Wanna buy a theater? The Hollywood Theater in Minneapolis can be yours for a cool $275K. Fight-Club-style uses discouraged.
May 27, 2012
May 11, 2012
Greta Oglesby made quite a stir when she starred in Caroline, or Change at the Guthrie Theater and then Black Nativity: A Season for Change back in 2009. Based on reviews of these shows, Minneapolis is glad to have her back as Sister Margaret in yet another Penumbra Theatre Company production, The Amen Corner. The production features music by a 10-member gospel choir from Minneapolis’ Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church and tells the story of a Harlem woman and congregation leader who struggles with balancing her faith and her family.
May 10, 2012
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Twin Cities based Troupe America Inc., is searching for two Christmas Cowboy poems to be included in their holiday production of a new musical entitled ‘Christmas on the Ranch.’ The production will open at the Plymouth Playhouse in Minneapolis November 1, 2012 and run through January 12, 2013. […]
Each poem should be no more than three minutes in length when read aloud. One poem should be humorous and may tell a story or reminisce of something humorous that a cowboy might have experienced or witnessed of past Christmases. The second poem should be sentimental in nature and reflect on the season through observations and/or fond memories of Christmases past.
The poems selected will each be awarded a cash prize of $500.
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Press release. If you’ve been sitting on any cowboy Christmas poetry, submit it to Troupe America by August 15 via—that’s right—U.S. Mail.
3313 Republic Ave.
St. Louis Park MN 55426
Cowboys don’t cotton to no World Wide Web.
May 10, 2012
It’s hard to nail both entertaining and profound, and no local playwright does it better than Savannah Reich. Her play Dalí’s Liquid Ladies is based on a story so strange that obviously it’s true: at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Salvador Dalí installed a surrealist pavilion that you entered by walking through a woman’s legs (he was way ahead of Patch Adams) and that contained a giant aquarium tank inhabited by topless women playing “mermaids.” Reich’s play begins as a humorous look at those women’s lives, but ultimately becomes something much stranger and deeper.
In its initial production at Bedlam Theatre, Dalí’s Liquid Ladies was one of the most remarkable pieces of theater I’ve seen in my five years on the local arts beat—I put it at the top of my best-of-2009 list. Now, Box Wine Theatre is presenting a new production of the play, with an expanded script. It’s going to be hard to beat the original cast, featuring an unforgettable Jon Mac Cole as Dalí, but nonetheless, this is one of the year’s can’t-miss productions.
May 10, 2012
“The Addams Family” musical: La cage de la mort
In The Addams Family musical, the famously morbid tribe must welcome into their Gothic mansion a family who are distressingly lively and bright. But there’s a larger problem that they’re not allowed, except for one sly aside about word-of-mouth, to realize: they’re in a Broadway musical, a genre as antithetical to unhappy endings as country music is to flag-burning. A successful Addams Family musical would steer into that skid, would deploy the contrarian Addamses to tear down the walls of a genre that’s desperately in need of renovation. Instead, the characters inhabit this by-the-numbers show like the brand they are, answering to their names but not their natures.
I’m not the first one to pan this particular production: upon its 2010 Broadway debut, with Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth in the starring roles, the critics pounced. (New York Times: “A tepid goulash.”) Audiences haven’t given a damn, though, and The Addams Family is currently the Great White Way’s third highest-grossing show on any given week. Proving once again that producers care what critics think a lot more than audiences do, the show was signficantly retooled for the touring production now playing at the Ordway. A song about sex with a squid was cut, and the plot’s central conflict was changed.
I haven’t seen the Broadway version, but I was surprised to learn about the specific nature of the changes to the plot—because if you asked me what to do with the show, I’d push it right back in the Broadway direction. More uncomfortable encounters and less contrived conflict between Gomez and Morticia. The new central conflict has Gomez (Douglas Sills) torn by his promise to his daughter Wednesday (Cortney Wolfson) to keep her engagment secret from his wife (Sara Gettelfinger).
The fact that Wednesday’s old enough to get married (albeit young) while her brother Pugsley (Patrick D. Kennedy) apparently stays the same age is typical of this show’s sloppiness. Rather than precise observation of eccentric but coherent characters, the Addams Family musical shoehorns the characters into what’s basically the plot of La Cage Aux Folles. Seeing Lane in the Broadway production must have felt especially tragic for those who saw him in The Birdcage, Mike Nichols’s wonderful 1996 American film adaptation of La Cage. The Addams Family musical is even shameless enough to make the father (Martin Vidnovic) of Wednesday’s fiancé (Brian Justin Crum) a conservative Republican, not that the script actually does anything inventive or funny with that trait.
The musical’s book is by Marshall Brickman (a notable Woody Allen collaborator) and Rick Elice, and it’s there that lurk any vestiges of connection to Charles Addams, theNew Yorker cartoonist who created the characters. There are several lines that feel sharper than they need to be in the context of this sad-sack musical, such as Gomez’s reply to a query regarding whether the house has a little girls’ room. “We used to,” he says with regret, “but we set them all free.”
