This San Francisco band is picking up beaming notices from such papers of record as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Kerrang! for its new album, Apple O’ (5 Rue Christine), but as with its previous four I had to overcome my natural resistance to overweening cuteness. All those bubblegum melodies and girly squeaks can seem like a last gasp of the early-90s kindercrap trend, in which too-old young people who’d never gone in for My Little Pony and pink barrettes as children felt compelled to induce a belated appreciation for such things....

Since I haven’t yet heard Directions in Music–the quintet convened for this tour, and hasn’t recorded–it’s hard for me to imagine any way this show could go wrong. To celebrate what would’ve been the 75th birthdays of Miles Davis and John Coltrane (born four months apart in 1926), pianist Herbie Hancock–arguably their equal in terms of influence and accomplishment–has assembled a group modeled after the 1950s Davis band that starred Coltrane....

Everything’s Ducky, Northlight Theatre. This musical, an adult adaptation of “The Ugly Duckling,” has an able director, a dynamite cast, and a lovely score. Now it needs a book: it’s full of gags and puns signifying nothing. Though the bits are amusing, the threadbare subject is too trivial to sustain a two-hour play. Playwright-lyricists Bill Russell and Jeffrey Hatcher copy most shamelessly from Bye Bye Birdie and the “Passionella” section of The Apple Tree: unlovely Serena (the appealing Jennifer Powers), who wants to be a movie star, becomes smitten with an Elvis-style bad boy (Sean Allan Krill in a brilliant performance)....

Neal Samors opens his book, Chicago’s Far North Side: An Illustrated History of Rogers Park and West Ridge, to page 139. There’s a picture of the Howard Street he knew as a boy. The marquee of the Norshore Theatre advertises Lady and the Tramp. The word “Bowling” rises in neon letters from the front door of the Howard Bowl. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Big city neighborhoods never let their natives go....

JOSHUA REDMAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Halfway through his busy, tessellated solo on “Stoic Revolutions,” a tune from his latest album (Beyond, on Warner Brothers), Joshua Redman reaches for a phrase and doesn’t quite get there–so he plays it again, finds the conclusion he wanted, and moves on. Jazz musicians do this kind of thing all the time, but in the context of Redman’s recent history, it’s a remarkable moment....

MISSING PARTS, NeoFuturists. The Neo-Futurists kick off their prime-time season with Sean Benjamin’s new work on the discontinuity of time and identity. But though the writing is occasionally quite clever and the four performers (including Benjamin, who also directs) are winsome, the show ultimately feels rather hollow. Set in a vaguely authoritarian and hermetic black-and-white world, Missing Parts is an existential Mobius comic strip employing familiar devices and themes. Time shifts, actions repeat, and the actors step in and out of one another’s roles....

Each of the following recently released music books is informative and entertaining by turns, but only the first is an unqualified success. In his appealingly irreverent new book David Wondrich (who writes about cocktails for Esquire) goes looking for the roots of the primordial American sound he calls hot music: music that combines a Celtic-derived foursquare stomp with the swerving melodic and rhythmic impulses (read: blue notes and syncopation) of Africa....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In November on the Pacific islands of Fiji, British army recruitment officers interviewed and examined over 500 applicants, and reported encountering a large number of men with marbles sewn under the skin of their penises–a practice intended to heighten pleasure during sex. The marbles did not automatically disqualify a potential recruit, according to an Agence France-Presse report: one of the visiting officers, Captain Sarah East, said that 106 of the men will “probably” get into the army....

The 15th annual Polish Film Festival in America, produced by the Society for Arts, continues Friday, November 7, through Sunday, November 16. Unless otherwise noted, films are screened from 35-millimeter prints and tickets are $9 at the Copernicus Center, 5216 W. Lawrence, and at the Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Films are projected from video and tickets are $7 at the Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee. A $40 pass admits you to any five screenings; for more information call 773-486-9612....

It takes Roddy Doyle a while to find his legs in Oh, Play That Thing, a sequel to A Star Called Henry. The Booker Prize-winning novelist has always had a luminous talent for describing place, but here, as he follows protagonist Henry Smart, on the lam from Ireland to the States, the closely observed settings and speech of his native Dublin are replaced with a confusing blur of details from Prohibition-era New York: sandwich boards and jingles, flimflam artists, hooch....

ROSENBERGS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If Julius and Ethel had gotten the kind of press this Long Island power-pop quartet has, they might never have been executed. The musical Rosenbergs made headlines early last year for turning down a particularly rapacious contract offered them by Farmclub.com, a combination Web site/cable TV show/record label established by Interscope founder Jimmy Iovine and Universal Music Group chairman Doug Morris....

