THEATER REVIEW | 20% Theatre Company’s “Q-Stage: Set A”: Mixed bag and mixed responses

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When a theater company puts together a new works festival like 20% Theater Company is doing with their second year of the Q-Stage program, the results can be a mixed bag. In its inaugural year last year, Q-Stage had some really polished powerful work on display. It also had some things that were sweet alongside some things that were riotously funny. And it had some things that felt more like works in progress that sometimes made me smile and other times had me scratching my head in confusion. It’s great to have an incubator for local artists and new work with a queer sensibility like Q-Stage. Continue Reading

“Jersey Boys” by the numbers

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Jersey Boys has 33 songs in its score, drawing off a song catalog that sold 175 million records worldwide and several cover songs from the Four Seasons’s early years. Many of the show’s other numbers are quite impressive. Number of People in the Company: 52

Actors: 19
Musicians: 10
Crew: 14

Largest Number of Roles Played by an Actor: 18 (Leslie Rochette)
Number of Distinct Costumes and Looks: 196

Pairs of Shoes Worn per Performance: 87
Most costume changes for a lead character: 15 (for Frankie Valli)

Valli’s quick changes: 12
Valli’s shortest quick change: 15 seconds

Fastest costume change overall: 9 seconds (“My Eyes Adored You”

Lighting

609 lighting cues
401 fixed lights + 96 PAR lamps for concert lighting
77 moving lights

©2015 Basil Considine Continue Reading

THEATER REVIEW | “Jersey Boys” shines at the Orpheum Theatre

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November 6 of this year will mark the 10th anniversary of Jersey Boys’ opening on Broadway. For a show that starts with “Oh, what a night!” this means an awful lot of nights of rocking the charts 60s-style. So what does it mean when this show tour – still running after nine years on the road – touches down on Hennepin Ave? Is the magic still there? The answer to the second question is, “Yes.” The answer to the first is, “If you haven’t seen it already, buy your tickets for a ride on an amazing musical rollercoaster.” The show production is a tightly paced, comedic yet affectingly serious journey through a profoundly varied song catalog of hits. Continue Reading

THEATER REVIEW | “Detroit ’67” at Penumbra Theatre: A look back at the future with a great soundtrack

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The Penumbra Theater brings to life segments of history that many of us didn’t read in our textbooks. Detroit ’67 is an inside look at the race riots from the view of a basement in Detroit near the epicenter of the riots. Main characters Chelle and Lank have inherited the house from their parents. They host house parties in the basement to make money; the work is more regular and profitable than factory jobs. The house parties feature Motown music that punctuates the action throughout. An interesting tangent in the play is the change over from records (45’s) to 8 track tapes – a movement that represents a leap into the future. Continue Reading

THEATER REVIEW | “Fruit Fly The Musical”: Fringe show buzzes back at Illusion Theater

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This is the season of Minnesota Fringe Festival show planning. Lottery numbers were drawn in late February, venue assignments and showtimes went out to producers last week, and Minnesota Playlist is sprouting Fringe-related casting notices and other classifieds. For some teams, now is the time when the writers first begin to frantically craft material; for others, the scripts and scores were set in stone well before their applications went in. The clock is ticking: in less than four months’ time, the country’s largest unjuried theatre festival will have come and gone, bringing about 50,000 attendees – 10,000 more than Target Field’s maximum, and about 91% of the capacity of the old Metrodome – to Minneapolis stages.So what happens to a Fringe show once the festival has come and gone? For most shows, a quiet repose and a few playbill credits await. Continue Reading

THEATER REVIEW | The Chameleon Theatre Circle’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” powerful, frightening

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Passion Sunday has come and gone, but the passion and drama live on in Burnsville in The Chameleon Theatre Circle’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar. This staging of the classic musical by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber is recast by co-directors Jim Vogel and Bradley Donaldson as a pot of mob violence on the verge of boiling over. The result is striking, arresting, and often frightening in its power.When the music of Jesus Christ Superstar was first released 45 years ago, the BBC banned its broadcast on the grounds that its content was sacrilegious. This ban proved much more temporary than the musical’s success, which was enormous. As stagings proliferated around the world, however, many of the once-controversial elements in the story—the sympathetic treatment of Judas, erotic overtones in Mary Magdalene’s relationship with Jesus, and Jesus’s struggles with his impending crucifixion—have been toned down.“Toned down” scarcely describes CTC’s production. Continue Reading

“Down Below or The Womb of the World: A Shadow Opera” on the life of Leonora Carrington

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Leonora Carrington was an artist and writer. Her art is like a mashup of Beatrice Potter and Hieronymus Bosch, intricate and complicated with the nursery rhyme sweetness of Potter and dark edge of Bosch. There’s something compelling that makes you look closer. Her life reads the same way.Born in the UK, Leonora met fellow artist Max Ernst and moved to France until Ernst was arrested by the Nazis for “degenerate art.” After that she moved to Spain where she became increasingly anxious and had a breakdown. Eventually she moved to Mexico where she wrote about her psychotic experience in her novel Down Below.Down Below or The Womb of the World is also a shadow opera playing at Bedlam Theater; it presents vignettes from her life and work based specifically on three stories, The Hearing Trumpet, The Stone Door and The Oval Lady. Continue Reading

THEATER REVIEW | “The Other Place” transcends subject matter at Park Square Theatre

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The Other Place, one of the most powerful plays I have seen in the last year, opened at Park Square Theatre on April 3. Shari White’s play concerns a medical researcher working on a drug to combat dementia who, herself, is suffering from early on-set Alzheimer’s. Aditi Kapil masterfully directs this intense show which highlights how fragile the mind can be.Given the subject matter, one at first cannot help comparing this play to the recent movie Still Alice. But any comparisons soon go by the wayside. In Still Alice, the audience sees the character’s illness from the perspective of people who still have their minds. Continue Reading