Live Performance entertainment in Chicago
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A
Green Mill
You can sit in Al Capone’s favorite spot at the timeless Green Mill, a true cocktail lounge that comes complete with curved leather booths and colorful tales about mob henchmen who owned shares in the place (a trap door behind the bar leads to tunnels where they hid their bootlegged booze). Little has changed in over 70 years – the club still books top local and national jazz acts. On Sunday night it hosts a nationally known poetry slam, where would-be poets try out their best work on the openly skeptical crowd.
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B
Neo-Futurists
The theater is best known for its long-running Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, in which the hyper troupe makes a manic attempt to perform 30 plays in 60 minutes. It runs Friday and Saturday at 11:30pm and Sunday at 7pm. Admission cost is based on a dice roll. The group puts on plenty of other original works that’ll make you ponder and laugh simultaneously. Well worth the northward trek.
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Ravinia
In the summer the Chicago Symphony Orchestra heads to Ravinia, a vast open-air summer series in Highland Park on the North Shore. It’s certainly a hike from downtown, but if you go, avoid the traffic and take the 45-minute Metra/Union Pacific North Line train from the Ogilvie Transportation Center to Ravinia Station ($9 round-trip). Trains stop both before and after the concerts right in front of the park gates.
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C
Civic Orchestra of Chicago
Founded in 1919, this orchestra is something of the kid sibling to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, made up of younger players who often graduate to the big-time professional symphonic institutions around the world. It’s the only training orchestra of its kind in the world, and, amazingly, tickets to performances at Symphony Center are free.
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D
Theatre Building
Fans of musicals should try to make the mid-August Stages Festival, which brings a dozens of tuneful new scores, some from Chicago writers, to the Theatre Building. Around the same time of year, there’s a two-week presentation of solo shows called the Single File Festival.
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E
Davenport’s Piano Bar & Cabaret
Old standards get new interpretations and new songs are heard for the first time at this swanky place on a rather lonely stretch of Milwaukee Ave. The front room is a fun, inclusive (read: sing-along) place, with the back reserved for more fancy-pants cabaret events (where singing along will get you thrown out).
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F
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti leads the CSO, one of America’s best symphonies, known for fervent subscribers and an untouchable brass section. The season is from September to May at Symphony Center’s Daniel Burnham–designed Orchestra Hall, though the orchestra also plays summer engagements at Ravinia.
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G
Civic Opera House
The Lyric Opera of Chicago, one of the country's best, performs in the grand venue here.
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