BEST Things To Do In Chicago
Thursday, June 27, 2019

The Event Oracle knows ALL the fun things to do in Chicago. Select your date above then scroll down for all the Arts, Entertainment, and Events in my crystal ball...

• Chicago Water Taxi

  Wendella Tours & Cruises
  400 N. Michigan Ave.
  Chicago, IL 60611
  

  Chicago Water Taxi is Chicago's river transportation service with seven stops located on all three branches of the Chicago River. Hop on/ hop off at all your favorite river locations with a Chicago Water Taxi All Day Pass. Water taxi stops include, but are not limited to; Michigan Avenue, Chinatown, The Chicago Riverwalk, Ogilvie/Union Train Stations, and more. All Day Passes are valid for unlimited rides for one person for 24 hours on Chicago Water Taxi.

• The Chinese Helped Build the Railroad – The Railroad Helped Build America

  Chinese American Museum of Chicago
  238 W. 23rd St
  Chicago, IL 60616
  

  The Chinese American Museum of Chicago is excited to host a new year-long temporary exhibition, The Chinese Helped Build the Railroad – The Railroad Helped Build America, beginning March 2, 2019, to coincide with the 150th Anniversary of the Golden Spike at Promontory Summit in Utah.

  The bilingual exhibit, which features photographs by Li Ju, pays tribute to the approximately 12,000 Chinese workers who completed the west coast portion of the world’s first Transcontinental Railway.

• PURCHASED LIVES: THE AMERICAN SLAVE TRADE FROM 1808 TO 1865

  Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center
  9603 Woods Dr
  Skokie, IL 60077
  

  urchased Lives: The American Slave Trade from 1808 to 1865  illustrates the pain and injustice of the American domestic slave trade, illuminating just how widespread the practice of slavery was in American life, as well as its impact on enslaved families across the country.

  This exhibition, originally curated by The Historic New Orleans Collection, showcases more than 75 original artifacts, slave narratives, and oral histories. Through interactive displays, visitors engage directly with historical records by tracking the shipment of more than 70,000 people to New Orleans. Purchased Lives also contains a collection of “Lost Friends” ads placed after the Civil War by newly freed people attempting to locate Illinois family members.

  Illinois Holocaust Museum consistently uses special exhibitions to tell stories of inhumanity and resilience, both historical and present-day. Purchased Lives, combined with its related programming, facilitates a broader conversation about the legacies of the American slave trade and their manifestations in today’s world.

• Nuestras Historias

  National Museum of Mexican Art
  1852 W. 19th street
  Chicago, IL 60608
  

  Nuestras Historias (Our Histories) highlights the Museum’s Permanent Collection to showcase the dynamic and diverse stories of Mexican identity in North America. The exhibition presents cultural identity as something that continually evolves across time, regions, and communities, rather than as a static, unchanging entity, and features ancient Mesoamerican and colonial artifacts, modern Mexican art, folk art, and contemporary works from both sides of the U.S.–Mexican border. The vast diversity of Mexican identities demonstrated in these works defies the notion of one linear history and a singular identity.

• Grainger Hall of Gems

  Field Museum
  1400 S. Lake Shore Dr.
  Chicago, IL 60605
  

  Celebrate precious stones in every form.

  A visitor favorite since the museum opened in 1921, the Grainger Hall of Gems has a history older than the Field Museum itself. 

  At the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, Tiffany & Co.’s gem collection captivated viewers from all walks of life. When the exposition closed, World’s Fair President Harlow Higinbotham purchased the entire collection and donated it to Chicago’s then-new natural history museum.

  Today, the Grainger Hall of Gems is more stunning than ever. Our collection has grown to include more than 600 gemstones and 150 pieces of antique and contemporary jewelry. (Several pieces were donated by Chicago philanthropist Thuy Ngo Nguyen, who visited often and would offer her stunning baubles to the museum on the spot!)

  Each display features a gem in its three stages of transformation: raw crystal, cut and polished stone, and mounted jewel in a finished ring, brooch, or necklace.

