John Judd in “Birds Of North America” at A Red Orchid Theatre
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ART
Puck Profiles Freeman’s Head Jay Krehbiel
Sketch Reveals Origins Of “American Gothic”
“The famous painting by Grant Wood shows a farmer holding a pitchfork and a woman standing next to him. The earlier sketch is a bit different,” reports the New York Times. “Originally, the farm tool that’s almost a character in Grant Wood’s ‘American Gothic’ was a rake, not a pitchfork… We know about the rake from the only known sketch for ‘American Gothic’… The artists Red Grooms and Lysiane Luong have owned the sketch since 1989. Christie’s plans to sell it next month in a sale called ‘We the People: America at 250.’ The presale estimate is $70,000 to $100,000.”
DESIGN
West Loop Hindman Auctioneers Building Demolished For New Tower
“Demolition is in progress for the three buildings that formerly comprised the Leslie Hindman Auctioneers complex at West Lake and North Ada,” pictures Chicago YIMBY. “No confirmation yet that new construction is imminent, but developer CedarSt received the blessing of the Committee on Design in January 2023 for a proposed residential tower, designed by Solomon Cordwell Buenz, that would deliver 271 residential units in a twenty-eight-story building.”
Preserving Wisconsin’s Railroad Depots
“Eight railroad depots still serve passengers in Wisconsin for Amtrak trains that travel across the southern half of the state,” reports WPR. “But once, there were a few hundred rail stations here. While many of those buildings are gone, others remain with new uses.” One “old depot now houses the Mineral Point Railroad Museum,” while a depot in Belleville, south of Madison, may be renovated into a cafe and community event space.
DINING & DRINKING
Undercover Reporter Gets “Review” Prices From Chicago Influencers
In an investigative report, “legal fraud” is how Earnest Graham describes practices of local influencers at Michael Nagrant’s The Hunger (free link). On behalf of a nonexistent restaurant, Graham solicits prices for good reviews and other placement from “forty-eight influencers in the Chicago area with over 10,000 followers that primarily focus on restaurants.” He reviews the dismaying results, and even gets prepared price sheets from a couple.
Three-Starred Smyth Sues Tribeca’s Smyth Tavern Over Name
“Smyth, the Chicago fine dining restaurant that has been awarded three Michelin stars for three years, has filed a federal trademark lawsuit against Smyth Tavern, a neighborhood restaurant in Tribeca that has been open since 2022,” reports Eater. “The lawsuit, filed on November 19, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, alleges trademark infringement, unfair competition, and dilution under the Lanham Act, along with related state-law claims.”
Former Bear Israel Idonije Conquers South Loop Dining
For the past two years, Israel Idonije’s “attention has been on starting bars and restaurants in the South Loop, where he lives,” reports Chicago magazine. “It’s the city’s best neighborhood,” he says. His growing neighborhood empire includes “Signature, a high-end sports bar at 1312 South Wabash Avenue,” “the Staley, a casual sports bar in the former Kroll’s South Loop space at 1736 South Michigan Avenue,” and Italian cocktail bar “Buttercup, [which] he opened in September in the former 16th Street Bar space at 75 East 16th Street.”
Spacca Napoli Ownership’s Eventful Year
About halfway through this last January’s Jean Banchet Awards, seventy-year-old local pizzamaker Jonathan Goldsmith and his wife, the artist Ginny Sykes, took the stage. Their twenty-year-old Ravenswood restaurant, Spacca Napoli, “was crowned Chicago’s best pizza that night. Unlike the other awards, this one was decided by the people in the room.” Their reporter “wanted to know more about Goldsmith, how he perfected his craft making classic Neapolitan pizza,” reports WBEZ. “What I didn’t yet know was that the couple had been facing some serious personal challenges. Goldsmith had been battling stomach cancer and was scheduled to have the tumor in his abdomen removed just days after accepting the Banchet Award.” Goldsmith updates what’s happened in the months since.
Deliz Debuts Steak In Bucktown
Newcomer Deliz Italian Steakhouse, located “in the former Etta space, marries pasta and beef,” writes Chicago magazine. Says chef Jake Peterson, “We wanted to bring something to Bucktown so people don’t have to go to River North or Gold Coast or the West Loop. We wanted to give people something closer to home that could be that date night spot or let them just come into the bar and get a pasta.”
