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Mixed Motion Art 1102 N. Ashland 773-888-1662 mixedmotionart.com Runner-Up: Stage 773

As You Like It Midsommer Flight’s As You Like It is outdoor Shakespeare done the old-fashioned way, complete with Elizabethan costumes and musical interludes. The banished duke’s daughter, Rosalind (Emily Demko), and her sisterly cousin, Celia (Charlee Cotton), flee the frigid atmosphere of court for a life of revelry and disguise amid the forests of Arden. They bring the motley fool Touchstone (Adam Habben) along for the ride; despite overemphasizing his punch lines from time to time, Habben makes a fine clown....

Kim Gordon always struck me as the Sonic Youth member most rooted in a primal punk foundation. Her no-frills bass lines anchored the chaos surrounding them, and the songs she sang lead on always packed a streamlined gut punch. That makes it all the more interesting that in our post-Sonic Youth landscape, she’s the only member who’s really letting her freak flag fly. While Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo continue to release Sonic Youth-lite indie-rock records with various projects, Gordon’s been going strong with Body/Head, her guitar duo with experimental musician Bill Nace....

MICHAEL EGON SCHIELE Toupee Creepy local postpunk band Toupee have released their first music video this week, a gross clip for the song “Mommy is a Mummy,” off of July’s upcoming Leg Toucher LP. “Mommy Is a Mummy,” today’s 12 O’Clock Track, is a chaotic, dark blast of eerie, bizarre punk that features the theatrical, twisted vocals of Whitney Allen, who contorts her voice into monstrous growls and desperate wails through the blur or reckless drums and harsh guitars....

When house music is recounted in books, television shows, and other media, three things are always mentioned: Chicago, the Warehouse club, and Frankie Knuckles. UrbanTheater Company’s Back in the Day, written by artistic director Miranda González and based on José “Gringo” Echevarría’s memoir The Real Dance Fever: Book One, fills in the blanks of mainstream retellings with an all-encompassing “dancesical” of teens in the underage club scene that laid the foundation for house parties today....

Donald Trump is full of shit. Is this opportunism masquerading as pop art? Maybe. But it’s way better than Ted Cruz “the Liberator.”

One cannot truly write an obituary for Chicago improv, because improv, like a zombie, is inherently undead. And like most horror flicks, improv is filled with the exciting thrill of watching actors delight without the safety net of the script, combined with legitimately disturbing scares. But in improv, some scares aren’t fiction—they are the very real horrors of harassment and racism. The Black Lives Matter movement served as a catalyst for a long-overdue reckoning for major institutions, exposing inexplicable negligence under the harsh interrogation lights of social media and outlets like the New York Times....

Almost 14 years ago, a YouTube user posted a homemade music video of sorts for “You Should All Be Murdered,” an even older song by Another Sunny Day, the solo project of UK singer-songwriter Harvey Williams. It was originally released on the band’s 1992 album London Weekend, and I’ve included it on many mixtapes and playlists since rediscovering it years later. “You Should All Be Murdered” shares the jangly guitar and moody lyrics typical of mid-80s Smiths (and Williams sounds uncannily like golden-era Steven Patrick Morrissey—you know, before we knew he’s a racist)....

Four-piece Massachusetts postmetal band Astronoid took three years to follow up their 2016 debut, Air, with a new full-length, a self-titled album that dropped in February on Blood Music. That’s because the type of music they play doesn’t just fall together; it takes a lot of work. Astronoid’s sound is a dreamy fusion of metal, prog, and shoegaze, and because they have roots in black metal, they use its dark satanic rhythms as a foundation atop which to build risers in the sky for a celestial choir....

A couple months before he dropped June’s Beautiful Thugger Girls (300/Atlantic), Young Thug tweeted it would be his “singing album.” But to expect Thug would follow any traditional concept of singing would be to ignore his track record of eschewing what had been generally accepted as rap’s norms. As he rose to fame he didn’t just blur rapping and singing, he rearranged words at their molecular level to render even the most rote turns of phrase alive, for example, slowly wringing the words “play with my money” on “Wyclef Jean” off last year’s Jeffery....

Evanston Subaru Toyota of Lincoln Park Finalists: Howard Orloff Imports, Berman Auto Group

Joe’s Barbershop Chicago 2641 W. Fullerton 773-252-3980 joesbarbershopchicago.com Runner-Up: Rev. Billy’s Chop Shop

The Lives of Robert Ryanby J.R. Jones Runner-Up: The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregationby Natalie Y. Moore

Second City and Hubbard Street Dance’s The Art of Falling Dance and comedy don’t inherently go together; one is an art form all about precision and grace while the other finds laughs in bumbling. Yet Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and the Second City managed to find common ground for their visually stunning and effortlessly hilarious show The Art of Falling. Otherwise left-footed comedians held their own during group numbers with the contemporary dancers, who in turn expertly nailed comedic beats throughout....

Bil Vermette has been making ambient and electronic soundscapes for more than 40 years, and his new album, Hunting for Planet 9, won’t disappoint fans looking for another collection of instrumental, synthesizer-heavy space waves to add to their playlist. The Berwyn musician became known for his hypnotic compositions as a member of late-70s synth collective VCSR, and after the band split in the early 80s, Vermette began self-releasing solo work on his own Rainforest Productions label, starting with 1984’s Katha Visions (reissued in 2013 by the Galactic Archive label run by Reader contributor Steve Krakow, in conjunction with Permanent Records)....

P Perhaps she was passed over, she muses, because unlike Rasheed (Al’Jaleel McGhee), who got the job, she’s “not black enough.” This problematic sentiment, combined with her insistence that she doesn’t date “black guys” and her habit of wearing a wig of long, straight, light brown hair, sets Margaret up as the self-hater in the play’s subtitle. It’s a shame, because Nwandu’s writing shows moments of engrossing nuance, the sort that might make Margaret’s journey wholly convincing....

Berlin Roscoe’s Finalists: Lips Drag Queen Show Palace, Smart Bar/Queen!

Logan Square Farmers Market Runner-Up: Green City Market

City Winery