Director Barbara Gaines tries moral equivocation to address the most problematic of Shakespeare’s problem plays: Shylock is cruel, but the Christians drive him to it. The scene where Scott Jaeck’s choleric Antonio spits in Shylock’s yarmulke before shoving it on his head is particularly harsh. As Harold Bloom points out, the play only really works if Shylock is a slapstick comic villain, and this handsome but somewhat airless production is far too polite to take that route, leaving us with no one to feel strongly about, except possibly Shylock’s anguished daughter....

On June 15 Mayor Daley brought public school officials and aldermen to a south-side grammar school for a revival meeting of sorts. The ostensible purpose of the press conference was to announce the mayor’s plans to spend $1 billion over the next six years to build 24 new schools in neighborhoods across Chicago. But Daley and the other officials made a point of reminding people of the economic development plan that makes this possible: the tax increment financing program....

In Scott Oken and Ernest Deak’s self-consciously zany comedy for Factory Theater, a playwright (Mike Beyer) is given the chance of a lifetime when a prestigious Chicago company agrees to produce his play if he can pull off rehearsals in two and a half weeks. Toast of the Town features wacky characters, rubber chickens, funny voices, bad puns, face slapping, cartoonish double takes, and Keystone Kops-style chases. But as directed by Nick Digilio, the actors seem to believe that the louder they talk the funnier they are, and tedious blackouts slow the pace....

Rock, Pop, Etc. BLACK NOIZE with Woody Rock. Sun 6/27, 3 PM, DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl. 773-947-0600, ext. 225. STEVE COOPER ORCHESTRA performs at Chicago SummerDance (preceded by dance lessons at 4 PM). Sun 7/4, 5 PM, Spirit of Music Garden, Grant Park, Michigan between Harrison & Balbo. 312-742-4007. JACKYL, DOKKEN, SKID ROW, TERMINAL FIX, BONFIRE, X-GIRLFRIEND, DAWNSTONE, RIPLEY STREET Sat 7/3, 1 PM, Star Plaza Theatre, I-65 & U....

Reggaeton’s most ubiquitous offering of 2005 was “Mayor Que Yo,” a bombastic posse cut that stuck Puerto Rico’s BABY RANKS into a crowd of the genre’s more momentous stars–Daddy Yankee, Wisin y Yandel–and immediately elevated his status. It didn’t hurt that Ranks also has the backing of Luny Tunes, the production duo responsible for Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina” and most every major reggaeton hit of the last three years–he shows up on seven tracks on Luny Tunes Mas Flow 2, which has sold more than 200,000 copies since its release in March (“Latin platinum” according to the RIAA–as opposed to, uh, non-Latin platinum, which is one million)....

Inventive, heartfelt performances can’t redeem Samm-Art Williams’s unfocused script about a successful woman returning to the town that scorned her as a pregnant teenager. The actors are remarkably successful at an impossible task: portraying characters who are both archetypes and individuals. Nonetheless this mating of morality play with naturalistic drama produces only sterility. The play drags, and its plot twists are frustrating instead of intriguing–what the hell is this about, anyway?...

Logan Square may be the only Chicago neighborhood with its own Statue of Liberty: for decades she’s been greeting the clients of Liberty Bank for Savings (2392 N. Milwaukee), standing guard over the steel-framed glass and mosaic-tile entrance. The building itself is an anomaly, a 60s design in a neighborhood that, as a general rule, doesn’t do modern. Take a walk down the street, east of California, and you’ll see what I mean....

The Castanets are often slotted into one of several nouveau genres–gothic country, dark Americana, avant-psych–all of which leave out a crucial component that would seem to define the band as much as any fancy name ever could: they’re quietly Christian. Singer and band nucleus Raymond Raposa drops bread crumbs from the Holy Writ throughout their latest album, First Light’s Freeze (Asthmatic Kitty)–divinity that proves itself in daily life, the living world posited as just half the picture, redemption themes, faith in unseen guiding forces–singing with a chipped and craggy holler from beneath his old-man beard....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My earliest memory of western swing legend Bob Wills is from a record shop I worked at in the late 80s, where a couple of my coworkers responded to every one of the bandleader’s frequent interjections—“Well, all right,” “Aw, yeah,” “Yes,” “Yes, yes,” or “Uh huh”—with a resigned “shut up, Bob.” That response makes loads of sense after listening to Legends of Country Music, the terrific career-spanning box set that Columbia/Legacy released earlier this year....

The night Shady got lost, eight-year-old Robbie Penna cried himself to sleep in his mother’s arms. Shady was his pet box turtle, and for almost two years he’d lived in Robbie’s room in a glass aquarium lined with wood chips. Shady would bang his shell against the glass every morning. He was like an alarm clock, Robbie joked, because he seemed to know exactly when Robbie needed to wake up....

