What to do in Chicago: EXPO Chicago, Charli XCX and Theaster Gates live
'A Clay Sermon': Chicago artist and 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient Theaster Gates is turning his Stony Island Arts Bank into a working clay studio for a 12-hour performance project this weekend. As described in an announcement of the experience, 'Gates will bring the art of ceramics to life in real-time,' and will offer 'a window into his creative process.' It's a fundraiser for his Rebuild Foundation, tied to EXPO Chicago; guests are invited to come and go throughout the day. Gates will be joined by the Black Monks and other special guests. Noon to midnight April 26 at the Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island; tickets from $25 at www.eventbrite.com
Charli XCX: Need a dance break? The Brat Tour rolls back into town, fresh off of the British pop star's triple Grammy win. 8 p.m. April 28 at Allstate Arena, 6920 N. Mannheim Road, Rosemont; tickets from $149.50 at charlixcx.com
Ivan Cornejo: Or maybe you need something a little more chill? Ivan Cornejo, the crooner who blends alt rock and música Mexicana, is in town for the second leg of the Mirada tour. 8 p.m. April 26-27 at United Center, 1901 W. Madison St.; tickets from $91 at ivancornejoofficial.com
Chicago Renaissance Showcase: An industrial warehouse will transform into a celebration of art, fashion and music. The day-long event will feature a vendor marketplace, panel discussion, art auction, interactive graffiti art, house music dance lessons and a fashion show before wrapping up with an afterparty featuring DJs Joe Smooth and Paul Woolford. Noon-1 a.m. April 26 at 1801 W. Carroll Ave.; tickets from $15 (proceeds benefit Museum of House) at lu.ma
Art on the Mart: Merchandise Mart lights up this weekend with projections by digital artist Shana Moulton, known for colorful installations that focus on female figures among mandala-like patterns. 8:30-9 p.m. April 25-June 1 and 9-9:30 p.m. June 5-July 6 (Thursdays-Sundays), best viewed from the Chicago Riverwalk between Wells and Franklin streets; free, more at artonthemart.com
Doc10 Film Festival: Looking for inspiration? Doc10, one of the city's finest film festivals, kicks off Friday and really gets rolling with 'Move Ya Body: The Birth of House' on April 30. The evening features a Q&A with producer Chester Algernal Gordon and house music innovator Vince Lawrence as well as an afterparty featuring DJ Celeste Alexander. Through May 4 at the Davis Theater, 4614 Lincoln Ave., and Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.; tickets from $16 and more information at Doc10.org
'The Goonies in Concert': Go on a 40-year-old treasure hunt with 'The Goonies,' as the Chicago Philharmonic performs Dave Grusin's original score. Ride the swell of the orchestra down the waterfall and into the adventure. 7:30 p.m. April 26 at The Auditorium, 50 E. Ida B. Wells Drive; tickets from $49.50 at chicagophilharmonic.org
Shopping: Get offline and go shopping IRL. Celebrate Independent Bookstore Day on Saturday with the Chicagoland Bookstore Crawl. Or, if you're in need of something handcrafted, check out the One of a Kind Show + Sale. The show features more than 350 vendors, ranging from food products and ceramics to fine art. Consider, too, Modern Vintage Chicago. Presented by the Randolph Street Market folks, Modern Vintage offers an opportunity to browse a range of wares dating from the 1890s and beyond. Whichever you choose, you'll likely find something you didn't even know you wanted. Chicagoland Bookstore Crawl is April 26; more details at chilovebooks.com. One of a Kind Show + Sale will be 10 a.m.-7 p.m. April 25-26 and 10 a.m.-5 p.m. April 27 at The Mart, 7th floor, 222 Merchandise Mart Plaza, tickets from $15 at oneofakindshowchicago.com. Modern Vintage Chicago will be 10 a.m.-5 p.m. April 27 at Ravenswood Event Center, 4021 N. Ravenswood Ave.; tickets from $5 at randolphstreetmarket.com
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
16 minutes ago
- Yahoo
How are Strictly's partners chosen? Inside the BBC's 'speed dating' event
How Strictly bosses use 'speed dating' to pair the celebrities with their professional dance partners The BBC bosses match the Strictly celebrity line-up with professional dancers at an event that has been likened to "speed dating". Strictly Come Dancing's partnerships can make or break how well the celebrity performs on the show. The incredible winners Chris McCausland and Dianne Buswell's natural dance chemistry made them immediately fan favourites months before they lifted the Glitterball trophy. One of this year's competitors Ellie Goldstein — who is a trailblazing model with Down syndrome — has declared who her dream partner would be. "The best partner is Nikita [Kuzmin]," she said on Good Morning Britain last week. "I love him! I want him, please, I love him so much." It begs the question about how the pairs are selected for the BBC's crown jewel. How are Strictly's partners chosen? Celebrity contestants and the professional dancers engage in a "speed dating" exercise when they meet face-to-face for the first