2521 N. Clark 312-638-9151 chicagofalafel.com Runner-Up Taste of Lebanon

Hyde Park Runner-Up Halsted & North Brown/Purple Line

Around 1997, before the CTA used payment cards, wine company owner Rodney Alex, now 50, got locked up for fare evasion after jumping the turnstile at the Harrison Red Line stop, next to Jones College Prep high school. When he and the officers showed up for his court date, the judge dismissed the charges. “He seemed kind of annoyed,” Alex says. “There’s no way cops should be wasting time taking someone in for stealing $2....

Even though this highly fictionalized 1972 musical, based on the life of the ne’er-do-well son of the eighth-century warrior king Charlemagne was made for the Broadway stage—where it ran for 1,944 performances from October 23, 1972, to June 12, 1977—it transfers very gracefully to a considerably smaller cabaret space—namely the Venus Cabaret, recently carved out of a former Irish pub by the folks at Mercury Theater. In fact, as revealed in this revival, the show has a sweet intimacy about it that can get lost in the razzle-dazzle of a big production....

Aimee Levitt It’s like the Great Barrier Reef, only it’s on a street in Rogers Park and there are no fish. It’s March. We’re all still wearing our snow boots and long underwear, which are starting to get a little rank by now. There’s not enough booze, Girl Scout cookies, or even paczki in this whole stupid world to compensate for this shitty, shitty winter. But if you still have a molecule of optimism left inside of you, try to see last weekend’s snowstorm not as another opportunity to pretend you’re living in Siberia (you are a political prisoner, you have been sent to the gulag, your continued survival is a triumph of the human spirit, etc) but as a chance to get to know snow in all its multifarious forms....

I need to begin this review with an apology. In the January edition of the Reader‘s semiannual list of books to look forward to, I included Dr. Eleanor’s Book of Common Ants of Chicago with the explanation “Because forewarned is forearmed.” I thought I was being witty. Now that I’ve actually read Dr. Eleanor’s Book of Common Ants of Chicago, I realize how painfully naive and prejudiced I was. So I’m sorry, ants of the world, for underestimating you all and assuming you were pests....

Crawling out of a misty bog, his hair like Don King’s on a bad day, bass-baritone Eric Owens stole the show as goblin king Vodnik in Dvořák’s Rusalka at Lyric Opera this spring. He was comically randy one minute, tragically bereft the next—never mind his clown-size three-toed feet. These days opera singers are asked to perform in all sorts of odd positions (before long I expect to see an aria sung in downward-facing dog), but Owens projected majesty even while “air swimming” across the stage floor....

Twenty-eight years. That’s how long it’s been since the last time a Cook County judge was voted out of office. This election year, as on every even year when we hit the polls to pick a president or governor, Cook County voters are also asked to vote on 39 candidates trying to join the judiciary for the first time and vote “yes” or “no” to keep another 61 judges already on the bench....

It’s August, and under the Cermak and Western viaduct, scraps of plastic, broken glass, and discarded chicken bones collect like autumn leaves. A line of yellow freight cars languishes on the tracks above. Near an LED sign for a grocery store, a new billboard is striking in its starkness. But it’s not an ad. Rather, it’s a black-and-white drawing of two proud black farmworkers. The project’s execution, however, was not without drawbacks....

Drop Remember how bummed everyone was when Thee Oh Sees, the best garage rock band of our time, called it a day in December? Looks like before they totally say good-bye, they have one final LP left in them. Drop, coming out on John Dwyer’s Castle Face Records, is due out on April 19, Record Store Day, and today’s 12 O’Clock Track is the record’s first song. Called “Penetrating Eye,” it has the classic psychy, garagey Thee Oh Sees sound but adds a little bit of a Black Sabbath vibe....

Lifted Bells member Seth Engel has been writing and recording as Options since 2008, and July’s What You Want was one of my favorite local emo albums of last year. The guy’s a talented multi-instrumentalist and pop-savvy songwriter who uses complicated guitar patterns sparsely to deliver sharp, catchy songs. The full-band recordings of What You Want are magnetic, and Engel’s equally capable of delivering strong material when he goes acoustic, which he does on the new Tacit in Tact....

Respect the opening act of a wildly hyped sold-out show. This past Saturday, Sarah Lipstate (aka Noveller) was tasked with captivating a restless audience before the stunning spectacle that was St. Vincent’s set emerged. A solo instrumental performer, she was a human alone on the Riviera stage—her guitar and pedal board providing the only accompaniment—as she performed tracks from her recent No Dreams. Back in December, the Reader‘s Peter Margasak previewed a show Lipstate was playing at Schubas and described the record as a “collection of shimmering instrumentals built from sustained tones—sometimes produced by meticulously harnessed feedback, sometimes with the bowing of her electric guitar—that arrive as gently rolling, ambient tracks embedded with rich detail....

ARTIST: Vance Kelly SHOW: Graveyard and Earthless at Lincoln Hall on Sat 12/5 MORE INFO: vancekelly.com

An adaptation of the Dostoevsky short story variously translated as “A Gentle Creature,” “The Gentle Woman,” and “The Meek One,” Gentle, the latest from TUTA Theatre (the acronym stands for “The Utopian Theatre Asylum”), is an examination of hurt male pride. It concerns a washed-up pawnbroker (Tom Dacey Carr) who, sensing himself a victim in life’s grand scheme, marries a desperate girl with few other options (Dani Tucker). Adapter-director Zeljko Djukic’s version is emotionally canny, with an especially effective performance by Tucker, who can say more with a trembling eyebrow than the depraved pawnbroker ever manages to convey in incessant monologues....

Whenever I listen to “Red Eyes,” one of several perfect tracks on the War on Drugs’ most recent album, Lost in the Dream (Secretly Canadian), I imagine how thrilled main man Adam Granduciel must have been after he wrote the dusty guitar lick that opens its chorus. His simple, skittering lead, backed by what sounds like a symphony of synths, makes for a beautiful wide-screen hook—and it hasn’t lost an iota of its luster in the six months I’ve been obsessively spinning the record....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, May 17, 2017. UIC report: In some categories, racial inequality in Chicago has gotten worse since the civil rights movement Racial inequality in Chicago has gotten worse since the civil rights movement in some respects, but there’s been progress in other areas, according to researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In a report called “A Tale of Three Cities: The State of Racial Justice in Chicago,” the researchers examined inequality between blacks, Latinos, and whites in categories including employment, economics, housing, and education....