01.26.08: Romeo and Juliet at Ordway Center

I think Charles Gounod’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, currently being produced by Minnesota Opera, gets a bad rap. That’s true of Gounod generally. Granted, neither of his masterpieces, not this one, based on Shakespeare, nor his Faust, derived from Goethe, are anywhere near as profound as their sources. But that doesn’t mean that Gounod “pillaged” those great works, as one critic accused!

I admit to having a soft spot in my heart for this sentimental work, but to appreciate Romeo and Juliet, it’s probably best to forget Shakespeare’s play altogether, though plot details will remind you time and again. The opera is, in reality, an extended five-act love duet, briefly interrupted by such bothersome necessities as arias, choruses and ensembles, and it is in the perfumed lyricism of its love music that it rises to the heights.

That said, even I have to admit Romeo and Juliet is not top-tier opera. Great singing on the part of its leads is necessary to make a strong case for it. And in Ellie Dehn and James Valenti, Minnesota Opera struck gold. I might have wished for a warmer, rounder sound from the two, but that's a minor quibble.

Dehn’s Juliet had the coloratura for a dazzling "Waltz Song" and a voice large enough to encompass the demands of the potion aria. Valenti’s Romeo had a clear, ringing top that was thrilling and the power to soar over the ensembles.

Call me a philistine, but it doesn’t hurt that the two looked their parts and acted with youthful exuberance. Director David Lefkowich gave both characters an active physicality that resonated passion and erotic energy and built to an ecstatic finale.

His production is an outstanding success, almost good enough to convince that the opera itself is first rate. He was creative without being intrusive, maintaining the integrity of the work. There was a heightened theatricality—for instance, using dancers to interpret and underline the action--and a refreshing commitment to having the characters behave like actual human beings.

The physical production (sets by Erhard Rom, costumes by Jennifer Caprio, lighting by Steve TenEyck) mirrored this down-to-earth realism with an engaging simplicity. Clever use of projections gave the whole an added emotional resonance. These artists provided an ideal setting for the jewel of Dehn’s and Valenti’s performances.

Occasionally, the use of the dancers (particularly during the orchestral interludes) became a bit intrusive, as if Lefkowich was worried that he had to keep things moving to keep the audience engaged. But that minor misstep was more than made up for by his thrilling fight choreography.

Note must also be made of the excellent work done by the chorus, especially in the Act III finale, where Mercutio and Tybalt are killed and Romeo is banished. Both vocally and dramatically, they carried the scene. Of the supporting singers, Adriana Zabala was the standout, singing the trouser role of Stephano with true Gallic grace. Some of the subsidiary characters left something to be desired, and if Kelly Markgraf’s Mercutio lacked the last degree of gossamer French elegance, he still sang his "Queen Mab" aria with great wit and style.

It was conductor Ari Pelto who occasionally let down the side. He fell too far under the spell of the romance, lingering excessively over some of the love music until the action began to drag and the sentimentality became cloying. But when it counted, particularly in the big finales, he rose well to the occasion.

Whether or not his work is your cup of tea, Gounod delivers the goods of an exciting and moving lyric opera. And overall, Minnesota Opera's production is about as convincing a representation of that opera as I can imagine.

Romeo and Juliet plays through February 3 at the Ordway Center for Performing Arts.

1.26.08: The Battleship Potemkin at Orchestra Hall

It’s lonely being an old-school cinephile in a digital, downloadable world. NetFlix, movies-on-demand, and pimped-out home-theater systems have turned a night at the movies into a housebound, couch-bound activity. Ever wonder why multiplexes are disproportionately filled with the kinds of movies teenage boys love? Well, for starters, they’re a demographic that still makes a regular habit of seeing movies in a movie theater. 

I happen to think that tasteless popcorn, etiquette-challenged audiences, and dingy theaters are a small price to pay for the incomparable experience of watching a movie with a room full of strangers. But I understand why I’m increasingly alone in that thinking.

As new distribution models open up and technology evolves, it’s only going to become more tempting to stay at home. So if the moviegoing habit is going to be resuscitated, then maybe we need to make going to the movies more than simply, well, going to the movies. Program the films, curate them, bring DVD-style extras to life. The folks over at Orchestra Hall have the right idea.

The Minnesota Orchestra’s month-long Sounds of Cinema series wrapped up last night with a spectacular orchestra-accompanied screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s silent film classic The Battleship Potemkin  led by Finnish conductor (and Osmo pupil) Esa Heikkilä. In the lobby before the show, the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphony sold popcorn and Junior Mints, and a pianist played to a loop of Laurel and Hardy and Felix the Cat shorts. Film music historian Bruce Crawford even moderated pre- and post-show discussions. Try replicating that in your den.

The Battleship Potemkin is a fitting cinematic spectacle for such red-carpet treatment. A cinema-veritae-style retelling of the deadliest naval mutiny in Russian history, it’s a film of epic size and serious cinephile pedigree—a mastery of a medium that was still in its infancy when the twenty-seven-year-old Eisenstein shot the film on location in Russia in 1925.