• Chicago Works: Jessica Campbell

  Museum of Contemporary Art
  220 E. Chicago Ave.,
  Chicago, IL 60611
  

  The satirical drawings, comics, and textiles by Chicago-based artist Jessica Campbell (Canadian, b. 1985) take aim at everyday experiences that reveal the sexism women face in the 21st century. Drawing from a wide range of influences including science fiction, art-world politics, and her Evangelical upbringing, she infuses her work with humor and vulnerability. Her recently published graphic novels include Hot or Not: 20th-Century Male Artists (2016) and XTC69 (2018).

   

• Waking the T. rex 3D: The Story of SUE

  Field Museum
  1400 S. Lake Shore Dr.
  Chicago, IL 60605
  

  In this thrilling 3D adventure, scientists trace the events of SUE’s life, following this T. rex’s growth from a tiny hatchling to seven tons of pure carnivorous glory. Learn the amazing story of SUE’s discovery in South Dakota’s badlands, and join Field Museum paleontologists on an excavation as they search for and excavate ancient fossils. If seeing the world’s largest, most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton gives you goosebumps, dare to come face-to-face with this roaring, earthshaking, and breathtaking dinosaur like never before. 

• Dinosaur Expedition

  Chicago Children’s Museum
  700 East Grand Avenue
  Chicago, IL 60611-3428
  

  Explore this re-creation of the real Saharan expedition where Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno discovered a NEW type of dinosaur. See a life-size skeleton of suchomimus (sue-co-MY-muss), dig for bones in the excavation pit, compare skulls, teeth, and claws with a T-Rex, and learn what it would be like to be part of Paul's expedition team.

• Atrium Project: Ellen Berkenblit

  Museum of Contemporary Art
  220 E Chicago Ave
  Chicago, IL 60611
  

  The latest installment of the MCA’s second-floor lobby atrium project features a mural by New York–based artist Ellen Berkenblit (American, b. 1958). This new work, titled Leopard’s Lane (2019), continues two recent themes in the artist’s painting practice, the expressive potential of cats, and the inherent energy of urban elements such as trucks, stoplights, and smokestacks. For the past several years, Berkenblit has incorporated a striped, tigerlike cat into her works, finding endless compositional potential in a simplified, even cartoonish profile, that remains relatively constant. This tactic of using schematic witches, birds, clocks, flowers, and horses as starting points for complex exercises in color, surface, and space has guided much of her work. Here, that cat has grown into a menacing leopard let loose in a dark landscape, sharing space with a box truck and an abstracted chimney. Honing her craft since her professional debut in the early 1980s, Berkenblit has arrived at a place of artistic assuredness where scale, orientation, and different degrees of completion or virtuosity are all up for grabs, in service to an overall goal of making images that are captivating, dynamic, and unforgettable.

• A Nation of Writers: John and Cathie Estey

  American Writers Museum
  180 N Michigan Ave
  Chicago, IL 60601
  

  English is our de facto national language, a legacy of colonization. Yet today’s Americans speak more than 350 languages, a reflection of the nation’s immigrant history and the enduring presence of our indigenous people. Given such diversity, is it possible to say that there is a single American literature, a body of work with a distinctive character? In a word, yes.

  The 100 authors featured here represent the evolution and flourishing of American writing. Writers of the 1600s and 1700s borrowed forms and themes from Europe, applying them to New World settings and issues. Then, over the course of the 1800s, a new, democratic style emerged, rooted in the way Americans talked and thought. Previously underrepresented voices began to be heard, culminating with an explosion of perspectives in the modern era. Taken together, this rich literary heritage reflects America in all of its complexity: its energy, hope, conflict, disillusionment, and creativity.

• Children’s Literature Gallery

  American Writers Museum
  180 N Michigan Ave
  Chicago, IL 60601
  

  The first books we read play a powerful, shape-changing role in our lives. “Children’s books are gateways to a lifelong love of literature and art,” says historian Leonard S. Marcus. “They give us the heroes we need just when we need them: at the start of our quest to discover who and what we are. They give us stories we will long remember.”

  Books for young people have been published in North America for more than 300 years – from well before the founding of the United States. Through them, writers and artists have crystallized each generation’s hopes and dreams for the next generation, and young people have learned what it means to be an American…and a human being. As Marcus observes: “To understand what our nation has cared about over time, we have only to look at the books we have given our children and teens.”

