Make It Better, July-August 2018 — Read my recommendations for Chicago-area plays.
Photo by Liz Lauren
Make It Better, July-August 2018 — Read my recommendations for Chicago-area plays.
Photo by Liz Lauren
Chicago Magazine, June 27, 2018 — From epic game dinners (including ibex ham and juniper-soaked bear) to lobster palaces to revered railroad cuisine that took advantage of food available along the journey, Chicago chefs were pioneers long before the city was a food destination. Read the story.
Crain’s Chicago Business, June 24, 2018 — Chicago area’s 50 fastest-growing businesses. Read my contribution about the No. 4 company on the list, Hireology.
Chicago Magazine website, May 17, 2018 — The ubiquitous plastic vessel has come a long way: from South Side immigrant inventors to big business in Lake Forest, a Toby Keith hit to syndicated TV specials starring its inventor’s wife—and now a galaxy far, far away. Read the story.
Crain’s Chicago Business, May 4, 2018 — Read my recommendations for concerts, movies and outdoor events.
Playbill, May 2018 — Done on a tiny budget of $150,000, the independent Irish film Once barely made it into theaters. And it easily could have disappeared without a trace, but audiences were captivated by its simple story about two musicians writing songs together and falling in love. After it screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007, Chicago Tribune critic Michael Phillips became one of its earliest and most enthusiastic champions, calling it “the best music film of any stripe” anyone had made in decades.
But was director John Carney’s film a musical? Not exactly. It certainly wasn’t one of those spectacles where characters suddenly burst into song while fantasy dance numbers break out around them. In fact, it felt more like a documentary, with cameras capturing intimate moments from the real lives of people struggling to make a living with their music. Read the rest of my story about Once at the Paramount Aurora.
Photo by Liz Lauren
WBEZ’s Curious City, April 28, 2018 — Read my interactive online story about some of Chicago’s oddest laws, and listen to the audio story about the city’s oldest laws:
Audio production by Laura Pavin | Illustrations by Nate Otto | Digital production by Katherine Nagasawa | Edited by Alexandra Salomon
Make It Better, May-June 2018 — Read my recommendations for Chicago-area plays.
Photo by David Jensen
Playbill, March 2018 — Cooking contests are an American pastime. After a long history of local bake-offs at county fairs and churches around the country, competitions hit the big time in 1949, when Pillsbury held its first national recipe contest. During that prosperous post-World War II era, Americans were watching television for the first time and buying new gadgets for their kitchens. And hundreds of thousands of people were hoping to strike it rich by concocting a tasty dish no one had ever sampled before.
Most of those contestants were women. This was the 1950s, after all, a time when the kitchen was still seen as the traditional domain of housewives. The lives of those women—and their kitchen conversations—are captured in the new musical, A Taste of Things to Come, which runs March 20 to April 29 at the Broadway Playhouse at Water Tower Place.
Read my story.
Photo by Carol Rosegg
Crain’s Chicago Business, March 9, 2018 — Read my recommendations for the spring’s rock, folk and world music concerts.
Photo by Robert Loerzel