time. This year's contestants and pros have met for the first time but the 2025 pairings remain tightly under wraps. The event, where the partnerships are chosen, is one of the first rehearsals held in the summer ahead of the show starting in mid-September. The celebrities have the chance to have a quick dance and chat with all of the professional dancers while the TV staff are watching on. Their first encounter leads to the choices made by TV bosses about who will be paired with whom. Whether the celebrity and their partner have natural chemistry is one of the big things on the checklist for those organising the pairs. They also have to take into account the height of the contestants compared to the professional dancers too. Lorraine star and presenter Ross King, who is used to the bright lights of Hollywood, revealed how it played out behind the scenes this year. He said: "It was like the first day of school... Everyone was so warm and welcoming. The 'speed dancing' which was really funny. All the men get in a circle. "All the female pros are on the outside. Then you do a little waltz. Then they move on and then you dance again... It's a little chemistry test. The chemistry of who gets on with who." It's the same exercise used for the female contestants taking part in Strictly. Last year, former 2023 Strictly contestant Angela Rippon revealed how she bagged her partner Kai Widdrington. She told The Express: "When we all meet for the first time before we get into the studio, what they do is they have a day where all the new celebs come to meet all the professionals and what they do is they ask all the men to go downstairs into the canteen with all the female professionals.' She added: "We female celebrities were put in circles and all male professional dancers were put in a circle around us and they played eight bars of a cha cha. And what happened is we all danced eight bars with whoever was in front of us. Then after eight bars, they moved on. "So we had the next one, and then they moved on and it was just like speed dating. We all ended up playing the music so we all danced with each other three times." Who gets a celebrity dance partner? Every year, only some of the professional partners get the enviable role of teaching a celebrity partner to dance. The other professional dancers remain focused on the group routines that make up some of the BBC show. This remains a secret until the show begins. However, this year, fan favourite Gorka Marquez announced he will not get a dance partner because of his conflicting schedule. He has taken up judging duties on the Spanish version of the show, Bailando Con Las Estrellas, and some of the filming times clash but he plans to take part in the group dances on Strictly. The professional dancers confirmed for Strictly in 2025 include: Dianne Buswell, Nadiya Bychkova, Amy Dowden, Karen Hauer, Katya Jones, Neil Jones, Marquez, Nikita Kuzmin, Luba Mushtuk, Jowita Przystal, Johannes Radebe, Aljaž Škorjanec, Kai Widdrington, Nancy Xu, Carlos Gu, Lauren Oakley, Michelle Tsiakkas and Vito Coppola.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Martin Shaw: ‘Lewis Collins behaved so badly'
Passing through the corridors backstage at the Harold Pinter Theatre on the way to meet Martin Shaw, line after line of A Man For All Seasons runs through my head like holy writ. The Robert Bolt play, turned into an Oscar-winning film in 1966, includes some of the most powerful but perfectly weighted dialogue of the 20th century. Shaw is making his second appearance in the play as Sir Thomas More – Henry VIII's martyred chief minister – for a summer West End run. 'I never got this play or Sir Thomas More out of my system,' he says. Shaw's career has oscillated between high theatre and high-profile TV roles such as Judge John Deed, Inspector George Gently and – most famously for those of a certain vintage – as Doyle in the much maligned cop show The Professionals. When we speak, he is an incredibly spritely 80 in his Hush Puppies, with long white hair falling either side of the face of a man 10 years his junior. That's just as well given the demands of playing More, a man with such integrity he would rather die than endanger his immortal soul by taking an oath confirming Henry VIII as Supreme Head of the Church. More's saintly virtues have been called into question recently, with Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy and the resulting BBC drama adaptation portraying him as a sadistic schemer of the Tudor court who enjoyed torturing heretics in opposition to his great rival Thomas Cromwell. In A Man For All Seasons, these roles are more or less reversed. 'I think Wolf Hall is one of the greatest dramas with the greatest performances ever produced by British television,' says Shaw. 'I've heard Hilary Mantel partly wrote Wolf Hall as a response to A Man For All Seasons. But from what I know, I think her portrayal of More is probably not accurate.' 