3.29.08: The Blue Man Group at the Xcel

On Saturday night at 8:00 p.m., while legions of energy-conscious eco-citizens were turning off their lights and computers in observance of “Earth Hour,” I and 10,000 other not-so-conscientious Twin Citians were gathered at Xcel Energy Center to witness one of the most gleeful, excessive, and exquisitely gratuitous uses of electricity ever devised by man: a performance by the Blue Man Group. (I’ll leave it to you to count up how many ironies are involved here.)

I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the Blue Men’s moving trucks secretly houses a small nuclear reactor. I mean, the megawatts necessary to power this show are enough to poke a few extra holes in the ozone and power an entire season’s worth of holiday displays on the moon, or Mars, or wherever it is the Blue Men are from. Let’s see: 6,000 or so strobe lights, a few million LEDs, dozens of spotlights, black lights, portable video cameras and projectors, enough juice to fuel a twelve-person rock band, all the computers necessary to keep it all synched properly, and occasional bursts of extra power to fire streamers out into the audience, all of whom are waving fully charged cellphones.

Don’t get me wrong: I wholeheartedly support this kind of nonsense. The gloom and doomers may think it’s necessary to conserve every last kilowatt by using fluorescent curly bulbs, eating by candlelight, and going to bed right after dinner. But every once in a while we need to be reminded that electricity is also a resource that should be squandered and enjoyed. It’s all about balance. Besides, electrons don’t care how much fun we have with them, so why not use them for whatever forms of ridiculous amusement we can think up?

Thankfully, the Blue Man Group is not run by a bunch of earth-hugging, buzz-killing conservationists. Otherwise, they would put on a very dull show. All the flash and sizzle would disappear, and they would just be three guys with blue heads banging on pieces of PVC tubing with plastic spatulas. As tube-bangers go, they’d still probably be among the best in the business, but it wouldn’t be the same.

For Saturday night’s show, the Blue Men brought their deluxe arena package, which means that everything was louder and crazier than usual. This was a stop on the How to be a Megastar 2.1 tour, though how it differs from the 2.0 version isn’t clear. The woman sitting next to me observed that the Blue Men themselves looked slightly bluer, but that could have been the beer talking.

It’s a funny, clever, entertaining show—the sort of thing that deserves to be running simultaneously in ten cities, six days a week, until the end of time. In it, the Blue Men are trying to become rock stars and are following the directions in a “Rock Star Instruction Manual” that shows them how to swivel their hips, bob their heads, pump their fists in the air, wear weird makeup, and generally fashion themselves after the great rock icons of yore. In between making fun of rock ‘n’ roll concert conventions and playing silly arena games with the audience, they and their band play the living daylights out of those tubes (I cannot emphasize enough how good they are at banging on plastic), and send booming waves of thunder throughout the arena as they whack their big drum and an open grand piano with a mallet the size of a lamppost. 

I read online yesterday that a scientist in Hawaii is suing to stop scientists in Switzerland from firing up something called the Large Hadron Collider, a seven-trillion-volt electron accelerator designed to smash atoms into each other with such force that it will recreate conditions similar to those of the Big Bang. The scientist in Hawaii is afraid that these electronic adventurers will accidentally rip a hole in the space-time continuum, creating a black hole into which the entire earth might be untimely sucked.

Before that happens, put it on your list to see the Blue Man Group, somewhere, someday. Their use of electrons is far less serious and much more entertaining—and if enough of us go, and if we ever do get sucked through a wormhole and blasted into a parallel universe, the Blue Men might be gracious enough to help show us the way.

3.28.08: The Current’s Fakebook: Greil Marcus and The Mekons

For the first time in the Current’s Fakebook series—a concert series pairing authors with like-minded rock bands at the Fitzgerald Theater, hosted by afternoon drive-time DJ Mary Lucia—I felt sympathy for poor Mary during her interview with Pompous Rock Crit Emeritus, Greil Marcus.

For the last couple of years, Fakebook has been the perfectly programmed series, bringing in writers who appeal to the ideal Current listener, the literate indie-rock lover. The station has booked John Hodgman, Neal Pollack, Chuck Klosterman, and Amy Sedaris. The interviews have been uniformly great, especially for what are basically book events, with the authors managing to elicit something more than the typical knowing “MPR chortle” out of the audience—people have actually laughed their asses off. But I’ve always thought the interviews have succeeded because of the level of talent they’ve brought in, that they’ve succeeded despite the interviewer, Mary Lucia.

Because as the Fakebook host, she totally bugs.

Look, The Current is the only music station that I listen to anymore. And I’ve been listening to Mary Lucia since she was on REV when I was a teenager; so in my lifetime of radio listening, I’ve heard her voice more than any other afternoon drive-time DJ’s.

