Jill Schafer - Page 2

Wikipedia tells me that THE TEMPEST is 'now considered to be one of Shakespeare's greatest works,' but I'd never seen it until last week. Theatre Coup d'Etat brings us a stripped down, one act, in-the-round, intimate production in the non-traditional theater space that is SpringHouse Ministry Center, where they've often performed. I found that I like the play, that ends neither with everyone dead nor everyone married, like most Shakespeare plays seem to (although one couple is betrothed). Furthermore, the moral of the story seems to be forgiveness and peace, which is quite a refreshing story to experience these days. In the hands of this wonderful cast 13-person cast, this clear adaptation with great use of space, physicality, and music is the perfect introduction to THE TEMPEST.

Minnesota Jewish Theatre Company brings us another modern (well, late '90s) Jewish family trying to maintain their cultural identity while living in the melting pot of America. Four siblings gather at the family home in upstate New York for their father's Jahrzeit (one-year anniversary of death), and disagree about just about everything. At times funny, at times heart-breaking, THE LAST SCHWARTZ is an intense 90 minutes spent with a family that puts the fun in dysfunctional. Or as one character puts it when another laments 'why can't you be a normal family?' - 'this is a normal family.'

This fall, Freshwater Theatre is featuring new work by women artists, and they couldn't have picked a better time. In rep with a short play festival called 'The Feminine Surcharge,' they're presenting a collection of three short plays set in a women's bathroom. A place where many of us spend a considerable amount of time. While my visits to the restroom are usually less dramatic than these, it certainly is a place for drama, for strangers coming together, for friends having intimate conversations, for women hiding from undesirable people or events outside the bathroom door (true confession: I've been known to spend a longer time than necessary in the bathroom when events are awkward or boring or uncomfortable). Ruth Virkus' three plays under the title PREFERRED BY DISCREET WOMEN EVERYWHERE  explore these ideas. The result is funny and real and poignant, and feminist. An all-female cast and creative team shouldn't be as rare and novel as it is, but you can witness it now through October 28 at the Crane Theater in Northeast Minneapolis.

'People by and large are idiots.' Wow, does this ever ring true, especially on a day when some of my fellow Minnesotans showed up and cheered for the current White House resident despite all the ugly things he's said and done. How can people do that?! It's completely incomprehensible to me; they are completely incomprehensible to me. This feeling is at the core of the new play UNDERSTOOD by Tyler Mills, which Trademark Theater is intentionally producing running up to next month's midterm election. Director Tyler Michaels notes in the program, 'This play swirls around these two ideas: A broken couple and a broken country.' In this thoughtful and thought-provoking two-hander, a married couple is looking to be understood by each other, the one that is supposed to know and love them best, and also by a stranger whose beliefs are inexplicable to them.

To open their 30th season, intrepid nomadic #TCTheater company Frank Theatre is bringing us THE VISIT in the Minnesota Transportation Museum. This is actually the second play I've seen in this unique and super cool venue (see also Wayward and Mission's co-production of GHOST TRAIN). Both plays are set (at least partly) in a train station, so the museum is a perfect location. Filled with vintage train equipment and displays (which you can wander through before the show and at intermission), the museum is fascinating but also kind of dark and creepy and cold, and smells a little like a garage. Which is the perfect atmosphere for Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt's absurd 'tragicomic' play. This is a very Frank play, with a huge and talented cast and great commitment to the highly stylized design and tone of the play.

Playwright Aleshea Harris' play IS GOD IS, receiving just its second production at Minneapolis' Mixed Blood Theatre, is a revenge play. More than that, it's a revenge fantasy. Filled with the kind of vengeance that we don't resort to in real life because we're civilized people, but it sure is fun to think about. When you hear of a man who does horrible things to his wife and/or children, or even worse, experience it first hand, there's a part of the primal brain that wants to deliver an eye for an eye. This play is the cathartic fulfillment of those desires. It reminds me of the Dixie Chicks' song 'Goodbye Earl,' in which two friends conspire to kill the abusive husband of one of them. Critics cried - you're advocating violence and murder, how horrible! No - it's fiction, art, fantasy, metaphor, seeing an evil someone get what they deserve, if only in our imagination. Such is IS GOD IS, tenfold, in all its horrific yet somehow satisfying violence to avenge great hurts against one's self and loved ones.

I love sad plays. I love stories of miserable families who love each other but don't know how to express it in healthy ways. AWAKE AND SING!, now playing at Artistry's black box theater, is one such tragically beautiful and beautifully tragic play, like Tennessee Williams set in the Bronx. Or rather, since Clifford Odets' 1935 play predates Williams' major works, I guess I should say that Tennessee Williams is like Odets set in the South. The multi-generational Berger family has become beaten down by life, with the younger generation trying to break free and make a new life in this new country, if only it will let them. With a strong cast and detailed design in an intimate space, Artistry's production is beautiful and heart-breaking.

