Events on Friday, December 19
Portage 2008 Christmas Spectacular
Friday 12/19 @ Portage Theater
Since its grand re-opening in 2006 after years of neglect, the Northwest Side's 1920s-era beaux-arts movie palace has been charming a...
Friday 12/19 @ Double Door
Despite the moniker, you won't find singing policemen in Scotland Yard Gospel Choir. The Chicago-based band, led by songwriter Elia Einhorn,...
Ten Out of Tenn Christmas Tour
Friday 12/19 @ Schubas
Nashville singer/songwriter ensemble Ten Out of Tenn have much to croon about this month, in support of their Christmas album. Filled...
Ongoing Events
Friday 12/19 @ Steppenwolf Theatre Company
Sure, many people find the holidays depressing, but at least you're not a functionally alcoholic Dublin undertaker whose estranged daughter shows...
Friday 12/19 @ Peter Miller Gallery
Like the "viral components of consumer desire" she hopes to underscore, the familiar forms of domestic objects are omnipresent but elusive...
Friday 12/19 @ Museum of Contemporary Photography
Photographer Michael Wolf transitioned from keen observations of Hong Kong in his Architecture of Density series to a...
Friday 12/19 @ Millennium Park
Nothing could be more charmingly festive, more seasonally upbeat, more iconically Chicago, than holiday carols sung live beneath the "Bean." In...
Artifacts of Childhood: 700 Years of Childrens Books
Friday 12/19 @ The Newberry Library
The Newberry Library's celebrated collection boasts copies of Shakespeare's first folio and the Popol Vuh, but a new exhibition showcases a...
Marcel Broodthaers: Décor: A Conquest
Friday 12/19 @ The Arts Club of Chicago
Though it's cited as a seminal example of installation art, Marcel Broodthaers imagined his late work Décor: A Conquest (1975) as...
A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant
Friday 12/19 @ A Red Orchid Theatre
A bunch of children singing carols about Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard sounds like the recipe for an episode of South...
Friday 12/19 @ Museum of Contemporary Art
Her art may blend in with Las Vegas-strip-style lighted advertisements, but Jenny Holzer's brightly colored Truisms and arresting catchphrases are unlike...
Friday 12/19 @ Old Gold Exhibitions and Events
Selina Trepp invited dancer Ayako Kato to respond to Tina Turner's plaintive ballad "Private Dancer" for her latest collaboration. In Old...
Friday 12/19 @ Drury Lane Theatre Water Tower Place
If you like your holiday entertainment gentle, heartwarming, and family-friendly, this is the show for you. Based on Sally Benson's short...
Friday 12/19 @ Rhona Hoffman Gallery
Beautiful young black women level their gaze at the viewer from within Mickalene Thomas' large paintings. Covered with glittering rhinestones, Thomas'...
Friday 12/19 @ Lakeshore Theater
If ever there was a perfect show for its time, it was MST3K. Hocking good-natured snark at some of the most...
Friday 12/19 @ Chicago History Museum
In this glittering costume exhibition, the Chicago History Museum presents a rarely seen collection of haute couture fashions designed for the...
Friday 12/19 @ 65GRAND
The tangible and the ephemeral have a dance in Daniel Johnson's exhibition (curated by Melanie Schiff), which pairs photographs of reflections...
Friday 12/19 @ Graceland Cemetery
Hidden away on Chicago's north side, this secret memento of the city's architectural history is a large, rambling Victorian-style cemetery. Filled...
Friday 12/19 @ Graham Foundation
Labyrinthine hedges of gleaming, die-cast metal fill the ground floor of the Graham Foundation's Prairie-style mansion, like viral arabesques from a...
Friday 12/19 @ Landmark Renaissance Place Cinema
Not everyone adores the sprawling stories-within-stories that identify Charlie Kaufman's screenplays (e.g. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John...
Friday 12/19 @ David Weinberg Gallery
Conventional wisdom has it that art and science don't get along. For years, artists/twins Mike and Doug Starn have been gracefully...
Friday 12/19 @ Gene Siskel Film Center
François Truffaut's exquisite L'Enfant Sauvage is based on the true(ish) story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron, an 18th-century feral child...
Friday 12/19 @ The Second City
The 2008 election may have delivered a ray of hope, but storm clouds still hang above us. That's the uneasy premise...
Friday 12/19 @ Gene Siskel Film Center
Hiroshi Teshigahara's homage to Antonio Gaudí is, like the Spanish architect's own work, as much about form as it is about...
