The Guthrie’s Dowling Studio Theater is the site for Mu Performing Arts fresh, new production of their founder and artistic director’s play, Yellow Fever. Although it’s been thirty years since the play’s premiere – and the W. W. II-era internment camps are a generation or more removed – the play’s premise remains as meaningful...
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Lauren Yee‘s The Tiger Among Us (Mu Performing Arts performing at Mixed Blood Theatre, through Feb 10) sprawls. Literally: director Ellen Fenster utilizes Mixed Blood’s widest configuration and in her firm hands the play ranges from Dad’s extreme stage right deer stand, to the car (we assume it’s a Minnesota beater) located on the...
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Sheena Janson plays the Baker’s Wife in the wonderful Mu Performing Arts production of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into The Woods (Mu, performing at Park Square Theatre, through Aug 5). Ms. Janson is quite the best actor in the show, no mean feat given the super-high standard of performance set by the rest...
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Stephen Sondheim‘s Into The Woods (Mu Performing Arts performing at Park Square, through Aug 5) can be, like many late Sondheim works, difficult. The songs, it goes without saying, thrill: Into The Woods contains the moving “No One Is Alone,” the show-stopping “Agony,” the otherworldly “Stay With Me.” Has a better song than “Children...
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Edith Can Shoot Things And Hit Them (Mu Performing Arts, performing at Mixed Blood Theatre, through April 1) wants to be a movie. Much of what we hear about in A. Rey Pamatmat‘s play – Edith’s armed “securing the perimeter” of the house, the shooting of Dad’s girlfriend Chloe, Benji’s fraught confrontation with his...
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Playwright Katie Hae Leo presents us with a pleasantly breezy and vivacious narrator in her lovely Four Destinies (Mu Performing Arts at Mixed Blood Theatre, through Oct 30). The narrator is named Katie Leo. This Katie is a playwright and her aim is modesty itself: to answer once and for all the vexing question,...
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Spring! Ah. The snowbanks are melting, temps are soaring (sort of), the sun has a delicious new bite. There will be no more snow. In honor of the new season, CTC is producing Annie, Penumbra is exploring the music of Nat King Cole and the Guthrie is doing…Shaw. Well, not everyone can get in...
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It’s entirely appropriate that WTF – excellent title – by Katie Ka Vang (Mu Performing Arts, at Mixed Blood Theatre, through Feb 6) is being produced in the midst of our nastiest winter in years. WTF is bleak, hallucinatory and intense, sprawling and long (nearly 3 hours), a hip-hip inflected piece that alternately thrills...
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Michael Golamco‘s amiable Cowboy Versus Samurai (Mu Performing Arts performing in the Guthrie‘s Dowling Studio, through Nov 28) is loosely based on Edmond Rostand‘s 1897 classic, Cyrano de Bergerac. Ah, but with one crucial distinction: Golamco’s letter composer, Travis, lacks Cyrano’s famously distended and ugly nose. Travis is a sweet-tempered, reasonably content Korean American,...
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Even the name is perfect: Dreamland Arts, a small one story building nestled in a modest St Paul neighborhood (not far from Hamline University), containing an intimate (maybe 40 seats) theater. I adore spaces like this, where actors can play with a soft, exploratory subtlety, with none of the bombast needed in theaters like CTC...
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