A new original folk-rock musical? It's like FLY BY NIGHT was created and brought to the Jungle just for me. The rare bird that is the new original musical is my favorite thing in the world, and folk-rock/folk/Americana is my favorite genre of music. I was primed and ready to love this show, and love it I did. Charming and funny yet poignant, with a fantastic score played by greats from the local music scene, and a cast that couldn't be better - what's not to love?
This fresh new musical is a terrific addition to the American musical canon, a show a lot of us have been waiting for. It's a rare thing: the main character is a young African-American woman struggling to find her way in present day USA. Without oversimplifying her struggles with love, sexuality, and work, it takes us all along on her search for self. Tuneful, funny, and soulful, GIRL SHAKES LOOSE is decidedly contemporary and honors the great Sonia Sanchez, a shining light of the Black Arts Movement.
The 2016-17 Ruth Easton New Play Series at the Playwrights' Center concludes April 3 and 4 at 7 p.m. with public readings of 'Minneapolis/St. Paul' by Core Writer Lee Blessing.
Mixed Blood Theatre today announced the cast for SAFE AT HOME-a site specific theatrical event performed at CHS Field in St. Paul. Directed by Mixed Blood Artistic Director Jack Reuler and featuring 18 actors, this 9-scene thriller uses baseball to examine flawed US immigration policies, racial politics, America's obsession with celebrity, and the collision of personal ethics with massive entertainment and media dollars.
?The Twin Cities theater community honored Graydon Royce, long-time theater critic for the Star Tribune, with the Lifetime Achievement Award, and costume designer Trevor Bowen with the Emerging Artist Award at the 12th annual Ivey Awards. The yearly celebration was held Monday, September 19, at the Historic State Theatre in downtown Minneapolis.
Award-winning director Marion McClinton makes his directorial debut at the Jungle with BARS AND MEASURES, a music-filled new play with an original score by jazz composer Justin Ellington. A National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere, the riveting drama by acclaimed playwright and spoken word artist Idris Goodwin is on stage August 26 through October 9 at the Lyn-Lake neighborhood theater, 2951 Lyndale Ave. S. in Minneapolis.
Award-winning director Marion McClinton makes his directorial debut at the Jungle with BARS AND MEASURES, a music-filled new play with an original score by jazz composer Justin Ellington. A National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere, the riveting drama by acclaimed playwright and spoken word artist Idris Goodwin is on stage August 26 through October 9 at the Lyn-Lake neighborhood theater, 2951 Lyndale Ave. S. in Minneapolis.
Philip Dawkins' CHARM is the story of Mama Darleena, an African American trans woman in her 60s teaching an etiquette class to trans youth experiencing precarious housing in a LGBTQI Chicago community center. Her students range in sexuality, race, and gender identity from a Latina trans woman, to a cisgender couple, to a member of a local gang, to a gay suburban teen. They fight each other and their instructor in equal measure, struggle through their daily battles with poverty, prejudice, and personal identity, seek solace in each other, succeed and fail separately and together.
AN OCTOROON, which the New York Times proclaimed to be "this decade's most eloquent theatrical statement on race in America today," is a shrewdly awkward riff on The Octoroon, a 19th-century melodrama about illicit interracial love. A funny, disturbing, whirlwind of a play, AN OCTOROON riffs on the antebellum South as well as our present-day American selves, delves into the complexity of American identities and their unresolvable connection to our legacy of slavery and genocide, and perpetrates a full-blooded investigation of race and cultural politics. At the same time it is so theatrically mind-bending, funny, energetic, and demented, that it's impossible to look away.
AN OCTOROON, which the New York Times proclaimed to be "this decade's most eloquent theatrical statement on race in America today," is a shrewdly awkward riff on The Octoroon, a 19th-century melodrama about illicit interracial love. A funny, disturbing, whirlwind of a play, AN OCTOROON riffs on the antebellum South as well as our present-day American selves, delves into the complexity of American identities and their unresolvable connection to our legacy of slavery and genocide, and perpetrates a full-blooded investigation of race and cultural politics. At the same time it is so theatrically mind-bending, funny, energetic, and demented, that it's impossible to look away.
Centering on the lives of four strippers, and propelled by the poetry and athleticism of live pole dancing, PUSSY VALLEY is a profound exploration of the African American, white, gay, straight, young, and old denizens of a strip club in contemporary rural Mississippi. Embedded in a world of poverty, abuse, power imbalances, racism, jealousy, homophobia, abandonment, and sexploitation, this searing drama reveals resilient women in pursuit of happiness, stability, motherhood, independence, a decent living, and romance, always battling for personal integrity.
Performed in four 15-minute quarters with a half-time show, featuring a dance company, a drum corps, and a fully-padded cast, COLOSSAL is an epic event that simultaneously celebrates and attacks our nation's most popular form of theater: football.
Performed in four 15-minute quarters with a half-time show, featuring a dance company, a drum corps, and a fully-padded cast, COLOSSAL is an epic event that simultaneously celebrates and attacks our nation's most popular form of theater: football.
Identity and racial politics form the foundation of PASSING STRANGE, one of the seminal musicals of our time, and Mixed Blood Theatre's production honors that epic rock legacy, with the added dimension of the intimacy and immediacy of the Alan Page Auditorium. With disparate styles that range from '60's Europop to '70's punk to '80's electronica, to gospel, soul, and funk, to musical theatre, and with a nod to James Brown, this Tony Award winner is a play within a rock concert. Eschewing preconceptions, this band's lead singer is a middle class African American Buddhist rocker ex-pat story-teller, sharing the picaresque journey of his youth via 24 songs. The play's title is inspired by a passage in Shakespeare's OTHELLO.
As Theater Latte Da's OUR TOWN heads into the final week, trumpet player turned leading man, David Darrow, reminds us that he's much more than a pretty set of abs. He's actually just a normal guy who likes to act and is somehow making it work in this town.
Identity and racial politics form the foundation of PASSING STRANGE, one of the seminal musicals of our time, and Mixed Blood Theatre's production honors that epic rock legacy, with the added dimension of the intimacy and immediacy of the Alan Page Auditorium. With disparate styles that range from '60's Europop to '70's punk to '80's electronica, to gospel, soul, and funk, to musical theatre, and with a nod to James Brown, this Tony Award winner is a play within a rock concert. Eschewing preconceptions, this band's lead singer is a middle class African American Buddhist rocker ex-pat story-teller, sharing the picaresque journey of his youth via 24 songs. The play's title is inspired by a passage in Shakespeare's OTHELLO.
Singin' In The Rain, the Tony nominated musical based on the famous MGM film, is certainly a must see among theatre attendees. With a screenplay by Betty Comden & Adolph Green and music by Nacio Herb Brown & Arthur Reed, Gateway's fantastic incarnation runs through August 10th and will surely have you leaving the theatre with a smile.
Rain will soon shower on the Patchogue stage, as 'Singin' in the Rain' prepares to open at the Patchogue Theatre for the Performing Arts, today, July 24-Aug. 10.
Rain will soon shower on the Patchogue stage, as “Singin' in the Rain” prepares to open at the Patchogue Theatre for the Performing Arts, July 24-Aug. 10.
