AVQ&A: What's the best live show you saw this summer?

I’ve been lucky enough to see Ted Leo And The Pharmacists live—allow me to do some quick calculations—a fuckton, but rarely has the timing worked out as well as seeing the band in top form ahead of this year’s Square Roots Festival. It was like I needed to be in the modest auditorium at the Old Town School Of Folk Music, listening to Ted wail over the mic and on the guitar, radiating the same fury so many of us feel right now, sounding a call for “The One Who Got Us Out.” We even got to hear some of the band’s new music, though I can’t pretend to remember the names of any of the tracks. I had to travel nearly an hour and a half by bus to get up there, and I got caught in the rain on the way home, but nothing could have taken the luster off the evening. [Danette Chavez]

I get too nervous in crowds to fully enjoy a lot of live music or theater, but I love movie trivia. (I love trivia competitions of all kinds, actually, provided they don’t dip into the dark forest of eldritch knowledge known as sports.) So there’s no “live performance” more holy to me than pulling up, once every few months, to the bar tables at Portland, Oregon’s gorgeous Hollywood Theater for the theater’s monthly The Movie Quiz. Broadcast on the big screen, and hosted and written by an affable British guy who I know only as “Mark,” it’s one of the best ways I know to tap into the soothing vibe of collective nerding out. This past July’s competition, the most recent time my wife and I managed to make it out to the always-sold-out Quiz, was a classic representation of what’s best about this collective act of pointless showing off: Fiendishly hard questions, lots of laughter as various groups struggled with oddball questions about classic movie musicals, and a few moments of just barely dragging the answer back from the edge of mental oblivion. [William Hughes]

For my birthday, my partner took me out to an inescapable yet much-maligned Chicago institution: a live comedy show. But don’t worry, this wasn’t a sweaty, friend-of-a-friend’s improv show at a depressing open mic night. Rather, the energetic flurry of dumb bits, cutting humor, and go-for-broke slapstick was mined from an hour-long stretch of 30 randomly ordered micro-plays written by The Neo-Futurists. It was still sweaty though. Sequestered in their tiny theater, fanning ourselves alongside a packed, masked, riotous audience of bears and leather daddies and lipstick lesbians and folks everywhere in between on the spectrum, I communed with my people, laughed freely, and watched more live-Googling of Pokémon Rule 34 than I had ever anticipated. It was a hell of a show, the performers were feeling themselves, and I ended up getting involved with a charity (Pushing Envelopes Chicago) that gives a shit about the right stuff. [Jacob Oller]

I was lucky enough to catch John Proctor Is The Villain on Broadway before it closed, and I’m so glad I did. It’s a funny, sharp play that cleverly layers history—from the Salem witch trials to McCarthyism to #MeToo—on top of small-town interpersonal conflict. The whole cast was excellent (special shout-out to Fina Strazza as the brainy, anxious teacher’s pet Beth), and I saw myself reflected in their teenage attempts to understand feminism and how it might apply to their lives. The plot can be heavy, but it moves along so lightly and with such humor that the moments of intense emotion and sublime catharsis caught me by surprise and moved me to tears. I hope the newly announced film adaptation manages to capture what made the stage production so special. [Mary Kate Carr]

It’s been a good minute since I went to see a Broadway show, which feels almost criminal to say as someone living so close to New York City. It turns out that Little Shop Of Horrors—a musical from Howard Ashman and Alan Menken that I’m already a fan of—was a great way to jump back in. This production had everything I wanted: Top-notch performances from The Handmaid Tale’s Madeline Brewer and Gossip Girl’s Thomas Doherty, who makes for a surprisingly good Seymour, an intimate setting (the Westside Theatre), and, of course, an ever-blooming, ever-ravenous Audrey II will always be an entertaining and funny prop. The MVPs were actors Christine Wanda, Savannah Lee Birdsong, and Morgan Ashley Bryant, who charmed me and the entire audience with their melodic singing. All in all, I loved the communal feeling of watching a well-known musical with a group of people who seemed just as enchanted as me. [Saloni Gajjar]