At Highest-End Restos, The Riche Are Nouveau Again
Wagyu and $600 suckling pigs tempt the New York Times (gift link): “In Manhattan and across the country, restaurants are trotting out ever-pricier dishes and luxury upgrades to meet the demand from affluent diners… The rich have always spent freely on food, but today’s menu prices are reaching dizzying heights. And they’re no longer confined to New York City. In Dallas and Las Vegas, Miami and Aspen, restaurants designed for the one percent (and the influencers who want to emulate them) now routinely offer shavings of truffles or flights of Wagyu… Across the country, even restaurants with more modest ambitions and prices offer upgrades like bumps of caviar with a martini, potato chips or chicken nuggets.”
Caviar Pairings At Atsumeru For New Year’s
Atsumeru is hosting a two-night New Year’s Eve celebration “anchored in Japanese-influenced technique,” featuring a caviar pairing, a champagne toast and a special tasting menu. The menu “debuts several new dishes featuring fruits de mer, Wagyu, sturgeon, caviar and truffles,” including scallop with rambutan; steamed oyster with aloe; and a caviar preparation warmed in Wagyu fat and carabineros chawanmushi. December 30-31. Reservations ($250 per person) at Open Table here.
FILM & TELEVISION
Chicago Filmmakers Debut New Feature At Berlin Film Festival
Chicago filmmaking duo Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson will screen their new feature, “Mouse” in a world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, reports Variety. A synopsis: “Callie and Minnie’s relationship is suddenly upended at the start of the summer before their senior year of high school. Left rudderless without her charismatic best friend, Minnie starts to form a complicated friendship with Callie’s mother.” Previous films from the couple include “Ghostlight” (2024) and “Saint Frances” (2019). (The Chicago Film Fund, managed by Newcity, is an investor in “Mouse.”)
Moving The Oscars To YouTube May Mean The End Of Playoff Music
“For decades, we’ve watched the Oscars contort the broadcast into an… uncomfortable shape, trimming categories, rushing speeches, and relegating entire crafts to commercial breaks—all to satisfy the tyranny of the three-hour broadcast window,” writes awards-spotter Clayton Davis at Variety. “With YouTube as a partner, the Academy no longer needs to choose between honoring filmmaking excellence and appeasing network executives watching the clock. Want to give best sound the respect it deserves? Done. Want to let winners actually finish their thoughts without being played off by an orchestra that’s ready to start the music as soon as they hit the stage? Finally possible. Want to showcase clips that do justice to the nominated work instead of snippets that last seconds? Now we can.”
Warner CEO Zaslav Anticipates Half-Billion-Dollar Payout
Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav will receive $567 million “if a deal is sealed to sell the WB empire, while longtime lieutenant Gunnar Wiedenfels will see $144 million in cash and stock considerations if a transaction closes,” tallies the Hollywood Reporter. Zaslav, whose past endeavors include purchasing the home of legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans and staging lavish Cannes parties at Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, will surely put the money to imaginative use.
LIT
Slavoj Zizek Sweeps Chicago
Philosopher and two-handed hot dog man Slavoj Zizek is coming to Chicago next April. Join Zizek “for a guide to the end times. Is despair the only hope? Can the world escape the clutches of libertarian fascism? Erudite and comic, ironic and profound, philosopher Slavoj Zizek has travelled into territory where few of us dare to tread–and aged seventy-six shows no signs of becoming less provocative.” Cahn Auditorium, Evanston, Thursday, April 2. Tickets ($50 and up) here.
Barnes & Noble Likely To Go Public
Fund manager Elliott Management “is preparing for a multibillion-pound flotation of Barnes & Noble and Waterstones, the booksellers owned by the U.S. investor, with a listing expected to come next year in London or New York,” reports the Financial Times. Barnes & Noble and Waterstones “are the two largest booksellers in the U.S. and U.K. respectively. The group has 775 shops in the U.S. and a further 316 in the U.K., and last year generated about $400 million in profit from about $3 billion in sales. Under chief executive James Daunt, the group has expanded quickly ahead of a possible flotation, opening dozens of shops.”
MEDIA
TikTok Agrees To Sell U.S. Business To Investor Group Including Oracle
“TikTok has signed a deal to sell its U.S. entity to a joint venture controlled by American investors, per an internal memo,” reports Sara Fischer for Axios. “Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based MGX will collectively own forty-five percent of the U.S. entity. Nearly one-third of the company will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors, and nearly twenty percent will be retained by ByteDance.” The deal is scheduled to close on January 22.
