What’s New

There’s much to do in the week ahead in Chicago.

All about Shakespeare

Chicago Shakespeare Theater has a new batch of plays for its Chicago ShakesSTREAM series beginning with a newly edited film of its 2017 staging of the playful romantic comedy “Love’s Labor’s Lost” (March 15-28). This is followed by two recently filmed solo shows by Tim Crouch inspired by Shakespeare’s supporting characters: “I, Banquo” (March 22-April 18) reexamines “Macbeth” through the eyes of the title character’s murdered friend, and “I, Cinna” (April 5-May 2) follows the apolitical and doomed poet in “Julius Caesar” as he explores words and actions, protests and power. Rounding out the online season are two new audio plays — “Measure for Measure” and “Twelfth Night” (both streaming April 19-May 6) — and “We Are Out There” (May 24-June 20), a digital prologue to Joe Kinosian, Kellen Blair and Daniel Schloss’ new musical “It Came From Outer Space,” which will have its world premiere next year. Tickets: $25, $100 for entire series. Visit chicagoshakes.com.

Get growing

Courtesy of City Grange

It’s time to start thinking about what’s going in that garden you’ve been thinking about all winter. The Great Grow Along, presented by the garden center City Grange (locations in Lincoln Square and Beverly), is a three-day virtual garden festival from March 19-21 featuring more than 40 sessions with authors and gardening experts. Topics range from edible gardening and DIY landscaping to urban gardening and caring for houseplants. Tickets: $29.95 (the sessions will be available to attendees for six months). Visit greatgrowalong.com.

Eating it up

With the past year so hard on local restaurants, it’s now time to show more support to your favorite eateries and even discover a new one to add to that list. Chicago Restaurant Week, the 17-day celebration of the Chicago area dining scene, runs March 19-April 4. For the first time, the popular event will include pickup and delivery, in addition to limited indoor and al fresco dining. Restaurants will offer prix-fixe menus for lunch or brunch ($25) and dinner ($39 or $55). For more information and a list of participating restaurants, visit www.choosechicago.com/chicago-restaurant-week/.

New dance film

Matthew Gregory Hollis

Winifred Haun and Dancers’ interesting new work “Press on, regardless” is now streaming. Filmed in various locations at Links Hall (doorways, a dressing room, a closet and the seating area), it features seven company members in a series of solos, duets and group performances. In the vignettes, Haun “explores circular, inverted movement that creates a disorienting but ultimately calming visual journey.” Stream the performance free at https://vimeo.com/520197021. The company also is hosting a free Wine with Wini online event (6 p.m. March 19), which takes an inside look at the making of “Press on.” To register, visit winifredhaun.org.

Latino theater fest

Courtesy of Water People Theater

Water People Theater presents “FIT 2.0,” an international online festival of Latino Theatre running March 18-27. More than a dozen plays are featured including Miguel De Cervantes’ “El Merolico en el Encierro (The Merolico in the Confinement),” about a charlatan salesman who reflects on human nature; Eduardo Pardo’s “La Chica del Paraguas Rojo (The Girl with the Red Umbrella),” in which two people discuss love in modern times, and Catherine French’s “Memorias de una Presidiaria (Memories of a Convict),” about a woman wrongly convicted of a crime who reflects on family ties, love and life. Audience members can help select the three winners of this year’s festival. Tickets: $7 per play. For a full schedule of plays, visit waterpeople.org.

Explore Marvel’s world

Sandro Vannini

Super heroes get the museum treatment in a new exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry. “Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes” celebrates Marvel history with more than 300 artifacts including original comic book pages, sculptures, interactive displays and costumes and props from Marvel’s popular films. Fans can dig into the origins of Spider-Man, Black Panther, Hulk and Captain Marvel to see how the characters have evolved over the past 80 years to become a pop-culture mainstay. To Oct. 24 at Museum of Science and Industry, 5700 S. Lake Shore Drive. Tickets: $12.95, $21.95 (museum entry); $9-$18 (“Marvel” exhibit). Visit msichicago.org.