• Remembering Dr. King

  Chicago History Museum
  1601 North Clark Street
  Chicago, IL 60614-6038
  

  Remembering Dr. King: 1929-1968 invites visitors to walk through a winding gallery that features over 25 photographs depicting key moments in Dr. King’s work and the Civil Rights movement, with a special focus on his time in Chicago.

  Chicago, like other U.S. cities, erupted in the wake of King’s assassination on April 4, 1968. While the center of his activism was focused on dismantling southern Jim Crow, the systems that kept African Americans oppressed in the American South, he spent time in Chicago and often spoke out on the realities of northern discrimination, particularly around the issues of poverty, education and housing.

• Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa

  Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University
  40 Arts Cir Dr
  Evanston, IL 60208
  

  Travel with the Block Museum along routes crossing the Sahara Desert to a time when West African gold fueled expansive trade and drove the movement of people, culture, and religious beliefs.
  Caravans of Gold is the first major exhibition addressing the scope of Saharan trade and the shared history of West Africa, the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe from the eighth to sixteenth centuries. Weaving stories about interconnected histories, the exhibition showcases the objects and ideas that connected at the crossroads of the medieval Sahara and celebrates West Africa’s historic and underrecognized global significance.

• Fragments of a Crucifixion

  Museum of Contemporary Art
  220 E Chicago Ave
  Chicago, IL 60611
  

  Artists have used the crucifixion of Christ as a powerful symbol to address suffering and redemption in the history of racial violence in the United States. Fragments of a Crucifixion explores the continuing relevance of the crucifixion, even as our society becomes increasingly diverse in its religious beliefs. Rather than depict the image of the crucifixion itself, artworks in this exhibition offer only fragments—incomplete images and narratives. These works invoke agony and ecstasy through bodily traces and scenes of absence and loss. Featuring works in the MCA Collection, this show is dedicated to the spiritual in art, and to art’s capacity to evoke life and love in the face of brutality.

• THE COLLECTION: Where Art Meets Fashion

  Fashion Outlets of Chicago
  5520 Fashion Outlets Way
  Rosemont, IL 60018
  

  THE COLLECTION: Where Art Meets Fashion, the multifaceted contemporary art program of Fashion Outlets of Chicago, will welcome a rotating exhibition by 2018 Olympic costume designer Dr. Keysook Geum to the shopping center this February. Dr. Keysook Geum’s rotating exhibition will feature three life-sized sculptural forms, entitled Enlightenment III, Nirvana in Red IV and NIGHTINGALE. Dr. Geum is an author and professor of Textile Art and Fashion Design at Hong Ik University in Seoul, Korea, and recently served as the Artistic Director for the Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Games in 2018, designing both the uniforms and dresses worn in the opening ceremony. Dr. Geum’s dramatic sculptures of elegantly posed forms embody the fusion of timeless Asian aesthetics and philosophy with contemporary air. They are constructed of paper-wrapped or enamel coated wires, gems, beads and silk. Starting with a central focal point, Dr. Geum works outwardly in a concentric manner reminiscent of a spider. As the artist weaves, twists and bends wire two-dimensionally, intricate forms and unintentional patterns emerge. The natural tensions of interlacing wire push and pulls out until ¬-figurative shapes begin to take form.

• Wintrust Chicago Gallery

  American Writers Museum
  180 N Michigan Ave
  Chicago, IL 60601
  

  Chicago writers are visionaries, unafraid of trying something new. The city is one of the birthplaces of realism, an approach to writing that elevates the”everyday” into art. Chicago poets, novelists, journalists, and other writers have found inspiration in everyday people, telling their stories and transforming the way they talk into art. Chicago writers are also troublemakers…with a humanist bent. They have shone the light on injustice, questioned authority, and articulated bold new visions for a better world. Chicago writers are agents of change.

• Above and Beyond

  National Veterans Art Museum
  4041 N Milwaukee Ave 2nd floor
  Chicago, IL 60641
  

  Above and Beyond is comprised of 58,307 dog tags. Each dog tag represents the death of military personnel in the Vietnam War and is arranged in date order of death. And, each dog tag shows their name, date of death and military branch.

