What’s ticking in Twin Cities Opera

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The last few weeks have been filled with great news for American opera lovers. On the national front, San Diego Opera announced its new General Manager on Wednesday, marking an important milestone in the turnaround of a storied company with a surprising near-closure last spring. David Bennett, currently the executive director of NYC’s Gotham Chamber Opera, will move across the country to take the reins. Notably, Bennett will draw a base salary of $200,000, 40% of his predecessor who led the drive to shut down the financially healthy San Diego Opera. This salary, according to the latest Form 990-C filings available, is roughly the same as earned by the President of Minnesota Opera; Minnesota Opera and San Diego Opera are predicted to have comparable budgets, if not sunshine, for 2015.Closer to home, the summer opera is shaping up with a slew of different announcements. Continue Reading

THEATER REVIEW | “The Manchurian Candidate” infiltrates, conquers at Minnesota Opera

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There is much that is not well in the opera world at large, but The Manchurian Candidate is not part of the problem. This new opera by Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell is thrilling, fast-paced, varied, and moving, with a story that excites and music that pulls the audience into a shifting world of paranoia, subterfuge, and love. In an industry where “saving” opera has too often meant protracted labor disputes and aesthetically confusing attempts to shock audiences, Minnesota Opera’s production of The Manchurian Candidate offers a third way forward. It presents a story that resonates with contemporary themes and concerns, populated with interesting and nuanced characters, told through fast-moving music in a presentation enhanced (rather than distracted) by technology. The formula works tremendously well.The story of this opera is adapted from the 1959 novel of the same name by Richard Condon. Continue Reading

THEATER REVIEW | Brilliant “Mary Poppins” ascends at Chanhassen Dinner Theatres

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Sunday, March 15, 2015 marks the five-year anniversary of Chanhassen Dinner Theatres’ current ownership. Half a decade ago, a consortium of investors led by Michael Brindisi, Tamara Kangas Erickson, and Steve Peters teamed up to buy one of the nation’s largest and most prominent Equity dinner theatres. Area residents and patrons were not exactly disinterested observers: not only was CDT a storied local and national theatre icon, but also a cornerstone of the local economy with almost three hundred people on staff. The new ownership also faced steep financial pressures from the beginning, taking the reins at an institution that had financially stumbled in recent years as theatre attendance in general and dinner theatre attendance in particular tumbled during the economic recession. Brindisi and Kangas-Erickson’s artistic credentials went without question, but did their team bring the business acumen necessary to revive the storied theater?Five years later, the answer to this question is a resounding yes. Continue Reading

THEATER REVIEW | “Disney’s Beauty and the Beast” enchants the Orpheum Theatre

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The crowd that filled the seats on Tuesday, Mar. 10 for the opening night of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast consisted heavily of children, but that doesn’t mean their parents weren’t humming along during intermission (and in the bathroom). The age range indicates throwback Disney movies aren’t going anywhere (as if there was any question), and reincarnated forms like the musical production of Beauty and the Beast only prolong Disney’s success. Among being a master at creating ear worms, Disney productions strike a chord with generations across the board, even despite the criticism the movies have received on social issues like gender and racial stereotypes.Beauty and the Beast is set in a 19th-century French village where Belle (Jillian Butterfield) finds herself wanting more than what “this poor provincial town” has to offer. Because she is a voracious reader and her father is an eccentric inventor (Thomas Mothershed), the people of her small town treat her as an outcast (“Look there she goes that girl is so peculiar / I wonder if she’s feeling well / With a dreamy, far-off look / And her nose stuck in a book / What a puzzle to the rest of us is Belle”). What really makes people—especially the women—question Belle is her rejection of the egotistical town hunk, Gaston (Cameron Bond), who’s drawn to her beauty and sets out to marry her. Continue Reading

THEATER REVIEW | Illusion Theater’s “Thurgood” a civil rights’ reminder

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A hundred years after the end of legal slavery, Thurgood Marshall became the first African-American to sit on the United States Supreme Court. George Stevens, Jr.’s play Thurgood, about the life of Justice Marshall brings to light many little known facts about Marshall’s early years and some of the significant accomplishments he made as an attorney before he was elevated to the high court. Michael Robins directs James Craven in a one-man show about Marshall at Illusion Theater.George Stevens, Jr., is best known to me as the writer of the screenplay for the television movie Separate but Equal which provides a detailed history of the facts behind the landmark 1954 school desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education. This case, as noted in the play, was the most significant decision made by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 20th century. It rendered illegal government sanctioned segregation of the races in school systems and, ultimately, it was the legal underpinning for elimination of all government laws that segregated people by race. Continue Reading

