The Fullerton/Milwaukee Tax Increment Financing district is raking in so much in property taxes that city officials have managed to spend only half the money. Yet they now want to expand the district and rake in even more. “How can they take more money if they haven’t spent the money they have?” asks Carter O’Brien, who lives in Logan Square just outside the district. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

In 2002 the Hamlisch/Carnelia/Guare musical version of Ernest Lehman’s 1950 novelette (and the 1957 film) was given a pre-Broadway run at the Shubert. Four years later, under Kevin Bellie’s direction, it feels swifter, tighter, and much hungrier, the story’s cruelties all the more concentrated on an intimate stage. With a plot as seamy as the tabloid column written by antihero J.J. Hunsecker, this musical chokes on its own ambition, its heavy-handed chorus driving home the crises like the wrath of God....

Quartino Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The latest venture from the owners of Gibsons Steakhouse and Hugo’s Frog Bar, Quartino takes its cue from Italy’s enoteche, wine bars that serve small plates of everything from antipasti to beef tenderloin. Chef John Coletta (formerly of Carlucci) occasionally puts his own subtle spin on classic recipes but stays true to the main tenets of Italian cuisine: the best ingredients, simply prepared....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m no expert when it comes to reggaeton, but in the last year or so I have noticed a pretty concerted effort by big names such as Daddy Yankee and Don Omar to expand the genre’s sound. I can’t say whether the shift, which has found artists incorporating straight hip-hop and dancehall along with bits of bachata, reggae, and soul, is a ploy to attract a wider audience or simply a necessary sign of growth....

According to the History Channel’s The History of Sex, the ancient Romans ate a specific plant for birth control purposes. It was described as being enormously effective, to the extent that it was extinct by the fall of the empire. I’m sure a quick Web search would tell me the story of a worthless little herb, but I’d like to hear you weigh in on this long-lost miracle drug. –Brett, Memphis...

Stephen Wade The purpose of the shows was to honor folk-music legend Hobart Smith and celebrate Smithsonian Folkways’ recent release of In Sacred Trust: The 1963 Fleming Brown Tapes, a compilation of material Smith recorded, 15 months before he died, in the home of Old Town instructor Fleming Brown, who has also since passed. Backed by a trio of guitar, fiddle, and either piano or pump organ, Wade played songs from those sessions, interspersed with lengthy prepared comments....

In a move familiar to any Wisconsinite, Leah Caplan held up her hand, palm in, thumb splayed. “Where’s Washington Island?” she asked. Well, if her hand were Wisconsin, she went on, then her thumb would be Door County. “And this,” she said, poking at the air about an inch off the tip of her thumb, “is Washington Island.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Here’s their story: In 2001 a Madison-based architect and urban planner named Brian Vandewalle bought the 100-year-old Washington Hotel, once a center of island life and a haven for captains sailing the Great Lakes....

The 21st Chicago Latino Film Festival runs Friday, April 8, through Thursday, April 21, at the Beverly Arts Center; Chicago State Univ., 9501 S. King Dr.; Columbia College Ludington Bldg.; Dominican Univ., 7900 W. Division; Facets Cinematheque; Pipers Alley; Landmark’s Century Centre; Malcolm X College, 1900 W. Van Buren; Moraine Valley Community College, 10900 S. 88th Ave., Palos Hills; Northwestern Univ. Thorne Auditorium, 375 E. Chicago; Richard J. Daley College, 7500 S....

Caryl Churchill’s 1979 comedy uses one sexually mixed-up family to poke fun at British imperialism and the mores of the Victorian era and the 20th century. In the first act, colonial bureaucrat Clive keeps as tight a rein on his family’s sexuality as he does on the African natives’ freedom. In the second, 100 years have passed (although the family has aged only 25 years), and the repression is subtler. Genevieve Thompson’s production for Infamous Commonwealth Theatre is engaging and funny, but she seems interested in each character’s personal longing above all else....

Cru Cafe & Wine Bar Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Outfitted with fancy chandeliers, cozy fireplaces, and lots of dark, pretty wood, Debra Sharpe’s reincarnated Cru Cafe & Wine Bar exudes all the elegance and luxury you’d expect of the Gold Coast–and at a commensurate price. Not surprisingly, the wine list is the centerpiece, with as many as 50 wines, ports, brandies, grappas, and sakes available by the glass or in flights of three, plus 30 half-bottle options and another 300-odd bottles in the cellar....