I love SPRING AWAKENING so much that after seeing the eight time Tony winner on Broadway (with most of the original cast), I named the next kitten I adopted Moritz Stiefel, after my favorite character. Nine years and three bladder surgeries later, my sweet Moritz is still with me, and so is my love for SPRING AWAKENING. Surprisingly (or maybe not so surprisingly), the themes of the late 19th Century German play, as seen through a rock musical, are still relevant today. Suicide rates are on the rise, there are some very real threats to abortion rights in this country, exposure and intolerance of sexual abuse and harassment is at an all time high, and 21st Century technology is making it harder to be a teenager than perhaps it's ever been. You think Wendla and Melchi had it rough? At least they never had their most embarrassing moment go viral for the entire world to bully them! For all of these reasons I'm grateful to Shoot the Glass Theater for bringing SPRING AWAKENING to us now, in a beautifully staged production featuring a super talented cast of young and unknown actors. I found myself falling in love with this story and these characters all over again.

That's right, #TCTheater friends, music-theater's favorite founding father has finally arrived in Minneapolis, along with all of this friends. Three years after opening on Broadway and becoming the biggest theater sensation in years, maybe even decades, the second national tour is playing at the Opheum Theatre for a six-week run. I'm lucky enough to have seen it four times now, and it's still just as epic and thrilling, if not quite as mind-blowing as the first time. HAMILTON is the rare thing that not only lives up to the hype, it exceeds it. In fact it's not really about the hype at all, the 'all the cool people are seeing HAMILTON so I guess I should see it too.' You shouldn't go see HAMILTON so you can impress your friends and neighbors, you should go see HAMILTON because it's the quintessential American story told through the quintessential American art form - musical theater. It's one of those ground-breaking milestone events in the history of theater that has forever changed it. And it's also three jam-packed hours of music, dance, stories, entertainment, and inspiration. If you don't already have your tickets don't despair. There are tickets still available through the official channels, and you can enter a daily lottery in which 40 lucky people win the chance to buy tickets for $10. I don't think I need to try to convince anyone to go see it, or tell you how incredibly amazing it is. You already know that, the rest is up to you.

Cooler weather, back to school sales, and the Minnesota State Fair may signal the end of summer, but one of #TCTheater's summer highlights is in full swing. This is my 5th year attending Mixed Precipitation's annual picnic operetta (now celebrating their 10th anniversary), and if you haven't seen them yet you're missing out on a unique delight. Mixing classic opera, pop music, and Minnesota's bountiful harvest, they perform a charming show outdoors while feeding the audience throughout the show. What's better than that?! For this year's opera, Artistic Director Scotty Reynolds has adapted German composer Otto Nicolai's 1849 opera DIE LUSTIGEN WEIBER VON WINDSOR (based on Shakespeare's THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR), setting it on the Iron Range in the '70s at the time of the foundation of the EPA, adding in songs by Bruce Springsteen. The result is exactly as weird and wonderful as that sounds. It's playful, fun, outdoors, and did I mention they feed you?! Playing in gardens and parks around the state, from Lake County to Winona (including several locations in the Twin Cities area), you're not going to want to miss this unique theatrical and culinary delight.

Leonard Bernstein. I know him mostly as the composer of one of my all-time favorite musical theater scores, WEST SIDE STORY (closing this weekend at the Guthrie), as well as other works ranging from classical to popular. But I never really knew much about the man behind the music or what his life was like. Thanks to Open Eye Figure Theatre and the team from Chronofon Productions (Bradley Greenwald, Dan Chouinard, Diana Grasselli, and Prudence Johnson), I now feel like I have an even greater appreciation for the music as well as the person who created it. DEAR LENNY: BERNSTEIN'S LIFE IN SONGS AND LETTERS is a well constructed and entertaining deep dive into the life and work of one of the best American composers of the 20th Century.

NYC-based theater artist Alice Eve Cohen had a surprise late-in-life pregnancy filled with traumatic experiences and decisions. So she wrote a play about it, because that's what artists do. The result is a frank, funny, and almost unbelievable story that touches on many common and relatable issues. For their production of WHAT I THOUGHT I KNEW, Minnesota Jewish Theatre Company enlisted Kim Kivens to perform the solo piece, a wise choice indeed. As much as anything else, the play is about storytelling. About our need to tell stories, our need to listen to each other's stories. Alice's story is a remarkable one, and listening to it, as told by the team at MJTC, is a joyful, heart-breaking, moving experience.

Friends, this is a tough one to watch. And I don't necessarily recommend it for everyone, especially people who might be triggered by the events of the play. Proceed with caution, because Marsha Norman's Pulitzer Prize-winning play 'NIGHT, MOTHER is 90 minutes of the most frank discussion of suicide I've ever seen. Dark and Stormy's production, featuring the two-person dream team of Artistic Director Sara Marsh and #TCTheater favorite Sally Wingert, is beautifully done and powerfully affecting, almost painfully so. And they're doing all the right things - partnering with the Minnesota chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness and including the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-8255) - so that hopefully this play brings more awareness of and discussion about suicide. And it's also some really intense, intimate, engaging theater. I expect nothing less from Dark and Stormy.