Virtual stage

In addition to some great performances, Porchlight Music Theatre’s annual benefit “Chicago Sings Rock & Roll Broadway” includes the presentation of the Guy Adkins Award to Tony Award-nominated actress Felicia P. Fields. Streams at 7 p.m. March 20 and on demand to April 18. Tickets: $25+. Visit porchlightmusictheatre.org. … Lifeline Theatre presents a six-part audio drama adaptation of Christopher M. Walsh’s “Miss Holmes,” inspired by the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Streams to April 30. Tickets: $20 or pay-what-you-can. Visit lifelinetheatre.com. … Hate crimes against Asian Americans are the focus of next episode of Collaboraction’s monthly talk show “Crucial Connections.” Streams free at 8 p.m. March 18. Visit collaboraction.org. … The Goodman Theatre offers a free reading of Ada A.’s “Tokens of Promise,” a satire about modern-day job searching. Streams at 7 p.m. March 20. Visit goodmantheatre.org. … Sideshow Theatre presents a reading of Ellen Steves’ “Thin Mints,” which follows a troop of Bonfire Girls during a five-day jamboree as they prepare for an important election. Streams at 7 p.m. March 19. Tickets: $10 or pay-what-you-can. Visit sideshowtheatre.org.

Mary Houlihan is a local freelance writer.

Read More

Best of Chicago 2020 is presented by Sponsored in part by…Read More

Best of Chicago 2020: Music & Nightlife

Some business to get out of the way: the reader poll results were determined by you, the readers! If you’re angry about the results, you only have yourselves to blame!…Read More

Best of Chicago 2020: Arts & Culture

Some business to get out of the way: the reader poll results were determined by you, the readers! If you’re angry about the results, you only have yourselves to blame!…Read More

A year after the shutdown, they’re bringing it back.

It was Friday, the 13th of March, 2020, when Lyric Opera general director Anthony Freud had to cancel the company’s decade-in-the-making, mega-bucks project—a three-week run of Richard Wagner’s four-opera opus, the Ring Cycle. The perfect date for what Freud calls “about as nightmarish a scenario as is possible to contemplate” for an opera company: pulling the plug on this internationally promoted project three-quarters of the way into rehearsal.…Read More

Best of Chicago 2020 is presented by Sponsored in part by…Read More

The Tony Award-nominated actress will be presented with the honor as part of Porchlight Music Theatre’s annual Chicago Sings fund-raising concert.

Long before her thundering alto and radiant stage presence made her a Tony Award nominee and one of Chicago’s brightest musical theater stars, Felicia P. Fields was an investigator for the Chicago Park District. It wasn’t as cloak-and-dagger as it sounds.

“Me and this guy named Percy were in internal investigations. We’d find people sleeping on the clock or whatever. That sort of thing,” she said. “We were hated. But we were both aspiring actors, and the schedule was just enough so that we were able to do the thing we really wanted to do,” she said.

More than three decades since she left the park district’s employ, Fields has done the thing she really wanted, playing leading ladies from August Wilson’s Ma Rainey to Thornton Wilder’s Dolly Levi. Over the course of her career, she’s collected a Clarence Derwent Award, multiple Black Theatre Alliance and Joseph Jefferson awards, and years of critical accolades from across the country.

On March 20, Fields will pick up yet another trophy, Porchlight Music Theatre’s annual Guy Adkins Award for Excellence in the Advancement of Music Theatre in Chicago. Fields — who earned a 2006 Tony nomination for creating the role of “Sofia” in the musical adaptation of “The Color Purple” — says she finds inspiration in the award named for a peer she valued in life. Adkins died of colon cancer in 2010, after almost 20 years as one of Chicago’s best song-and-dance men.

“This award, it’s been the lift that I needed at this particular time,” Fields said. “It’s God saying, ‘hey, maybe we can keep this party going,’ ” she said.

The award presentation is part of Porchlight’s annual Chicago Sings fund-raising concert, this year themed to feature rock and roll’s influence on Broadway. The concert — featuring numbers from the 2020 Broadway musical “Jagged Little Pill” among others — will be available via stream through April 18.

“For me, this past year has been a time of reflection, of recognizing your journey,” Fields continued. “I think of how hard this business is and how you have so many lows and so many highs and how your talent alone is a small part of what happens; it might get you somewhere, but it won’t always help you stay there. You have to treat people with respect, especially yourself. “

The Porchlight award will be presented by Gary Griffin, who won it last year and who directed Fields in “The Color Purple.” Fields credits Griffin with more than helping her raise her national profile. As the artistic director of the Drury Lane Theatre in the 1990s, Griffin was the first to hire her to work at the west-suburban venue, Fields said.