The story unfolds in five acts, starting with the Russian sailors’ refusal to eat a maggot-infested borscht and ending with a tense standoff with other ships in the Russian Black Sea fleet that have been sent to annihilate the mutinous crew. For his fiery, Bolshevik rallying cry, Eisenstein assembled a mix of professional and non-rofessional actors (the boilerman from the hotel where the crew stayed, a gardener from a nearby orchard), but he sublimated individual characters to the larger panorama. There is no single, easily distinguished hero or villain of Potemkin, or really any fully developed character, but rather a collection of sturdy, distinct (often fleeting) faces representing what Eisenstein called the “mass protagonist.”

The film is often dissected by scholars enraptured by Eisenstein’s pioneering use of montage, a style of editing in which successive, sometimes disparate, images are rapidly cut so as to produce cool juxtapositions and a collective visual punch.

The showpiece for Eisenstein’s montage skills is the famously frenetic Odessa Steps sequence, a historically inspired (read: highly embellished) account of the violent Tsarist crackdown on the port town residents of Odessa who rallied around the mutineers. In a quick succession of images, panicked crowds run for their lives down the long flight of steps to the harbor. A mother clutching her dying child asks for mercy from the approaching armed soldiers. An unmanned baby carriage is inadvertently set in motion down the flight of steps. (DePalma would lift this sixty-two years later for The Untouchables). Captured using a camera positioned on a trolley and another strapped to the waist of an acrobat, it’s easily one of the most exciting (and mimicked) scenes of early cinema.

As with so many film classics, The Battleship Potemkin has an incredible, intrigue-filled back story—missing and lost prints, sledgehammer edits by Soviet and German censors, bans in several countries, danger on the set (they filmed on a retired battleship that housed mines), and a Russian premiere that almost didn’t happen (Eisenstein’s editing assistant delivered the freshly cut film reel by reel via motorcycle to the Bolshoi Theatre as it was playing).

And there’s the film’s music, the raison d’ëtre for last night’s showcase and the indispensable partner of any silent film. For Potemkin’s original Moscow premiere, the film was shown without music; for the Berlin unveiling a year later, Edmund Meisel wrote a score partly under Eisenstein’s direction. Excerpts from Dmitri Shostakovich’s symphonies no. 4, 5, 8, 10, and 11 were used for a 1976 restoration of the film and have been sampled over the years to accompany DVD versions. It’s from this distinguished repertoire that Heikkilä tapped last night’s performance.

Shostakovich’s music, at turns triumphant, menacing, mechanical, melancholic, even sweet, seems scored specifically for Eisenstein’s film, though the pieces were written during another time and for different purposes (One exception: the Eleventh Symphony, which he wrote to commemorate the 1905 Russian Revolution that the Potemkin mutiny kickstarted.)

Selecting and performing a musical score for a silent film is no small task. Eisenstein’s rhythmic editing and equally rhythmic use of the title cards that deliver dialog and exposition demand music that is impeccably timed to what’s on the screen. In an audience Q&A after the show, Heikkilä likened it to “conducting a singer who is deaf and always right.” His three kids back home in Finland, he said, must have been puzzled these last few weeks as they watched him conduct, sans orchestra, to many, many silent screenings of The Battleship Potemkin.

Watching Eisenstein’s haunted images race across the screen to Shostakovich’s equally haunted music, you’d be hard pressed to find a moviegoing experience that delivers quite the same visceral thrill as the one Heikkilä commandeered last night. How could you ever go back to your Lazy Boy and TV?

1.25.08: Well at Park Square Theatre

Sometimes good plays happen to good artists who simply don’t understand what they’re doing or why, which makes everyone—the playwright, the actors, the designers—look bad. It’s a shame, because the production of Well at Park Square Theatre has an all-star lineup that, by anyone’s estimation, should have resulted in great theater. What has formed instead is a sorely misdirected interpretation of a play that requires far more than anyone involved was able to give it.

Playwright Lisa Kron is a performance artist whose oeuvre is challenging the area between theater, performance art and—in the case of Well, memoir—as valid theatrical performance. Kron has created a kind of metatheatricality that pokes fun at itself. It’s a lovely convention, but Park Square’s production doesn’t do it much justice.

Well is essentially a play about the relationship Kron has with her chronically ill mother, Ann. That through-line is important, as Well does not have a conventional narrative. Thanks to Michael Dixon’s confused direction, it barely has a narrative at all. (It should be noted that Dixon is an imminently talented director. His repeated missteps here are, to be metatheatrical about it, out of character.)

Lisa, played by Christina Baldwin, talks directly to the audience with personable, funny monologues. Baldwin begins strongly, but falters when the play requires honesty and emotional depth. Baldwin is a talented actor with a wide range, but she doesn’t show it here, and the demonstrative catharsis feels like a cop-out. In the Broadway production, Kron played herself, which undoubtedly worked much better.

Kron’s mother is played with benign, little-old-lady syndrome by Barbara June Patterson, who gets plenty of laughs but fails to capture the guts of the woman slumped in the La-Z-Boy. Ann was, according to Lisa’s recollections, a vanguard in their Lansing, Michigan neighborhood. A progressive, Ann moved the family into a neighborhood where they were the only whites and the only Jews, back when racial integration was crazy talk. That sly chutzpah, in addition to her chronic fatigue, is not apparent in Patterson’s interpretation. The most glaring problem is Baldwin and Patterson’s age difference. The character of Lisa (just like the real-life Lisa) should be in her mid-forties. Baldwin is too young. Instead of a charged mother-daughter relationship, we get something like a sputtering grandmother-granddaughter conversation, one that Lisa can back out of at any time.

