CHRISTOPHER DRUKKER Karl Berger You might’ve been able to glean from some of my Soundboard items that this is a pretty busy weekend, jazzwise. On Saturday night trumpeter Russ Johnson brings his excellent Eric Dolphy project to Constellation, but the big action is happening mostly at Hyde Park’s Promontory, where HotHouse makes a splash from beyond the grave with the Old and New Dreams Festival, an action-packed three-day event where the venue founded by Marguerite Horberg will make some kind of announcement about its return to a new location in Bronzeville, although I’m betting details will be sparse....

“We are not ourselves.” —Victims of Duty Big mistake. The Detective is looking for a malefactor named Mallot. Does Choubert know him? No? Well, no matter. Through a process of bullying and insinuation, the Detective convinces not only himself but Choubert that Choubert is Mallot’s pal. Through 8/5: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Tue 7/31 7:30 PM and Sun 7/29 7:30 PM, no performances Wed 7/18, Fri 7/27, Thu 8/2, A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N....

Alvin B. Waddles III Too Hot to Handel: The Jazz-Gospel Messiah is your grandmother’s choral classic sliced, diced, spiced, swirled, swung, amplified, and totally reinvented. You can still catch it today at 3 PM at the Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress. Tickets are $25-$68 at the box office or Ticketmaster. There’ll be a postperformance discussion with the artists.

When I bought my beautiful brown-felt fedora from him a few years ago, Optimo owner Graham Thompson was still operating out of a combination storefront and factory on Western Avenue in Beverly, where the hat-making happened on premises. Things have changed. In 2016, Thompson moved production to a former firehouse on 95th; if you want to buy a hat, you head for the store at 51 W. Jackson, in the Monadnock Building....

John Madere Chip Kidd 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.

“There is only one thing I know about life. If you live long enough you start losing things. Things get stolen from you: First you lose your youth, and then your parents, and then you lose your friends, and finally you end up losing yourself.” Throughout The Sarah Book McClanahan portrays himself as an agent of chaos and misery, detailing the ways in which his tantrums, fixations, and paranoias hurt his wife, children, and everyone else he comes into contact with; and yet the reader neither pities nor despises him....

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

The Warriors Each Friday, we recommend seven Old Movies to Watch Now, all of which come recommended by one of our critics and can currently be screened online. Read the review, watch the movie, feel accomplished. The Warriors, the tenacious cult classic from Walter Hill.

Magic Mike XXL In this week’s issue J.R. Jones looks at the number one new release in America, Magic Mike XXL, alongside two sexually themed indie comedies, The Overnight and The Little Death, and finds that the latest Channing Tatum vehicle just doesn’t measure up. Magic Mike XXL, incidentally, is not the stupidest title of any new movie we review this week. That would be Terminator Genisys, the fourth sequel to James Cameron’s 1984 sci-fi classic....

Lucille Bluth can’t believe that the time to vote for 2014’s Best of Chicago is almost over. Time flies. Take our Best of Chicago voting: it seems like only yesterday that we made BOC ballots open to the public. Now that time is coming to a close. We’re wrapping up voting in our Best of Chicago Readers’ Poll at 9 AM on Monday, May 12. So if you haven’t voted in our Best of Chicago poll, you might want to get started, er, NOW....

Botellita de Cielo/Wikimedia Commons The Afghan Whigs You can infer from our announcement of the full Riot Fest lineup that there is a surplus of acts to see this weekend. Despite the range of bands and solo artists playing the festival, I was nonetheless surprised to find that the Afghan Whigs are on Saturday’s bill. During the 90s the Greg Dulli-fronted Cincinnati band were viewed as a weirder (not wackier), stylistically varied alternative to much of the “alternative” grunge music proliferating at the time....

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek Today at 11:30 AM, the Music Box screens Unfaithfully Yours, a late film by the great satirist Preston Sturges. It isn’t among my favorite of his films—what Dave Kehr calls a “[move] toward a more Lubitschian elegance,” I’d describe as a softening of his sensibilities, though that’s in no way meant to disparage the great Ernst Lubitsch. Even with the film’s dark sensibilities, it lacks the bite of his best work, the unique brand of satire that’s simultaneously pessimistic and jocund....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. I Live Inside A Burning House by Body Void Ólafur Arnalds I’ve been listening to Icelandic minimalist composer and pianist Ólafur Arnalds since 2008, when I discovered his first album, Eulogy for Evolution. Arnalds creates music that paints grand landscapes in your mind and makes you breathe deep breaths of sadness, joy, and wonder....

Courtesy Chicago Nerd Comedy Festival Chicago Nerd Comedy Festival 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.

“If we’re doing a play about Mao, to a 21st-century American audience,” says Mike, a character in Christopher Chen’s The Hundred Flowers Project, “then we should assume they don’t know any Chinese history.” OK, let’s assume that. Here are three events you’ll need to know about if you’re going to keep up with Chen’s frantic, flawed, wildly ambitious piece of work, running now at Silk Road Rising in a version directed by Joanie Schultz:...

In a recent feature published in the New York Times Lindsey Jordan, who makes music under the name Snail Mail, said of the material she wrote for her debut full-length Lush (Matador), “The songs all had to have that moment for me where I feel like when I was playing live I could cry.” Though she’s only 18, her musical prepossession and clarity, cool precision, and depth as a singer would suggest someone older....

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

It’s been two years since Gossip Wolf mentioned an event by the Black and Brown Punk Show Collective, which advocates for POC in the DIY scene—but it would’ve been flat-out negligent to overlook this weekend’s two-day festival at ChiTown Futbol, entitled Or Does It Explode. The fest’s 21 acts include more than punk—Saturday’s bill features local rapper and self-described “gender abolitionist” Sol Patches, for instance. Both nights’ headliners are Chicago hardcore heroes: Los Crudos on Saturday and La Armada on Sunday....

Tommy Murphy’s 2006 adaptation of Australian actor and writer Timothy Conigrave’s 1995 coming-of-age memoir is a difficult pill to swallow, for reasons that shift halfway through this two-and-a-half-hour show. For most of the first act, the difficulty arises largely from the surface-skipping breeziness that turns Conigrave’s first two decades of life-discovering he’s gay in his prepubescent years, falling head over heels for the class jock in high school, stumbling upon gay rights activism in college—into a scattershot, oddly impersonal, and at time credulity-straining highlights reel (did none of Conigrave’s mid-1970s high school classmates, including his putative girlfriend, display even the tiniest unease with his open homosexuality?...