by CHRISTINE SARKES SASSEVILLE Russ King’s hilarious holiday drag satire pokes fun of Christmas, religion, sexual orientation, Mayan doomsday predictions and Minnetonkans. No group is safe from Miss Richfield 1981’s sharp-tongued, spike-heeled humor. King’s hysterically funny Miss Richfield 1981: We’ll All Be Dead By Christmas, back for its 13th and possibly final year, is a holiday tradition for many of the repeat audience…
by SOPHIE KERMAN and EMILY MEISLER, guest reviewer Who hasn’t watched “Waiting for Guffman”, the mockumentary about a small town that puts on a community theater production, and felt a twinge of envy for the fictitious audience of “Red, White, and Blaine”? How much fun would it be to see that play, a production so ridiculous…
by SOPHIE KERMAN I look for two things in a children’s show: first, that the kids like it, and second, that it’s got something to entertain adults, too. The Children’s Theatre Company leaves no doubt about either in its revival of the holiday favorite, Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas. It’s a book most Americans have…
by MICHAEL J. OPPERMAN Keri Alkema as Anna Bolena in the Minnesota Opera production of “Anna Bolena” Anyone with a glancing knowledge of British history knows all does not end well for Anne Boleyn. Anne was Henry VIII’s second wife (“divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived”), and, after specious charges of adultery and treason, spent…
by MIRA REINBERG Living in Western countries generally implies having access to a vast array of media venues that provide an abundance of uncensored and updated news. Journalism is charged with the sacred task of unveiling democracy’s biggest enemy: collaboration of institutions in repressing crime, corruption, and injustice. It is not at all certain that…
by SOPHIE KERMAN As the opening to the MORPHOLOGIES Queer Performance Festival, Scott Turner Schofield‘s Becoming a Man in 127 EASY Steps is a perfect balance of art and storytelling. The three companies organizing MORPHOLOGIES – Pangea World Theater, 20% Theatre Company, and RARE Productions – have spent the last two years putting together the festival, which aims to celebrate…
by SOPHIE KERMAN The process of getting to the Loring Alley Theatre last night was long and circuitous. The space – a chilly concrete room also used as an indoor skateboard park, when not as a theater – is tucked away in the alley behind Joe’s Garage and Lurcat, and my friend and I walked past…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Kill Me Don’t Go, a brand new play by Trista Baldwin, does not shy away from marriage’s most harrowing moments. Ambitious in its emotional scope, Kill Me explores the profound connection and dangerous interdependency that can develop between two people who have chosen to wind their lives around each other. Although the situation between…
by MIRA REINBERG That the vibrator gained wide and accepted usage to treat hysteria in women during what is considered one of the most demure of social ages – Victorian times, is a historical reality brimming with irony and asking to be dramatized in theatre. Playwright Sarah Ruhl put history into literary action in In…
By MIRA REINBERG “Why are wicked men such good company?” This question, asked in The Lives of the Most Notorious Highwaymen by Six Elements Theatre playing at Gremlin Theatre, has clearly attracted playwright John Heimbuch, who has offered us a tale that does much more than provide an answer. Early eighteenth-century London is the setting…
Aisle Say - Twin Cities 