Friends and Neighbors
Arts, Life, and Musings from Greater Minnesota
Category: theatre criticism
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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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The Great Gatsby is one of the great paradoxes of adaptation. On the one hand, it feels natural – the story has vivid characters, iconic imagery, buried secrets, and stark commentary on the American dream. On the other, much of the drama is internalized within the characters’ emotional states, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s poetic language…
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Everybody on stage has a story. Everyone who serves as part of a show got there in their own way, has their own inspiration, brings their own baggage. At best those qualities illuminate the final product, but sometimes the things that make the performers special are flattened in service of the director’s vision. And yet,…
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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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Forbidden Broadway is a show made primarily for such a specific audience of theatre nerds that I’m a little surprised to see it being put on by a group in this area. However, I very much am a part of that specific audience of theatre nerds, so I had a jolly good time watching it.…
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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…
Friends and Neighbors 