December 19, 2008

Was Kate DiCamillo well-served by Hollywood?

Local author Kate DiCamillo has been a hit with kids, teens, and the parents looking over their shoulders for years now and was honored with the 2004 Newbery Award for The Tale of Despereaux.

The story of a magnificently eared mouse with romantic passions beyond his years, class, and, well, species, has now received the Hollywood animation treatment, opening this weekend. The voice talent is first-rate: Matthew Broderick, Dustin Hoffman, Sigourney Weaver, Stanley Tucci. But will it live up to the hype? The early reviews say no. But it's a safe bet the kids will be less discriminating, and a certainty that... Read more »

Posted on Friday, December 19, 2008 in Front & Center | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 16, 2008

Intermedia Arts fights for its life

For 35 years, Intermedia Arts, near the corner of Lake Street and Lyndale Avenue, has managed to stay atop the urban arts scene, from hosting the art car parade to bands at the Lyn-Lake Street Fair to the undeniably empowering B-Girl Be showcase of women in hip-hop. The frequent updating of its colorful facade with new graffiti art was a way of marking time in my neighborhood, and I often wondered how thick the paint must be at this point.

And yet it's now scrambling to keep the doors open, much less the paint... Read more »

Posted on Tuesday, December 16, 2008 in Front & Center | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 12, 2008

With Will Smith on the red carpet in Edina

"This is everything I [bleeping] hate about journalism," a photographer for the Pioneer Press said as we walked the freezing parking lot of Southdale, where some 300 freezing fans of actor Will Smith waited in the freezing night for the star to appear on a red carpet and promote his new film, Seven Pounds. As KDWB's Dave Ryan bleated on the microphone, cops referred us to other cops who knew nothing who referred us to still other cops who finally directed us to a media table where fashionable young women handed out passes on lanyards. Then we waited, for nearly two hours. Did I mention it was freezing?

There is something about journalism, as my colleague referred to, when it succumbs to the hype machine of... Read more »

Posted on Friday, December 12, 2008 in Front & Center | Permalink | Comments (2)

December 8, 2008

Review: Song and sweaters, a St. Olaf spectacle

There's something about St. Olaf College, with its crisp, clean , orderly campus perched above Northfield, its simple limestone buildings like Lego creations, that brings out the Nordic Lutheran in everyone. And everyone, it seems, with a drop of Scando in them comes out for the St. Olaf Christmas Festival, a 97-year-old tradition begun by F. Melius Christiansen, a Nordic Lutheran if there ever was one and the founder of the college's famed music department.

Hours before the afternoon performance on Sunday, hordes of alumni, parents of students, and other concert-goers piled into Buntrock Commons, the sleek new student center, for a Scandinavian buffet ($17.83 per person--how's that price for Nordic precision?) Shuttle buses... Read more »

Posted on Monday, December 8, 2008 in Front & Center | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 5, 2008

The best off-beat holiday shows

There are classically gorgeous Christmas shows—concerts by the VocalEssence and the National Lutheran Choir and A Christmas Carol at the Guthrie Theater. And there are the shows involving space aliens.

Commedia Beauregard (extra points for a name that sounds like a floppy-eared French dog) is staging A Klingon Christmas Carol for one night only--December 13--at the Paul and Sheila Wellstone Center in St. Paul. It's translated directly, they claim, from Dickens into tlhIngan Hol, fully functional Klingon language invented by the original Star Trek language consultant. And no, they're not kidding. The troupe specializes in plays in translation, though generally Polish, Spanish, and the like. A... Read more »

Posted on Friday, December 5, 2008 in Front & Center | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 3, 2008

World-class dance at the Bryant-Lake Bowl

At 3 pm today, a crew of choreographer-dancers took the stage of the Bryant-Lake Bowl Theater in Uptown Minneapolis for what might have been the surprise dance event of the year. Middle of the afternoon on a Wednesday, for one thing. And then the fact that along with such creative local talents as HIJACK dance troupe, Galen Treuer, and Jin-Ming Lai, the stage is being graced by avant-garde stars Eiko and Koma. A Japanese duo living in New York City, Eiko and Koma performed this fall at the Walker Art Center, this summer at the American Dance Festival, and at the 100th anniversary of the Japan Society in New York. The event, called the 9x22 Dance/Lab-Special Editon, is named for the modest dimensions of the BLB stage. But there's nothing modest about the BLB's ambitions to host more... Read more »

Posted on Wednesday, December 3, 2008 in Front & Center | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 26, 2008

Review: "A Christmas Carol" at the Guthrie

Guest review by Courtney Lewis, Minnesota Monthly assistant managing editor

Jacob Marley may be getting a little concerned about the ticket prices demanded by the Guthrie Theater for A Christmas Carol these days ($70 on opening night). But the production values have arguably kept pace--nowhere in the country will you see a more polished production. Eight years into the directorial tenure of Gary Gisselman—four with Raye Birk as Scrooge—this juggernaut has settled into a sweet spot of sentiment and storytelling, with brisk pacing that never lets the moralizing stick long enough to become cloying. Gisselman was the founding director of Chanhassen Dinner Theatres, of course, and blends a crowdpleasing knack for choreography and crowd scenes with crisp... Read more »

Posted on Wednesday, November 26, 2008 in Front & Center | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 21, 2008

Preview: TU Dance electrifies the O'Shaughnessy

When TU Dance literally leaped headfirst into the local dance community a few years back--landing at the top of the heap--it was as if a cool (but not too cool) breeze had swept in, sweeping away much of the pedantry, didacticism, and other limitations of a rather academic choreography scene, muscling open new possibilities through sheer physicality, playful humor, and intuition. In its fall performances, November 21 to 23 at O'Shaughnessy Auditorium in St. Paul, TU Dance will offer a new work that gets right to the pulse of choreographer Uri Sands' intuitive approach: Sense(ability) Sketch 1, the first in a series exploring the relationship between the senses and the elements.

Sands, who leads the company with his wife, the dancer Toni Pierce-Sands, is not so much a... Read more »

Posted on Friday, November 21, 2008 in Front & Center | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 14, 2008

Review: "Shadowlands" reveals C.S. Lewis at the Guthrie

Guest blog by Courtney Lewis, assistant managing editor at MNMO

William Nicholson’s Shadowlands, playing at the Guthrie Theater through December 21, tells the sad tale of the relationship between author C.S. Lewis and the two great loves of his life: American writer Joy Gresham—and God.

I’m ashamed to admit that I know little of C. S. Lewis outside of the Narnia Chronicles (our shared surname didn’t even pique my interest). The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was a favorite childhood story of mine, but I had always assumed that to know more about the author would be to destroy the fantasy. Instead, I fashioned him a stout... Read more »

Posted on Friday, November 14, 2008 in Front & Center | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 10, 2008

The Al Franken / Soul Asylum Conspiracy

Last Friday, as Al Franken's vote total escalated post-election, KTLK radio ranter Jason "Mr. Right" Lewis postulated that it was no coincidence the additional votes were coming from St. Louis and Pine counties--St. Louis encompassing part of the DFL-dominated Iron Range, and Pine County, well, that was Indian country (part of the Mille Lacs reservation, with its Grand Casino, is in Pine County). And everyone knows that Native Americans, he asserted, are the sugar daddies of the Democrats.

In the face of Obama's overwhelming victory last week, with its promise of less partisanship, you could almost hear the bandwidth of right-wing blather narrowing, squeezing shut, screaming as it swirls down the drain.... Read more »

Posted on Monday, November 10, 2008 in Front & Center | Permalink | Comments (0)