There are other characters in Well, played with varying degrees of success by Faye M. Price, Heidi Bakke, Edwin Strout, and Emil Herrera. Their talents, like Baldwin and Patterson’s, are wasted. Every time the foursome enters to play people in Lisa’s past, the bottom drops out. When the actors rebel and walk offstage because the play makes no sense, one is tempted to go with them.

Well runs through February 10 at Park Square Theatre.

1.23.08: Minnesota Biennial 3D II at the Minnesota Museum of American Art

Shows that feature Minnesota–based artists reassure me. It’s good to know that so many creative minds walk among us, especially in the thrall of winter, when any ounce of life seems to have drained away. The Minnesota Museum of American Art’s juried show of three-dimensional work by Minnesota artists satisfies the deep need for color, texture, and even energy (given that several of the pieces actually move).

Anastasia Ward’s ”Mole,” “Wolf,” and “Knob,” (this last a cross between a sloth and a pterodactyl), are both whimsical and unnerving. Something like stuffed animal Frankensteins, her work evokes sympathy and maybe even nostalgia while also striking a dissonant chord. Cuddly, off-putting, or both—you decide.

“Networked Bamboo,” by David Bowen, might be just as at home at a science fair as in an art gallery. The piece is described as “kinetic, interactive, robotic and sculptural,” and features a half-dozen hydroponic pods radiating out from a central hub, connected by wires. Each pod houses a single bamboo shoot, its leaves sprouting from its plastic enclosure. Here’s where the kinetic part comes in: The plants react to photo resistors, picking up sources of light around the gallery and wobbling around as the source of light shifts. It could be a metaphor for our modern fusing of technology and biology, but whatever the intention, it’s just plain fun to look at!

It’s impossible to ignore Jack Pavlick’s “6 Bands,” an incredible moving metal contraption. Powered by an old-fashioned system of mechanical cranks, the six bands of metal after which the piece is named sway rhythmically, creating criss-crossing waves when viewed from the front. Mesmerizing.

Contrast that with Seho Park’s “Work 1,” a tiny paper sculpture held together by a few staples (a mutant form of origami, perhaps?) and you get an idea of the variety in scale and materials. David Hamlow works on a variety of scales, but like Park’s paper sculpture, it’s one of his small creations that attracted my eye. Hamlow crafted a structure out of playing cards featuring parts of receipts from past purchases; an ode to personal consumption. He calls each piece “a self-portrait” and an “act of penance for having consumed unhealthy things.” A house of cards fits that paradigm well while bringing to mind the less self-conscious pursuits of children everywhere—to play, to explore what’s possible given the limitations, to create.

Minnesota Biennial 3D II runs through Februart 3, mmaa.org

1.20.08: The Carolina Chocolate Drops at The Cedar

While everyone else in town was watching the Packers get their hearts broken, a sellout crowd was packed into the Cedar Sunday night to see the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a trio of hypertalented musicians in their midtwenties who are spearheading what’s come to be known as the Black String Band Revival.

A little history: The banjo is often thought of as the quintessential American instrument, but the truth is that the banjo’s roots stretch back to Africa, and slaves in the South played home-made, banjolike instruments made of gourds and sticks for more than 100 years before a white person ever picked one up. Prior to the rise of bluegrass music, string and jug bands got people’s feet stomping and the repertoire of the Carolina Chocolate Drops is drawn largely from this era of all-but-forgotten music from the early 1800s. Specifically, the Chocolate Drops hail from the Piedmont area of North Carolina, where a distinctive brand of fiddle- and banjo-driven string-band music was played, a form that dispenses with the high nasal harmonies of Appalachian–style traditional music and lets the banjo and jug drive the beat rather than a guitar and bass.

Still, this is the sort of mountain music that can be monotonous and grating in the wrong hands, especially if the fiddle player is drunk or out of tune. But the Chocolate Drops have a knack for putting together interesting arrangements of these old tunes—songs with names such as “Old Cat Died,” “Ol’ Corn Likker,” “Another Man Done Gone,” and “Viper Mad”—injecting the songs with new life while still retaining echoes of their traditional roots. Each member of the band plays five or six different instruments, and they change instruments on practically every song.

Spectacular musicianship helps, too. I don’t know this for sure, but I’d be willing to bet that each of the Chocolate Drops—Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens, and Justin Robinson—has a healthy chunk of classical training under their belt. Their arrangements are too smart, they play too well, and they’re far too young not to have developed some Suzuki chops along the way. Another key asset is Rhiannon Giddens, the lone woman in the group, who has a singing voice that’s like an unusually good batch of moonshine—smoother and more supple than you’d expect, but just rough enough around the edges to remind you of its raw ingredients.

Together the Drops sound larger than a mere trio, partly because audience members inevitably start stomping their feet along with the band. They have fun, too, which is part of their charm. They goof around with each other between songs, pass the jug back and forth incessantly (for playing, not drinking), and encourage the audience to dance wherever they can find space. Dancing was almost impossible at the Cedar last night, though, because the place was sold out.

This is only the second time the Chocolate Drops have played in Minnesota, and word of mouth from their last performance was tremendous. There’s no telling when the Drops will be in town next, but if you don’t want to wait that long, they’re giving another performance tonight in honor of Martin Luther King Day. It’s primarily for school kids, but as of last night there were still some tickets available.

