by MICHAEL J. OPPERMAN & EVA VON DASSOW Minnesota Opera’s 50th Anniversary Season opens with the company’s first presentation of Verdi’s Nabucco, the opera that Verdi considered to be the beginning of his artistic career. The composer fully exploited the orchestra’s expressive capacity, and the musicians give a persuasive account of Verdi’s potent score. We’re fortunate…
By MIRA REINBERG Some of playwright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton’s most refined plays contemplate the conjunction of history and literature. Such was the exquisite screenplay of Dangerous Liaisons, which brought to life the cynicism and manipulation of life in eighteenth-century French court and pushed its travesties to the limit. Likewise, his adaptation of Atonement dramatized…
by SOPHIE KERMAN In Sarah Ruhl‘s take on the classic myth of Eurydice, there are many ways to cross between loss and forgetting. Letters find their way to and from the underworld, where a chorus of stones silently fights the speech and song that bring memory back into dark places. An elevator transports the dead to their…
by MELANIE BOWMAN When the question of marriage equality arises, solemnity prevails. The seriousness of the issue generally excludes comedy, though derision is never far from the discussion. Better (or) Worse, presented by the Freshwater Theatre Company, takes on marriage as an institution with seriousness, realism, laughter, and hope. The play is a series of short scenes…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Contemporary theatre has a wide range of potential – to break new artistic ground, to offer pointed social commentary, to provide audiences a window into the lives of others. The Brothers Size, performed in the Guthrie Theater’s Dowling Studio, tries to do all three. But while the play’s vague nods to Yoruba-inspired mythology¹ do…
By MIRA REINBERG Audiences and readers of Samuel Beckett have long since become aware that of all the different nuances that the playwright attributed to the meaning of responsibility, Beckett has never deemed it his task to attenuate the gravity with which he beheld life. He doled out his views of the absurdities and ruthlessness…
by SOPHIE KERMAN No matter how busy your summer may be, you certainly have 90 minutes on a weekend to sit outside in a beautiful garden, eat tasty snacks, and watch a highly entertaining, impressively executed operetta. “But,” you whine, “I just don’t get opera!” With its adaptation of The Return of King Idomeneo, which integrates…
by MIRA REINBERG Nature smiled upon Public Dreams Theatre’s opening of The Tempest and the pastoral scene at Matthews Park in Minneapolis was not suggestive of the stormy intrigue of sorcery and vengeance that was to follow. Nor was there any set on the grass awaiting the audience with allusions to a tale of shipwreck…
by CHRISTINE SARKES SASSEVILLE and ERIKA YASMEEN SASSEVILLE The Guthrie Theater’s new musical production of Roman Holiday, based on the iconic 1953 movie and book by Paul Blake, has all the glamour, glitz and stylish corniness you would expect from a romantic comedy set to classic, toe-tapping Cole Porter tunes performed by a fabulous live pit orchestra (under…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues” were certainly ground-breaking in 1996, but the contemporary conversation about gender – and all the many fluid forms it may take – makes Ensler’s focus seem a bit narrow. After all, some people have no particular affinity towards their vagina, while others ardently wish that they had…
Aisle Say - Twin Cities 