A new theater company with firmly established Twin Cities artists has ventured forth with a credo that is, not surprisingly, given the founders, committed to new ideas; this has been the calling card for shows conceived and guided by Dominique Serrand and Steve Epp since their Theatre de la Jeune Lune days. Drawing from...
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Park Square Theatre is turning plays about classical music into a minor specialty. They recently produced (it opened the night of the Big Blizzard) 2 Pianos 4 Hands, a lively and affecting mediation on failure: what happens when you devote your life to an instrument only to discover that you don’t – quite –...
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Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney lives in London and, indeed, his powerful In The Red And Brown Water (Pillsbury House Theatre performing in the Guthrie‘s Dowling Studio, through June 5) is written with an expatriate’s ardor. This begins with the play’s mythical smalltown Louisiana setting. Louisiana is, at least from this northerner’s perspective, the prime...
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The Ordway has brought a powerful, substantial and beautiful new musical to its main stage with the Tony Award-winning “Next to Normal,” a play that plots out new territory for what musicals can talk about. In this case, the subject is living with bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia. Amazingly, for all of the pain attached...
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Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami is a master of the everyday surreal: he creates ordinary characters – bank clerks, university students, data processors – and builds around them fantastic dream-like stories. Like Dorothy thrust into the land of Oz, Murakami’s people find themselves in positions of great and often unwanted power. This applies to his...
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