Taking A Month Off, Reader Will Return As A Monthly
Reader owner Noisy Creek, which also owns alt-weeklies The Stranger in Seattle and the Portland Mercury, is taking the fifty-four year-old Chicago publication monthly after taking a month off, announces the Reader. The Reader had previously returned to a weekly format last year before new ownership took over. Noisy Creek operates their Pacific Northwest properties in a classic alt-weekly format but with a monthly frequency. “Switching our print cadence will help us play to our strengths harder while [building] our capacity across the organization.”
Tribune Syndicator Walter Mahoney Was Seventy-Four
“During a thirty-eight-year career as an executive at Tribune Media Services—now known as Tribune Content Agency—Walter Mahoney took great pride in promoting and encouraging both the talent that his agency managed, as well as working to mentor employees of his organization,” chronicles the Trib. “During Mahoney’s career, Tribune Media Services had hundreds of local newspaper clients around the country who purchased syndicated content—from editorial cartoonists and comics to advice columnists.
“‘Walter was a mentor to me,’ said Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Jack Ohman, whose work has been syndicated for decades by the [agency]. ‘He was always very encouraging to me, and he’s somebody who literally constructed my career. He got me into 392 papers in four days at age twenty, and that made me the second most-read cartoonist in America.’”
MUSIC
Yuval Sharon Leaving Detroit Opera
Detroit Opera and artistic director Yuval Sharon “have mutually agreed to end his contract at the close of the 2025-26 season, ending a six-year collaboration of highs and lows that broadened the company’s reach and pushed the boundaries of American opera,” reports the Detroit Free Press. “Under Sharon’s tenure, Detroit Opera marked significant milestones and witnessed a striking transformation in audience size and diversity. Several of his bold and innovative productions—two of which recently premiered at New York’s Metropolitan Opera—drew national acclaim.”
Renée Fleming Presents The Anthropocene At Lyric
“Renée Fleming makes her much-anticipated return to the Lyric Opera of Chicago stage with a program based on her 2023 Grammy-winning Best Classical Vocal Solo Album. Created in partnership with the National Geographic Society, ‘Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene’ blends classic Romantic Era works and contemporary works in a program that captures the evolution of the human experience in nature,” notes the Lyric. The stage setting includes “immersive imagery from the National Geographic Society.” Lyric Opera, Thursday, February 5. Tickets ($79 and up) here.
Gabriela Lena Frank Is Composer Of The Year
Musical America Worldwide named Gabriela Lena Frank, the composer of “El último sueño de Frida y Diego,” as its 2026 Composer of the Year, records OperaWire. “Frank, a Latin Grammy Award winner who has also been Grammy nominated as both a composer and pianist, is also a Guggenheim Fellow, a USA Artist Fellowship, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.” Her opera “El último sueño de Frida y Diego,” set for productions at the Metropolitan Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2026, “premiered at San Diego Opera in 2022 and subsequently received performances at Los Angeles Opera and San Francisco Opera.”
Michael Shannon & Jason Narducy Set Spring Tour For R.E.M’s “Lifes Rich Pageant”
Michael Shannon & Jason Narducy And Friends have announced a spring 2026 U.S. tour celebrating the fortieth anniversary of R.E.M.’s album, “Lifes Rich Pageant.” After the pair’s run earlier this year honoring the band’s 1985 album “Fables of the Reconstruction,” “which saw the four original members of R.E.M. join Shannon & Narducy on-stage at their two shows in Athens, the extensive ‘Lifes Rich Pageant’ tour will take Shannon & Narducy to stops in Chicago, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Seattle and Philadelphia. They will return for two shows in R.E.M.’s hometown of Athens.” (The two Chicago dates at Metro in March are sold out, but there is a waitlist.) More here.
Phil Upchurch, Noted Musical Collaborator, Was Eighty-Four
Guitarist Phil Upchurch, who made his name in Chicago, “was known for his silky sound and ability to blend jazz, blues and funk,” chronicles the Sun-Times. Upchurch “played on Chaka Khan’s 1978 hit ‘I’m Every Woman’ and Michael Jackson’s 1979 funk hit ‘Workin’ Day and Night.’ He was friends with fellow Chicagoan Curtis Mayfield and played on Mayfield’s top-selling soundtracks for several films including the 1972 hit ‘Super Fly.’” He recorded at Chess Records, Vee-Jay, Mercury and Brunswick “when the labels flourished in Chicago during the 1960s [and] worked closely with Chicago singer Donny Hathaway, including on what Mr. Upchurch considered to be the best Christmas song ever by a Black performer: ‘This Christmas.’”
