Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hardly the sort of nobility you’d expect from the future Henry V, who eventually delivers the ringing “band of brothers” speech before the battle of Agincourt. But it’s exactly what you’d expect from the callow, self-serving youth who attains power but not compassion or wisdom in the Henry IV plays. Overall Gaines’s Chicago Shakespeare Theater production (which travels to the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon after this run) isn’t revolutionary....

Long-Distance Relationship Marlette did what good editorial cartoonists are paid to do: he pushed a raging story to its extreme and drew the extreme, letting the chips fall where they might. Since the basis of the raging story is a series of racist comments overheard on fire department radios, not fires in black neighborhoods that white firemen wouldn’t fight, it can be argued that in pursuing the extreme Marlette wandered dangerously far from reality....

Singer-actress Molly Picon was one of the great iron butterflies of American theater. Sarah Blacher Cohen’s cut-and-paste stage biography doesn’t quite do her life justice, but Renee Matthews is winning as the lead in Chicago Jewish Theatre’s production, breathing some life into the leaden script. Picon began her career by singing for pennies on the trolley to make rent, then survived the death of vaudeville and Yiddish theater to star in Broadway shows and on the silver screen....

I hope this problem isn’t too boring: I adore my smart, affectionate, sexy husband, but he’s impotent. We don’t really need medical advice–we know why. (It started out as a physiological problem, side effects from antidepressants; now it’s psychological.) He’s currently–and willingly–seeing a psychiatrist, but I need some advice on how we can get back in the saddle. Direct discussions about the problem make him feel worse and more inadequate. He’s even admitted he avoids situations where we might fool around, because if he doesn’t try he can’t fail....

Note to Tireswing Theatre: TURN DOWN THE VOLUME! Shrieking doesn’t make lines funny, it makes them piercing and incomprehensible. There are good things in writer-director Tami Zimmerman Henry’s family-oriented production, which looks at both Leonardo’s life and his literary efforts: not all of it’s loud. Fourteen-year-old Pippin Mueller is deft as the artist’s hummingbird model, and occasionally the fables earn a laugh, as when Maggie Graham plays a balky camel and Rick Smith a frustrated camel driver....

Jerry Kleiner is standing inside Loncar Liquors, an old-man bar on the corner of Brandon and 92nd Street. He motions at the chicken in the deep fryer behind the bar. “They use pure lard,” he says approvingly. The employees at the counter, a few of whom look like they’ve been around since the bar opened in 1924, have stopped working to stare at Kleiner. He’s wearing a red windbreaker over a blue Puma sweatshirt, brown Nike warm-up pants, and white wing tips....

Is it possible to be dyslexic in Chinese? Surely someone with dyslexia wouldn’t be likely to misconstrue a word’s meaning if that word were represented as a distinctive symbol as in Chinese, right? I mean, if you were to show a dyslexic a picture of a house, that person would still easily recognize it, even though he might have trouble deciphering the written word. Or am I totally in the dark about dyslexia?...

Monday nights are sticky-floor, nasty-meat-market, sopping-wet-menu nights so packed that I spill half my drink just getting away from the bar. I always wear killer heels, and I can never get a table unless I cut into the wait-list line. By the end of the night I’m hurting from head to toe. Otherwise there’d be no point in going out at all. And from now on there isn’t. My regular beginning-of-the-week hangout, Mod, which hosts Martini Monday ($3 martinis all night), is closing this Sunday after brunch–five years to the month after its birth....

The lineups in New York and California were more high–powered, but the Chicago installment of Rock the Bells is hard to complain about. Headliners WU-TANG CLAN may have peaked ten years ago, but even without ODB they’re one of the most insanely awesome rap mobs on earth. Their set will probably include material from their weaker recent albums and the forthcoming 8 Diagrams, but they know not to ignore the classics....

Bollywood Nights Bar & Grill In the middle of the room, between taking phone calls and directing the activity around them, owners Benhur Samson and Waqas Mirza were engrossed in an interview with a heavily made-up belly dancer. They asked her rate; she said it was $150 per show. They asked if she had experience dancing to Bollywood music–songs from the lush productions India’s film industry is famous for. She told them she did–not only that, several friends know the choreographed numbers as well and regularly perform at “crossover parties,” as gatherings of Arabs and Indians are called....

