Category: reviews
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Eddie Cantor’s 1935 song “Merrily We Roll Along” (later immortalized as the Looney Tunes theme) is about a couple who stick together through hardship and poverty because they believe in each other and what they do. Stephen Sonheim and George Furth’s 1981 musical of the same title borrows the title (but not the song) to…
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Lend Me a Tenor is such a perfectly executed farce that it could practically serve as an object lesson. The script by Ken Ludwig has all of the classic ingredients – broad, archetypal characters, misunderstandings, schemes, the possibility that the whole thing could collapse at any given moment – and the direction from Patrick Spradlin…
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“The butler did it” is one of those turns of phrase that has existed as a cliché for so long that it’s impossible to think of a context in which it could be used seriously. Jeffrey Hatcher’s new play The Butler Did It, having its world premiere at Park Square Theatre in St. Paul, is…
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Over the last few years, there’s been a trend on various forms of social media of women taking on the role of “tradwife”, where they relegate themselves to, and presumably find fulfillment in, traditionally conservative gender roles of the woman as homemaker and nurture. Laura Wade’s play Home, I’m Darling may have preceded this trend…
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My Ántonia, a new musical having its world premiere at Theatre Latte Da in Minneapolis, is a triumphant production filled with emotion, joy, and humanity. It’s a story that speaks effortlessly about immigrants, the obstacles women face in society, about masculinity, class divides, even art – and it’s all wrapped up in a love story…
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Since it was made available for licensing, Irene Sankhoff & David Hein’s seminal musical Come From Away has become one of the most produced shows in the country. In Minnesota alone there are a half-dozen productions planned over the next two years or so. With so many planned, what is it that makes Come From…
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There’s something about con artist stories that is inherently entertaining. The constant balancing act that comes with having to keep lies straight – or reform them on the fly – is irresistible to watch, and the charisma needed to pull off such deceptions almost always makes the central characters in these stories fun to follow.…
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John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is one of the seminal pieces of American literature, butbstrangely enough it’s one I’m mostly unfamiliar with except by reputation and premise. It wasn’t one of the novels I read in school, and despite my being a major fan of both John Ford and Henry Fonda, I still haven’t…
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Funerals are always a whirlwind of emotion. People are gathered together surrounded by feelings of loss, memories of what was, and considerations of what might have been. It’s not unusual for people at a funeral parlor to run through the whole gamut of emotions, from grief to laughter to anger and everything in between. Jeffrey…
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The Guthrie’s new production of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a tense thriller that showcases new dimensions to one of the Bard’s darkest tragedies. Cutting down Shakespeare’s text to less than two hours and running the show without an intermission enhances the overall sense of claustrophobia, but one also gets the sense that the cast might…
