Chicago Tribune: Entertainment

Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan last shared a Chicago stage with guitarist James Iha at the group's farewell concert at Metro in December 2000. Following a March reunion of the warring former bandmates in Los Angeles, the two teamed up again Thursday at Chicago's Civic Opera House when Corgan...

When the head of AMC Theatres' parent company told Variety earlier this week that he is open to the idea of allowing audiences to use their phones to text at the movies, who among us was surprised?More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

The role of Effie Melody White — she who tells you she's not going — already transformed the life of one woman from Chicago. It's hard to imagine the Porchlight Music Theatre production of "Dreamgirls" — staged in a Belmont Avenue box for a fraction of a Broadway budget — doing anything Jennifer...

A black hole greets visitors to the recently reinstalled galleries of contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago. The elusive American artist Lee Bontecou welded it from steel, copper wire and canvas in 1960 — it's a dormant volcano as much as a terraced wasteland and an evil eye.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

To many who hold to liberal orthodoxies, Clarence Thomas, Herman Cain, J.C. Watts, Alan Keyes and Condoleezza Rice are all examples of a paradoxical absurdity: the African-American Republican. To many of those African-American conservatives, the inability of the left to understand that one actually...

Members of Cheap Trick were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last week, but the legacy of the 1970s-era band from Rockford doesn't stop there. Several of the band members' children also have taken on careers in music, the Rockford Register Star reported.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

The story Laura Bialis wanted to tell in her film "Rock In the Red Zone" was about the rich music scene in Sderot, an Israeli town close enough to the Gaza Strip to endure thousands of deadly rocket attacks.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

Several women sit motionless on stools, hands resting in their laps or on their knees, eyes closed — but flashing open at unpredictable times with a look of pleasure, astonishment, appreciation of a secret joke.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

Christopher Wheeldon’s all new production of “The Nutcracker” for the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago is shaping up to be quite a Broadway-style extravaganza. Plans include a new narrative by the acclaimed author Brian Selznick (“The Invention of Hugo Cabret”), a top standard ticket price of $150 and...

“I’ve kept ya’ll long enough,” Wanda Sykes languidly remarked in her uniquely identifiable speech pattern towards the end of her 90-minute set at the Chicago Theatre Saturday night. “Let me wrap this up.” The writer/actress/comedian best known for “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “The New Adventures of...