The Chocolate drops play again at 7 p.m. on January 21 at the Cedar, 416 Cedar Ave. S., Mpls., 612-338-2674, thecedar.org.

1.19.08: Peer Gynt at The Guthrie

Disclaimer: If she were running, I would totally vote for Jane Fonda. So it doesn’t necessarily mean that I hate women just because I love Robert Bly, whose new translation of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt opened at the Guthrie last night.

In tenth grade, I read Iron John, Bly’s seminal book about how men should use fairy tale and myth to recreate the hero’s journey in our own lives. I admit, for a fifteen-year-old completely mystified by The Ladies, early exposure to a how-to book about illuminating your soul by celebrating your inner warrior was probably problematic. Back then, I would read passages to my girlfriends (tragically, anti-heroically, never ever girlfriends) to their disgust. You didn’t have to be Susan Faludi, it seems, to recognize Bly’s PBS–poetic, back-to-the-earth chauvinism for what it is—you know, chauvinism.

Since, I’ve (sort of) learned that it’s not cool to use fairy tales, or HBO series, or epic myth—or even the bible—as either a guide or justification for acting like a prick. But I do recognize the ongoing benefit of gathering around the campfire and trying to figure out what’s going on with us dudes, singularly and collectively. And last night, after braving the twenty-six below wind-chill, turning my back to the arctic void, and huddling around the thrust stage with my bearded, Norwegian sweater–wearing comrades (I really don’t know if it was my imagination, but I was overwhelmed by the wintergreen fragrance of snus, Norwegian chewing tobacco, throughout the performance), it seems to me there’s still no storyteller better equipped or more willing to grapple with the dude issues than Bly.

Because Peer Gynt is a total dude. The play starts with Gynt as a fifty-year-old, successful businessman being surprised to death at his birthday party by his coworkers. From there we travel back through his unconscious to his adolescence, when he was living with his mom in Norway. In an incredible performance that holds together what becomes a surreal, at times completely incoherent journey, Peer is portrayed by the English actor Mark Rylance. Rylance lends Peer a sort of Bill Murray–esque sangfroid, even though he intentionally mangles his vowels with a backwoods, hick from Fon-du-Lac, Kevin Kling accent. It’s a heroic performance, and an entirely necessary one: It wouldn’t be fair to say that “Rylance saves Peer Gynt,” because any dense, nearly impenetrable work needs a singular point that us mere mortals can concentrate on: Barbarella needed Jane Fonda, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex needed Woody Allen, and Peer Gynt needs Rylance.

The Rylance likeability factor has to be high because Gynt is the town’s wild and crazy guy, an immature trickster and womanizer constantly regaling anybody willing to listen with tall tales about tackling reindeer and flying through the fjords with eagles or trapping the devil in a walnut and tricking the town’s blacksmith into pounding him on an anvil. All the old Joe Campbell/Robert Bly/Star Wars elements are there: Peer’s storytelling ability serves as sort of his magical power, simultaneously elevating him above and casting him out of the hoi polloi (it’s how he seduces girls); he loves his mammy, who raised him herself, but he’s never known his famous father or grandfather; he hasn’t found his innocent-as-the-Oslo-snow one true love, but he knows she’s out there, somewhere (and to hell with the tramps that he takes advantage of in the meanwhile, right?); and he hasn’t yet learned to focus his unique abilities so he can grow up and fulfill his destiny.

Look, even though Ibsen wrote Peer Gynt in 1867, it’s basically a comic book story, so you kind of know what’s going to happen. But I won’t ruin it for you, so from here on out, I’ll use disclaimers. Evidently, Ibsen wrote the original in rhymed couplets, which, I know, sounds like a major drag. But in his translation, Bly [SPOILER ALERT!!! SPOILER ALERT!!!] doesn’t start in with the rhymed couplets until well into Act II, (the sneaky bastard), and by that time it sort of works because: a) you’re invested in the character, and b) Peer is confronting the Troll king after making out with his smoking hot Troll daughter (played by the sexy Tracey Maloney) [END OF SPOILER ALERT].

Peer’s attitude towards women is going to be difficult for audiences to deal with. His behavior is reprehensible—he takes advantage of women sexually and then casts them aside, refusing to deal with the consequences. Frustratingly, it’s hard to say if Peer ever really does suffer any tragic consequences, or if he even really learns anything at all. After intermission, when things get really bizarre, there’s a crazy dream sequence at a German insane asylum where the point is made that you have to act like a sociopath if society acts insane. Throughout, there’s a lot of talk about “being true to yourself,” and it’s not really clear if that’s a good thing or a bad thing or if our hero or anybody else is really capable of attaining that goal. (Faludi would probably hammer this thing.)

So are we all acting like trolls? Should we? What does this have to do with nationalized health care? All are themes explored in Peer Gynt. I’m not kidding. At the end of the play, Rylance took a bow, and then asked the audience to stay for a second. He stopped the ovation, and made a little thank you speech about how all of us men are on a path and sometimes we need our elders to look back and wave at us in order to help us figure it out (“Which some of you,” Rylance joked, “are no doubt trying to do with this play right now.”). He turned our attention to Bly, the old poet with the white, wild Iron John shock of hair, sitting in the back of the theater with his wife, Ruth. Here was the dude who just translated Ibsen from the original Norwegian rhymed couplets and made it sort of interesting. I mean, I didn’t necessarily get it, and maybe I never will, but Bly is a hero just for telling the story. 

