Karen Bovard - Page 3

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 1976 for its Broadway run, which I saw. Let's pause to note that it was the first Broadway show written by a Black woman since Lorraine Hansberry's RAISIN IN THE SUN in 1959.

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.

Women making comedy can be a radical act. The best moments of SOMETIMES THERE'S WINE at Park Square Theatre in Saint Paul are truly funny and border on radical, by offering glimpses of how real women sometimes talk to each other when no one else is listening. For theatergoers who never have access to such moments, it may be revelatory or discomfiting or embarrassing; but it will likely make others laugh in identification, as it did during the final preview I saw.

For the opening of her third season as Artistic Director at Minneapolis' spunky Jungle Theater, Sarah Rasmussen and her team commissioned a new adaptation of LITTLE WOMEN from Kate Hamill in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the novel's publication. Kate Hamill is an actor who has, of late, gained notice for her skillful adaptations of classic novels for the stage (several Austen works, Vanity Fair, etc.), to the point that she was one of the 10 most frequently produced playwrights in the US last season.

Flying Foot Forum is one of the Twin Cities' most original performing companies. What they do-full evenings of original percussive dance, often with a historical or cultural jumping off point, and always with a big dose of humor-is unique. FRENCH TWIST (or parts of it) has been in their repertoire since 2008. A revival with new bits plays just through July 15 at Park Square Theatre's basement space in Saint Paul, as the company celebrates its 25th experimental season.

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 History Theatre is having fun this month, with a world premiere by the popular writing duo known as 'Hatchling': Jeffrey Hatcher (book) and Chan Poling (music and lyrics). LORD GORDON GORDON is a romp of a musical in the tradition of con man stories like THE MUSIC MAN. It's based on little known true events in Minnesota and New York in the 1870s-events that eventually led to the fleecing of a bunch of investors (including the wealthy robber baron Jay Gould) and a Minnesota militia marching on Canada.

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.

In this 50th anniversary year of the Loving vs. State of Virginia Supreme Court case that made interracial marriage legal in all 50 states, it is right that the renowned Penumbra Theatre, which puts questions of social justice at the center of its artistic mission, should take up gay rights. THIS BITTER EARTH centers on a love affair between two men, one black, one white.

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.

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.

FIVE POINTS is an ambitious, tuneful, dance-rich new musical in the final stages of preparation for its world premiere in Minneapolis at Theater Latte Da, the locally famous small house committed to smart re-imaginings of traditional musical theater pieces but also-and with real vigor-to playing a significant role in creating "the dramatic canon of tomorrow."

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.

'History is something that we can and should improve upon' sings the modern Major General in an added lyric in this cleverly refreshed production of the Gilbert & Sullivan classic. The laugh-out-loud show remains faithful to the original while integrating historical asides and contemporary political memes, all with a knowing wink at the audience, which had a roaring good time on opening night.

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.

A CRACK IN THE SKY is a new autobiographical play about an immigrant from Somalia who arrived in the Twin Cities in 1997. As a civic project-something the arts can and should provide-this event is hard to beat. Still, it is true that as a play, A CRACK IN THE SKY is not very compelling theater.

CARDBOARD PIANO is an ambitious play centered on questions of trauma: what can and can't be fixed. It opens with life-affirming and joyous love between two young women in Uganda.

Design. Pattern. Composition. Balance. Light. Dark. Harmony. These are the principles artist Georges Seurat-as imagined by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine-names in his struggle to paint in a new way. All these principles are present in the musical SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE. The current production in Minneapolis is a delight, visually scintillating, gorgeously sung and orchestrated, and successful at melding the two disparate acts into a satisfying whole.