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Love Gone Wrong: Minnesota Opera’s Werther provides all of opera’s basic elements in one nourishing (but mildly bland) serving

I don’t know if it was the slow snow or the melancholy tale of a doomed love, but the Minnesota Opera could have stood a little more “Vivat Bacchus” spirit for the opening of Massanet’sWerther. There is a certain irony in watching a dramatic opera about Germans be performed in

Life or Fiction? Walker Art Center’s final “Out There” show is refined, engaging and teeming with (gasp!) real life

“A life  becomes fiction.” When applied to the current ‘mega fiction’ staging at the Walker, truer self-descriptors were never spoken. The Past is a Grotesque Animal, the final play in the “Out There” series, is a darkly comic display of life as fiction and fiction as life. It combines real

A Year Worth Remembering: History Theatre’s theatrical take on 1968 a fitting complement to History Center’s exhibit

“If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday,” novelist Pearl S. Buck once said. History Theatre’s new production,1968: The Year that Rocked the World at the Minnesota History Center, is a vivid depiction of the mantra. A hodgepodge of timelines, song snippets, and short sketches the piece illustrates

For Women’s Eyes Only

Sorry gentlemen: I have to advise you to sit this one out. When writers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein named their newly reprised show at New Century TheaterGirl’s Only: The Secret Comedy of Women, they meant it. Comprised of diaries, sleepover parties, purses, menopause and puberty jokes, pantyliner – as well

Something Is Missing

Contemporary culture seems fixated on capturing a digital record of nearly everything. So how is it possible that people are still capable of vanishing into thin air, without a trace? McGuire Theater was packed on Thursday night for Rabih Mroue’s new show, Looking for a Missing Employee, a reminder that it

Letting It All Hang Out: Walker Art Center’s “Out There” festival opens with a revealing performance

Walker Art Center’s annual theater program certainly has an approrpriate title. The annual celebration of the avante garde, Out There, opened for the 23rd year on Thursday with the Walker-commissioned Untitled Feminist Show from Young Jean Lee, a rising star from New York City. And it was certainly out there. The most

Keeping the Faith: A Wisconsin retreat provides respite and resources for grieving families

Losing a child, or watching one struggle with illness, is without a doubt the hardest experience parents can go through. Thanks to Faith’s Lodge, a retreat nestled among 80 wooded acres in northwestern Wisconsin, they don’t have to do it alone. Since 2007, more than 800 families have made use

Anne Ulku: Designer Anne Ulku spins beautiful words from color, prose and clothing

At first glance, this year’s Keepers are a ragtag bunch. Their mediums run the gamut from good old-fashioned pen and paper to the human body; their habitats are classrooms, venerable theater stages and rock clubs. But here’s where this diverse group converges: Each Keeper has talent to spare, and is

A Motown Good Time

In terms of excellently produced theater,Always and Forever, the new show at Illusion Theater in downtown Minneapolis, doesn’t exactly top the list. But boy is it fun. From the interactive audience to a solid pit and classic tunes, it’s hard not to enjoyAlways and Forever, whatever its flaws. Always and

History Deconstructed

Part concert, part recitation, and part pantomime, All Is Calm is an entirely unique approach to the season’s most popular Christmas story. The show uses the inimitable vocal stylings of Cantus, the nine-piece male vocal group, and three actors to simply tell the story of the Christmas Truce, which occurred on the

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotype is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. they make one story become the only story.

– chimamanda ngozi adichie

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Copyright Becki Iverson 2024.