There is a reason Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance is a theater mainstay – it is clever, approachable, and hilarious. Yet, with so many productions of the show over the years, it’s charm inevitably has faded for all…
Category: Reviews
Review | Park & Lake: a hoot and a half
Ten Thousand Things; various venues (check the TTT website), through March 11What gives with all these outré comedies currently gracing stages in the twins? Two Mile Hollow. 21 Extremely Bad Breakups. Noises Off. And now the latest offering from Ten Thousand Things: Park & Lake. Are the sanctimonious clowns in Washington…
Review | Two Mile Hollow: over-the-top, and thoroughly enjoyable
A co-production between Mu Performing Arts and Mixed Blood Theatre; at Mixed Blood through March 4Camp: when the process(es) of the performers supercede(s) the needs of the story being told. By this definition, Two Mile Hollow – a co-production between Mixed Blood Theater and Mu Performing Arts (an arrangement one wishes more theaters would make),…
Review | 21 Extremely Bad Breakups: should I stay or should I go?
Walking Shadow Theatre Co., performing at Red Eye Theater (15 West 14th St., Mpls), through March 3Any play with a title like 21 Extremely Bad Breakups is bound to be a bit of a yuk-fest and so it is with Walking Shadow’s new work of that name. Though 21EBB fits this description, it’s more than just…
Review | The Humans: realism returns
Presented by the Hennepin Theatre Trust at the Orpheum, MinneapolisIt is Thanksgiving Day. A family gathers in the Manhattan Chinatown apartment that one of the daughters shares with her boyfriend. Grandmother, in a wheelchair, only somewhat “with it.” Sister, dealing with recent breakup. Mom, mother hen-ing, and Dad, doing…
Review | Assassins: overlong maybe, but fab
Theater Latté Da, through March 18Ever wonder why the dapper Johnny Wilkes Booth murdered Abraham Lincoln? Laid awake at night sorting out the reasons why the cheerfully insane Charles Guiteau put a bullet in President Garfield’s back? Tried to figure out why the effervescently cute…
Review | The Wiz: a fun, funky fairytale
Penumbra and Children’s Theatre, performing at Children’s Theatre through March 18The Twin Cities is blessed with many storied theater institutions, two of the most vital being the Children’s Theatre Company and Penumbra Theatre. Both have distinct missions – one to introduce theater in approachable ways to new generations and one…
Review | Noises Off: a fine British farce
Artistry Theater, through Feb 18Noises Off is a perennially popular farce about all the things that can go wrong with a theatre production. Anyone who knows theatre knows the list is almost endless: last minute changes that rattle the actors, backstage romances that threaten…
Review | The Maids: pure energy
Dark & Stormy Productions, 77 13th Ave NE, though Feb 17Like all of Dark & Stormy Productions plays, Jean Genet‘s The Maids is done in a small, empty office space in the old Grain Belt Brewery (77 13th Ave NE, Minneapolis, through Feb 17). The space is intimate. The actors…
Review | A Steady Rain: solid
Of all the horrific things that have happened over the past fifty years the Jeffrey Dahmer story stands out. What makes it especially distressing is that a fourteen-year-old boy escaped from Dahmer’s basement apartment, ran naked to two Milwaukee police…