THEATER REVIEW | Frank Theatre keeps us on our toes with “Love and Information”

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God bless Caryl Churchill and Frank Theatre. They just keep screwing with the art form and serving up something interesting. Frank’s latest production of Churchill’s latest play, Love and Information, is one of the more peculiar, intriguing, mind-bending pieces of theater I’ve seen in a while. Churchill’s script doesn’t trouble the theater company with things like stage directions or characters. There’s just text lined up as if it were almost an epic poem. Continue Reading

THEATER REVIEW | Mu Performing Arts’ “F.O.B.”: Haunted by ghosts of the past

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I’m conflicted.  F.O.B. is an Obie Award-winning play. It’s David Henry Hwang’s first significant play. It launched his career and laid the groundwork for everything he wrote that followed, from The Dance and the Railroad to M. Butterfly to Yellow Face and many others. It also deals head-on with the poisonous and self-defeating issue of racism within ethnic minority groups in a way that’s so honest it’s sometimes hard to listen to (in a good way, because it should be uncomfortable). “They’re yellow ghosts.”One of the problems with being a pioneer and leading voice like Hwang, though, is that all the plays that come after yours—build on and copy and riff off of yours, including plays you write yourself—sometimes make revisiting that very first play an awkward exercise. F.O.B. won the Obie in 1980. Hwang was a good writer then but he’s become an even better writer in the 35 years since. Continue Reading

THEATER REVIEW | Gertrude Stein and a Companion

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Founding artistic director Bain Boehlke’s enduring triumph in Twin Cities arts, The Jungle Theater, opens its 25th Anniversary season with its seventh production of the can’t miss ringer, Win Wells’Gertrude Stein and a Companion.Wells crafted a uniquely compelling portrait historic figures Stein and Alice B. Toklas as human beings, warts and all, devotedly in love, wending their way through a remarkable – if at times trying – existence together.  Boehlke skillfully directs Jungle mainstays Claudia Wilkens as Gertrude Stein and Barbara Kingsley as Alice B. Toklas.  All said, you have an excellent evening in the theatre.  Indeed, with the aim being to hit a target of theatrical brilliance, this amounts to shooting fish in a proverbial barrel.  The author deftly takes two eccentric characters whose lives and careers are marked by prominence among the intelligentsia, generally regarded as cerebral celebrities, and renders them warmly down-to-earth, as readily accessible anyone’s next door neighbors.  The director, as long has been his stock and trade, respects the text to subtly let the material’s beauty come to life rather than indulge some intrusive hand at interpreting it.  He has always respected actors the same way, eliciting and allowing their artistry to emerge in a given role rather constrict them with forced guidance.  It has never hurt, of course, that Boehlke has routinely enjoyed the advantage of working with some of the best talent in town and, accordingly, Wilkens and Kingsley strike not one false note in bringing Stein and Toklas richly to life.  Ironically, for all that these two women are famed as legends of academia and intellect, this is, when it comes down to it, a heartwarming love story.This production is a fine note on which to observe the company’s legacy.  Bain Boehlke has stepped down at the helm but audiences can be confident quality theatre will remain the order day. Particularly, if someone on the staff  succeeds him.  After all, he hasn’t done it in a vacuum but has a vision those around him has shared.  As long as there’s a Jungle Theater, the Twin Cities will be safe for premium artistic fare. Continue Reading

THEATER REVIEW | Minneapolis Musical Theatre’s “Calvin Berger” a modernized classic at New Century Theatre

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Calvin Berger is a musical update of the story of Cyrano de Bergerac. That’s a big nose to fill, but the production now playing at the New Century Theatre is smartly done. The music and script are fun, funny, and enough of their own animal so as to not invite too many comparisons with the wonderful poetry of Edmond Rostand’s classic play. As Minneapolis Musical Theatre & Hennepin Theatre Trust collaborations go, it’s also a story that fits particularly well with the space of the New Century Theatre.This version of Cyrano strips down the essentials to just four characters: Calvin (the Cyrano analog), Rosanna (Roxanne by another name; Calvin’s object of affection, but distinctly not his cousin), Matt (the Christian analog), and Bret (Calvin’s sort-of-maybe-not-platonic-it’s-complicated female best friend, a character without a straight analog in the source play). Instead of 17th-century France, this story unfolds in the setting of a present-day high school, with cell phone use, text messaging, and Bluetooth headsets factoring in. Continue Reading

THEATER REVIEW | Minnesota Opera’s “The Elixir of Love” has body, pipes

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Classical music audiences are not as loud as they used to be. Eighteenth-century opera patrons could eat, drink, and converse during a performance; through much of the 19th century, many operagoers treated the opera as a participatory event, shouting encouragement and boos, calling for encores, and stopping performances with applause. The present culture of silence in the concert hall and opera house is largely a product of the last century or so. It was in many ways a blast from the past on Saturday when Minnesota Opera’s performance of The Elixir of Love paused due to riotous applause.More than one opera performance has charged on in spite of applause, drowning out clapping in the conductor’s drive to create a seamless musical and dramatic experience. Leonardo Vordoni shrewdly did not try this and waited out the applause before continuing, and a good thing, too – the audience would have won that battle. Continue Reading