  Above and Beyond was commissioned by the National Veterans Art Museum and created by veteran artists: Rick Steinbock, Ned Broderick, Joe Fornelli and Mike Helbing. It was originally installed at 1801 S. Indiana Ave. on May 26, 2001 to coincide with Chicago’s Memorial Day parade. Above and Beyond was created over a 2-year period as each dog tag was stamped by hand using a former military Graphotype machine.

• Indigenous Entrepreneurship: Tribal Enterprises & Co-ops

  Mitchell Museum of the American Indian
  3001 Central St
  Evanston, IL 60201
  

  As there are no reservations in Illinois, most tribal based businesses are not well known in this area. While many people are familiar with the arts, crafts, and casinos, there are many other products and services offered by Indigenous businesses today.

  The Mitchell Museum is proud to present the latest exhibit showcasing Indigenous-owned businesses, tribal co-ops and enterprises; Indigenous Entrepreneurship: Tribal Enterprises & Entrepreneurs about the expansion of tribal initiatives that support tribal sustainability and the incorporation of tribal values into business models.

  The exhibit also covers the challenges that many tribal entrepreneurs face, their unique opportunities based on their sovereign nation status, and the programs that offer them support. Learn about the various products and services offered by tribal enterprises and Indigenous entrepreneurs, from Ioway Honey to buffalo meat Tanka Bars!

• Pop América, 1965–1975

  Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University
  40 Arts Cir Dr
  Evanston, IL 60208
  

  Pop América, 1965–1975 challenges and reframes familiar notions of Pop Art by bringing together artists from North, Central, and South America, as well as the United States and the Caribbean. Pop América is the first exhibition to unify Latin American expressions of Pop and explore how its bold and colorful imagery, references to mass culture, and representations of everyday objects, signs, and symbols were embraced by artists working across the hemisphere. The exhibition makes a timely and critical contribution to a deeper understanding of this period and the impulses behind Pop Art from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s.

• Lincoln’s Chicago

  Chicago History Museum
  1601 North Clark Street
  Chicago, IL 60614-6038
  

  Lincoln was a frequent visitor to Chicago, which became his second home and political headquarters during his rise to prominence. This gallery features portraits of Lincoln’s contemporaries with lithograph views of Chicago created in the 1860s. The pairings provide a glimpse of the city that Lincoln knew—a dynamic young metropolis on the verge of greatness.

• Sensing Chicago

  Chicago History Museum
  1601 North Clark Street
  Chicago, IL 60614-6038
  

  Use your five senses to uncover the past and discover that history is all around Chicago. Children can ride a high-wheel bicycle, hear the Great Chicago Fire, catch a fly ball at Comiskey Park, smell the Union Stock Yard, and dive into a giant Chicago-style hot dog!

• The Fifth Star Challenge

  Chicago History Museum
  1601 North Clark Street
  Chicago, IL 60614-6038
  

  If Chicago’s flag had a fifth star, what would it represent? Discover highlights from the city’s past, cast your vote, and see how your choice stacks up. While in the gallery, be sure to look beneath your feet and explore Chicagoland on our wall-to-wall floor map.

• Prisoner of Love

  Museum of Contemporary Art
  220 E. Chicago Ave.
  Chicago, IL 60611
  

  Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death, by acclaimed artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa, is a multilayered seven-minute montage of the black experience in America. The video tells a story of trauma and transcendence in a flurry of footage—from historic speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama, to clips of cultural icons Beyoncé and Notorious B.I.G., to flashes of concerts, home movies, news footage, music videos, and sports matches—all set to the soaring gospel tones of Kanye West's Ultralight Beam. Centered around this filmic journey, the exhibition features a rotating body of work from the MCA's collection that complements Jafa's video and captures some of the same intense emotions about life in America today. Powerful, moving works by artists such as Deana Lawson, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Marilyn Minter, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Carrie Mae Weems alternate throughout the run of the show, alongside the mainstay of Bruce Nauman’s iconic Life, Death, Hate, Pleasure, Pain.

  The exhibition is curated by Naomi Beckwith, Manilow Senior Curator. It is presented in the Sylvia Neil and Daniel Fischel Galleries on the museum's second floor.

