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Music Box Runner-Up: Logan

WBEZ WXRT Finalists: CHIRP Radio, Vocalo

Q: I’m a 40-year-old bi man. I’ve been with my 33-year-old bi wife for three years and married for one. When we first met, she made it clear that she was in a long-term (more than three years) “Daddy” relationship with an older man. I figured out six months later that her “Daddy” was her boss and business partner. He is married, and his wife does not know. I struggled with their relationship, since I identify as open but not poly....

Kristi Sutton Elais Nicole Mitchell The Chicago-born AACM (Association for the Advancement for Creative Musicians) is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. A lot of festivities are in the pipeline: a series of concerts at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where an exhibition called The Freedom Principle, opening on July 11, will carry a strong AACM focus; a key component of this year’s Chicago Jazz Festival; a monthly concert series at Constellation; the ongoing exhibition at the DuSable Museum of African American History (“Free at First: the Audacious Journey of the Association for the Advancement for Creative Musicians,” which runs through September 6); and other events to come....

According to resident Josh Dumas, the 6Odum building at 2116 W. Chicago will soon be no more. An under-the-radar countercultural hub for more than 20 years, it’s housed performance and practice spaces as well as the Semaphore recording studio; Pieholden Suite Sound, which moved in circa 2010, left on November 1 and will reopen shortly in Logan Square. The building recently changed hands, and it appears likely to be demolished—the new owner hasn’t found new tenants....

This review contains spoilers. The biologist’s willpower, or lack thereof, also figures into the hypnosis subplot. The psychologist, an older woman who commands the team, places her three companions under hypnosis to endure the rigorous crossing into Area X. But after the biologist, leaning too close to the funguslike script, accidentally inhales a shower of spores expelled from one of the flowers, she becomes impervious to the psychologist’s powers of suggestion and learns that she and her fellows are being programmed to enact a secret agenda on behalf of the Southern Reach, the organization that administers the exploration and study of Area X....

Fireside Bowl Runner-Up: Lincoln Square Lanes

Dawn Xiana Moon Jessica McVay Finalists: Jess Tong, Joshua Fletcher

King Krule at Metro

In planning for its 2020 season, Weinberg/Newton Gallery owner and executive director David Weinberg and his team partnered with the ACLU of Illinois to create an exhibition addressing the 2020 election in alignment with the gallery’s mission to engage the public in social justice issues. But faced with social distancing guidelines, and in the interest of public safety, the gallery has been shut down since March, altering previously laid plans. From there, the gallery’s curator and codirector Kasia Houlihan shifted gears and worked to open the exhibition online....

Merchants of Doubt The Tribune modestly chose an outside reviewer to write up the new documentary Merchants of Doubt; I greatly doubt the Trib‘s own critic, Michael Phillips, would have composed a paragraph as careless as this one—which is from Kenneth Turan of the LA Times: In the very same way, says Merchants, the fossil fuel industry now denies that air pollution has anything to do with global warming. It doesn’t just deny; it’s somehow turned denial into a “tribal” marker; if you claim to be a God-fearing conservative American but don’t deny climate change, you betray your tribe....

How’s this for irony: Jesse Eisenberg, who has a penchant for playing ambitious, high-profile business tycoons, is suddenly campaigning against real-life billionaires J.B. Pritzker and Bruce Rauner in support of a “middle-class” governor candidate. “Jesse and Daniel met a few years ago,” says Elliott. “Jesse is really interested in Daniel’s commitment to working families and social services, and he’s showed an interest in helping Daniel get his message out.”

Former Chicago man-about-town Ben Pirani has played a lot of musical roles over the past couple of decades, among them jamming with a bunch of psych bands, including Civilized Age; drumming in maniacal grindcore group My Lai; and playing guitar in blues-rock outfit Chicago Stone Lightning Band. But while Pirani has spent much of his life mastering all the realms of punk and rock, he truly hit his stride about ten years ago, when he started dabbling in funky electro-soul—he made an impression as the hype man for the DJ night he helped found, Windy City Soul Club....

Revolution Brewing Company Runner-Up: DryHop

Onstage or -screen, the tropes of horror (teens in peril, demonic children, stormy nights, rusty saws, etc) have been exhausted for generations. What was once revolutionary is now mostly just revolting torture porn. Which brings us to the hellishly fine cast. The cabin is home to Raleigh (the magnificent Kirsten Fitzgerald) and her children, Marlow (Sara Cartwright), A1656 (Haley Bolithon), Bernie (Kayla Casiano), Squirrel (Autumn Hlava), the Boy (Charlie Herman), and the Ancient (Dado)....

AP Photo/Richard Drew In 2005 the New York Times cracked down on the use of unnamed sources. It wrote itself a new rule. As then public editor Byron Calame explained a few months later, “Readers are to be told why The Times believes a source is entitled to anonymity—a switch from the previous practice of stating why the source asked for it.” By now the Times had a new public editor, Margaret Sullivan, who’d turned anonymous sourcing into a crusade....

It was less than a year ago that Wayne Self’s UpStairs: The Musical was produced at the Pride Arts Center, so it would be reasonable for audiences to confuse it with Circle Theatre’s current production of Max Vernon’s unrelated 2017 musicalThe View UpStairs. It’s sort of an Armageddon/ Deep Impact situation. But considering how far the two shows deviate from a similar starting point, a more apt analogy might be Gremlins and Gremlins 2....

Since 2005, Northwestern University’s American Music Theatre Project has been boosting fledgling musical theater composers. For the young artists whose work will debut this year, AMTP offers a double milestone: the aspiring composers and lyricists (all seniors at NU) will finally see their work—much of it years in the making—on its feet. For months, Khazanchi says, the creators of A Bridge to the Moon could only meet outside, so they’d work on the show while going for walks....

Plenty of couples banter, woo, and fall in love in Chicago, despite the vast majority of American films locating romance elsewhere (most often in New York). But in dramatizing the first date of Barack and Michelle Obama in the summer of 1989, when they were colleagues at a Loop law firm, writer-director Richard Tanne returned to the city where the couple met and, three years later, married. Shot over 15 days last summer, Southside With You showcases a city as photogenic, dynamic, and charming as the lovers themselves....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.