Peter Engler Gyros at Gyros on the Spit Even in my most impaired moments I’ve never been able to stomach the gray, mulched meatstuff whittled away from the ubiquitous rotating gyros cone. I know that’s borderline heresy given that Chicago is pretty much the capital of mass-production gyros, tzatziki-drenched sop to an infinity of hangovers. But I don’t see why anyone would ever opt for that stuff when there’s so much perfectly good shawerma to be had....

Thodos Dance Chicago has never been about one person alone. Over the last 25 years, the company has hired dancers, yes, but more importantly, it hires dance makers. During auditions for the company, founder Melissa Thodos has consistently looked for people who bring creative intangibles to the studio other than technique—a cornerstone that has made Thodos a local standout. That feeling is never more evident than during the company’s annual New Dances series, one of the city’s longest running in-house choreography incubators and an annual summer showcase that gives current and rising dancers an opportunity to hone new material, almost always different in style and tone....

Peter Hapak Beck Given how long getting across Union Park can take when it’s filled with festivalgoers, it pays to plan ahead. Pitchfork’s schedule tends to make you wish you could be in two places at once (whose idea was it to have Kelela overlap with Tune-Yards, or St. Vincent with FKA Twigs?), but barring sudden, radical advances in wormhole technology, that won’t be an option. These day-by-day, hour-by-hour itineraries, assembled by Reader staffers and a few obliging friends (plus one contest winner), ought to help you decide where to go....

Courtesy of Illinois Federation of Teachers Members of the faculty union at the University of Illinois at Chicago are about to make good on their long-developing threat of a walkout. UICUF president and economics professor Joe Persky says the walkout is meant to “show them we’re serious,” while the two-day period was chosen in an attempt to minimize the impact on students. Since most classes meet either Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, or Tuesday and Thursday, “the idea was that each course will lose only one class,” he says....

Laquan McDonald was armed with a knife and acting erratically on the evening of October 20, 2014. The 17-year-old had already used the knife to pop the tire of a police car and scratch its windshield. He’d ignored orders from officers to drop the knife. He had PCP, a hallucinogenic that can cause combativeness, in his bloodstream. Gaughan, 74, was an apt draw for several reasons. He’s a 25-year veteran of the bench....

I never watched Three’s Company during its eight seasons on ABC (1977-1984), so I googled some old episodes to prep for this review of David Adjmi‘s dark parody, 3C, running now at A Red Orchid Theatre. And just . . . Lord. Adjmi’s larger intention, though, is to expose what Marx and Monty Python might call the violence inherent in a homophobic system. By tearing out the sitcom’s cultural safety features—including its assurance that Jack is a conventional horndog at heart—3C means to bare its nasty underpinnings....

As I wrote in my year-in-review piece on overlooked Chicago hip-hop, no agreed-upon variables exist to help determine which releases are definitively “overlooked.” I’m less willing to characterize artists that way if I notice that, say, publications outside the city are giving them attention—but some musicians are so good that even when they start to get popular, it’s hard not to feel that they deserve still more fans. Maybe “underappreciated,” not “overlooked,” is the better word here....

Ryan Bardsley The Great Chicago Fire Festival promises pyrotechnics. Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

COURTESY OF BIG HASSLE Battle Trance Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

Courtesy Pitch Perfect PR Jack Name Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

Midwestern Cuisine Running a cafe that’s located inside a locavore superstore means that Abra Berens has at her fingertips the freshest seasonal fruits and vegetables, lovingly grown and harvested on midwestern farms. From her station in Stock’s open kitchen, the chef, a farmer herself, is able to survey Local Foods’ produce cooler, which in late September overflows with peppers, cauliflower, corn, and squashes. Here she gets a feel for what’s in abundance without having to look at an availability sheet like the other local chefs who source ingredients from the four-month-old grocer and wholesaler....

Justin Townes Earle The country blues man stops by City Winery to play some tunes. His last two albums, the companion pieces Single Mothers and Absent Father, were released less than a year apart, adding to a quality discography that features records released on local label Bloodshot Records. Expect songs old and new tonight. Brooklyn Brewery Mash Tour Chicago folks normally don’t take too kindly to New Yorkers, but I think we can make an exception when tasty beverages are involved....

No one needs another spiel about Why George Saunders Is Important. He’s “the writer for our time,” according to the New York Times Magazine, which laid that honorific at Saunders’s feet in 2013 upon the publication of his story collection Tenth of December. And with the release last week of Lincoln in the Bardo, he became a long-awaited first-time novelist at age 58. But you’re probably aware of this already. What I wanted to find out is: What don’t we know about George Saunders?...

Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove One of the supreme pleasures of the new 35-millimeter restoration of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (which screens for two more nights at the Music Box) is that it allows you to celebrate how grainy Stanley Kubrick’s movies are. I can’t think of many other comedies that look like Strangelove, with its sci-fi mise-en-scene and newsreel-style matter-of-factness....

Portrait of Jason Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

Sun-Times Media Jon Anderson, 1974 Jon Anderson was impossibly handsome and he married a Rockefeller. If there is more to him than that, Chicago wasn’t dying to know about it. Editors at the Tribune read my column. Before Iowa, he’d worked there 11 years. When they discovered he was in town again and available, they hired him back. In conversations with me, he’d construe this as his good fortune and thank me....

Robert Falls marks three decades as artistic director of Goodman Theatre this year. So how does he celebrate? In part by directing Uncle Vanya—Anton Chekhov’s dark comedy about a bunch of miserable Russians, facing mortality with the growing certainty that they’ve wasted their lives. Chekhov’s title character is a 47-year-old, unmarried gentleman farmer, living on the family estate he runs with his adult niece, Sonya. We’re told Vanya used to be passionate—”lit from within,” in fact....

Any dance acolyte knows that “virtuoso” is the proper adjective to glue in front of the name Savion Glover. The prodigy of hoofing—distinguished from traditional tap by its heightened interest in improvisational riffs and its lowered interest in incorporating the body, focusing mainly on the feet—has a unique, incessant style. His tremolo is like syncopated lightning. His staccato sounds like a rattlesnake on amphetamines. Once he finds his groove he barely rests a fraction of a beat—and in the interim he seems be using his hands to snakecharm the beat out of the floor and into his shoes....