“I believe that the steps of a righteous man are ordered by God and I believe I didn’t meet Gary Griffin by chance but by design,” Fields said. “He took a chance on me in a place that wasn’t necessarily conducive to gender or racial diversity. I found myself working harder with Gary because he saw something in me that I didn’t always see in myself,” Fields said.

Griffin’s take: “All I did was put her in front of people. She did all the rest.”

Fields recalled her earliest encouragement coming from three invaluable sources: The Englewood Antioch Baptist Church where she sang, powerhouse singer/actor E. Faye Butler, and composer Rufus Hill.

Paul Kolnik

“I happened to be singing in church the day Julie Shannon came to look for vocalists to record a demo for her new musical, ‘Stones,’” Fields said, adding that her pastor had been friends with Shannon’s husband. After the service, Shannon asked Fields to come record those demos, and then cast her in the Bailiwick Theatre’s production of “Stones.” That show also featured Butler and Hill, both of whom subsequently told Fields to audition at the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire. Fields was cast as Glinda and Auntie Em in that 1987 Lincolnshire staging, opposite Butler’s Addaperle/Evillene.

“I had just seen E. Faye in ‘A My Name is Alice’ at the old Ivanhoe,” Fields recalled, “And now we’re co-starring in the same show. It just goes to show you never know who you’re going to be working with next,” she said.

Fields has covered vast ground since that inaugural role, steadily working at the city’s largest houses including the Goodman, Chicago Shakespeare, Northlight and Writers theaters among them. The Broadway run and the glitz of Tony season were fun, Fields said, but she never considered leaving her home base of Chicago.

As for the award she is receiving, Fields remembers Guy Adkins as a colleague with an impish wit and a remarkable talent, and said she treasures being the recipient of his namesake honor.

“He was so mischievous. You never saw him when he wasn’t smiling or joking around. I didn’t know Clarence Derwent or Antionette Perry. I [didn’t] know Joseph Jefferson. But I did know Guy Adkins, and I know what it’s like to be acknowledged by your peers like this. It feels good,” she said.

Read More

Patricia Panalle was found badly burned about 7:05 a.m. Dec. 31 in her apartment in the 3700 block of South Cottage Grove Avenue, Chicago police said.

A 75-year-old woman died Tuesday after being injured in a fire months earlier in Oakland on the South Side.

Patricia Panalle was found badly burned about 7:05 a.m. Dec. 31 in her apartment in the 3700 block of South Cottage Grove Avenue, Chicago police said.

She was taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center in critical condition, and died there about 5:45 p.m. Tuesday, the Cook County medical examiner’s office said.

An autopsy ruled her dead an accident, saying she died of complications from burn injuries, according to the medical examiner’s office.

Read More

All of the churning going on has a big impact because, more than ever, 401(k) accounts are tied to the performance of the S&P 500 and other stock indexes.

A huge shift is underway in the stock market that might roil your 401(k) in the short term but that many professional investors see leading to long-lasting gains.

A surge of optimism that the coronavirus pandemic is on the way out has investors looking to revamp where to put their money. As a result, most stock prices are rising, with the biggest gains coming from companies that would benefit most from a healthier economy, such as airlines and banks, which got pounded by the market for much of the pandemic.

At the same time, those hopes are prompting a rise in bond yields. And that’ sending a group of tech stocks back to earth after they carried the market for much of the pandemic. When bonds pay more in interest, investors are less willing to pay as high prices for stocks viewed as the most expensive or to wait as long for their big growth forecasts to come to fruition.

Because of how stock indexes are calculated, any weakness in the biggest stocks can mask strength sweeping across the rest of the market. It’s why the S&P 500 isn’t up much so far this year: Energy stocks have soared, and financial stocks also are up. But tech stocks, which account for more than one-quarter of the index’s market value, have risen just a bit.

All of that churning below the surface might sound like so much inside baseball. But it has a big impact because, more than ever, 401(k) accounts are tied to the performance of the S&P 500 and other stock indexes. More than half of the dollars in U.S. stock funds are directly mimicking indexes, according to Morningstar, the Chicago financial services firm.

