Best of Chicago 2013: Arts & Culture

on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

Best View From a Performance Space

Performance penthouse

by Aimee Levitt on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

You may not think a university best known for its philosophers, physicists, and economists would need one of the most spectacular arts venues in the city. But why wouldn't it want one?

Best Amateur Hip-Hop Dancer Who's Also a Professional Wrestler

Lisa Marie Varon

by Laura Molzahn on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

reallisamarie.com If you can execute a moonsault, hip-hop will be a snap, of course.

Best Dance Venue in New Digs

Links Hall

by Deanna Isaacs on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

OK, let's make this clear: Links Hall, 35-year-old hothouse for some of the city's most innovative dance and performing art, is no longer at Links Hall, the Wrigleyville building that was its longtime home. This spring the organization signed a ten-year lease with musician and producer Mike Reed, and now makes its home at Constellation, otherwise known as the former Viaduct Theater, at 3111 N. Western.

Best Outré Dance

Blushing Poppy Productions

by Laura Molzahn on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

blushingpoppy.org To some folks—like the lunkheads who scorn men in tights but couldn't do a barrel turn if their lives depended on it—all dance is weird.

Best (and Most Vocal) Mime

Dean Evans

by Dan Jakes on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

Discovering you're at a show that involves audience participation can provoke a state of anxiety comparable to being pushed onstage at a karaoke bar. Dean Evans's alter ego revels in that.

Best Performance in a Fat Suit

Dale Calandra, The Whale

by Tony Adler on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

Dale Calandra has some experience with padding, having played Edna Turnblad, the jolly fat mommy in the musical stage version of Hairspray. And I guess he's had some experience with overeating, too, since he claims to have been paid for his first acting gig—a McDonald's commercial—in hamburgers.

Best Theatrical Use of Unruly Facial Hair

Hans Fleischmann

by Justin Hayford on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

The Glass Menagerie, Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co. To prepare for his role as Tom, narrator and errant son in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, Hans Fleischmann spent more than a year doing nothing—at least when it came to cutting his hair.

Best Farewell to Bricks and Mortar

Dawn, Quixote

by Tony Adler on June 19, 2013 at 12:40PM

The Building Stage Blake Montgomery was the heart and soul of the Building Stage, and Blake Montgomery decided to move on to other things.

Best Performances That Make You Think One Guy Is Two Entirely Different People

Adam Poss

by Tony Adler on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

Last summer Adam Poss contributed mightily to the general greatness of Victory Gardens Theater's barrio-gritty Oedipus el Rey, with an intense turn in the title role. About seven months later he was scary charming as the manipulative gay editor of a college newspaper in Goodman Theatre's Teddy Ferrara.

Best Way to See The Book of Mormon

Sitting next to Rahm Emanuel and his son, and in front of Trey Parker and Matt Stone

by Tal Rosenberg on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

The Book of Mormon Through 10/6: Tue-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 7:30 PM, Bank of America Theatre, 312-902-1400, broadwayinchicago.org, $65-$125.

Best Uncategorizable Weirdness

Mike Tyson's The Undisputed Truth

by Tony Adler on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

Savage brawler, ear eater, and convicted rapist Mike Tyson, alone onstage, attempting to repackage himself in the two-hour, Spike Lee-directed reminiscence Mike Tyson: The Undisputed Truth. Tyson pranced.

Best Lost Soul

Alana Arenas, Head of Passes

by Tony Adler on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

steppenwolf.org Tarell Alvin McCraney's Head of Passes was a majestic mess when it premiered at Steppenwolf Theatre in April.

Best Example of Youth in Revolt

Claire Molek

on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

Brave New Art World, bravenewartworld.com The art world can seem like an intimidating place.

Best Street Art Riffing on Everyone's Favorite Joke Involving Poultry

The chicken-in-action minimurals beneath the Bloomingdale Trail bridge

by Leor Galil on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

Why did the chicken cross the road? Why didn't it, say, try its hand at showbiz, take a nap, or get an X-ray?

Best History in a Nonhistorical Joint

Museum of Contemporary Art

by Sam Worley on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

I still haven't quite gotten over "This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s," a blockbuster of an exhibition curated by Helen Molesworth that was on display last year at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It was beautiful and moving, sure, but it was also the thing you hated most about museums as a kid: it was educational, highlighting the radical, tragic beauty of AIDS-era queer activism that gay rights groups today are largely content to forget.

Best Bargain Painting (If You're Jay-Z)

Everyone's Scared by Hebru Brantley

by Mara Shalhoup on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

You're at Art Basel. You're a megamillionaire rap mogul.

Best Small Venue for Big Ideas

Comfort Station

on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

Anyone passing through Logan Square has likely noticed the small brick building on the corner of Milwaukee and Logan and wondered, What the hell is that? Constructed in the early 20th century as a shelter for trolley passengers, the building eventually fell into the somewhat ignoble role of storage shed for the city's lawn equipment.

