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 PAIGE BEAMAN King Lear at the Guthrie Theater is a captivating and heart-breaking portrayal of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Accented with standout acting and exquisite 1920s/30s costume design, the play takes us on a beautiful yet painful journey of a father‘s relationship with his daughters. While the epic fight scenes were a delight, Stephen Yoakam’s haunting…
by Jacob Froelich I just can’t seem to write a traditional reflection on Michael Mayer’s production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, now playing at The Ordway in St. Paul. Normally I’d tell you a bit about the background of the show, some stand-out moments and give a final recommendation to see or skip…
By Jacob Froelich What more could possibly be said about one of the world’s most popular and successful Broadway shows? MAMMA MIA! is one of only five shows to have run for more than 10 years on Broadway and has been viewed by over 60 million people worldwide. It was made into a blockbuster of…
by CHRISTINE SARKES The Royal Family at the Guthrie Theater is an entertaining, long and chaotic mess of a tribute to a comically dysfunctional Broadway “theat-ah” family – a thinly-veiled homage to the Barrymore dynasty. Although the play has muddled themes of honoring family traditions, work/life balance and living up to parental expectations, it is…
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…
While the show itself lacks a dynamic storyline, the Guthrie’s adaptation of “The Lion in Winter” is a quality one.
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