There is no detracting from her local icon status. Her tone of voice is perfect for hosting an indie-rock radio program. Balanced between being a fan and being totally whatever, it’s probably the happy result of being Paul Westerberg’s sister and having been around legendary rock dudes her whole life. It serves her well, whether she’s sighing, “I love that song” after playing “Leave Without a Trace” for the millionth time, or whether she’s trying to keep Wayne Coyne on topic, or whether she’s trying to tease some interesting answers out of a road-weary rock quartet from Sydney, Australia. Mary’s our supercool older sister who’s been to all the shows and had all the dorky rock conversations with the rock stars themselves.

Basically, she has a conventional sense of humor that works great when she’s plowing through a list of questions intended to shake something novel out of a guitar player. But put her in front of an intellectual with impeccable comic timing, and Lucia comes off as rote. Like the time she asked Amy Sedaris, “If somebody put a gun to your head, what tattoo would you get?” And Sedaris answered with an are-you-kidding dismissal: “A gun?”

Awkward.

But in retrospect, the chemistry between Marcus-Lucia made Sedaris-Lucia look like Davis-Sarandon. Greil Marcus is given to crediting, say, a New Pornographer’s concert with, “restoring my faith in humanity.” In his most recent book, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, he compares Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address to Sleater-Kinney. Uh…yeah. He takes this rock stuff seriously. It’s a pretty dramatic departure from Lucia’s philosophy of “color me impressed.”

Their interview covered all the requisite ground: Greil’s comparison between British and American punk, Greil’s thoughts on Dylan going electric, Greil’s time as music editor for Rolling Stone, and Greil’s rock critic creed (“You can’t care if the artist likes you”). But the entire time there was a disconcerting rhythm to the back and forth between Lucia and Greil. It was hard to watch.

Q: Do you think Lester Bangs was writing at the perfect time? Do you think it would’ve been different if he was writing now, for Mojo or something?

A: No.

Q: Do you think that back when you were editing Rolling Stone, the writers were able to write about themselves as much as they were writing about the music, and maybe that’s changed?

A: No.

Q: Do you think that maybe Dylan left for awhile after his 1966 tour because he just didn’t want to get booed anymore?

A: No.

Q: Do you have any strong feelings about David Bowie?

A: No.

Greil expanded on each one of those “no’s,” often hilariously (with that cold, derisive hilarity of the academy). He went on a long digression about how much he loved Jakob Dylan, and he shocked the audience by asserting “Lucinda Williams is a fraud.” But as the interview went on, I started feeling for Mary Lucia, up there with her list of questions for the Great Man. I mean, maybe she hasn’t seen the Stones at Altamont, and maybe she’s not a Stanford professor who can quote D.H. Lawrence off the top of her head, but she’s been backstage at the Entry when Tommy threw a beer bottle at Bobby. She knows what punk rock is too. She just hasn’t written the book on it.

At one point, after Mary was earnestly giving Greil credit for the New Pornographer’s quote, saying she appreciated the “innocence” in it, he protested that there wasn’t anything innocent about his opinions. And then he sort of compared his critical thinking ability to Lenin’s (a quick Walter Sobchak is called for: “Shut the f*ck up, Donny! V. I. Lenin. Vladimir Illich Ulynov!”). Talking about how he keeps his critical focus, Greil referenced Lenin’s famous quote about how he couldn’t listen to Beethoven’s Apassionata because it made him “want to say sweet silly things, and pat the heads of little children.” It’s a great quote, and it really does say something about how we probably need hard-asses like Greil Marcus in the world—thinkers who are unafraid to be negative, who are unafraid to tell us the truth even if it bothers us (even if it’s only about how Rufus Wainwright probably stinks). But it also says something about how there’s something really insufferable about being the smartest guy in the room. Really, is there anything more pretentious than comparing yourself to V. I. Lenin? 

We need the Mary Lucias of the world too. Maybe Fakebook works so well precisely because she’s never the smartest person in the room. She’s standing there in our place, asking the dumb questions we would ask. Charlie Rose does the same thing on his show, I suppose.

But Mary is way cooler than Charlie Rose.

03.28.08: 42nd Street at Chanhassen Dinner Theatres

Leave it to director Michael Brindisi to breathe new life into an old chestnut like 42^nd Street. He treats this quintessential show biz musical like it’s real drama and ends up giving it a dark core, reminiscent of the 1933 movie on which it’s based, which was itself keenly reflective of the despair of the Depression.

The show follows the plot of the movie. Director Julian Marsh has been wiped out by the Stock Market Crash and is desperate that the new musical he’s mounting be a success to restore his fortunes. When his star, Dorothy Brock, breaks her ankle, it looks like the jig is up, until neophyte chorus girl, Peggy Sawyer, steps in and saves the day.

The book of the stage version, which premiered on Broadway in 1980, is amazingly sharp and smart, full of wit and more than its share of bitchy dialogue. It pokes gentle fun at the genre while still celebrating every cliché.

