The Ordway Center for the Performing Arts and Teatro Del Pueblo present West Side Story, April 4-16. The musical, based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, places a new pair of star-crossed lovers in Manhattan’s Upper West Side during the 1950’s.
By Adam Michael Schenck Assuredly, the dinner theater experience hearkens back to a different era of live entertainment, before the days of stand-up comedy and before television provided our laughs in the comfort of our homes. Why then do we go out, in this case, to the Bunker Hills Event Center in Coon Rapids? My…
by CHRISTINE SARKES Fun Home at the Orpheum Theatre is devastatingly honest, achingly funny and worthy of all the praise it has received. The musical won five Tony Awards last year, including Best Musical, and made history as the first show written exclusively by women to win that award. Based on Alison Bechdel’s best-selling and award-winning graphic memoir, Fun Home introduces…
By Jacob Froelich From the neighborhoods of East St. Paul to the shores of Lake Minnetonka, no one is safe from the loving ridicule of Miss Richfield 1981. She’s bold, sassy and blissfully “Doesn’t Care!” about holding back and following the unwritten rules of ‘Minnesota Nice’. Miss Richfield 1981, as played by Russ King, has been…
Collective Unconscious Performance is a local company that is quite small, fairly new, and quite ambitious. They take as their goal “to re-imagine stories from our ‘collective unconscious’ (such as fairy tales or myth) with a bold, contemporary perspective.” With the world premiere of their latest show, The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, they show that they…
By Anne Skonieczny The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is unpleasant—in the best possible way. Tasked with telling a story filtered through the “extraordinary mind” of a teenage boy named Christopher (who appears to fall somewhere on the autism spectrum), the play creatively uses sound, light, choreography, and set design to…
by LISSI CORBETT Every American should see this play. In one of the most powerful moments of playwright Jeanne Sakata’s one-man show Hold These Truths, Gordon Hirabayashi realizes that his and his family’s faces are the faces of the enemy. By accident of race and ancestry, they are now the dangerous and unwelcome Other. Hold…
by CHRISTINE SARKES Finding Fish at the Illusion Theater is a labor of love for playwright Carlyle Brown, who lived a seafaring life for over twenty years on the Maine coast. A commission to write a play about the sustainability of Maine’s fisheries led to this work, which imagines a future world in which much…
Despite having been a Twin Cities theatre-goer for years now, last night’s performance of Ragtime was the first time I had ever seen a show by local favourite Theater Latté Da. Nuts, I know, but at least I finally got there. And it seemed like fortuitous timing that I should finally see the much-praised company at their first…
By BRYCE + LIZ BYRON. Set in the green room of a production of Waiting for Godot, the play Waiting for Waiting for Godot re-imagines the themes of Beckett’s absurdist play through a lens of modern “show business”. The play’s action unfolds as the two understudies, Ester and Val, wait for their chance to go on stage and…
