Twin Cities Daily Planet (https://www.tcdailyplanet.net/author/dprw/page/3/)
Illusion Theater and the Lighthouse Group presented Molière’s Misanthrope or the Impossible Lovers as this year’s Lights Up production. Eric Powell Holm updated and directed this famous 17th century French comedy of manners about love, hypocrisy and self-indulgence. The production starts out sluggish but ultimately proves worthwhile.
When Osseo’s Yellow Tree Theatre opened in 2008, a last-minute loss of rights to a different holiday play resulted in co-founder Jessica Lind writing the last-minute holiday play Miracle on Christmas Lake. The production is now in it’s third year, and from the way the packed house enjoyed the latest performance of Miracle, it’s likely to remain a holiday staple.Miracle tells the tale of Colin and Tess. Colin was a soap opera actor in New York City, but he and Tess have just moved back to Colin’s small hometown of Christmas Lake. Tess is unhappy living in a small town and she wants to move back to New York City. Colin’s father owned and operated the local playhouse and, upon his recent death, left it to Colin. Continue Reading
Commedia Beauregard’s Dickensesque holiday show A Klingon Christmas Carol is a must-see for die-hard Star Trekkers, especially fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation. But if you don’t know what a Klingon is, this is probably not going to be the show for you.
Song and family underscore the History Theatre’s warm reprise of the holiday musical The Christmas Schooner. Written by John Reeger with music and lyrics by Julie Shannon, this play was last performed at the History Theatre in 2002. It is a charming family entertainment and a viable alternative for families tired of the usual holiday fare.
Mixed Blood’s latest production, The House of Spirits, is an engrossing tale of torture and human rights as well as a compelling family saga. The play is written by Caridad Svich and is based upon the novel by Isabel Allende, the niece of President Salvador Allende, a freely elected Maxist president who was killed during a military overthrow of his government in Chile in the 1970s.
Last weekend, Mixed Blood Theatre opened the Midwest premiere of playwright Thomas W. Jones II’s play A Cool Drink a Water. The play is an ambitious modernized, alternative-universe portrayal of the characters from Lorraine Hansberry’s groundbreaking play A Raisin in the Sun, which debuted on Broadway in 1959. Just as the Raisin title came from the Langston Hughes’s poem “Dream Deferred,” the title for Cool Drink comes from a poem by poet Maya Angelou that also refers to the struggle to achieve one’s dreams. But whereas in Raisin the characters looked to the future to fulfill their dreams, in Cool Drink the characters look to their past to find a direction forward.
The dre.dance contemporary dance company took on the daunting task of portraying the soul of autism in the Midwest premiere of its latest work beyond.words at the Ordway Center last Thursday, May 20. The founders of dre.dance, Andrew Palermo and Taye Diggs, were inspired to create this dance work by a CNN documentary about Amanda Baggs, a woman who used technology to convey her autism as an alternative way of seeing the world. The dance portrays the outward expressions of autism, but does not fully realize its apparent goal of conveying the internal life of those afflicted with autism as a viable and desirable alternative world.Palermo and Diggs relied on Baggs’s videos portraying her world of autism as the foundation for developing their dance work. Then, through a serious of intensive study, workshops, residencies, and interviews with persons affected by Autism Spectrum Disorders, the company developed this dance performance about autism.The hallmark of this dance work is the incorporation of the repetitive behaviors that characterize some of those affected by autism: slow shifting or rocking motions, arm slapping, odd hand movements, etc. There are three movements to the dance. Continue Reading
The Magic Pot: Three Tales from China opened at SteppingStone Theatre this past weekend. It is one of the most entertaining children’s shows that I have seen in the past few years. Dan Staufer wrote the script, music and lyrics. SteppingStone commissioned and produced the show in collaboration with New York City’s TADA! Youth Theatre. Continue Reading
At the Bryant-Lake Bowl, Joshua English Scrimshaw and Levi Weinhagen are reprising their bestselling show from the 2009 Minnesota Fringe Festival. The Harty Boys in the Case of the Limping Platypus is a parody of the old Hardy Boys teenage detective novels. I never read any of those books, so I was not sure what to expect. What I found was a delightfully silly show.
Fred and Jack Harty (Joshua English Scrimshaw and Levi Weihagen) are two rather old-looking adolescents who spend their time trying to find clues to solve crimes. Their father is Philmore Harty (played with a fine sense of melodrama by Ari Hoptman), a world-famous freelance—and apparently unemployed—detective who needs his sons’ help to solve crimes. Continue Reading
Facism, oppression of women, and sexual repression are the themes underlying the Pangea World Theater and Teatro del Pueblo co-production of The House of Bernarda Alba. The play opened last weekend at SteppingStone Theatre in St. Paul and is the last work by Federico Garcia Lorca, a Spanish playwright murdered by Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. It is an ambitious production that seeks to add avant-garde movement techniques to Lorca’s ritualism, but the execution of the idea unfortunately falls short.The play concerns the events occurring after the death of Bernarda Alba’s second husband. Bernarda (Tinne Rosenmeier) imposes on her five adult daughters (ages 20-39) a period of mourning to last for eight years during which time the daughters are to be confined to the house. Continue Reading