This weekend the Arcade Fire will play the Coachella festival in California, a two-day, 90-band blowout headlined by Coldplay and Nine Inch Nails. Three days later the band will kick off a three-week tour of Europe and the UK with a show in Manchester, but when they cross the Atlantic they’ll be leaving a member behind: 22-year-old Will Butler, who plays bass, keyboards, and percussion, is finishing his senior year at Northwestern....

As a pianist Cooper-Moore has played with Susie Ibarra, William Parker, and David S. Ware, among others. But the 59-year-old New Yorker doesn’t just play piano. On a pair of duet recordings with Israeli-born reedist Assif Tsahar, he plays flute, drums, and myriad instruments he designed and built himself. Those include a three-string banjo; an ashimba (an 11-bar xylophone); a horizontal-hoe-handle harp; a bass diddley bow; and a mouth bow, a bowed instrument he plays using his mouth as a resonator, like a jaw harp....

Beirut, aka Zach Condon, is a 20-year-old high school and college dropout who spent one not-so-distant summer bumming around Europe, where he was exposed to the music of Balkan composers. Back home in New Mexico, mostly working solo, he started recording emulations of Gypsy orchestras and the hard, mournful brass bands of the eastern bloc; he made tracks from Gulag Orkestar (Ba Da Bing!), his debut as Beirut, available online, where they were feted by the blog set months before the album’s May release....

Wong Kar-wai’s idiosyncratic style first became apparent in this gorgeously moody second feature (1991), whose romantic vision of 1960 Hong Kong as a network of unfulfilled longings would later echo through In the Mood for Love. Leslie Cheung, Hong Kong’s answer to James Dean (in fact the movie appropriates its Cantonese title from Rebel Without a Cause), plays a heartless ladies’ man, raised by a prostitute, who eventually leaves for the Philippines in search of his real mother....

Dear Ms. True, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I made the trip from New England to Chicago specifically to participate in the event at great expense because of my great respect for the project. I especially resent Ms. Armstrong’s slanted and skewed remark “Images projected at the head of the runway were of hipsters partying and Indian women toiling with needle and thread or painting pots....

Going Coastal An elegiac discussion of This American Life classics followed, peppered with outbursts. “NYC? It is such a different place,” someone moaned. “It is almost impossible that it will not change the feel of the show.” Somebody else reminisced about Friday afternoons spent shopping at Marshall Field’s, followed by a sandwich at the Berghoff and a mai tai at Trader Vic’s. “I’d be home in time for the friday night broadcast of TAL....

Early on in her stay in Port-au-Prince, writes Kathie Klarreich in her new memoir, Madame Dread: A Tale of Love, Vodou, and Civil Strife in Haiti (Nation Books), she saw a crowd and followed it. It led to the temporarily unoccupied home of a retired general, where people were engaged in dechoukaj, or “uprooting”–systematically and competitively stripping the house and redistributing the wealth on the street, exacting revenge on the alleged mastermind of a massacre....

Every time I listen to Metric’s 2003 debut, Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? (Everloving), I have a vivid flashback: I’m standing around in a loud, crowded club, staring at the latest suicide bomb carnage in Iraq on the TV above the bar, which is being narrated by the thump-thump-thump from the DJ booth. Old World Underground captured the zeitgeist of the early days of Desert Storm II: Electric Boogaloo with its tableaux of war, Gen-X ennui, and hipster culture....

Murs came of age in LA during the Chronic sessions, but all you hear of it is the hard edge in his voice and the trademark west-coast shuffle in his cadence: instead of glorifying his violent surroundings, he’s always preferred to scoop out his own guts and serve them on a paper plate. He’s poised but not flashy, proud but not grandiose, self-deprecating but not meek–all evident on the personality-driven 3:16: The 9th Edition....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Researchers at Japan’s Tohoku University reported in June that they had used classical Pavlovian techniques to condition cockroaches to salivate upon smelling a specific odor, thus replicating results seen before only in vertebrates. Also in June Reuters reported on a research team in Temuco, Chile, that claims to have synthesized both a spermicide and a treatment for erectile dysfunction from the venom of the Chilean black widow spider....