Andrew Lippa’s a capable lyricist, but his songs are nothing more than running jumps to the sustained concluding notes that tend to motivate audience members to clap, which tends to convince them that they’re actually watching a good show. Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch are credited as “original directors” with no current director listed, which might explain a lot about the flat characterizations and unimaginative blocking. Colombian choreographer Sergio Trujillo endured the gratuitous Latino caricaturing of Gomez (memo to the world: incorporating Mexican foods into made-up Spanish names is officially no longer funny) to deliver some spirited steps, especially in the celebratory tango.
The best thing about the show is the Drama-Desk-Award-winning set by McDermott and Crouch, especially the lovely setpiece depicting a yard and a tree with a rope swing overlooking New York. If you’re thinking that there’s something wrong when an Addams Family review includes the word “lovely,” my response is: exactly.
May 7, 2012
The gripping nature of the play comes from the fact that the audience can never be sure of anything. Is Beauvier an intolerant representative of the old Catholic order out to get rid of anyone with new ideas, or is she truly concerned about the student with legitimate suspicions and knows full well that the male-dominated Church hierarchy will suppress any effort to expose a pedophile priest? Is Flynn a good-hearted priest who is reaching out to a troubled boy whose father regularly beats him…or is he a predator who has chosen a vulnerable target for a criminal sexual relationship?
“In the pursuit of wrong doing, one takes a step away from God,” is a line from the play that demonstrates Beauvier’s quandary. She feels compelled to both lie and make threats to stop this man she believes is a predator, but she also lives with the possibility that she may be damaging an innocent man. Sister James vacillates. She desperately wants to believe Flynn’s denials, but she can’t shake her own suspicions. At one point, James cries out to Flynn that Beauvier’s admonishments about teaching methods ruined her love of teaching—but is it Beauvier’s strict ideas about education that bother her, or is it the fact that Beauvier made her face a possible evil when she would prefer to be ignorant?
keep reading Bev Wolfe’s review of the Park Square Theatre production of Doubt
May 7, 2012
Being a big history buff of the gangster era in St. Paul, I always thought that the stories of the Barker-Karpis gang warranted their own play. But the History Theatre did better: it made not only a play based on them, it produced a play about the whole gang. The current production of Capital Crimes: The St. Paul Gangster Musical is a revival of the theatre’s 2000 production of The Gangster Musical, which was written by David Hawley with music and lyrics by Drew Jansen. In this latest version of the musical, the show has been tweaked and songs have been added. Noah Bremer directs this new version with interesting, but sometimes mixed results.
The show does an effective job of capturing the culture and the people of the time. It does not overly romanticize the gangster life, which such gangster shows are prone to do, but it also does not condemn those who chose a life of violent crime. The play is designed to make the audience ponder why men chose the life that they did. Being a gangster definitely had its perks, but it also had obvious downsides. More compelling is the play’s focus on the women in these men’s lives: their mothers, girlfriends, and wives who continually paid the price of their men’s lifestyle by having to live on an emotional roller coaster caused by the deadly consequences of the profession. The ironic part is that they deal with these serious consequences in a production otherwise dominated by campiness.
May 4, 2012
Any local production of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters can be considered a site-specific production, if you consider the state of Minnesota a site. The characters are bound to their town by family, friends, and property. Some are content with their lot, and others long to escape, but all are defined by the limitations imposed on them by their distance from the metropolis. If only they could go to New York—er, Moscow—their problems would be solved. Or not.
It was a cool but humid spring evening on May 4, and the eerie sunlight was still fading as Nightpath Theatre’s production of The Three Sisters began at Walker Community Church. It was apt that the church’s windows were open to the budding summer and dying day, a moment that captured the vertigo with which Chekhov’s characters struggle. Irina, a character who emerges as central in this production, is a young woman with her life ahead of her, but she’s resigned to let her fate fall down upon her like the steel trap that’s already encased her older sisters Olga and Masha.
May 3, 2012
Promotional image for Basic North, an upcoming production by Live Action Set.
April 29, 2012
This video review of Mamma Mia! by Minnesota teen Madeleine Bertch wins the Internet today.
(Source: tcdailyplanet.net)
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Rite in the Rain All-Weather Journals.
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Made some new staff illustrations for The Tangential writer page today. More to come tomorrow.
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To paraphrase the Grateful Dead, “Birther, don’t you come around here anymore.”
you got way too much money for...
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Here is Erica firing the MP5 like she’s Ripley from Aliens. Complete badass. Fearless. (Taken with instagram)
I. Love....
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Author Jonathan Lethem talks about his book on Talking Heads’ Fear of Music in the latest installment of our Paper Trail feature...
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Looking Local - What We Can Learn from Red Wing Shoes
Over the memorial day weekend, I visited the Red Wing Shoe store, in Red Wing...