• Wildlife Photographer of the Year

  Field Museum
  1400 S. Lake Shore Dr.
  Chicago, IL 60605
  

  From simmering volcanoes to the whiskers on a walrus, experience the beauty and intrigue of our natural world.

  Wildlife Photographer of the Year, produced by the Natural History Museum in London, showcases 100 of the world’s best nature photographs. An international panel of experts selected these images from over 45,000 entries.

  Striking scenes of diverse animal life and changing landscapes come into focus on immersive light panels. Trek through China’s mountains among endangered monkeys and glimpse owls in a bustling Indian city. Experience the many sides of life in the wild—at times surprising and even devastating, but also heartwarming and humorous.   

• The Photographs of Edward S. Curtis

  Mitchell Museum of the American Indian
  3001 Central St
  Evanston, IL 60201
  

  Between 1900 and 1930, Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) traveled from Mexico to the Arctic, compiling a vast store of information covering more than Indian tribes, in the form of 40,000 photographs, 10,000 recordings of songs and stories, and several volumes of field notes. The published result, The North American Indian (1907), spanned 20 volumes of illustrated text, accompanied by 20 photo portfolios.

  Most critics agree that the work is an impressive achievement, and that Curtis overcame many obstacles, including difficult field conditions and a chronic shortage of funds, to complete such a comprehensive project. However, opinions diverge about the value and integrity of his undertaking. Do these photos have merit beyond the world of art? In his quest to preserve “vanishing” tribes, Curtis promoted, and helped to shape, the public’s view of Indians as “noble savages.” Because he staged many of his scenes with overly fancy accessories or culturally inaccurate details, some scholars have criticized his work. However, others praise Curtis’ genuine interest in the Native people he photographed, in an era when tribes had been forced onto reservations and children sent to government-run boarding schools that stripped them of their language and traditions.

• The Commons Artist Project: Brendan Fernandes

  Museum of Contemporary Art
  220 E Chicago Ave
  Chicago, IL 60611
  

  Brendan Fernandes’s dance-based installation in the Commons explores the ways that society sees—and values—different kinds of bodies. Using language, architecture, and gesture to understand the nature of being seen, the artist encourages dancers and visitors to collaborate and generate new forms of physical language that move and attract other bodies in space.

• Birmingham, Alabama, 1963: Dawoud Bey/Black Star

  Museum of Contemporary Photography
  600 S Michigan Ave
  Chicago, IL 60605
  

  The exhibition Birmingham, Alabama, 1963: Dawoud Bey/Black Star responds to the September 15, 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama—an event that resulted in six deaths of black children by white supremacists. Organized by Dr. Gaëlle Morel, exhibitions curator at the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto, the exhibition pairs Dawoud Bey’s (American, b. 1953) The Birmingham Project (2012) with a selection of prints from the Black Star archive of photojournalism, providing a historical context for the bombing, and revealing the political and social turmoil that placed the American Civil Rights Movement in the media spotlight during the months leading up to the explosion. Commissioned by the Birmingham Museum of Art, Bey’s The Birmingham Project was created in memory of the children who were killed in Birmingham that day, nearing the 50th anniversary of the tragedy. Each diptych features a portrait of a child at the exact age of one killed in 1963 paired with a portrait of an adult at the age the child would have been in the year 2013. Also on view will be Bey’s 9.15.63, a split screen video exploring the social spaces of the black community in Birmingham alongside a route to the 16^th Street Baptist church from the vantage point of a child in the back seat of a car.

• Ornamental Traditions: Jewelry from Bukhara

  Art Institute of Chicago
  111 South Michigan Avenue
  Chicago, IL 60603
  

  Located in present-day Uzbekistan, the Emirate of Bukhara (1785–1920) was an important center of Islamic religion and scholarship and a major oasis on the famous Silk Road that traversed Central Asia from ancient times. As such, it was highly diverse—home to the majority Uzbek and Tajik populations in addition to communities of Arabs, Jews, and Turkmens who played a role in the emirate’s vibrant trade. Over time, Bukhara developed its own iconic style of jewelry characterized by intricate blue enamelwork that mirrored the region’s blue-glazed, tiled architecture. Russia’s colonization of Bukhara in 1866 brought with it more advanced enameling techniques, allowing for increasingly complex designs.