Sophomore guard Frank Williams has a blank stare on the basketball court–not a warrior’s glare but a tabula rasa. It makes one wonder where his intensity and creativity come from when he takes over a game–and where that intensity goes when it’s gone. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It came as something of a shock. The Illini had brushed aside their first two NCAA opponents, quieting critics who’d questioned their mental toughness....

One of baseball’s inherent contradictions is that this most individual and intensely quantified of games is also a team sport so subject to the intangible of “chemistry”–that vague, all-encompassing term applied when things go inexplicably well and a group of players becomes a unit. Sometimes a good team matures and comes together, as the young White Sox did last year; other times, a team simply enjoys a one-year blessing. The 1998 Cubs were an example, the 1990 Cincinnati Reds a more spectacular one, the “Miracle” New York Mets of 1969 the most painful of all from a Chicago fan’s point of view....

For years Steven Schwarz was a man obsessed–not with an idea but with a man: Spalding Gray. Schwarz idolized the New York-based monologuist (famous for such autobiographical works as Swimming to Cambodia, Sex and Death to the Age 14, and Monster in a Box), bought every book he wrote, saw every self-obsessed piece he performed, rented every movie documenting his work. Then, slowly, Schwarz fell out of obsession. And in this hilarious mix of parody, homage, and autobiography he recounts the process of disillusionment....

Collage Productions’ staging of Kaufman and Hart’s loony love letter to Alexander Woollcott, king of the Algonquin Round Table, has lots going for it. But Adam Slagowski as Sheridan Whiteside conveys neither Woollcott’s serpentine charm nor his caustic edge, and he had some difficulty remembering his lines. The pauses, paraphrases, and “ums” kept the pace at a canter at best when a gallop was needed for this screwball comedy. But the space itself–the Gunder mansion–represents a casting coup, and director Jeff Helgeson’s use of it is inventive and evocative....

A flyer appeared in Roseland last September announcing a rally to support Chicago’s only black-run mall. A collection of low-priced clothing, shoe, jewelry, and nail shops, plus a shrimp-and-catfish carryout, the Halsted Indoor Mall at 115th and Halsted was operated by a Haitian named Pierre Romeus far behind on his rent. His landlord, the Jewel-Osco chain, seemed determined to evict him. “Let Us Stand Black to Black Against a Common Economic Enemy,” the flyer proclaimed....

The King Is Alive * Directed by Kristian Levring Written by Levring and Anders Thomas Jensen With Miles Anderson, Romane Bohringer, David Bradley, David Calder, Bruce Davison, Brion James, Peter Kubheka, Vusi Kunene, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Janet McTeer, Chris Walker, and Lia Williams. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If that’s the operative assumption, The King Is Alive triumphantly refutes it. The movie was shot with three digital video cameras–unlike Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogma film The Celebration, which was shot with only one, and Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (not a Dogma film, but made by one of Dogma’s founders), which was shot with a hundred–and that might make it seem new as well as passe....

Reviewing the Neo-Futurists’ signature show is difficult: not only does the cast change frequently, so do the scripts. Every week company members roll dice to determine how many of their 30 short plays–which they aim to perform in 60 minutes (a timer cuts them off after an hour)–they’ll trash and replace with new ones. Since all scripts are written by cast members, the show is constantly being reinvented, springing off incidents in the news and the performers’ own lives to produce an evening that’s consistently funny, challenging, thoughtful, and silly–and occasionally brilliant, like the one I saw recently....

Team America: World Police Filmmakers trying their hand at political satire are always wise to note the Firefly Doctrine, established in 1933 at the end of the Marx Brothers classic Duck Soup. As Rufus T. Firefly, president of Freedonia, Groucho has led his country to war against neighboring Sylvania. Trapped in a house and under siege by the enemy, he and his brothers triumph through the relatively simple maneuver of pinning down the advancing Sylvanian ambassador like a carnival target and pummeling him with apples....

Lynne Taylor-Corbett is well-known to Chicagoans for her work with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, which acquired five of her pieces in the mid-80s, including the popular Diary, a brief duet for a dancer and piano player. And she’s choreographed several Broadway shows, including Swing! But I didn’t know that she danced with the Ailey company from 1967 to 1968. With them she toured the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, an experience that made a deep impression–especially since their shows in Israel were canceled once the Six-Day War began....