The fall theater season is packed with new shows both off-Loop and downtown; the list below charts a sampling of openings over the next three months, beginning September 14. What it doesn’t include are productions that are already under way–from the Rhinoceros Theater Festival (a sprawling showcase of fringe performance up through early November) to such long-running hits as Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, Blue Man Group, Late Nite Catechism, Shear Madness, Wicked, and Forbidden Broadway: Special Victims Unit....

It had to be a little painful: just when Google ponied up $1.65 billion for YouTube earlier this month, producer Tom Weinberg was finally preparing to launch Media Burn (mediaburn.org), the Chicago-based streaming-video site he says he was working on before YouTube was a glimmer in Chad and Steve’s eye. Weinberg’s been making and promoting independent video since 1972, right after portable cameras were introduced and the genre was born. He created the WTTW video showcase Image Union and produced it for 11 years, then spent four seasons at the helm of The 90s, which brought indie video from all over the world to PBS....

Why Name Names? Former prisoners who maintain they were tortured into making false confessions want every subpoenaed officer named. The city of Chicago and its police department have asked for that too. So it was up to Biebel–as he wrote–to “carefully balance” the right of the police officers “to be shielded from negative publicity with the right of the public to be informed of the results of the Special Prosecutor’s investigation....

What a difference a decade makes. Kenneth Branagh reached the pinnacle of his directing career in 1996 with his epic four-hour adaptation of Hamlet, in which he headlined a staggeringly talented cast that included Derek Jacobi, Julie Christie, Kate Winslet, Brian Blessed, Rufus Sewell, Charlton Heston, Jack Lemmon, Billy Crystal, and Robin Williams (with the likes of Judi Dench and Gerard Depardieu in cameos). Hamlet was nominated for four Oscars and earned rapturous reviews, but it grossed just over $4....

San Francisco singer-songwriter Sonny Smith has only one formal release to his name, and that disc came out back in 2003–he’s hardly a star in the Bay Area, and outside it he’s practically unknown. But earlier this year he finished what may turn out to be one of the best records of 2007. The forthcoming concept album, Fruitvale, plays like a postmodern barrio version of Our Town set to music, a series of character sketches drawn from the mostly Latino neighborhood in Oakland where he lived for three years....

Akron/Family exercised its eclecticism like a group of talented but green rookies on its self-titled debut, released last year on Michael Gira’s Young God Records. It was cool to hear them hop from mellow folk picking to squelchy vocal collage to spacey stadium rock on “Suchness,” or flip from flute-led psychedelia to acoustic balladry to a lumbering “Carry That Weight” finale on “Lumen.” But the album wasn’t particularly cohesive; if the Brooklyn quartet had a reason for doing all that beyond the fact that they could, I wasn’t hearing it....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I jumped the gun on tomatoes this week because I was so anxious to try the BelGioioso burrata I bought in the deli at Trattoria Trullo (newly reviewed this week). Burrata is a fresh, fragile cow’s milk mozzarella, native to Puglia. It’s comprised of an outer shell, more like a bag, of mozzarella that’s filled with cream and scraps of more mozzarella, left over from the cheesemaking process....

This has happened to every Chicagoan who’s ever left town: you tell someone where you’re from and they bring up the pizza. Or the winter. Or Al Capone–still with the Al Capone! Come on, you want to say, Chicago’s so much more than that. Sure it’s the Sox and the Sears Tower, but it’s also rattlesnake hot dogs and Del Close’s skull. It’s the Mayors Daley and the Jesses Jackson and, hello, future president Barack Obama....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not that it really matters: there are more than a few notable musical events taking place during the fest, which begins at midnight on Wednesday, October 25, and (theoretically) runs until 11:59 PM. Among the highlights is a rare local performance by composer Pauline Oliveros, a pioneer of drone music of incredibly high caliber and sophistication. She plays an accordion retuned in just intonation, a system based on the ratios of natural harmonics....

Frankly, my first reaction to the piece was relief. Finally, I thought, someone of prominence is stepping forward to try to challenge Mayor Daley on his management of city finances and resources. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In your Trib piece, you repeatedly referred to a period in 2006 when you were “exploring” a run for mayor. It’s clear that much of the criticism you laid out in this piece is based on research and preliminary campaign work you and your team did when you were acting like a Daley opponent for a few months there....