1.18.08: Dawn Upshaw with the SPCO

The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s artistic leadership model, rather than depending on one strong maestro to determine the organization’s musical character, engages a cadre of world-class musicians with star status and particular specialties. Friday night’s concert introduced the SPCO’s newest “artistic partner”–and also its first woman in that role–soprano Dawn Upshaw.

Upshaw was paired perfectly with pianist Pierre Laurent Aimard, who joined the orchestra as an artistic partner last year. The two have compatible visions and complementary personalities on stage. Both bring twin specialties of classical and contemporary music and both are considered important interpreters of Mozart. Aimard is identified as an acolyte of Boulez and a champion of contemporary composers, while Upshaw, who just won the prestigious MacArthur Genius Fellowship, is noted not just as a performer but as an integral and inspiring advocate for new music.

Where Aimard coolly captivates with a thrillingly articulate intent, Upshaw delivers her superhuman artistry with a warm, accessible humanity. She walked onstage as the anti-diva, unfussy and approachable in a little black dress with an artsy scarf draped around her. Her physical demeanor and engagement with the audience is simply likeable, and that quality matches her voice. She sings with a dancer’s flexibility, agility, and suppleness, and delivers text with an uncanny honesty and a range of expression that goes far beyond simple beauty. Beyond bringing her wide-ranging genius to concerts and programming, Upshaw is the perfect fit for the friendly neighborhood profile the SPCO has been working to grow.

Aimard conducted Haydn’s witty Symphony no. 60. Written as incidental music to a comic play by Regnard called The Absentminded Man, the symphony is an extended joke; the finale, essentially the punch line that derails the strings until they have to stop and retune, was camped up with the maestro’s mock frustration and embarrassment. Aimard also soloed on Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 23, a perfect vehicle for the clarity of his playing. In his hands, the andante was magnetic with pathos. Both classical works showed off the ensemble’s cleanliness while also revealing its warmth.

While not new music, Upshaw’s selections for her debut in this new role were great showpieces for her range of expression. She began with Stravinsky’s Pribaoutki (nonsense rhymes), a miniature song cycle of Russian poems. Along the lines of “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,” the poems’ wit comes from their sound rather than the meaning of the words, and delivered by Upshaw they were an instant delight.

She sang Ravel’s "Three Poems of Stéphane Mallarmé" with graceful subtlety, her delicate phrasing perfectly paired with the ethereal pointillism rendered by the SPCO instrumentalists (including Aimard at the piano).

The high, clear notes the audience was waiting for were saved for Mozart’s “Ch’io mi scordi di te?,” a song that bleeds with ardent youthfulness. Upshaw delivered them with clarity and grace. With such a beginning, Upshaw’s term as artistic partner promises to be fruitful and fascinating.

1.17.08: The Poetry of Pizza at Mixed Blood Theatre

Mixed Blood Theatre’s The Poetry of Pizza is easy on the drama and heavy on light comedy. That said, it’s not the most original of stories. Playwright Deborah Brevoort’s persistent quirkiness results in an overlong play about what is essentially A Midsummer Night’s Dream, minus the poetry and fluidity of Shakespeare. Like actual pizza, Poetry is not substantial, but it is palatable.

Poetry, directed by John Miller–Stephany, focuses on Sarah Middleton (Stacia Rice), a professor of poetry living in Copenhagen while researching the topic for her next book. One night, as Sarah is walking home, she bumps into a Kurdish–owned pizzeria to get out of the rain. Her red umbrella looks like a beautiful rose to the Kurdish pizza boy, Soran, and he falls head over heels in love with her. Unfortunately for Sarah, two Danish men, Ule and Heino, lust for her too.

Patrick O’Brien’s Ule is small and good-natured, but his Sarah–stalking tendencies are more creepy than cute. Barbara Kingsley provides a nice contrast as his agoraphobic wife, Inga. Sean Michael Dooley’s Heino is slimy but inconsequential, and Michelle Hutchison’s Pam, Sarah’s best friend, seems out of place and overacted. The same can be said for the role of Olga (Jayne Taini), who commiserates with Inga over the phone until she unwittingly falls in love with her husband. Omar Koury, as the Kurdish owner of the pizzeria, Rebar, is great. He brings an inner life to his character’s outsized personality.

The play’s emotional center revolves around Soran’s earnestness and believability, and Ron Menzel does an excellent job. He’s created a compelling, charismatic portrait of a young man who has been through hell and whose heart is still filled with love. Soran makes Sarah beautiful pizzas, with names exotic enough to melt any woman’s bookish heart—Arabian Nights, Purple Passion, and The Persian Kiss. It’s weird, but also sweet.

The speed bumps that the lovers hit on their way to the altar get chuckles, but many of the laughs come at the expense of greater depth. There is a lovely moment during Soran and Sarah’s first date. She looks at a picture of a thin boy on the wall and asks who it is. It’s him, a few months after he’d arrived at a refugee camp. The quiet moment of realization that sets in relays in five seconds what two hours doesn’t. Soran, having seen the worst humanity has to offer, craves beauty. Sarah, despite her fancy degrees, can’t fully comprehend it.

Poetry is the stuff of fairy tales, though, and everything works out in the end. It’s a little ridiculous, but a lot better than the alternative. Everyone, even thinly written characters, deserves a happy ending.

