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Altar Boyz This toothless send-up of boy bands, Christian rock, and Catholicism (music and lyrics by Gary Adler and Michael Patrick Walker, book by Kevin Del Aguila, based on an idea by Marc J. Kessler and Ken Davenport) is too gentle to be called satire, too tongue-in-cheek to be taken seriously, too risque to be religious. The tunes, though, are easy on the ear, and the lyrics witty—or at least witty enough to keep an audience’s attention....

Joseph Michael’s Salon and Spa 1313 N. Ritchie 312-482-9800 josephmichaels.net Runner-Up: Nail Fetish

So you want to start watching Indian movies. Where to begin? The truth is, there is no one single starting point for such a wide and varied industry—or rather, series of interconnected industries, subdivided by region and language, producing nearly 2,000 films a year. Fandry (directed by Nagraj Manjule) Combining the worlds of the colonialism period-piece, the Bollywood musical, and the increasingly popular cricket movie, Lagaan (2001) was India’s last Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee, and with good reason....

The latest Cocktail Challenge, in which local bartenders challenge fellow bartenders with an ingredient of their choice. He describes the cocktail as boozy, salty, sweet, and a bit spicy. “It’s got a lot going on, but I think it actually turned out OK,” he says. Not that he’s planning to serve it at Gilt Bar. “It’s pretty salty—if you know what you’re getting into, it tastes good, but I don’t know if salty drinks are going to be fashionable anytime soon....

roadtrippers.com This is a buried giant in Chesterfield, Missouri. Kazuo Ishiguro is a writer who really tries the patience of his readers. First he made us wait ten years for his follow-up to Never Let Me Go. And it turns out to be The Buried Giant. This makes reading The Buried Giant an eminently frustrating experience, even if you remember Never Let Me Go and that Isiguro is a master of the slow burn....

Former Chicagon Ben Babbitt knocked me out with his 2014 score for the third act of Kentucky Route Zero, a magical-realist video game by Chicago indie developer Cardboard Computer. The fourth act came out last month, which I learned when I got an e-mail from Bandcamp this weekend alerting me to the release of Babbitt’s score for it. It’s immersive, largely instrumental, and suffused with wistfulness and mystery—I’ve listened to it several times a day all week....

90 Miles Cuban Cafe

Lucy Stoole Derry Queen Finalists: Abortia De Rossi, Aunty Chan

Greek Islands Athenian Room

Chicago Diner various locationsveggiediner.com Runner-Up: Upton’s Breakroom

Starting a theater company any time is tough. Starting one right before a pandemic shuts down performing arts venues around the globe is maybe the worst possible timing. But for Perceptions Theatre, going digital with their first full show provided possibilities they hadn’t imagined. And that show—Black Magic by Jerluane “Jay” Jenkins—addresses issues of pain and loss for Black women in ways that feel particularly poignant right now. Perceptions was in its second day of auditions for a live staging of Black Magic when they realized that the shutdown was coming....

The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. This article was written more than 25 years ago, but none of the underlying issues have changed very much.

The other night I was talking to a friend about the way a properly deployed hand-clap pattern can make a good pop or rock song great. There are countless gems out there with well-placed claps—”Hey Ya!” by Outkast, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles, “Stuck in the Middle With You” by Stealers Wheel—but the tune I always turn to first to make this point is the 1966 stomper “Shot Down” by Seattle protopunks the Sonics....

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Media Alderman Danny Solis still can’t explain where $140,000 for arts and culture projects disappeared to. If you find the $140,000 missing from the 25th Ward, please let Alderman Solis’s office know. In 2013, the ward contracted the artist collective Pawn Works to recruit muralists for the ward’s Art in Public Places initiative. By the end of that year, the group was still owed $16,000 of the $30,000 it was promised....

Do you know your mother? I don’t mean her identity but who she is as a person. Does she know you? Truly know you. Mother-daughter relationships are fraught even under ideal conditions. What if your mother has dark secrets she’s unwilling to divulge? What if she might be mentally ill? How about if she develops degenerative dementia causing her to fade away before your very eyes? Toronto-based poet Damian Rogers grapples with these issues and much else in her graceful, melancholy memoir An Alphabet for Joanna: A Portrait of My Mother in 26 Fragments (Knopf Canada)....

We Were Feminists Once (PublicAffairs), the new book from Andi Zeisler, cofounder of Bitch Media, takes aim at “marketplace feminism,” a specific kind of politicking that embraces a Midas-like sensibility: if a woman touches it, it must be feminist. In anticipation of her appearance at the Printers Row Lit Fest on Saturday, I spoke with Zeisler about the changes in media that created this phenomenon. That’s a good question. I don’t think marketplace feminism replaced activist feminism....

Alice’s Runner-Up: Lincoln Karaoke

It’s nearly officially spring—the equinox is March 20—and it’s time to plan the weekend. Here’s some of what we recommend: Fri 3/18-Thu 3/24: John Mulaney and Nick Kroll bring their characters George St. Geegland and Gil Faizon to the Athenaeum Theatre (2936 N. Southport) for Oh, Hello. They’re a pair of self-proclaimed “racist liberals” who met in Toronto while dodging the draft during the Vietnam war, and they bonded over a shared love of wearing turtlenecks with blazers....