Musicals are famously expensive to produce. (Wicked reportedly cost $14 million to mount on Broadway; touring and local productions are less expensive but remain considerable.) And audiences for musicals are famously conservative, generally preferring shows written 50, 60, or 70 years ago by composers and lyricists who are mostly dead (or Stephen Sondheim) to something new by living artists. One of the three openers, Fanatical, is quite strong, however. And a 33 percent success rate is pretty good....

Al Podgorski / Sun-Times Media Mayor Emanuel and the Chicago Board of Education hoped to pinch a few million pennies by privatizing school cleaning services. In his three years in office, Mayor Emanuel has tried such curious experiments in education as school libraries without librarians and school bathrooms without toilet paper. We, the taxpayers, gave Aramark a three-year, $260 million contract to run janitorial services in most of our schools....

There was a time when air travel was considered glamorous, but then, there was a time when baseball fans wore suits and hats to Wrigley Field (the past truly is a foreign country). The three veteran flight attendants at the center of Marisa Wegrzyn’s Mud Blue Sky, now onstage at A Red Orchid Theatre, bear little resemblance to the Pan Am stewardesses of the old days, with their fashionable uniforms and youthful air of freedom and adventure....

Mud and some muddy sound didn’t spoil day one of Riot Fest. Between shooting Against Me, Faith No More, Living Colour, Motorhead, and other Friday acts, photographer Alison Green turned her lens on the festgoers in Douglas Park to capture the Mohawks, mosh pits, and the pervasive muck.

Chicago hip-hop fans used to speak strictly in terms of rappers, beat makers, and DJs, but over the past few years we’ve also started celebrating saxophonists, guitarists, band leaders, backing vocalists, and poets. As a listener, I get a lot of joy surveying this sprawling world and finding musicians who enhance my understanding of what Chicago hip-hop—and, by extension, Chicago music—is and where it can go. And this fall I’m particularly looking forward to new releases from rapper Roy Kinsey and singer-songwriter Tasha Viets-VanLear, who performs under her first name....

Photographer Alison Green has shot every Pitchfork festival since 2012 for the Reader, but this year she turned her camera away from the larger-than-life acts onstage and toward the everyday heroes who keep the festival running. It’s easy to forget just how many people it takes to put on an event this size—including gate personnel, security guards, the workers who check IDs and hand out those coveted 21-and-over drink wristbands, the vendors at the Book Fort, the CHIRP Record Fair, and your favorite food tents, and of course the roadies and engineers who set up the gear and run the sound checks so you can hear Jamila Woods’s silky, honeyed vocals or Vince Staples’s dense wordplay in his distinctive Long Beach accent....

In September 2006, Matthew Wilhelm, a 25-year-old mechanical engineering graduate who worked for Caterpillar, was cycling on the shoulder of a two-lane highway east of Urbana when he was fatally struck from behind. Police said the driver, 19-year-old Jennifer Stark, was downloading a ringtone on her cell phone at the time, and she was so far off the road that she hit Wilhelm with the driver’s side of the car....

Charles Dickens wrote only two of his 15 novels in the first person: David Copperfield and Great Expectations. Both are semiautobiographical and centrally concerned with class mobility. But in key ways they’re mirror images of each other. David Copperfield, published in 1850, charts the title character’s fulfilling progress from poverty to fortune, his talent and determination bringing him success and happiness. Great Expectations, published a decade later, focuses on young, impoverished Pip—equally talented and determined—whose efforts to better his station bring him mostly anguish, doubt, and a crushing loss of self....

Pitchfork’s second day of wall-to-wall entertainment presents festivalgoers with a lot of tough choices. Two Reader staffers and Fake Shore Drive deputy editor Ty Howard make their calls below—and while I’d never suggest that you follow any of these people around, their schedules sound pretty fun. —Philip Montoro Ty Howard Deputy editor, Fake Shore Drive 6:15 PM Danny Brown. J.R. Nelson Reader writer 1:45 PM Speaking of nuclear waste, it’s superior to most 2014 Brooklyn rap....

Q: I’m a kinky single woman who keeps attracting the wrong men for me—specifically, submissive guys into face sitting. I’m submissive myself, and face sitting is not a turn-on for me. But the vast majority of men who hit on me have this fetish. I think it’s a size-related issue—a my-size-related issue. I’m a full-figured/curvy woman with a big butt. Granted, it’s a fabulous butt, but my butt sends the wrong signals, apparently....

“I really shouldn’t be drinking right now,” says Stephanie, a bikini-clad twentysomething sucking down Modelo Especial from a can. “I’m having surgery in three days.” The unemployed hairstylist momentarily feigns concern before doubling over with impish laughter. Her smile beams bleach-white against a complexion that’s more self-tanner orange than sun-kissed brown. “I’m getting ’em done, again,” she explains, giving her breasts two quick squeezes. “I want ’em bigger—triple D, almost an E!...

Update: According to an Instagram post by Experimental Sound Studio, Greg Fox’s flight to Chicago has been canceled. He will no longer conduct his workshop at ESS or perform at the Hideout. Drummer Greg Fox has been duly celebrated over the last decade for his mind-melting work with a range of heavy projects including Liturgy, Zs, Man Forever, and his own Guardian Alien. Now Fox has let his curiosity take him beyond his rock chops into different sound worlds....

Peter Yang Amy Schumer 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.

Greys 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.

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

Rex Harrison in Doctor Dolittle A week and a half ago I got doored while riding my bike. Apart from my bike’s frame I didn’t break or fracture anything, though I was sufficiently bruised for the ER doctor to prescribe six days’ worth of hydrocodone. I spent most of those days asleep and was still woozy for several days after that. To my pleasant surprise, though, I found this made at least one movie I had to watch for work seem more tolerable than I would have thought otherwise....

One problem for anyone trying to write about Twin Peaks: The Return, of which four episodes have already aired on Showtime, is that it’s impossible to predict where it will go next. This predicament was also somewhat true of Twin Peaks, the ABC TV show produced by Mark Frost and David Lynch that debuted in 1990, ran for two seasons (one consisting of eight episodes, the other an oddly weakened 22), and led to the feature-film prequel, written and directed by Lynch, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me....

Gossip Wolf loves a record-release show, especially when more than one act is partying! On Thursday, April 20, five solid local bands play at two different venues, and they’re all celebrating new releases. This wolf is gonna need a wheelbarrow to carry the merch! The Hideout hosts three of the bands in question: psych merchants Dark Fog (see concert preview), stoner-rock combo Bionic Cavemen, and funky rock weirdos the Velcro Lewis Group, who describe their own Taking Frogg Mountain as sounding like Funkadelic bootlegs, Euro-horror erotica, and Hawkwind....