The Poetry of Pizza runs through February 10 at the Mixed Blood Theatre.

1.11.08: Barry Manilow at Xcel Energy Center

I’ve always hated Barry Manilow. The feathered hair, that monster schnozz, the anchorman teeth, his pansexual wholesomeness, all those sappy songs: hate it—hate it all.

I especially hate the music. In 1974, when I was in eighth grade, “Mandy” was the number one song in the nation, and during the bus ride home it played on the radio at the exact same time every day for the entire year. In 1978, when I was a senior in high school, the guy had no fewer than FIVE best-selling albums on the Billboard charts. Boston, Foreigner, Kansas, Supertramp, REO Speedwagon—even these insufferable bands were no match for Manilow. The man’s music was inescapable. When I think of the time I’ve spent struggling to get “I Write the Songs” or “Copacabana” out of my head, I weep for the brain cells that have died along the way. Even as I write this, the chorus of “Mandy” is going through my head and I cannot make it stop! It’s no accident that officials in Australia blast Barry Manilow to chase teenagers and thugs out of their parks. For many, Barry Manilow’s songs aren’t music; they are a kind of aural weapon that seeps into your brain through your ears and drives you crazy—slowly or quickly, depending on your tolerance for shamelessly sincere love songs.

So it was with some fear and trepidation that I ventured into Xcel Energy Center Friday night to see what was billed as a “pumped up” version of the stage show Manilow has been doing at the Hilton in Las Vegas for the past few years. At a party a while back, a friend whose judgment I respect suggested that I might change my mind about Manilow if I ever saw him live, so I was putting that challenge to the test. “He puts on a helluva show,” was how my friend put it. Plus, Manilow: Music and Passion is reportedly being transported around the country in eleven semi trailers, and I was curious how all that crap would fit into the Xcel. (Clearly, at least one of those trailers was devoted to carrying boxes of green glowsticks, which were passed out before the show to the all but capacity crowd. The Manilow faithful love to wave glowsticks in time with the music, and Barry likes to wave back, so it all works somehow.)

These days, Barry Manilow sports a frosted, punkish hairdo and the skin on his face is Botox tight, but it’s hard not to be impressed by the power of his primary instrument: that voice—the one that haunted my childhood. Backed by a combo orchestra/rock band and four backup singer/dancers, Barry belted out one tune after another, leading each song to a soaring, Vegas–worthy crescendo. I never saw him take so much as a sip of water to whet his pipes; he just kept the songs rolling, one after the other, in a barrage of giddy nostalgia.

But something else has happened to Barry Manilow along the way, something I didn’t expect: He’s gotten cool. He knows he’s a nostalgia act, and in between songs he makes self-deprecating fun of himself for it. “My only hope is these songs will be ruined in karaoke bars everywhere for a long time to come,” he deadpanned early in the show. When a picture of him from the 1970s flashed on the jumbo screen, he looked up and said, “Look at the clothes I’m wearing. Shoot me now!” The crowd eats this stuff up. During a little skit before his 1960s medley, he pretended to smoke a joint, then said, “I’m just kidding. The only drug I take is Lipitor.”

Manilow also appears to have reached that humble age where one doesn’t take anything for granted. Certainly, twenty-five years without a hit song could have that effect, but on stage last night, Manilow seemed genuinely amazed that thousands of people in St. Paul, Minnesota would drive through the snow and cold just to hear him sing songs they’ve all heard hundreds of times before.

To honor his fans, Barry Manilow hasn’t simply embraced himself as a nostalgia act; he has appointed himself the grand keeper of all nostalgia, the living embodiment of a mythical world seemingly untainted by irony or cynicism. He is a one-man jukebox who plays hits from the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, decades that cannot be improved but which can be remembered fondly, if only someone is willing to sing the songs of those bygone days as if they still matter.

And when it came time for the dreaded 1970s—the decade of “Mandy,” “I Write the Songs,” and “Copacabana”—the cannily self-aware Manilow let the stage go dark. The giant video screen behind the stage lit up with a clip of one his first appearances on television, wearing sequins and singing “Mandy” behind a white piano. The man onscreen is impossibly young, his skin boyishly smooth, his blue eyes big and clear. Slowly, the lights came up and present-day Manilow joined his 1975 self in a touching duet that spanned the decades and made me feel something I didn’t expect to feel: respect, a grudging sort of gratitude, and a wee bit of pity.

I may have grown tired of these songs, but I can choose to listen to something else. Manilow, on the other hand, has been singing “Mandy” practically every night of his life for the past thirty years. He is trapped inside this song; that is his fate, and he has accepted it, with graciousness and humility, even though deep down he must hate that song more than anyone.

And yet he continues to sing it, with as much passion and conviction as he can, because even after all these years his audiences aren’t sick of it. It amazes him. It amazes me. So when his orchestra builds to that all-too-familiar chorus, there is only one thing for him to do, and Manilow does it as well as anyone ever has—he belts that song out again, like he did back in 1974, and appears genuinely grateful that he is still alive to hear the applause.

1.9.08: "Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People: Everyone" at the Walker Art Center

Miguel Gutierrez’s intensely lovable, crowd-pleasing “Everyone” is a great kickoff to the twentieth year of the Walker’s alternative performance showcase, Out There. What makes this modern dance import from New York such a happy experience?