So your 401(k) could fall even if the economy — and most stocks — are rising.

This is the mirror-image of what happened early in the pandemic, when the S&P 500 powered higher as the economy fell into a pit. And professional investors say this rotation among sectors still has room to run.

“It brings me back to business school, where we learned about how all the indices are different,” said Lamar Villere, a portfolio manager for Villere & Co. in New Orleans. “It seems so boring and academic. But there is not one monolithic thing called the stock market. It’s these hugely different areas of the market that are moving differently.”

Investors already have felt the moves in recent weeks, when expectations for coming inflation and economic growth suddenly hit an upswing as COVID-19 vaccines rolled out and Congress neared its $1.9 trillion economic rescue.

The Nasdaq composite tumbled more than 10% from Feb. 12 through March 5, with its many tech stock holdings hurt by the sudden rise in yields. The S&P 500 also fell during that span, by 2.4%, even as more than half of the stocks in the index were rising.

Marathon Oil and other energy producers led the way, with several up more than 20%. Cruise-ship operators also were steaming higher.

If the economy roars back soon, as nearly everyone on Wall Street expects, profits should jump much more for those types of companies than for big tech stocks, which benefited from the stay-at-home economy.

That’s why investors generally should take it in stride if the S&P 500 falls because of drops for a just a few heavyweight companies. Many analysts and professional investors expect the improving economy to boost profits for companies enough to more than make up for stumbles caused by rising rates in the near term. They expect the S&P 500 to rise over the next year.

Since tech stocks’ recent tumble, they’ve come back, as worries about inflation have been tamped down a bit. Even if tech stocks’ shine never fully returns, many continue to produce huge profits — such as Apple and its nearly $29 billion in net income last quarter.

But many professional investors still expect the rotation out of tech stocks into other beaten-down areas of the market to continue a while longer. Tech and high-growth stocks still look much more expensive than the rest of the market, and higher interest rates make that gap appear even more glaring. That could keep the pressure on the S&P 500 and index funds that track it.

High-growth stocks largely had been pulling away from their more cheaply valued value stocks for much of the past 15 years, said David Joy, chief market strategist for Ameriprise. Long term, a reversal could last just as long.

Within such long-term trends, the market can swing back and forth. For this most recent move into value stocks out of high-growth tech stocks, Joy said there’s likely months left to go.

“If I had to guess, it’s halfway to maybe two-thirds done,” he said. “But it’s still the place to be.”

Read More

About 20 dancers performed outside Swedish Covenant Hospital in Ravenswood Wednesday. Patients watched from their windows, doctors and nurses took videos from the street, and health care workers’ kids leaped to the music.

When Olivia Dela Cruz arrived at Swedish Covenant Hospital to visit her mother, she didn’t expect to see dozens of Irish dancers hopping and prancing outside.

“This is like such a wonderful just break from the stress of worrying about your parent,” said Dela Cruz, who took videos of the performance to show her mom.

The dancers were from the Trinity Academy of Irish Dance, and about 20 of them performed outside Swedish Covenant Hospital in Ravenswood on St. Patrick’s Day. Patients watched from their hospital windows, doctors and nurses took videos from the street, and kids of health care workers jumped to the music.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

“We are really trying to bring, you know, the joy and the power of Irish dance to our health care workers,” said Shannan Bunting, parent of one of the dancers. “This is really our opportunity to give back.”

“This has been a, you know, a remarkably challenging year for health care and people in the community have found a few ways to try and kind of bring a little sunshine and this is just such a perfect example of that,” said Bruce McNutty, the vice president and chief medical officer of Swedish Covenant Hospital.

Given Chicago’s large Irish American population, the area, not surprisingly, has many Irish dance schools. Around St. Patrick’s Day, dancers from those schools typically perform at restaurants, pubs, church halls, retirement communities, hospitals and at other holiday gatherings throughout the region.

This year, of course, is different. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trinity, like the others, modified its program, Bunting said.

“It’s really cool that we get to dance during a pandemic too,” said Reilly Leahy, who’s performed for almost 10 years. “We still have the opportunity to, like, make people happy and it’s my senior year, so I’m really glad that I get to do it my last year and don’t get to miss out on all these opportunities.”

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Read More