  In almost every context, the jewelry of Bukhara embodied great meaning and was rarely considered mere decoration. Large, ornate suits of jewelry were thought to protect the wearer from evil spirits, particularly during important events like weddings, and were the strongest assertion of a person’s power and wealth. Throughout Uzbekistan, such objects were designed to be worn as sets rather than exist as singular pieces.

• Tinkering Lab

  Chicago Children’s Museum
  700 East Grand Avenue
  Chicago, IL 60611-3428
  

  Welcome to Tinkering Lab, Chicago’s first DIY maker-space for families! Step into the ultimate workshop where we provide the space and resources, and you decide what to do next. We’re talking REAL tools, REAL materials and the freedom to innovate and explore life outside those fancy computer and smartphone screens.

• The S. Leigh Pierson and Douglas R. Conant Readers Hall

  American Writers Museum
  180 N Michigan Ave
  Chicago, IL 60601
  

  In addition to being the museum’s primary event space, Readers Hall also offers interpretive exhibits celebrating the critical role of the reader in American literature, both now and in the past. Visitors can get a glimpse of what everyday Americans were reading throughout history, and weigh in on their favorite reading material.

• Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well

  Art Institute of Chicago
  111 S. Michigan Ave.
  Chicago, IL 60603
  

  I Wanna Be Well—named after the 1977 Ramones song—marks the first comprehensive overview of the artist’s prodigious career, which spans three decades of production. Moving between multiple genres including video, art made for television, published poems, site-specific installation, live performance, and rare selections from the artist’s personal archive and library, the exhibition contemplates an expanded concept of portraiture as a mode of political and artistic address.

• Everyone’s Art Gallery: Posters of the London Underground

  The Art Institute of Chicago
  111 S. Michigan Ave.,
  Chicago, IL 60603
  

  In 1919, 39 posters came to the Art Institute of Chicago, courtesy of the Underground Electric Railways London. The posters, full of brilliant colors and innovative designs, were part of an effort to encourage Londoners to use this commercial transportation system: to visit the city’s cultural attractions, go shopping, attend sporting events, and even venture into the countryside—all by taking Underground trains and buses, of course. Installed outside Underground stations on public streets and on the front of buses that traversed the city, these posters formed a vibrant civic art presence—a public gallery available to all.

• The Great Chicago Adventure Film

  Chicago History Museum
  The Robert R. McCormick Theater
  1601 North Clark Street
  1601 North Clark Street
  Chicago, IL 60614-6038
  

  This dynamic film presentation in our newly renovated theater transports visitors through major events in Chicago’s history. Feel the intensity of the Great Chicago Fire and splendor of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Explore the sights of bustling Maxwell Street in the 1950s and peer down from an I-beam of the Sears Tower in the 1970s. Relive Chicago sports victories and cheer on President Obama during his Grant Park victory speech.

• Susan Te Kahurangi King: 1958-2018

  Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
  756 N Milwaukee Ave
  Chicago, IL 60642
  

  Organized by Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Susan Te Kahurangi King: 1958-2018 presents a survey of the living, New Zealand-based artist’s work. This major exhibition brings together more than 60 of her drawings, along with memorabilia from the personal archive of her sister, Petita Cole. The exhibition includes drawings that span her output from her early colorful mashups of Donald Duck and cartoon imagery to her detailed graphite abstractions to her most recent brush work created during a summer residency at the Elaine de Kooning House in East Hampton, N.Y. The exhibition will be the first major presentation of King’s work at Intuit and the first museum exhibition to include personal objects.

• THE GOLDEN GIRLS: The Lost Episodes, Vol. 3

  Mary's Attic
  5400 N. Clark St.
  Chicago, IL 60640
  

  Chicago’s geriatric “Fab Four” return in Hell in a Handbag Productions’ THE GOLDEN GIRLS: The Lost Episodes – Vol. 3! Join Dorothy, Rose, Blanche, Sophia and their whacky friends and relatives for all new adventures – including the first-ever musical episode.