Eugene O’Neill’s 1924 shocker retains its tragic force in the Hypocrites’ taut, intelligent revival. Based on the Greek myth of Phaedra and set in 1850s New England, it’s the story of a young woman who marries an old farmer and then seduces his son in a bid to take over the farm–a scheme that goes awry when the affair produces a child. Geoff Button’s well-crafted staging charts the characters’ shifting relationships while illuminating O’Neill’s vision of how the human spirit is warped by a lust for land....

Faure’s 13 nocturnes for piano span most of his life as a composer, straddling the 19th and 20th centuries. In an impressionistic current with eddies of romantic turbulence, they depart from Chopin and Schumann, heading toward Debussy and Ravel. Pianist Emile Naoumoff, here playing Nocturnes nos. 2, 6, 7, and 13, approaches them as a progression: in his hands the uneasy tenderness of the First Nocturne’s opening is a premonition of the last’s desolation....

Dry ice smoked in bowls by the sink. A sound like a telephone off the hook filled the air. A few dozen people sat around on an assortment of ripped-up chairs and a lazy old couch, nodding their heads appreciatively at what turned out to be music. “You think these guys rehearsed?” a guy in a white tank top and mini fauxhawk asked me. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Is It Real or Is It Racist? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » White Hot Black Comedy is the first attempt at playwriting for Plys, a former Reader staff writer (her City Council watch column, which originated in the Reader, went on to run in the Sun-Times and the Tribune). Figliulo, a former executive with E! Entertainment Television and Plys’s cousin, has tried her hand at screenwriting but is a playwriting novice....

MADtv has always played second fiddle to Saturday Night Live, but many of its characters–the man-child Stuart and the disgruntled Lorraine, for instance–have been among the funniest on television. Tonight 13 of the writers and cast members perform on a double bill. The first part is “MADtv Writers on Hiatus,” now in its fourth year at the Chicago Improv Festival; it showcases banned and undeveloped TV sketches (some of which have later made it onto the show) performed by writers Tami Sagher, Stephen Cragg, and Jim Wise and cast members Arden Myrin and Crista Flanagan....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Government Accountability Office reported in July that two of its undercover agents had been able to buy $1.1 million in “sensitive” military surplus from defense-department contractors, much of which–including shoulder-fired missile launcher parts, tracking and surveillance gear, and body armor–“could be used by terrorists.” The Pentagon had failed across the board to enforce existing security controls governing such equipment, the GAO wrote; in the previous eight months at least 2,669 sensitive items that should have been destroyed were instead sold to the public....

The name of Dave Rempis’s latest group is fair warning: never before has the local saxophonist led a band that hit this hard. Bassist Anton Hatwich provides a stable fulcrum with his thrumming, insistent vamps, around which drummers Frank Rosaly and Tim Daisy, both on trap sets, play a dynamic array of swinging beats, interlocking Latin motifs, martial cadences, and nuanced, meterless textures. Even at full throttle the two drummers mesh precisely, despite their divergent styles: Rosaly’s is fluid and sinuous, busy with double-kick flutters, while Daisy’s is more spiky and agitated....

Despite her top billing on Dap Dippin’ With Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings (2002), singer Sharon Jones was essentially a figurehead. The album was yet another showcase for the gritty New York funk-revival band led by bassist-producer Gabriel Roth (aka Bosco “Bass” Mann), though Jones gave the taut, propulsive, unapologetically retro grooves a healthy dash of soul charisma. Success on the road, however, seems to have shifted the balance of power....

In 2000 Yo-Yo Ma, long fascinated with cross-cultural exchange, assembled the Silk Road Ensemble–a leap from his classical perch that has broadened both his artistry and the world of music. The group now has a shifting roster of more than 50 members and a large repertoire of new commissions, traditional music from countries along the ancient Eurasian trade routes, and Western classical compositions. Ma sees the project as a musical conversation rather than a fusion of styles, Western instruments playing side by side with Eastern ancestors such as the pipa and the sheng, a Chinese mouth organ....

Very freely adapted from Upton Sinclair’s meatpacking expose The Jungle, Tantalus Theatre Group’s ambitious two-hour rock opera/bar act delivers a strong score and dedicated performances. The company transforms Sinclair’s muckraking depiction of the Chicago stockyards circa 1905 into a brutal but maddeningly indeterminate portrait of a “music plant.” Wannabe star Jurgis, an immigrant as in Sinclair’s book, pursues his dream and loses his way, his wife, and his family. Finally he achieves a perverse peace by surrendering to the status quo of the music-making machine....