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.
by ERIKA SASSEVILLE I’ll admit, I may have been a terrible theater major. Before this week, I’d never seen Cabaret, either in film or on stage. Even so, my companion and I were blown away by Roundabout Theatre’s production playing through October 23 at the Orpheum Theatre. Cabaret premiered on Broadway in 1966 and picked up eight…