  Episode One: Caged Miami Heat – Find out what happens when the girls are arrested and thrown in jail for the murder of their long-lost cook, Coco.

  Episode 2: Singing in the Pain – Can Rose overcome her crippling stage fright and perform a duet with her idol, Lyle Waggoner for the big Miami’s Ladies’ Auxiliary fundraiser? This is the first Golden Girls musical episode, so be prepared for songs like, ‘Back in St. Olaf’, ‘You’re a Tramp, Blanche’, and many more.

• Tight Ship @ Riverview Tavern

  Riverview Tavern
  1959 W. Roscoe St.
  Chicago, IL 60618
  

  Tight Ship Comedy is a professional independent showcase featuring the city's vast talent EVERY THURSDAY at Riverview Tavern (1958 W Roscoe St). Our first show is taking place 9/28 at 7:30pm, and you can purchase tickets online for $5, plus a small service fee. With each online ticket purchased, you’ll receive a FREE domestic beer when you arrive the night of the show.

• Six

  CHICAGO SHAKESPEARE THEATER
  Navy Pier, 800 East Grand Ave
  Chicago, IL 60611
  

  Henry VIII's six wives are stepping out from the big man's shadow to take their turn in the spotlight. Created by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, this musical celebration of 16th Century girl power debuted on the West End in 2018 to fantastic reviews. Much like Hamilton, Six injects its historical story with modern day attitudes and modern day music, serving up a dizzying whirl of pop and comedy, and an all-female cast. 

• Dream Freaks Fall From Space

  The Second City
  1616 N. Wells St.,
  Chicago, IL 60614
  

  Dream Freaks Fall from Space holds a funhouse mirror up to the already bizarre times in which we’re living. The powerhouse cast delivers a show that’s surreal, musical, maniacal, and utterly entertaining all at the same time. You’ll fall for this other-worldly adventure that’s unlike any other show on the planet!

• Máximo the Titanosaur

  Field Museum
  1400 S. Lake Shore Dr.
  Chicago, IL 60605
  

  The titanosaur Patagotitan mayorum is a big deal—literally, the biggest dinosaur that scientists have discovered to date. This long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur lived over 100 million years ago in what is now Patagonia, Argentina. 

  Named Máximo, meaning “maximum” or “most” in Spanish, our titanosaur cast reaches 122 feet across Stanley Field Hall on our main floor and stands 28 feet tall at the head. Modeled from fossil bones excavated in Argentina, this touchable cast conveys the sheer size of the biggest animal ever to live (It’s longer than a blue whale!). Patagotitan weighed about 70 tons in life—that’s as much as 10 African elephants, like the two specimens on display next to Máximo. 

• Facing Freedom in America

  Chicago History Museum
  1601 North Clark Street
  Chicago, IL 60614-6038
  

  What does freedom mean? To whom should freedom be extended? How are denied rights gained?

  Based on the central idea that the history of the United States has been shaped by conflicts over what it means to be free, this new exhibition uses images, artifacts, and interactive elements to explore familiar and not-so-familiar stories from the nation’s past. From women’s suffrage and the formation of labor unions, to Japanese internment, to a local school boycott, the exhibition highlights some of the ways Americans have struggled over the true meaning of freedom.

• Guards at the Taj

  Steppenwolf Theatre Company
  1650 N. Halsted St.
  Chicago, IL 60614
  

  India 1648. The dawn will reveal for the first time the extraordinary beauty of the Taj Mahal, built as a tribute to the ruler who demanded its construction. But for two hapless imperial guards, the morning light brings with it an unspeakable task that will shake their faith in God, the empire and their lifelong friendship. This boldly funny and deeply moving play examines the true meaning of beauty and the cost of transcendence in a world that confuses the value of both.

• Hamilton

  CIBC Theatre
  17 N State St., Suite 810,
  Chicago, IL 60602
  

  HAMILTON is the story of America’s Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, an immigrant from the West Indies who became George Washington’s right-hand man during the Revolutionary War and was the new nation’s first Treasury Secretary. Featuring a score that blends hip-hop, jazz, blues, rap, R&B, and Broadway, HAMILTON is the story of America then, told by America now.