STAGE
Tribune Names Steppenwolf’s Glenn Davis Chicagoan Of The Year In Theater
“Glenn Davis, forty-three, is a son of the Chatham neighborhood, a DePaul University graduate and a longtime Chicago actor who has made it his business since becoming co-artistic director in 2021 to keep Steppenwolf very much in the national cultural conversation,” writes Chris Jones. “With his stellar co-artistic director Audrey Francis keeping the theater’s artistic and educational offices running smoothly and creatively, the gregarious Davis has been free to roam, all the way to the Tony Awards, where he was a 2025 nominee for his featured performance as Solomon ‘Junior’ Jasper in the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama ‘Purpose,’ a character clearly based on former U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr.”
Early Tennessee Williams Play Uncovered
When Tennessee Williams “was a student at the University of Iowa in the late 1930s, still referring to himself by his birth name, Tom Williams, he completed a rarely-heard gothic sketch for radio called ‘The Strangers,’” reports AP. “Williams’ play has now been published in The Strand Magazine, which has previously published little-known works by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck… ‘The play incorporates all the theatrical elements of early radio horror,’ writes Strand managing editor Andrew Gulli, ‘a storm, howling wind, shadows, a house perched over the sea, flickering candles, mysterious footsteps on the stairs, spectral beings — as well as early hints of the themes and devices Williams would return to in his most famous later works: isolation, fear, the shades of gray between imagination and reality, and a house haunted by memory and the private terrors of those who inhabit it.’”
Chairman Trump To Rename Kennedy Center “The Trump-Kennedy Center”
The Board of the Kennedy Center has voted “to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center, because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building,” announces press secretary Karoline Leavitt on X. “Not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction, but also financially, and its reputation. Congratulations to President Donald J. Trump, and likewise, congratulations to President Kennedy. The building will no doubt attain new levels of success and grandeur.” Board members include Lee Greenwood, attorney general Pam Bondi, chief of staff Susie Wiles, Fox personalities Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo and Usha Vance.
A Red Orchid Theatre Sights Local Premiere Of “Birds Of North America”
A Red Orchid Theatre continues its thirty-third season with the Chicago premiere of Anna Ouyang Moench’s father-daughter drama “Birds of North America,” directed by artistic director Kirsten Fitzgerald. The production stars ensemble member John Judd and Cassidy Slaughter-Mason. January 15-February 22. Tickets and more here.
ARTS & CULTURE & ETC.
City Announces “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” Plans, With Chance Headlining
The city has announced details about Chicago’s New Year’s Eve celebrations, including planned performances as well as safety and logistics plans. For the first time, the festivities will be featured as part of the “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” national broadcast. Chicago artists including DJs Mike Dunn and Mike P, J. Ivy and Shemekia Copeland will perform on the mainstage at the corner of West Wacker and North Franklin starting at 9pm, following a presentation projected from ART on THE MART that begins at 7pm. Co-host Chance the Rapper will take the stage for his countdown performance shortly before midnight. Entrances will be open at Wacker Drive at the corner of Wells or Lake for the free event.
Billionaire Bears Owners Now Dangle Stadium In Northwest Indiana
“The Chicago Bears are considering a move to northwest Indiana amid growing concerns that Illinois lawmakers will not approve the financial incentives needed to build a new stadium in Arlington Heights,” relays the Trib. “Bears President and CEO Kevin Warren confirmed the possibility of crossing state lines, but said the organization also would consider sites in other parts of Illinois. A letter to season ticket holders Wednesday outlined plans to look elsewhere, too, adding more fodder to the ongoing political debate over the franchise’s future and renewing an old threat to leave the state if the team doesn’t get its needs met.”
Chicago Pope Names Joliet Bishop To Lead New York Archdiocese
“The appointment of Bishop Ronald A. Hicks is expected to bring a markedly different leadership style to New York’s archdiocese,” reports the New York Times. It’s “a selection that signals his embrace of a more mild and unifying style after the political upheaval of Pope Francis’ papacy, while preserving the spirit of the late pope’s reforms…The appointment echoes Pope Leo’s own ascent earlier this year, the unexpected elevation of a little-known bishop from Chicago with a longtime focus on pastoral work and smooth governance.”
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