THEATER REVIEW | Maximum Verbosity’s “Tales from Wonderland”: Beware the jabberwock

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There’s one really great piece in Maximum Verbosity’s Tales from Wonderland at the new Phoenix Theater, and three others that are… not so great. One could be thankful that the really great piece, phillip andrew bennett low’s stage adaptation of Bruce Holland Rogers’ Lewis Carroll-infused short story “A Common Night,” is the piece that comes last, for they say if you end well, the audience will forgive you anything.  Well, almost anything. One could also, unfortunately, despair by intermission that Lewis Carroll would ever prove stage worthy. I, for one, fall in the grateful camp. I also wish there’d been more time to develop Tales from Wonderland in the vein of “A Common Night.” If more of the evening had been theater inspired by Carroll and less reader’s theater trying to recite Carroll, Tales from Wonderland might have been more successful.“I teach poetry.”“I’m not surprised. Continue Reading

Interview with Kevin Newbury of the Minnesota Opera’s “The Manchurian Candidate”: Paranoia, spying and politics

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The world premiere performance of the opera The Manchurian Candidate takes place this Saturday at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts’s Music Theater. This new opera by Mark Campbell and Kevin Puts was commissioned by Minnesota Opera as part of the company’s New Works Initiative, and adapts the bestselling 1959 thriller novel by Richard Condon. The Daily Planet sat down with The Manchurian Candidate’s stage director Kevin Newbury to discuss the opera.When were you first engaged to direct The Manchurian Candidate?I know Mark Campbell and Kevin Puts fairly well, so as soon as I heard about it I started angling for the job. I have a long relationship with Minnesota Opera, so I read the first draft of the libretto and called Dale [Johnson] and said, “I really would love to do this,” and everything worked out. I was involved very early on – I could attend all the workshops, be part of the writing process, and really be involved from the beginning.Is getting hooked up with productions that you hear about through the grapevine a normal process for you?It happens in many ways – sometimes companies call me up and you’re involved at the genesis of it, sometimes I come in after the piece is already written…which is not what I prefer to do. Continue Reading

THEATER REVIEW | Mixed Blood Theatre’s “Hir” an extremely queer play

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You should go see Mixed Blood’s current production of Taylor Mac’s comedy Hir, under the direction of Niegel Smith. It’s a chameleon of a play that can look different to everyone who watches it. Regardless of whether it ends up bewitching you or just weirding you out, it’s still a heck of a lot of fun to watch in action.“I want to know how far down I have to go before I can drag you back with me.”Isaac (Dustin Bronson) returns home, dishonorably discharged from the military during wartime, to find his childhood home transformed into a dump. His mother Paige (Sally Wingert) has taken over and is finally running the place the way she sees fit. His father Arnold (John Paul Gamoke) is adjusting to life after a debilitating stroke, which Paige sees as an opportunity to reform his behavior. Continue Reading

Beautiful, aurally sumptuous Concert Hall opens at the Ordway

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The Ordway Center for the Performing Arts formally inaugurated its new concert hall on Saturday with an elaborate gala celebration. The evening began with a cocktail hour and a formal dinner in the Music Theater, followed by a sumptuous concert in the new space and an afterparty that continued into the wee hours.The star of the evening was the new performing art space, the succinctly named Concert Hall. (John and Ruth Huss, whose $10 million gift underwrote a quarter of the $40 million construction costs, humbly declined naming rights.) This 1,100-seat space sits on the northeast corner of the Ordway complex, filling in the southeast corner of 5th and Washington and the old footprint of the McKnight Theatre. The Concert Hall was dressed for the occasion with 14.7 linear miles of mahogany-stained oak, a coat of 1,100 or so acoustic panels, and a cloak of glass curtain walls overlooking Rice Park. More than a thousand friends showed up for its society debut and greeted it with cheers and applause.Perhaps the biggest concern on attendees’ minds was whether or not the space’s new acoustics measured up to their advertising. Continue Reading