The Tangential

Ordway’s “Sound of Music” summons old-world charm

Based on a true story, The Sound of Music tells the story of Maria Von Trapp, a young postulate at an Austrian abbey just before World War II who is sent to be governess for the seven children of widower Georg Von Trapp. Maria uses her love of music to bring joy back first to the…

Sheep Theater is Totally a Thing Now

Why Sheep? “I like to paint,” said Joey Hamburger, sitting at the Spyhouse on Nicollet on Tuesday night. “Every time I paint it starts with a sheep, so I have a lot of paintings of sheep.” Hence, Sheep Theater. “There’s a lot of effort people put into names,” said Iris Page, sitting next to Joey.…

20% Theatre Company Twin Cities Brings Stereotypes To Heel With “Femmes: A Tragedy”

Gina Young’s 2013 play Femmes: A Tragedy has a clever, subversive premise. Young reimagines Clare Booth Luce’s 1936 play The Women — a comedy of manners portraying heterosexual relationships as a battle both within and between the sexes — as a contemporary story about lesbians who are femme, or, more precisely in one case, a “non-identifying polyamorous genderqueer who…

5 Fun Ideas for Those Thanksgiving Leftovers!

Happy end of the beginning of the holidays, readers! The extended family has gone home, all your cleverest strategic hiding spots for bottles of booze around the house have been depleted, and you’ve got a refrigerator full of enough food to feed four more families. Here are some fun and clever ideas on how to…

Choreographers’ Evening 2015: Walker Art Center Put the Dada in Dadance

There’s always a certain conceptual flavor to the Choreographers’ Evening — this is the Walker Art Center, after all — but this year’s collection of dances were, even more than usual, about freeing your body by freeing your mind. In some of the pieces, in fact, there was hardly any movement at all. Curated, with a warm eye…

Guthrie Theater’s “Cocoanuts” Reheats the Marx Brothers

There’s an undeniable energy to the Guthrie Theater’s Cocoanuts — but I was left wondering whether there mightn’t have been a more interesting use of that energy than uncritically trotting the Marx Brothers out. The first family of vaudeville continue to feel contemporary both because of their anarchic zest and because their antics were well-documented on film, but 1925…

A short history of The Tangential

The Tangential is a pop culture and creative writing blog launched in 2011 by three writers living in Minneapolis: Becky Lang (now Radecki), Jay Gabler, and Katie Sisneros. That was a golden age of irreverent confessional blogging, and over the first couple years we built a national following. Notably, we gained over 120,000 followers on Tumblr, where we were often associated with the provocative, extremely online writers in the movement known as alt lit. We created spinoff blogs including The Sport Hole, The Party Whip, The Tangential Ruins Minneapolis, and Tan Genitals. We hosted Minneapolis events and published three books.

We were having so much fun, in fact, that we never got around to monetizing. Oops! Well, we did have a little income from the books and events, and we became an Amazon affiliate. (This is your official disclosure that we subsidize our hosting costs via revenue from partner links.) Eventually, though, the editors and contributors who fueled the site’s early years largely moved on to other projects.

Today, The Tangential is run by Jay, who continues to publish criticism and other writing as well as to maintain the site’s catalog of posts — if only for, as we’ve always said, “the good of society.”