There are the aptly named Powerful People, Gutierrez’s cast of eight—eight individuals of different sizes, different looks, different styles, all attractive in their distinctive flaws, who dance and play with such energy and abandon that you can’t help feeling affectionate toward them. There are many lovely moments; for example, when the curtain finally opens approximately two-thirds of the way through the show (did I mention you’ll be sitting at the back of the stage, watching the dancers perform from the stage space?) and the performers go out into the seats, “flying” in extended arabesques all over the theater, making the McGuire space look like a toy playhouse. Or there’s the breathless moment when the performers come running straight at the audience. Or the lovely kaleidoscopic patterns in one section, corps de ballet in sneakers and T-shirts. Or—well, there are many others, but I’ll leave you to discover them on your own.

What I want to bring to light is one of the mechanisms of delight that Gutierrez employs, repetition. Each section of this performance is a loop, often of tightly structured improvisation, running over and over before moving on to the next loop. (An example: The dancers stand on one foot for a long time, then at a certain signal strenuously leap to the other foot. Each leap, direction, and ending pose is the dancer’s choice.) This may not be the greatest strengthener of overall form—the sections don’t always seem related to each other—but on the smaller scale, it works so well that any overall flaws can be overlooked. How does it work?

The first couple of times you see one section, you’re just figuring out what you’re seeing (classical ballet usually repeats twice and goes on). In the next few repetitions, you might find yourself becoming impatient and irritable: “Well, all right, move on,” you might find yourself thinking. But Gutierrez and the Powerful People don’t move on. Instead, they keep going, and something else happens to your mind. You start watching not the gist of the movement but the individual parts—seeing, almost in slow motion, the articulation of one performer’s hand, the readiness in another’s face. You see beauty in the dancers, in their movements. Then you start understanding the game the performers are playing, the rules for each section, and your eyes trace potential outcomes. Will she jump this way or that way? How will he get out of the box he’s in?

Finally, you begin to want to play along with the dancers—it looks like fun, and more than fun, it looks like experience, real life. And that’s when Gutierrez moves on. Performance can do a lot of different things for us; Gutierrez chooses to entertain at the same time that he suggests it’s necessary for us to move and act. “Everyone” works as a powerful reminder of the activity of life.

“Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People: Everyone” continues at the Walker Art Center though Jan. 12.

1.5.08: Tino Sehgal at the Walker Art Center

I tried to see the new Tino Sehgal exhibit at the Walker on Saturday but only partially succeeded. Sehgal—a bad-boy favorite of European art wonks—is a London-born, Berlin-based conceptual artist who is said to be pushing the boundaries of art by creating work that has no physical footprint. You can’t buy a Tino Sehgal poster in the Walker book shop because his work consists entirely of people—trained actors and volunteers—who say and do odd things presumably in the name of art but also in the name of something more subversive as a kind of anti-art that turns creative expression into something so ridiculous, it’s almost impossible to take seriously. For instance, in a piece called This is Contemporary, shown at the Venice Biennale in 2005, a museum guard danced around in a gallery singing, “This is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary.” (Sadly, this piece is not being presented at the Walker.)

Sehgal’s work can be funny because it seems to have a satirical edge to it, but people take it very seriously, which in a way is even funnier. Grad students and art critics rub their thesauruses raw trying to find a vocabulary for describing what Sehgal’s work is “about”—“immediacy,” “spontaneity,” “the something-ness of nothing”—, and art museums all over the world are clamoring to exhibit his work. The Walker exhibit is Sehgal’s first major exhibition in the United States, and it is actually a retrospective of five of his earlier works though I only saw two of them during my visit. (I might have seen a third, but I’m still not quite sure.)

The pieces are scattered throughout the Walker, and some are meant to be surprises, so you’re not supposed to know when and where they are going to happen. If you ask, you will discover that the staff has been instructed not to spill the beans. One of the staffers I asked could only muster the courage to point me in the general direction of Gallery 2 and apologized for not being more helpful.

Because Sehgal’s work “exists” only in interaction with other people, I decided the best time to go see it would be on Free First Saturday when the bargain-minded masses flock to the Walker in droves. The place was jammed on Saturday, and the line to get into the Frida Kahlo exhibit, which ends on January 20, was so long it looked more like a line at Disneyland.

Perhaps fittingly, Sehgal’s only gallery-bound piece is housed as far away as possible from Frida—on the seventh floor in the Medtronic Gallery. There were no lines here. In fact, most of the people I saw were afraid to take more than a step or two into the gallery. After a hasty glance, many people concluded that the Medtronic gallery was actually empty—and it was, except for a guy in the corner wearing orange high-top sneakers who was rolling around on the ground like he had just been kicked in the nuts. The piece, called Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things (2000) is one of Sehgal’s earliest works, and the whole point of it seems to be the degree of discomfort all that empty space can generate. Sehgal himself tells people that what he really does is “stage situations,” to which people must react. I stuck around for about twenty minutes, and most of the people I saw reacted with their feet—as in, “let’s get out of here.”

The only other easily located Sehgal piece is in the Burnet gallery, where a guide sings a little aria and then announces, “This is propaganda, courtesy the artist, Tino Sehgal, 2002.” When I pulled out a pen to jot down some notes, this same woman scolded me for two violations: 1. Leaning against a wood pylon/artwork, and 2. Using a pen in the gallery; she handed me a pencil. (Evidently, the only people allowed to break the rules at the Walker are the artists.) When she went back to singing, pretty much everyone ignored her, and the woman seemed to be taking it a little personally, as if she were doing something wrong.