Brindisi’s clever staging expands on that premise, managing to be both satire and homage at the same time. That is an incredibly difficult line to walk, but Brindisi’s version does it expertly and, as a result, he creates a show that is both sardonic and full off heart, hilariously funny and genuinely moving.

It’s not hard to see Marsh, the aging director in search of a hit, as a stand-in for Brindisi himself. This is clearly very personal for him. Through Marsh, Brindisi focuses the silly show on the struggle of the artist, the act of creativity that gets the show up by sheer force of will. And this is reflected in David Anthony Brinkley’s performance. He played Marsh twelve years ago in Chanhassen’s last staging, but this time he creates a far richer character, darker and more wretched, who seems to unravel under the pressure. His rendition of “Lullaby of Broadway” has a palpable, inspiring passion.

Michelle Barber's Brock has that same passion and even a greater degree of humanity. She is every inch the bitchy temperamental diva, but as the character who really transforms over the course of the evening, she adds an emotional depth to the proceedings and carries much of the show. She demonstrated her acting chops earlier this year in Pen at the Guthrie, and they are on display here as well. She also gives a master class in how to belt out a ballad.

As Peggy Sawyer, Jodi Carmeli proves that she is anything but a neophyte, especially in her performance of the title song, which she makes into a real star turn. She is a diva in the making herself. Earlier, she manages to make the character’s innocence fresh, fully embracing the sentimentality of the role without ever becoming cloying.

It’s hard to imagine a stronger dancing chorus anywhere in the country, even on 42^nd Street. And choreographer Tamara Kangas puts them through their paces. From the first curtain, she challenges them with dances that are at once appropriately familiar and yet full of surprises. Her inventiveness keeps the eye captivated at every turn.

The show also demonstrates an amazing depth of talent in its strong supporting cast, which is full of Chanhassen regulars. Tony Vierling is charming as the juvenile, both in his spectacular dancing and in his ability to invest the implausible love story with real believability.

It’s up to Janet Hayes-Trow and Jay Albright, as the second bananas, the married writers of the show, to add an extra level of jocularity. Their performances in “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” are priceless. No one can mug or do the sad-sack shtick better than Albright. And Hayes-Trow’s wisecracking, tough-as-nails dame is a perfect foil.

Nayna Ramey’s set is not one of her more successful efforts. It is functional and efficient, but not particularly eye-catching. But it does provide an effective canvas for Sue Ellen Berger’s dazzling lighting effects. The pride of place for design elements, however, goes to Rich Hamson’s stunning costumes, particularly the flower gowns he creates for a faux-Ziegfeld Follies number.

This is not your grandfather’s 42^nd Street. It’s as silly as any old-fashioned musical should be, and yet carries with it an extra level of seriousness that leavens the foolishness and turns this into a very special celebration of the theatre.

42nd Street continues at Chanhassen Dinner Theatres through July 26.

3.28.08: Ali Selim and Will Weaver at the Minneapolis Central Library

Plenty of authors have felt burned by abysmal film adaptations of their books. Others have eked out a nice living selling stories to Hollywood and never expressed much guilt about all the dreadful movies that have resulted (that’s you, John Grisham).

Then there’s filmmaker Ali Selim and novelist Will Weaver whose collaboration (or lack thereof) on the 2006 indie hit Sweet Land is maybe a truer reflection of how such a partnership can work when the material and talents are well-matched. The two Minnesotans reunited last night for a jokey, fast-paced Talk of the Stacks discussion at the Minneapolis Central Library that was moderated by Cristina Córdova of rakemag.com and focused on the sometimes-indelicate art of film adaptation.

When Selim first read Weaver’s short story, “A Gravestone Made of Wheat,” in 1990, he knew immediately he wanted to make it into a movie. “I got to the end of the story and I cried.” At the time, Selim was a successful director of TV commercials (antacids were his specialty). KTCA owned the rights to Weaver’s story, so Selim waited it out two years until the one-hour film they had planned fell apart. The rights now his, he began collaborating with Weaver in what turned out to be an impractical attempt at co-screenwriting. “We were so nice to each other, we weren’t really making any progress,” Weaver said. “A film, like a novel, has to have a singular voice.”

Even as Selim took over sole screenwriting responsibilities, he regularly sent Weaver revisions until the author wrote him a polite cease-and-desist note telling him it wasn’t necessary. Weaver sensed that Selim’s screenplay was succeeding for all the reasons a 1989 made-for-TV movie of his novel Red Earth, White Earth had failed. Of that early experience with film adaptation, Weaver remarked, “It wasn’t pretty, that sort of contraction of the story—or dehydration, as I have come to call it.”

