Dan Norman News

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 through fate for six days in Dublin, Ireland. The Girl, a Czech immigrant ready to begin a new life, intersects at a train station with an Irishmen who repairs Hoovers while pondering on abandoning his musical career. Together, in an old Dublin shop where pianos are sold, Girl plays her accompaniment to Guy's lyrics. The two indeed "make beautiful music together," while Latte Da's production keeps the musical drama and their audiencenes, as a song from the musical quotes, "walking on moonbeams." 

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. Beautifully designed, as ever on Guthrie main stages, the script is quite postmodern in that different moments in the chronological sequence interpenetrate. Despite strong work by skilled actors in the six roles, the whole somehow falls short.

Theater Latte Da offers a first look at the regional premiere of Once. Winner of 8 Tony Awards including Best Musical, Once features a book by Enda Walsh with music and lyrics by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. Theater Latte Da Artistic Director Peter Rothstein directs the production with Music Director Jason Hansen and choreography by Kelli Foster Warder.

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.

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.

Cincinnati Opera, today announced the repertoire and casting for Cincinnati Opera's 2019 Summer Festival, which will run from June 13 to July 28. The company's 99th season begins with a charming production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro in Music Hall's Springer Auditorium.

Children's Theatre Company (CTC) is proud to announce the world premiere of The Best Summer Ever! written and performed by Minnesota's treasured storyteller, Kevin Kling beginning July 11, 2018. The production includes songs and sing-a-longs by CTC's resident composer Victor Zupanc, inspired animations by Liz Schachterle, and directed by CTC's Artistic Director Peter C. Brosius. This inventive and hilarious series of stories is about family, life's surprises, and the great delight of what seem to be disasters becoming your favorite memories. From Norwegian camp to interviewing a mosquito to the terror of his big sister getting her driver's license, each story transports the audience into nine-year-old Maurice's world.

THE LORAX is a fantastic fable, one that seems as apt for today as when the book was written in 1971. Playing at The Old Globe through August 12th. For information on tickets and showtimes go to www.theoldglobe.org

This one character philosophical scavenger hunt of a play has been staged all over the US and Europe since it premiered in 2001. It follows a fictional Dutch librarian who tries to track down the patron who returned a book to the overnight slot 113 year late. Her starting clues include hand written marginalia in the book and a dry cleaning ticket used as a bookmark. That leads her to a pair of abandoned trousers in London. These furnish another hint, and so on….

Twin Cities native Thomasina Petrus and legendary director Marion McClinton have teamed up to mount a definitive production of this famous concert show about the great jazz singer Billie Holiday. The show is structured as a club performance late in Holiday's career in a small Philadelphia venue, after she was barred from performing in New York nightclubs due to multiple drug convictions. Her voice has lost some of its power and flexibility. She is worn out by a hard life of multiple childhood traumas, abusive lovers and subsequent addiction made even harder by the endemic racism in the United States. It's March 1959. Her heyday is well behind her. Death will come in a matter of months, when she is just 44.

The plot of AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE seems ripped from today's headlines: think Flint, think Detroit. Of course, Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (an iconoclast in his day, generally regarded as "The Father of Social Realism" in western theater history) penned this prescient piece back in 1882. What the Guthrie is producing is a new adaptation by Brad Birch, first staged in 2016 in Wales. It's undergone further revision for this production. Birch's adaptation is most welcome. The familiar story is lifted up to a whole new level by the striking visuals and swift, intriguing transitions devised by director Lyndsey Turner and her design team.

Unless. What a powerful word. So many scary things might happen. Unless. Unless what, you ask? 'Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.' The best thing to happen lately in this dark and scary world is people caring a whole awful lot about things, and taking to the streets and the polls to make them better. That's the heart of Dr. Seuss's story THE LORAX, which specifically is talking about the environment, nature, the wilderness around us. The Old Vic Theatre in London has turned this beautiful story into a charming, playful, and poignantly relevant musical that is now receiving its US premiere at Minneapolis' Children's Theatre Company (in conjunction with San Diego's Old Globe Theatre, where it will play this summer). It gave me all the feels, and had me walking down the street on this first truly spring-like day in wonder. Such is the power of theater, of stories, of people who care a whole awful lot.

The Guthrie can be counted on to mount beautifully designed and lit shows on its two main stages, peopled by fine actors under crisp direction, and this production of GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER is no exception. Playwright Todd Kreidler, who worked for many years with August Wilson, penned this adaptation of the iconic screenplay from the famous movie from the 1960s.Staged on the thrust space, the production is also surprisingly funny, without demeaning any of the characters. It stands in dialogue with the Guthrie's last production on the proscenium stage: Danai Gurira's FAMILIAR.

BroadwayWorld has an exclusive first look at Theater Latte Da's Broadway-aimed world premiere musical FIVE POINTS. Check out the cast in action in the photos below!

The WOLVES are a girls travel soccer team of highly competitive high school athletes, many hoping to be noticed and recruited by college coaches. Yes, they are fierce, and yes, they howl. They also grapple with issues as varied as (spoiler alert!) genocide and justice, social anxiety, love and sex and abortion, loyalty, injury, honesty, playing time, disordered eating, religious belief, how to play when you have your period, and death. Just as real young women do.

Gurira's family drama FAMILIAR has just opened in a lavishly designed and carefully calibrated production at the Guthrie. It's familiar in many ways, as a well-made play on a single set (the interior of an upscale household in Minnetonka, MN) unrolling in real time, that dives into the secrets and dreams of a family, whose distinctive characters are all drawn together now for the wedding of the elder daughter.

INDECENT is a play about a play: Sholom Asch's GOD OF VENGEANCE, first performed in 1907 in Berlin, then widely across Europe, and eventually in 1923 in New York. There it was censored and the acting troupe was arrested and jailed. It's also about how writers work, about forbidden love, about family, about being an immigrant to the US who speaks with an accent, about Yiddish theater and changing tastes on Broadway, about McCarthyism, and, yes, about the Holocaust.

Children's Theatre Company is proud to announce its 2018-2019 Season, which includes eight productions, four commissioned premieres, three musicals, and one preschool production. The season consists of 3 ½ more weeks of performances over last year's schedule and includes summer programming.

It's hard to imagine a better production of the Sondheim/Weidman dissection of the perpetrators of violence toward US presidents than the ASSASSINS that has just opened in Minneapolis at Theater Latte Da. Running a brisk 100 minutes without intermission, it is staged, sung, and performed with terrific assurance and brio.