Best Approximation of the Final Scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark

Basement of the Oriental Institute

by Aimee Levitt on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

It's unclear whether any of the early field researchers at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute were the inspiration for Indiana Jones. Archival photos show that they traveled widely in the Middle East and Asia and wore lots of khaki and broad-brimmed hats.

Best Potential National Park

Pullman

by Sam Worley on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

Like bison in Yellowstone, architecture is what draws outsiders to Pullman—of the 900 or so brick homes that old George P. built for his railroad town, almost all remain standing in what's today a quiet, bucolic little neighborhood. This spring the National Park Service was investigating the idea of turning Pullman into a national park, which would make it the second in Illinois, after Abraham Lincoln's home in Springfield.

Best Architectural Open House

Open House Chicago

by Deanna Isaacs on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

Chicago Architecture Foundation, openhousechicago.org The Chicago Architecture Foundation's Open House Chicago weekend, set for October 19 and 20 this year, offers an inside look at some of the city's most fascinating structures, many of them usually off-limits to the public.

Best Structure About Which to Explain Design Technique in Order to Pretend You Know What the Hell You're Talking About

Pritzker Pavilion

by Kevin Warwick on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

It starts with the Bean, really. If it weren't for the obligation to haul out-of-town visitors to Millennium Park so they can gawk at fun-house-mirror versions of themselves and the surrounding downtown, I wouldn't have the opportunity to lead them ten yards east to the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, place my elbow on its western sill, and act like I know what's what about the outdoor venue's state-of-the-art acoustics system.

Best Career Move

Good Kings Bad Kings by Susan Nussbaum

by Sam Worley on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

Last month I wrote a profile of Susan Nussbaum, a longtime Chicago playwright and disability rights activist who'd just released her first book. That she left the theater was a bit of a bummer—it stemmed from her frustration at failing to get her last and, in her view, her best play produced—but she followed it up with a respectable enough second act: Good Kings Bad Kings, a moving, creatively structured novel about a group of disabled kids trapped in a state-run institution.

Best Work of Art Masquerading as a Book

Building Stories by Chris Ware

by Jerome Ludwig on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

The box containing Oak Park-based comics auteur Chris Ware's Building Stories (Pantheon) is so gorgeous that you may be tempted to leave it in the shrink-wrap to preserve its pristine collectability. But don't deny yourself the visual and literary pleasures contained within.

Best Novelist Moonlighting as a Bartender

Charles J. Saporito

by Luca Cimarusti on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

Burke's Web Pub, 2026 W. Webster, 773-276-3411 Behind the bar of Burke's Web Pub, he's Charlie—a smiley, upbeat, tolerant bartender.

Best Book for the Disillusioned Artist in All of Us

Office Girl by Joe Meno

by Shannon Shreibak on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

Joe Meno has a way of capturing, in Polaroid moments, the unexplainable allure of the Second City. Hometown pride pulsed throughout 2004's Hairstyles of the Damned, and again last year through Office Girl (Akashic Books), a novel that ping-pongs around the various landmarks, topics, and minutiae of the urban mosaic that Meno is so skilled at representing.

Best Beautiful Young Reader of Poetry

Anthony Madrid

by Jena Cutie on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

If the days of bashful, taciturn poets are numbered, Chicago poet Anthony Madrid sure has the shtick to prove it. He strikes a lofty pose, flicks open his first book, I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say (2012), and begins his weirdo routine.

Best Programming Rivalry

The Massacre and Music Box of Horrors

by J.R. Jones on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

facebook.com/moviessidefilmfestival musicboxtheatre.com Neither Music Box nor Movieside Film Festival will comment on why they ended their seven-year partnership presenting the annual Music Box Massacre, a wildly popular 24-hour horror marathon in the weeks leading up to Halloween.

Best Film Retrospective

"Pierre Etaix: The Lost Laugh"

by J.R. Jones on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

Gene Siskel Film Center, siskelfilmcenter.org Apologies to Jacqueline Stewart of Northwestern University—whose six-week series "L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema" spanned the north and south sides and brought numerous pioneering black filmmakers to Chicago—but the best retrospective of the past year was Gene Siskel Film Center's eye-opening series on the forgotten French comedian Pierre Etaix.

Best Avant-Garde/Experimental Film Series Located in a Mexican Restaurant

Taco Cinematheque

by Drew Hunt on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

Located in Tacos Garcia, a nondescript Logan Square taqueria whose walls are adorned with vintage movie posters, this new film series was founded on the simple but inspired notion that people love movies, and people love tacos—why not bring the two together? Created by Amir George of Cinema Culture, Taco Cinematheque is a bimonthly event specializing in local experimental film and video; the first edition featured Lindsay Denniberg's Video Diary of a Lost Girl, which premiered at last year's Chicago Underground Film Festival.