A romantic comedy about a rich Asian man and a hard-working Asian American woman featuring an all Asian cast. No, I'm not talking about the soon-to-be smash hit movie CRAZY RICH ASIANS, I'm talking about a world premiere new play written by a local Hmong playwright and featuring a charming 10-person local cast. Theater Mu's THE KOREAN DRAMA ADDICT'S GUIDE TO LOSING YOUR VIRGINITY, written by May Lee-Yang, is a sweet, funny, fantastical story about love, friendship, and the melodrama of life.

Reminiscent of LA CAGE AUX FOLLES and KINKY BOOTS, but with a spirit and humor all its own, THE LEGEND OF GEORGIA MCBRIDE is a drag show with a beautiful message of finding one's identity and embracing those you love as they discover their identity. What it doesn't resemble so much is playwright Matthew Lopez's other work seen recently on #TCTheater stages, the intense Civil War drama THE WHIPPING MAN, a beautiful and heart-breaking play done by Minnesota Jewish Theatre Company last year. Which just goes to show the range of the playwright, although I think it's safe to say that GEORGIA MCBRIDE is the more personal work. Similar to the protagonist Casey, he found himself in a drag club in Florida, although the details of the story are different. GEORGIA MCBRIDE is a really fun show, and you also may learn a bit about drag performance, and rethink some stereotypes about the real people behind all the glitz and glamour of the show.

HAND TO GOD is a little like AVENUE Q, but with less singing, more frequent cursing, and more graphic simulated puppet sex. The 2015 Tony nominee for best play is having its regional premiere in a fantastic production at Jungle Theater, and if you don't mind being a little uncomfortable at the theater (you shouldn't, it's good for you), it's well worth braving the construction, traffic, and parking headaches that come with a trip to Uptown to see this funny, irreverent, and sad little play.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. The characters in the play IDEATION are definitely paranoid, entertainingly so, but whether or not someone is out to get them is still a question mark at the end of the play. The regional premiere of IDEATION by Gremlin Theatre is a taut, thrilling, engrossing, and funny 90 minutes of work colleagues going down a paranoid rabbit hole, and it'll make your head spin, in the best way. Rarely has my logical math left brain side been so engaged and excited at the theater as I tried to follow these characters through their hypotheses and arguments and conclusions. Theories and algebraic equations are written on the white board, only to be erased and written over by a new theory. By the end you don't know what to believe, and neither do the characters in the play, but it sure is fun to watch their wheels spin.

Staging a mystery play during the summer is a longstanding tradition at Park Square Theatre, and I've come to look forward to it every year. It's always fun to immerse yourself in the light yet brain-teasing summer blockbuster fare. But their production of KEN LUDWIG'S BASKERVILLE: A SHERLOCK HOLMES MYSTERY is anything but traditional. This new play tells one of the most well known Sherlock stories in a fresh, fun, and imaginative way, with just five actors and a whirlwind, almost slapstick style. Director Theo Langason brings all the innovation and physical storytelling experience from Sandbox Theatre, of which he is an ensemble member, to bear on this wonderfully playful and endlessly delightful production. And the fantastic five-person cast is so playful and fun to watch, including a female Holmes and Watson, because why not?! At a time when so many of us need it, BASKERVILLE provides pure escapist summer fun.

The best thing about summer in Minnesota is outdoor theater. And the lakes, of course. But I love nothing more on a lovely summer evening than to sit outside in a park or a garden somewhere while someone tells me a story. Classical Actors Ensemble continues their tradition of bringing Shakespeare to metro area parks (for free!) with ROMEO AND JULIET, playing at Lake of the Isles and many other parks through mid July. Previously I've seen CAE do Shakespeare's comedies, and found them to be so fun, playful, and almost interactive, the way Shakespeare was meant to be. This is the first time I've seen them do a tragedy for their fun summer outdoor play. But Romeo and Juliet is pretty much a rom-com, until somebody dies, so it's still fun and playful in the beginning. And while maybe the tragedy doesn't have quite the same effect when the sun is softly setting, the birds are chirping, and the wind is blowing through the leaves on the trees, it's still the best way to see Shakespeare.

I've seen INTO THE WOODS twice in the last six weeks, and six times in the last seven years (not counting the recent movie adaptation). And while I would love #TCTheater to diversify its choice of shows (there are quite a few duplicates and triplicates this season), I'm not going to complain about this one. Every time I see Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's exceedingly clever fairy tale mash-up that explores what happens after the 'happily ever after,' I love it even more. It's instantly familiar due to the fairy tale characters we grew up with, but then it lures you into a darker story. And it's a versatile piece that works just as well set in the forests of Asia as in a German beer garden. For their production, newish theater company Shoot the Glass Theater has gone with a stripped down, bare bones, unmiked approach that works beautifully. With minimal (but charming) set pieces and simple costumes, they're able to focus on the storytelling and the music, which is what it's all about.