MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL THEATER REVIEWS

Where will a holiday memory be made this season? Somewhere near Whoville staged at Children's Theatre Company (CTC)? The illustrious CTC opened their musical extravaganza' 'How the Grinch Stole Christmas' penned by the iconic Dr. Seuss beginning in 1994, and reprises the production from last season....

On opening night for the Minnesota Opera (MNOP), the audience in attendance became curiously quieter and quieter, silent, when the curtain rose at the Ordway Center on the company's contemporary award winning opera 'Silent Night.' Commissioned by MNOP in 2011, the music by Kevin Putts combined with ...

If theater is my religion, THE BOOK OF MORMON is my most sacred text. Not the actual book of course, rather the wildly irreverent musical written by the creators of SOUTH PARK (Trey Parker and Matt Stone) along with EGOT winner Robert Lopez. It is a nearly perfect musical, and definitely one of mo...

In a spectacular evening celebrating the performing arts and jazz, Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts premiered their annual musical "Hot Funky Butt Jazz" in the Guthrie Theater's Dowling Studio The no intermission production carries three wishes for cultural improvisation on the ma...

For the Guthrie Theater's  final hurrah on the McGuire Proscenium Stage in 2019, the company presents a hilarious tribute to plates of sardines and humor in the farcical 'Noises Off.' English playwright' Michael Frayn's award winning 1982 play presents an alternative perspective to the theatrica...

Twenty years ago last month in a small college town in Wyoming, a young gay man was brutally beaten and tied to a fence post, left to die. The name Matthew Shepard has become synonymous with gay rights and in particular with the national hate crime legislation that bears his name, passed into law 11...

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 Cente...

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), an...

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 consi...

Ten Thousand Things is a treasure: a company dedicated to bringing live theater to marginalized and underserved audiences for free. Founding Director Michelle Hensley retired in June of 2018. So this production is the first in new Artistic Director Marcela Lorca's inaugural season, and is directed...

The Tony Award Wining 2009 'God of Carnage,' opened at Lyric Arts this weekend. The intimate theater offers a splendid production of Yasmina Reza's comic tragedy with sophistication. The 90 minute, no intermission evening presents a plethora of philosophical issues to contemplate, especially in reg...

 In a New York Times article dated October 14, 2018, 'A Mexican Man's Fatal Journey to Reclaim HIs Life,' the newspaper retells the story of Adrián Luna, a man from a small town in Idaho. His life scenario reads eerily familiar to the themes in the World Premiere Play at Children's Theatre Company...

The incomparable 'Mary Poppins' returns to Bloomington's The Artistry Theater on the winds of her iconic character's umbrella. Penned as a collection of eight stories beginning in the 1934, Walt Disney wrangled the rights from author PL Travers for their 1964 film. One of the studios crowning glorie...

Tira Palmquist's TWO DEGREES could not be more timely. Written in 2014, it centers on a woman paleoclimatologist, Emma, as she is called to Washington to testify before a hostile Senate committee about climate change-a committee that, she is told, is "easily bored by facts." She's been invited by ...

'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...

Pearce Bunting delivers a visceral gut punch as Lyndon B. Johnson in THE GREAT SOCIETY. Rarely in 50 years of serious theater going have I seen a more fully inhabited physical performance. It's masterful. Menacing and charming by turns, Bunting channels LBJ's ability to manipulate people into pos...

Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony were friends for 45 years through tumultuous times. The strategic interests of their respective causes did not always align, which caused rifts between them. In AGITATORS, Playwright Mat Smart has mined this rich terrain to create an episodic examination of ...

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 s...

Dancing and energizing music imbue life with joy in the Midwest premiere of Children's Theater Company's Last Stop on Market Street this September. Produced as a co-commission with Chicago Children's Theatre and based on the Newbery Award Winning book written by Matt de la Peña, Last Stop on Market...

To open their 2018-2019 season, Theater Latte Da presents the multi Tony Award winning musical ONCE at the Ritz Theater in Northeast Minneapolis.  Adapted by Edna Walsh with worlds and lyrics written or composed by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, ONCE recalls the story of a guy and girl who meet ...

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...

In keeping with their tradition of honoring the ancestors and artistic leaders of past generations, Penumbra Theatre is opening this season by revisiting Ntozake Shange's groundbreaking iconoclastic work, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, which won an Obie in 1...

30 years ago, Minneapolis based playwright Barbara Field penned an adaptation of Mary Shelley's famous novel for the Guthrie. Now, on the 200th anniversary of the novel's composition, the Guthrie is opening their season with a new production of Field's script, titled FRANKENSTEIN-PLAYING WITH FIRE....

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...

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 ...