'I told the casting director I couldn't work with Lewis' Whatever philosophical puzzles Shaw grapples with on stage, it's the legacy of a much less distinguished TV show he still finds tricky to escape. The Professionals, produced from 1977 to 1981, made Shaw a household name – all high cheekbones, footballer's perms and karate chops. It's remembered for the unbridled machismo of lead characters Bodie and Doyle – part police, part secret agents working for the fictional CI5 – who spent most of their time skidding a Ford Capri around the streets of London, shooting terrorists and making off-colour remarks about beautiful women. The trouble is, Shaw hated every single minute of it, in particular his toxic relationship with Lewis Collins, the actor who played Bodie to his Doyle. 'It was truly, truly horrible and there was a sense of blessed relief when it was over. Ten years after the show finished I met Lewis and everything was healed between us. But the trouble all started when I was a villain in The New Avengers in 1977 and he was my sidekick. Lewis behaved so badly on that set. He had a small part but he was so arrogant. It was beyond that. It was bizarre.' Shaw describes how Collins would boast about his physical prowess at the expense of the other actors and confuse the director by talking about how the scenes would play out if he had to fight for real. 'I looked at the script for The Professionals and was offered the part. I'd done a film with Anthony Andrews and we were good mates so we rehearsed together and I thought he was a shoo-in for the other lead. But the production company wanted an abrasive relationship. 'I'd already said to the casting director, 'I can't work with Lewis because we don't get on', but they cast him anyway. I went up to him on the first day of shooting and said: 'You know I didn't want you to do this but let's get on with it and have fun.' And he told me to f--- off and he never forgave me for the next four years.' There is a notorious episode of The Professionals called 'The Klansman' about a far-Right group Shaw's character has to infiltrate. It was never broadcast in the UK because it featured such a prevalence of racist language. Did Shaw think this seemed insane during filming? 'I thought pretty much every episode was insane,' he replies. The thing Shaw found most uncomfortable then as now is that his work up to that point – the Royal Court and the National Theatre, TV and movie roles – 'vanished' once he was in The Professionals. Shaw, born in Birmingham in 1945, attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda) from 1963, served his time in rep and London theatre, and came to prominence playing Banquo in Roman Polanski's film of Macbeth in 1971. Polanski – who owned a flat in Chelsea – asked him to test for the role of Macbeth, though the lead eventually went to Jon Finch. 'When I saw the people testing for Macbeth, including Antony Hopkins who was my hero and with whom I shared a house, I thought I had no chance. But Polanski called me and offered me the role of Banquo.' Shaw recounts the conversation in a Dracula-esque Polanski accent and says the seven months of Macbeth's production were some of the greatest of his life. He's understandably circumspect about Polanski's ongoing exile in France as a result of his flight from the US in 1971 following his conviction for sex with a minor. 'Polanski was great with actors. My admiration and respect for him carried on through the whole production. There is so much gossip about the case he was involved in but it's a terrible loss to the industry.' 'Rhodes did some very bad things but I didn't mind playing that character' In the four decades since The Professionals, Shaw invariably appeared on British TV as a detective or a judge, which he says is attributable more to television's obsession with the law than anything to do with his persona or slow, sonorous voice. One notable blip on this long list of hits was the eight-part BBC epic drama Rhodes in 1996, which told the story of Britain's most infamous 19th-century empire builder Cecil Rhodes in southern Africa. It seems almost inconceivable that this would be made today, given the bitter controversy over Rhodes's reputation. The show was rounded on by critics and the ratings almost halved between the first and second episode. 'Rhodes was hard enough to make even then,' says Shaw. 'The BBC didn't want to support it. I suspect they wanted to kill it. Eventually it was made for £8m instead of £12m. The South African government withdrew their funding, not because of any sensitivities over the theme of colonialism, but because they didn't like Rhodes being portrayed as a homosexual. 'It was clear even in 1996 that Rhodes did some very bad things. I didn't mind playing that kind of character. Those bad things are there in all of us and having a licence to access them as an actor is great.' 'It's almost impossible to be a person of integrity in public life' 'Bad things' are harder to find in Thomas More, but they must be in there somewhere. A Man For All Seasons is Shaw's happy place, having already taken the role in 2005 at London's Haymarket Theatre. Shaw says he went to see the play and the film over and over again in the 1960s, starring the peerless Paul Scofield. Shaw wants to keep evolving his approach to More, as much to make the most of the character's limitless depth as to step out of the great man's shadow. 