Tag: Minneapolis
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“Common Time”: In Making a Case for Merce Cunningham, the Walker Art Center Makes a Case for Itself
Merce Cunningham: Common Time is an enormously ambitious program mounted by the Walker Art Center in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago. It makes the case for the choreographer as a central figure of 20th century art — not just influential, not just respected, but absolutely pivotal. As well it should: in making…
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With “Question the Wall Itself,” the Walker Art Center Examines Image and Context in a Fragmenting World
The concept of Question the Wall Itself sounds like a skit from Portlandia. “As artists, we just really think that it’s time to question the wall. Why are you there, wall? What are you saying to us? What if you…went away for a while?” The Walker Art Center’s new exhibition, though years in the making, happens to be opening…
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Guthrie Theater’s “South Pacific” Soars
I walked into the Guthrie’s new production of South Pacific perhaps a little sadistically eager to measure it against the national tour of the 2008 Broadway revival. That tour’s performance at the Ordway was one of my favorite theatrical experiences of all time. South Pacific is a musical set during World War II, about two…
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“The Bridges of Madison County” Musical Brings Quiet Passion to Minneapolis
The beloved novel The Bridges of Madison County was written in 1992 by Robert James Waller, an Iowa college professor. Considered too short to be a novel and met with mixed reviews, it took word of mouth for the book to eventually rise to the bestseller list, where it stayed for 164 weeks. In 1994,…
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“Less Than One”: Walker Art Center turns a timely lens on its collection
The title of the Walker Art Center’s new show Less Than One might cause you to think that at least we’re making progress from Less Than Zero — but in fact, the inspiration for the show’s title was contemporary with Bret Easton Ellis’s 1985 novel. The title essay of Joseph Brodsky’s 1986 collection is a little more metaphorical: No…
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“Germinal”: Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort Discover an Absurd World at the Walker Art Center
Germinal gets the first of its many laughs with a teasing lighting cue at the show’s very onset. The amusement continues for the next 90 minutes, as four performers (Arnaud Boulogne, Ondine Cloez, Halory Goerger, and Denis Robert) awake on a blank stage. Each is clutching a sound-mixing board, which provide their first key to unlocking a series…
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“Pericles”: A Tall Tale, Told Warmly at the Guthrie Theater
I had never seen Shakespeare’s Pericles before today’s matinee at the Guthrie Theater, but I was plenty familiar with its latter-day regional descendants: tales of love, loss, and adventure on the stormy seas. In our case, that would be the Unsalted Sea. In shows like Ten November and Riding the Wind, Lake Superior performs the same function that the Mediterranean Sea…
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Rabih Mroué’s “Riding on a Cloud” at the Walker Art Center: A Tender Brotherly Portrait
Last time Beirut-born theater artist Rabih Mroué was featured in the Walker Art Center’s annual Out There series, he came to town with Looking for a Missing Employee, a show about the Kafka-esque bureaucracy at the Lebanese Ministry of Finance. At the time (2013), I wrote, “The performer’s style — a faux naïveté and hammy schtick — clearly…
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Daniel Fish Does David Foster Wallace, Dynamically, at the Walker Art Center
When you arrive at the Walker Art Center’s McGuire Theater for Daniel Fish’s A (radically condensed and expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again After David Foster Wallace, you’re greeted by the sight of hundreds of tennis balls, laid in precise formation across the entire stage. A serving machine repeatedly chucks tennis balls against a…
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“Fahrenheit 451”: Theatre in the Round Finds Layers in Bradbury’s Classic
If you, like a lot of people, read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 once, in high school, you might remember it sketchily as a dystopian science fiction novel about a future where firemen burn books so as to keep the populace from thinking the kind of complex thoughts that might upset the social order. The moral: don’t burn books.…
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“RoosevElvis”: At Walker Art Center, the TEAM Take a Resonant American Journey
Prior to the start of RoosevElvis at the Walker Art Center’s McGuire Theater on Thursday night, the TEAM’s artistic director Rachel Chavkin stepped onstage and explained that the Brooklyn-based company’s mission is to create shows that illuminate “what it means to live in America today.” Okay, then. RoosevElvis, however, proceeded to do precisely that: to tell…
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“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder”: Old-School Yuks, for Better and For Worse
A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder is the kind of show that you ask people about and get, in response, a shrug. “It won a Tony,” they say. Indeed it did: the 2014 Tony Award for Best Musical. So it must be good, right? Well, yes and no. The show — which is at…