By guest reviewer YONATAN REINBERG The all-male cast in The Shadow Company’s performance of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, by playwright Moisés Kaufman, play a variety of characters from prostitutes to queens, lovers to judges, press to persecutors. As the clever plot device played by a rascally professor makes clear, however, the…
The Yellow Tree Theater needs to perform a delicate balancing act. A well-supported community theater with excellent media outreach, Yellow Tree aspires to put on productions that compel metro area theatergoers to take a trip to Osseo. At the same time, their productions should please their core audience without lulling them into a stupor, a…
I am always wary when I sit down to see a new production of To Kill a Mockingbird. For one thing, it is so easy for Midwesterners to mess up an Alabaman accent; secondly, child actors in serious roles can, occasionally, be disastrous. Luckily the production at the Park Square Theatre avoided both of these…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Want to pair a night at the theater with a tasty meal beforehand? Josh Page over at I Like Food, Food Tastes Good and I are doing the legwork for you. Check out Josh’s site for his take on Chimborazo, where the unexpected combinations of sweet and savory Ecuadorian flavors will put you…
By MIRA REINBERG From the first words he pronounces, Sidney Bruhl (Steve Hendrickson) delivers such clever lines in Deathtrap that it is somewhat curious he should be the frustrated mystery playwright that he is. And frustrated he is at the writer’s block afflicting him, even if the obstruction to his creativity is alleviated by the…
by LIZ PANTING, guest reviewer As Yellow Fever opens, private investigator Sam Shikaze (Kurt Kwan) walks onto a dimly-lit stage in a fedora and trench coat, jazz music playing lazily in the background, and he turns to the audience and begins to narrate his life. It’s a classic hard-boiled crime drama… with a few changes…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Back before recovery programs like AA and treatment facilities like Hazelden became accepted parts of the substance abuse landscape, there were two options for addicts: desperate prayer or hopeless resignation. Relying on willpower or divine intervention, most alcoholics did not get very far for very long; it took the ingenuity and entrepreneurial…
by EMILY MEISLER, guest reviewer …This is a practise As full of labor as a wise man’s art, For folly that he wisely shows is fit. But wise men, folly-fall’n, quite taint their wit. -Viola, Twelfth Night In Act III of Twelfth Night, Shakespeare offers a warning to any potential fools in the audience. Substitute “fool”…
by MICHAEL J. OPPERMAN The bones of the story will be familiar to anyone who has taken a survey course in English literature. Hamlet, the heir to the throne of Denmark sees the ghost of his father who demands that his son avenge his death. The tricky thing is that, according to this ghost, the…
by LIZ PANTING, guest reviewer Are you ever at the theatre and feel bored before the curtain goes up? Do you find yourself thinking all plays are starting to look the same? Go see a PuppetLab show at In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre. Something in it will take you off…
Aisle Say - Twin Cities 