In just a couple years Champaign’s Headlights have evolved from low-key beginnings in a farmhouse-cum-home-studio to become an A-list orch-pop act. Last year Polyvinyl reissued the homemade The Enemies EP, four tuneful numbers that glided on Erin Fein’s wistful vocals. (The German label Mi Amante released a 12-inch vinyl version earlier this year.) Headlights’ debut full-length, the new Kill Them With Kindness (Polyvinyl), showcases increasingly confident writing and a flair for arranging: a passionate string section ebbs and flows through the stunning opening track, “Your Old Street....

Led by the flamboyant Joel Gibb–in childhood a troublemaker at fundamentalist Christian summer camps, later a semiotics student–this unwieldy Toronto collective tones down its “gay church folk music” on the recent Awoo (Arts & Crafts). It’s less overtly political and less sexually provocative (no songs about drinking piss this time), focusing instead on lush, spontaneous-sounding eruptions of orchestral pop that frame Gibb’s angelic but sublimely lusty voice. The lyrics on the band’s 2003 album, The Smell of Our Own, were unapologetically raw and dirty, like one of Francis Bacon’s suggestive swirls of naked musculature, writhing across a mattress under a bare lightbulb....

Brothers Chris and Richard Adams formed Hood in 1990 as teenagers, plugging their one guitar into their dad’s stereo and calling it a band. That ad hoc approach became the British band’s early aesthetic: the rickety playing, tape hiss, and occasional lapses into scuzzy noise on their first recordings obscured their winsome melodies and the wounded idealism of their lyrics. But in recent years they’ve traded primitive productions in for technologically savvy ones....

Frank Stachyra has been a Lyric Opera supernumerary for 24 years. The supers are cast members who neither sing nor speak, and they don’t get paid either, except for a stipend so small it barely covers parking. It’s volunteer work, and Stachyra, who figures he’s been in as many as 80 productions, loves it. Three years ago, after retiring from his law practice, he also began to work at Lyric as an actor....

The Lyric’s riveting new production of Verdi’s tragic masterpiece Rigoletto–about the hunchbacked jester to the Duke of Mantua, whose bed is his throne–revels in the story’s debauchery. In the title role is baritone Carlos Alvarez, whose first sound on opening night was as creepy as it was marvelous and whose every subsequent note was vocally and emotionally perfect. His embittered jester was bitingly sarcastic in the opening scenes, full of pain and loneliness as he headed home, lovingly tender with his daughter Gilda–his only source of happiness–and profoundly despairing when he learned she’d been abducted and delivered to the duke....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gotling didn’t actually mass produce the spicy mulled holiday wine in the back of the bar anymore, though he batched some up for insiders. Years ago, “Hans was giving away free samples on folding tables out in front of Wikstrom’s delicatessen,” says Roper. “And then if people liked it they could go in and buy some. Except Wikstrom’s doesn’t have a liquor license....

I’m a pretty normal guy except for one thing: I’m sexually attracted to zombies. When I was a kid I loved to watch horror films that featured them. Then, as I became a teen, I started to masturbate watching zombie flicks. Now I fantasize about having sex with zombies while trying not to get bitten, then eventually ending up getting devoured. I also fantasize about a woman being gangbanged by a group of zombies who then rip her apart and eat her....

With their poetic air and mix of abstraction and representation, Jered Sprecher’s gentle, tentative paintings and drawings suggest the work of Gerhard Richter. In fact Richter was an influence, but an encounter with an elderly woman while Sprecher was in grad school was even more important. While still an undergraduate at Concordia University in Nebraska, Sprecher went on a class trip to a nursing home to do clay portraits of the residents, then later returned to sketch them on his own....

The Silent Majority But the ban’s supporters haven’t figured out how to persuade Daley to take their side. “You don’t want to publicly attack him,” says one strategist, “because then it gets personal and he could hold a grudge.” Yet they don’t want to give him a pass. “At some point you have to hold people accountable,” says another ban supporter. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “‘Cause we’re working on the stuff, and I’d rather not say....

Like the Bad Plus, which has gotten loads of attention for playing jazz versions of songs by the likes of Nirvana, Aphex Twin, and Abba, the Thing brings a jazz sensibility to rock covers. But instead of sticking close to the familiar melodies it plugs into rock’s primal power to energize its febrile free jazz. The Scandinavian trio–saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, bassist Ingebrigt Haaker Flaten, and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love–debuted in 2000 with an album-length investigation of Don Cherry tunes, but they opened their second record, the superb She Knows ....