever giving in to slacker entropy. On their self-released debut EP, May’s This Is Orisun, multi-instrumentalist Kai Black and front person Asha Adisa artfully employ gossamer guitars, sophisticated keys, precisely programmed percussion with dampened drums, and relaxed, alluring vocals to calibrate moods that test the bounds of tranquility. Orisun can draw you in quickly—they give the gloomy atmosphere of “Miserable” a dose of animated energy with a straight-to-the-gut grunge riff....

“Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes” includes a long case displaying original issues of Clowes’s seminal 90s comic Eightball. They’re under glass, of course. They’re also, and somewhat surprisingly, in clear plastic bags, like the kind that encase back issues in comic shops. Clowes was born and grew up in Chicago, and he spent his early artistic career here as well, so the murals have a personal resonance. And it’s fun to try to identify both Clowes’s characters and Chicago landmarks in the images....

The NYT Mag‘s cover story this week is a fascinating exploration of CeaseFire (you will surely recognize their “Stop. Killing. People.” slogan) by Alex Kotlowitz, the purpose of which is to basically stop escalation on a case-by-case basis. In other words, CeaseFire’s employees, many of whom are ex-cons familiar with the territory, seek out the recently shot, beaten, or just offended and try to convince them not to seek revenge. It’s been around awhile, but with the evolution of local gangs into smaller, non-hierarchical, more chaotic groups–“a wilder group of youngsters now running the streets and by a gang structure that is no longer top-down but is instead made up of many small groups — which they refer to as cliques — whose members are answerable to a handful of peers”–the insider knowledge that CeaseFire provides will undoubtedly be useful....