Tag: Minneapolis
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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…
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Guthrie Theater’s 2015 “Christmas Carol” Doesn’t Miss a Beat
Longtime followers of the Guthrie Theater’s Christmas Carol think of the succession of actors playing Ebenezer Scrooge as eras — the way Bond fans think about 007s and the way football fans think about coaches. On the basis of the evidence onstage for opening night, we’re now at the peak of the Cutler Era. In the…
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“Doubt”: New Epic Theater Plumbs the Depths
I’ve always thought John Patrick Shanley’s 2004 play Doubt was an open-and-shut case. I think the priest accused of child molestation is as guilty — well, as sin. I was surprised, then, when an audience of female correctional facility inmates with whom I saw the play a few years ago expressed a majority view that the…
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Jungle Theater’s “The Night Alive”: Warm Hearts, Cold Truths
“That was a good ending!” declared the man sitting in front of me as the lights went down at the conclusion of the Jungle Theater’s Wednesday night performance of The Night Alive. I wasn’t sure, though, that I agreed with him in either sense of that judgment. If he meant it was good in the…
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“The Wizard of Oz”: CTC Recreates a Classic
Imagine an audience equally comprising young children and adults—all held captive for close to two hours, with the only sound being a young voice commenting excitedly on the action on stage. This is what I experienced when I attended The Wizard of Oz, currently playing at the Children’s Theatre Company (CTC) in Minneapolis. I went with two of my…
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“Hippie Modernism”: Walker Art Center Revisits a Utopian Dream
Last year, Miley Cyrus created the Happy Hippie Foundation: a nonprofit organization that aims “to rally young people to fight injustice facing homeless youth, LGBTQ youth and other vulnerable populations.” Cyrus raised awareness for the foundation through a series of loose, affectionate backyard music videos; meanwhile, she collaborated with the Flaming Lips on a psychedelic album…
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The Bakken is the Halloweeniest of all museums
I knew I was making a mistake by waiting all these years to make my first trip to the Bakken Museum. “It’s awesome!” said everyone. “I know!” said I. “It’s on my bucket list!” Yet, I never made a point of going. What a fool I’ve been. One thing I did right, at least: I chose…
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Soap Factory Haunted Basement 2015: Choose your own nightmare
I let my sister get abducted by Santa. She did come back, but she was bloody. At least, that splatter of red on the shoulder of her t-shirt looked like blood. I think it might have come from Santa’s empty eye socket. Fortunately, we’d come prepared for gore. When I wrote to invite Julia—my longtime Haunted Basement…
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In Guthrie Theater’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a “Watchman” quietly waits
I didn’t read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird until I reviewed it for a children’s literature class I was taking in college. On my review, my professor commented, “not really a children’s book.” That’s a matter of semantics, but the book is often picked up by young readers—and it feels like a children’s book, not…
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Theatre Pro Rata Tells “A Lie of the Mind” with Vigor
When I was growing up, I was fascinated with my dad’s CD of the Red Clay Ramblers’ music for the original off-Broadway run of Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind. The songs were gothic and foreboding, as was the play’s very title. What could it mean? Is it possible, I wondered, for your own mind…
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New “Cinderella,” at the Orpheum Theatre, fails to enchant
The production of Cinderella currently playing at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis is playwright Douglas Carter Beane’s 2013 adaptation of Rogers and Hammerstein’s 1957 musical, which was originally written for television. According to a press release, Beane went back to the original French version of the story and found additional elements that had been left out…
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“Looking for Fun(Bags)” at the Minnesota Fringe Festival: Can you love a cad?
Looking for Fun(Bags), now being presented at the Ritz Theater Studio as part of the Minnesota Fringe Festival, raises a lot of red flags before the lights even go down. For one thing, both the writer (Vincent S. Hannam) and the director (Philip Muehe) of this play about “mammary intercourse” are men. For another, the…