Hideout Christmas Dinosaur Panto
Friday 12/19 @ The Hideout
Christmas celebration, evolutionary biology, and good old-fashioned high-seas derring-do wrestle one another in this year's appropriately oddball Hideout Christmas Panto (as...
Friday 12/19 @ C33 Gallery at Columbia College Chicago
If artists ran the media, would Fox News actually be fair and balanced? And where would the voices of Sean Hannity and...
Friday 12/19 @ Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool
Escape the roaring cars on Lake Shore Drive and the crowds at Lincoln Park Zoo by slipping through the unobtrusive entrance...
Friday 12/19 @ The Art Institute of Chicago
A canonized master of photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson's legacy includes a staggering number of great images, as well as his influential idea...
Friday 12/19 @ Daley Plaza
Chicago's Christkindlmarket takes everything that is decadent about Christmas and German culture, and combines it underneath a large, sparkling Christmas tree...
Friday 12/19 @ Apollo Theater
Whether you love or fear musicals, you can delight in Baby Wants Candy, a fully improvised comedy show with song, dance,...
Friday 12/19 @ Museum of Contemporary Art
Joseph Grigely's artwork has a definite visual appeal, but sound — or the absence of it — drives his practice as...
Friday 12/19 @ AMC River East 21
Showing a human, fragile and, to some extent, remorseful side of the former president for the first time, David Frost's 1977...
Friday 12/19 @ Athenaeum Theatre
The singular H.P. Lovecraft casts a substantial shadow over modern horror fiction, and although his grandiloquent tales of "cosmic terror" aren't...
Friday 12/19 @ Smart Museum of Art
China's Three Gorges Dam has become a dark muse for many artists. One of the largest engineering efforts in history, it...
Friday 12/19 @ Chicago Cultural Center
For years, the photographic collection of Chicago's LaSalle Bank has been one of the small number of corporate art collections to...
Friday 12/19 @ Corbett vs Dempsey
Rising alongside the Chicago Imagists in the late 1960s, Robert Lostutter is known for his richly rendered, subtly unnerving watercolor portraits...
Friday 12/19 @ Landmark Century Centre Cinema
English actress Kristin Scott Thomas possesses a bristly elegance that has always restricted her options in English-language films. So it makes...
Twisted Into Recognition: Clichés of Jews and Others
Friday 12/19 @ Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies
Hoping to eliminate stereotypes about Jewish people — they all subsist on gefilte fish and bagels with lox, for example —...
The 25th Annual Music Box Christmas Show
Friday 12/19 @ Music Box Theatre
This year's Christmas Show offers a twofer stocking stuffer of classic holiday treats: Michael Curtiz's croon-tastic White Christmas and Frank Capra's...
Bing Faithful's Very Merry Nondenominational Holiday Special!
Friday 12/19 @ The Annoyance Theatre
As Mystery Science Theater 3000 proved, there's gold to be mined from failed art; cringeworthy entertainment can be so bad it's...
Friday 12/19 @ Donald Young Gallery
In Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's current exhibition, dusty cultural icons like the atomic bomb and Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome are reborn as sleek...
Friday 12/19 @ Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary
If nothing else, taking up birdwatching gives you a convenient excuse to bring terms like "Magnificent Frigatebird" and "Purple Gallinule" into...
Friday 12/19 @ Steppenwolf Downstairs Theatre
If the classic Christmas stories are starting to seem like cloying guests that have overstayed their welcome, The Seafarer at the...
Friday 12/19 @ Glass Curtain Gallery at Columbia College Chicago
It takes more than a tutorial in Adobe Illustrator to make someone an artist. Extraordinary computer design and illustration rely on...
Discarded Paintings by Gifted Amateurs
Friday 12/19 @ Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
Whereas most found-art exhibitions make aesthetic objects out of forgotten knick-knacks, the focus of this exhibition is, more literally, fine art...
Friday 12/19 @ Chicago Cultural Center
Can a chair be more than just a place to sit and rest your feet? In a modern-art exhibit, the answer...
Friday 12/19 @ Sullivan Galleries, SAIC
Chicago is quietly producing some of the nation's most innovative and thoughtful young curators, and it's evidenced by No End in...
Friday 12/19 @ Museum Campus
Just admit it, you've ogled the sleek modern houses you pass on certain streets and wished you could peek inside. The...
Friday 12/19 @ City Gallery
Scott Fortino, a Chicago cop who used his insider's access to photograph jails, jury rooms, and public schools for his book...
Friday 12/19 @ AMC Loews Pipers Alley 4
A pitch-perfect suspense film from Swedish director Tomas Alfredson, Let the Right One In is that rare bird: a chiller with...
