by SOPHIE KERMAN Although witty, suspenseful and well-acted, the Jungle Theater‘s latest production is not a Valentine’s Day offering for the insecure couple. As you get sucked into the detective work and criminal reverse-engineering that drives Frederick Knott‘s Dial M for Murder, you may find yourself glancing sideways at your date and wondering just how much…
The Minnesota Opera is offering an amazing ticket opportunity to our readers: $20 tickets to Werther on Tuesday, January 31. (Read our review of Werther here.) Just go online to http://www.mnopera.org, get tickets for Tuesday’s performance, and enter blog20 as your coupon code. The fine print: Limit up to 4 seats regularly priced $50-110 for the Tuesday, 1/31 performance…
by SOPHIE KERMAN With its latest offering of Werther by Jules Massenet, we start to see the trajectory of the Minnesota Opera‘s 2011-12 season. Having started the year with the user-friendly Cosí Fan Tutte and continued with the innovative Silent Night, the Opera now presents a completely different kind of audience experience. Werther, based on…
by SOPHIE KERMAN In the summer of 2011, I spent a few hurried weeks hunting for the perfect one-bedroom apartment on a graduate student’s budget**. One of the best prospects, at least on paper, was a garden-level with impressive square footage for the price. But when I got there, I was both fascinated and a…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Although every woman is different, there are some things that tie us all together – the mental anguish of putting on a pair of nylon stockings, the enormity of a first crush, the strange and wonderful experience of growing boobs and figuring out what to do with them. These common trials and…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Julius Caesar is not theater for beginners. Of all of Shakespeare‘s plays, Caesar is one of the least eventful and yet the most cataclysmic. In Acts I-II, a charismatic leader becomes too big for his britches and is brutally murdered for it; Acts III and IV show us the aftermath of the killing on…
by SOPHIE KERMAN What do you do with a group of talented women on a tight budget? You could strap a few pairs of roller skates on them and set them loose in the roller derby arena… or you could give them 24 hours to write, rehearse and perform six short plays. In the 24:00:00…
by SOPHIE KERMAN As a critic, it’s a rare opportunity to review a show in 2012 that I also saw on Broadway when I was twelve or thirteen. In its fifteen-year run, The Lion King has become such a Broadway staple that it’s hard to remember how revolutionary it was when it opened. Viewers marveled…
by SOPHIE KERMAN As the lights dim for Lorna Landvik‘s grand entrance at the Bryant Lake Bowl, it is clear that the woman has created a following. Whether through her eight novels or the four previous sold-out iterations of her one-woman improv show Party in the Rec Room, Lorna’s audience knows what to expect. For a comedy show, it’s…
by SOPHIE KERMAN As Theatre Unbound‘s Artistic Director Stacey Poirier says, “24 hour plays are the Xtreme Sport of theatre.” With that in mind, the company is presenting the 24:00:00 Xtreme Theatre Smackdown, a reincarnation of the 24-hour play project that has been a tradition for more than ten years. To gear up for the 24-hour…
Aisle Say - Twin Cities 