It seems that everyone has decided to open their shows around the weekend of September 20 this year, and we just can’t cover it all! You can stay tuned for reviews of Moon Show 143 at the Guthrie (Sept 14-18), Good People at the Park Square (previews Sept 13, opens Sept 20) and Uncle Vanya at the Guthrie (again, previews…
by CHRISTINE SARKES SASSEVILLE Director Joe Dowling and the entire cast and crew of the Guthrie Theater’s Pride and Prejudice can surely be proud of their stage adaptation of Jane Austen’s beloved novel, which is celebrating its 200th anniversary this year. The play is hugely entertaining, unexpectedly hilarious–while remaining true to the novel’s more thoughtful themes–and can…
by CHRISTINE SARKES SASSEVILLE Homer’s the Iliad is among the oldest works of Western literature and its illumination of the heroism and horrors of war has resonated with listeners and readers throughout history. One of the most moving segments of An Iliad, now at the Guthrie Theater through May 26, was actor Stephen Yoakam’s minutes-long listing of every war in human history since the Trojan…
by SOPHIE KERMAN There’s a certain mystique out there about fishing, a sense that the long wait (or desperate quest) for a fish can somehow be compared to the various ways of leading one’s life with artistry, impatience, or obsession. The idea has been exploited in various forms for centuries, from “A River Runs Through…
by LIZ PANTING, guest reviewer As Yellow Fever opens, private investigator Sam Shikaze (Kurt Kwan) walks onto a dimly-lit stage in a fedora and trench coat, jazz music playing lazily in the background, and he turns to the audience and begins to narrate his life. It’s a classic hard-boiled crime drama… with a few changes…
by EMILY MEISLER, guest reviewer …This is a practise As full of labor as a wise man’s art, For folly that he wisely shows is fit. But wise men, folly-fall’n, quite taint their wit. -Viola, Twelfth Night In Act III of Twelfth Night, Shakespeare offers a warning to any potential fools in the audience. Substitute “fool”…
By Mira Reinberg Propeller, an all-male London-based Shakespeare company, burst on the stage at the Guthrie Theatre with a revived production of The Taming of the Shrew, and gave the audience a taste of Elizabethan theatricality: a performance that fuses physical action, linguistic sparkle, and arresting story into a spectacle of colorful éclat. And did…
By MIRA REINBERG That the twenty-first century, and even the election of Barack Obama, have not ushered in a true “post-racial” consciousness within American society is a topic still in need of serious debate. In her play Buzzer, which opened on Friday at The Guthrie, playwright Tracey Scott Wilson contends that in fact the question…
by CHRISTINE SARKES SASSEVILLE The Guthrie Theater and The Acting Company’s staging and interpretation of William Shakespeare’s whimsical romantic comedy, As You Like It, is wonderfully inventive, superbly acted and suprisingly accessible to modern audiences. Everything from the mystical set design, roaring twenties costume vibe, musical interludes and the modern cadence of the monologues cleverly evokes Shakespeare’s motifs…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Though widely acclaimed as an American masterpiece and one of Eugene O’Neill‘s greatest plays, Long Day’s Journey Into Night is not a play that anyone particularly enjoys watching. The story of the Tyrone family’s struggles with addiction, money, and illness, Long Day’s Journey begins on a note of underlying anxiety and ends with the dissolution of trust,…