'This time I'm playing him as a more life-enhancing, life-loving character who could laugh and get incredibly angry as well as his better known qualities.' This is a play that poses one dilemma after another. At its heart is the question of how far a person is prepared to go to preserve their own conscience, their own sense of truth as they believe it to be. Every other character compromises for gain or self-preservation (other than Henry VIII, who doesn't need to). More goes to the block for his beliefs. 'From my point of view, More's stand was borderline ridiculous,' says Shaw. 'For him, his oath was 'words you say to God' so he could not, as his daughter suggested, take the oath and think differently in his heart.' Among many memorable lines – the quickfire battles with Cromwell, More's stirring defence of the law – the exchange between More and former hanger-on Richard Rich stands out. Rich perjured himself to gain promotion to the Attorney General of Wales and his lies provide the only evidence against More. Knowing his trial is all but over, More asks to see the red dragon on Rich's new badge of office. 'Richard, it profits a man nothing to gain the whole world if he should lose his soul … but for Wales?' The script is all but perfect. Shaw recalls the line, 'When statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties they lead their country by a short route to chaos.' 'That is true now more than ever,' he adds. 'Think about how important conscience and integrity are. It's almost impossible to be a person of integrity in public life – but I truly believe they are out there.' Shaw is full of contradictions. He has been a vegetarian since 1971 and follows Sant Mat, a mystical philosophy movement influenced by Sikhism and Hinduism. There's no reason why that shouldn't co-exist with sliding over the bonnet of an Escort RS2000 in pursuit of a gun runner, but it feels like it might. Still, despite all Shaw's misgivings, he has made something approaching peace with the worst experience of his career. 'There is another side to The Professionals. Years later an actor walked up to me on set and said 'It's so wonderful to meet you. You're my childhood hero.' So that helped me see the show differently. So many people loved it and got some sort of happiness from it.' It's wisdom of which Sir Thomas More would surely approve. A Man For All Seasons is at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London SW1, until Sept 6 Solve the daily Crossword
Geek Tyrant
an hour ago
- Geek Tyrant
Ian McKellen Teases Gandalf and Frodo's Return in Andy Serkis' New LORD OF THE RINGS Movie — GeekTyrant
There's magic in the air again with Warner Bros. developing several new film projects set in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. While Ian McKellen isn't officially signed on to reprise his role as Gandalf yet, that didn't stop him from dropping some interesting hints about The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum during a fan event in London. At the For The Love Of Fantasy convention, McKellen was joined onstage by his Fellowship brothers Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Billy Boyd, and Dominic Monaghan. And in classic McKellen fashion, he stirred up excitement by revealing that both Gandalf and Frodo are set to appear in the upcoming film, which will be directed by Andy Serkis aka Gollum. McKellen said to the crowd: 'I hear there's going to be another movie set in Middle-earth, and it's going to start filming in May. It's going to be directed by Gollum, and it's all about Gollum.' He then added: 'I'll tell you two secrets about the casting: There's a character in the movie called Frodo, and there's a character in the movie called Gandalf. Apart from that, my lips are sealed.' The film is slated for a theatrical release on December 17, 2027, but neither McKellen nor Wood have confirmed their involvement, though McKellen has long been open to donning the wizard's hat once more. McKellen previously said: 'Enthusiasm for The Lord of the Rings shows no sign of abating … I can't tell you any more than that. I've just been told there are going to be more films and Gandalf will be involved and they hope that I'll be playing him.' Backing the project is the powerhouse team behind the original trilogy including Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens returning as producers, with Zane Weiner also on board. The screenplay is being penned by Walsh and Boyens alongside Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou. With filming set to begin in May, fans can expect to learn more soon. Until then, the return of Gandalf and Frodo is more than enough to stoke the fires of of excitement and anticipation. And yes, McKellen even revisited one of his most iconic lines from The Fellowship of the Ring during the event, because what's a Gandalf tease without a bit of nostalgia? You can watch him talk about all about this in the videos below! Middle-earth is calling again, and it sounds like some familiar voices are answering.