Maybe it was the rubber masks or the flowerpot hats or the plastic hair, but to this day Devo can’t quite shake their reputation as a novelty act. To the faithful, though, Devo were more than a joke and even more than a band: they were a multimedia collective intent on exposing the artificiality of modern life and the way it degraded human existence, a process they called de-evolution. And their goofy props and pioneering music videos and sophomoric album art were as crucial to this mission as their songs....

As soon as he shows up on the covers of America’s three national jazz magazines, which could be in the next couple months, British singer-songwriter-pianist Jamie Cullum should reap the rewards of his genre-blending approach to jazz and pop. That is, he’ll become a lightning rod in the ongoing debate about the commercialization of jazz–and he’ll love it. This brash, elfin 24-year-old has a jack-in-the-box energy: even as he tries to turn his young listeners on to Herbie Hancock, he punctuates his performances with piano-bench acrobatics a la Elton John....

Pops for Champagne co-owner Tom Verhey plans to pop open a bottle of Taittinger Comtes 1996 this New Year’s Eve. He and his wife, Linda, have something to celebrate: after 24 years on Sheffield they’ve moved their jazz club and champagne bar to a 6,000-square-foot space in the renovated Tree Studios. There’s also an adjoining retail store, Pops Shop, which Verhey claims is the first in the country devoted exclusively to champagne and sparkling wine....

Like Talking to a Wall Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oberman concedes that CTA officials faced a difficult task at Fullerton, the largest and most costly station-reconstruction project on the line. The highest priority is to make the station accessible by installing elevators. The Americans With Disabilities Act required transit authorities to make all “key” stations accessible by the end of 2000, and that includes the Fullerton station, where the Brown, Red, and Purple lines converge....

It’s never been easy to run an indie record label, but these days the rapidly changing business climate makes it a special challenge. Tower Records, the biggest brick-and-mortar retailer in the States to specialize in deep-catalog and independent offerings, has gone bankrupt and will soon close its 89 stores. Big-box outlets are thriving–last year Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Target sold more CDs than anyone else, online or off–but they focus almost exclusively on current hot sellers....

The two members of Norway’s MOHA!–guitarist Anders Hana and drummer Morten Olsen–have kept busy with a host of projects on the bustling Oslo scene, but they bring a visceral intensity to every one. They’re the foundation for improvisational noise combo Ultralyd, and they’ve backed veteran Norwegian saxist Frode Gjerstad and New York reedist Andrew D’Angelo. On MoHa!’s recently released debut, Raus Aus Stavanger (Rune Grammofon), you can hear the duo’s aesthetic tendencies in their purest form....

The local quartet Palliard loves the Band. “They worked so well as a unit,” says bassist Anthony Burton. “There wasn’t this emphasis on a single front man or flashy solos. Each guy would just step up to do whatever it took to make the song work.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hamsher and Brown were the first members of the group to cross paths, meeting in early 2003 through their office jobs at the Art Institute....

To choose the best movies of 2005 is to compromise. I limit my list of candidates to films that have screened in Chicago, but I could easily fill it with movies that haven’t screened in the U.S. at all, and God knows what I’ve missed altogether. I’m at the mercy of studio heads, distributors, and publicists, whose decisions about what to release and when defy comprehension. The World. Not just the best film of 2005, Jia Zhang-ke’s feature was better, or at least more important, than my first choices for 2004 (The Big Red One) and 2003 (25th Hour and Crimson Gold)....

Friday 22 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » LOVE STORY IN BLOOD RED This show is a release party for Love Story in Blood Red (available for free at www.lovestoryinbloodred.com), the second full-length from this local band led by former Spiveys and Means front man Jason Frederick. The record has moments that are frighteningly good in a wild-eyed and hooky Modern Lovers way; the songs are straightforward and primal, and Frederick sounds twitchy and wired, as if he were constantly anticipating shocks from an electrified discipline collar....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight the second annual Umbrella Music Festival kicks off with a terrific triple bill at Elastic. Much of the festival is covered in this week’s Reader, but there wasn’t room to cover everything. New York trumpeter Peter Evans—who played here last month with the raucous Mostly Other People Do the Killing—plays solo, a context that finds him sounding more focused and minimal....