By Mira Reinberg Propeller, an all-male London-based Shakespeare company, burst on the stage at the Guthrie Theatre with a revived production of The Taming of the Shrew, and gave the audience a taste of Elizabethan theatricality: a performance that fuses physical action, linguistic sparkle, and arresting story into a spectacle of colorful éclat. And did…
By MIRA REINBERG As spectators of television or theater we are lured by the sheer possibilities of delectation that are accessible to the very rich, even as we scoff at the disproportionate luxury surrounding them and ridicule their lifestyle of pampered oblivion. Molly Smith Metzler’s “class war” play, Elemeno Pea, inserts us into the emblematic…
by LIZ PANTING, guest reviewer Girl Shorts is a festival of short plays all written by women playwrights, focusing on female characters. Each night of the festival, which runs from February 23-March 3, features 5 one-act plays, and certain evenings also feature live music after the show by Missing Peace, Lingua Luna, and Courtney McLean of the…
by EMILY MEISLER, guest reviewer After exiting the Saturday night production of Red Resurrected, I turned to my friend who accompanied me to the production and asked, “So, what did you think?” She paused. “It was good.” She smiled politely. “It was well done….but I’m not a theater person.” There are some beautiful moments in Red…
By Mira Reinberg How do words determine action? Even more fascinatingly, how do words perform the effect that will determine fatal action? Greek tragedy embodied the poetic quest to articulate the relation between words and performance in order to help us, humans that we are, explain a reality that is unexplainable through language. Here is…
By MIRA REINBERG That the twenty-first century, and even the election of Barack Obama, have not ushered in a true “post-racial” consciousness within American society is a topic still in need of serious debate. In her play Buzzer, which opened on Friday at The Guthrie, playwright Tracey Scott Wilson contends that in fact the question…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Need a break from winter? Step into the Walking Shadow‘s inventive production of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a well-timed throwback to the distant autumn days when the leaves – not the snow – crunched underfoot and it was the shivers down your spine, not a feel-good Valentine’s card, that made you sit just…
by LIZ PANTING, guest reviewer When most people hear the name C.S. Lewis, they think of The Chronicles of Narnia or The Screwtape Letters. They may think of Christian theology, of an author who was friendly with J.R.R. Tolkien, or maybe even of a stuffy British man in tweed. What they probably do not think…
by MICHAEL J. OPPERMAN Inevitably, talking about Yellow Tree Theatre productions starts with talking about the space. Often the first thought on pulling up to the building is something like ‘is this it?’ Or ‘am I here?’ The theater lives in a lowrise line of storefronts in Osseo, welcoming but nondescript. This first impression never…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Wholesomely all-American, with unrelenting optimism and unquestioning zeal: am I talking about musical theater, or about the Mormon Church? In The Book of Mormon, Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone have found the perfect subject for a Broadway musical. Religious conviction, fear of hell-fire and idealistic missions seem to have been made for nothing if not…
Aisle Say - Twin Cities 