Anyway, as I said, my third Tino Sehgal “experience” involved me being pointed to Gallery 2, me walking around in Gallery 2 for ten minutes, me wondering what I was supposed to be looking for, me looking at the guard who looked a little odd, me wondering if he was “it,” me getting impatient, and then me leaving to go look at something a little more traditional, such as a big ball of plaster with fishing rods sticking out of it.

Curiously, as I meandered through the Brave New Worlds exhibit (home of the aforementioned ball of fishing tackle), every time I saw someone who looked a little out of place, which is often on free Saturdays, I wondered if they might be a Sehgalian plant whose purpose was to make me question the very nature of art itself. At the Walker, one doesn’t usually need extra prompting to ask such questions—but ask them I did.

Tino Sehgal continues at the Walker through March 23

1.1.08: Avenue Q at the State Theatre

Last year, when Sesame Street: Old School 1969-1974 came out on DVD, everybody made fun of the disclaimer. Before the first digitally remastered episode, a cartoon character comes out and cheerily announces, “Welcome to Sesame Street Nostalgia. I am Bob, your host, and I want you to know that these early 'Sesame Street' episodes are intended for grown-ups and may not meet the needs of today's preschool child." It was an easy punch line for a lot of us deadline types—ha, ha, look how ridiculously overprotective and wussy our society has become! These days, even Sesame Street needs a disclaimer!

Well, after seeing Avenue Q last night at the State Theatre—the blockbuster, Tony-winning, dirty Muppet Broadway musical created in 2003 by two Sesame devotees and Muppeteered by many Sesame alum—I just have to say, once again, “Thanks a lot, Mom.”

As everybody else in my generation believes, and as Avenue Q abundantly reaffirmed last night, it’s my parents’ fault that my life sucks. Sure, they didn’t have access to a disclaimer back in the mid-seventies when they abandoned me to Sesame Street’s electronic guardianship three hours a day. But they were supposed to be my personal cops, serving and protecting me, right? They should’ve realized the long-term repercussions of consuming so many overly optimistic, Muppet-performed song-and-dance numbers sponsored by the letter T. I mean, talk about negligence! I wish they had some money leftover after putting me through school, so I could sue.

Avenue Q should be required viewing for every Sesame casualty like me. Its cynical song cycle—from “What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?” to “The Internet is for Porn” to “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” to “There’s a Fine, Fine Line (Between Love and a Waste of Time)” exposes every chipper lie we’ve ever been told, from cradle to quarter-life crisis. It’s the perfect squirm-inducing soundtrack to our lives.

Avenue Q’s creators, Jeff Marx and Bobby Lopez, have gone on record over and over again saying that Avenue Q is a love letter to their favorite childhood program, with clear parallels between the Sesame and Q casts: Sesame had Gordon and Maria, Q has Brian and Christmas Eve; Sesame had Burt and Ernie, Q has Rod and Nick; Sesame had Cookie Monster, Q has Trekkie Monster. But a love letter? If that’s the case, I would hate to read hate mail from these dudes. Because it seems to me that it’s pure exposé when a Muppet sings—in that strangled falsetto that all Muppets seem to possess (one of the fascinations of Avenue Q is watching the actors and actresses operating the Muppets throw their Muppet voices)—, poison-pen lines, such as this one from the big opening number, “It Sucks to be Me.”

“When I was little/I thought I would be/A big comedian on late night TV/But now I’m thirty-two/And as you can see/I’m not/Oh well/It sucks to be me.”

For our generation, Sesame Street was the first big lie. “You’re special!” turns out to be way more embittering than “There are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” And they haven’t stopped telling us “You’re special!” yet; sold to us over and over again, in that very-PR, very-PC, shiny, happy, Sesame Street way—the way everything sounds these days. It’s the tone of our society, served everywhere from the commercials during Lost to the counter at Starbucks. And it’s bulls**t. No wonder this show tanked in Vegas.

Look, I hate to sound like a whiner, but clearly, it’s not my fault. We are the most selfish and least resilient generation ever—commitment-phobic while at the same time insufferably entitled—and Avenue Q points out exactly why. The second act of the play doesn’t work as well as the first, probably because it tries to offer myriad solutions for this situation (e.g., “I Wish I Could Go Back to College,” “Schadenfreude,” and “Everything in Life is Only for Now”) when there really isn’t one. It’s too late to avoid these delayed and un-disclaimed growing pains now—we just have to suck it up upon being diagnosed as “adult.”

The latest New Yorker has set me off on the second major Raymond Carver kick in my life. Carver was no Big Bird. No Elmo. Maybe a little Oscar, though. He was writing during the same time Sesame Street was blowing up, before succumbing to lung cancer in 1984. Carver’s short stories are these heartbreaking little masterpieces that show how hard it is to communicate with others and how we usually don’t get what we want—whether it’s that job, or that girl, or that peace. His stories are full of grown men and women who have learned, the hard way, that a purpose remains elusive, usually bitterly so, and we self-medicate in order to temper the pain of our existential illness as it metastasizes. Although, unlike Sesame, it was certainly never his intent to instruct, Carver’s stories are instructive, if only in their brutal honesty. He seems to be saying: It has always sucked to be us.

He would’ve loved Avenue Q.