Sweetland, on the other hand, was an expansion, a twenty-two page story told in 110 minutes of film so deliberately paced that Weaver, upon seeing a rough cut of the movie, worried no one would want to sit through it. Selim’s screenplay retained the central premise of the short story (a 1920s Minnesota farmer and his mail-order bride-to-be are shunned when it’s discovered she’s German) but he bookended his elegiac romance with flashbacks to and from the 1960s to the present day. It was a choice Selim knew wouldn’t be easy for audiences, but it felt right creatively. “It’s the bumpiest part of the film,” Selim admitted, “but if you can get through it, it pays off in the end.”

Whereas Weaver wrote his story from the groom’s perspective, Selim focused on the woman. He also surrounded his couple with a whole community of characters and conflicts: a best friend who is about to lose his farm, a nasty town banker, a stern Lutheran minister. And he sloooooowed down time so his camera could linger on Hopperish compositions of fields and farmhouses. The sense of life unfolding at a natural pace, something that proves so elusive in adaptations of plot-driven novels, was one of Sweet Land’s many secret weapons.

Another, no doubt, was its location shoot in Montevideo, where a lean $1 million budget and twenty-four-day shooting schedule seemed marked by serendipity. Though he was a first-time feature director, Selim tapped friendships with actors Dan Futterman, Gil Bellows, and Alan Cumming to assemble a solid cast that included Ned Beatty, John Heard, Elizabeth Reaser, Tim Guinee, and Alex Kingston.

A very small group of “Will Weaver loyalists,” as Weaver calls them, criticized the film for the liberties it took with his story, but the champions outnumbered them, especially those in rural communities who felt “authenticated by this movie.” For his part, he said, he long ago made peace with Selim’s changes.

Selim, who just finished an adaptation of Pete Hautman’s, is hoping his next project is a script based on the life of Gene Roberts, an undercover cop who infiltrated the Black Panthers. Writing an adaptation is more interesting than writing an original screenplay, he said, even if it means always being judged by how closely your work adheres to the original. “People say that all the time. ‘I liked the book better. I liked the movie better.’ It’s like comparing apples and oranges, or apples and Fords. No, you don’t like the book better; you like books better. You don’t like the movie better; you like movies better.”

3.21.08: Bob Weir & Ratdog at O’Shaughnessy Auditorium

Since Jerry Garcia died in 1995 and the Grateful Dead disbanded, the living members of the Dead have splintered off to pursue other projects and form groups of their own. Lead singer and rhythm guitarist Bob Weir has reincarnated himself as pater familias of the band Ratdog, which kicked off its spring tour at O’Shaughnessy Auditorium on Friday night, raising the roof with a three-and-a-half-hour show clearly designed to both preserve the legacy of the traditional Dead concert experience and allow Ratdog to claim some musical territory of its own.

Rumor has it that Weir and friends chose to begin their tour in St. Paul because Al Franken is a Deadhead. To underscore the point, Weir and drummer Jay Lane spent part of the afternoon playing for a select group of Franken supporters at the home of Archie and Tina Smith, where they played, among other things, “Friend of the Devil” and “Brokedown Palace,” both of which could certainly be heard as oblique as references to the Bush administration. At O’Shaughnessy, rumor had it that Franken was in the house, but the only politico I saw in the flesh was Minneapolis mayor R. T. Rybak.

Ratdog—whose fans call themselves Boneheads—has been doing its thing for more than a decade now, but has had a strange evolution. In the late 1990s, Ratdog was an experimental vehicle that frequently flew off the rails and wrecked itself in an almost unlistenable cacophony of bleating saxophones and spastic rhythms. Since then, however, the band has abandoned most of its crazier inclinations and become a reliable fixture on the jam-band circuit, primarily playing tunes from the Grateful Dead vault re-tooled with a jazzier groove.

Friday night’s concert at O’Shaughnessy almost felt like a regression in a sense. The band only played two actual Ratdog songs; the rest were songs either the Dead or The Jerry Garcia Band used to play. The show felt almost too much like an actual Dead show, in fact, as if Ratdog thought it was somehow necessary on this tour to back up the train and hitch it more securely to the past before chugging ahead into the future.

The band’s opener, "Truckin’ ", the the best-known Dead song of all time, made it feel as if Ratdog was reaching out to anyone who had ever heard a Dead song in their entire life, which is most of the known universe. They followed it with a few other Dead tunes—“Loose Lucy,” “Señor” (Dylan), “Crazyfingers,” and “Big Boss Man”—before throwing in a couple of their own—“Lucky Enough” and “Jus’ Like Mama Said”—all mid-tempo tunes played ten or fifteen clicks of the metronome slower than the Dead did them, and with loping, leisurely solos that seemed calculated to ensure that no one would get lost along the way. It wasn’t until the end of the first set, with a barely recognizable rendition of The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows,” that Ratdog kicked it into third gear and gave the crowd a taste of the brilliance to come.

Deadheads know this pattern all too well. The Dead often played a listless, unremarkable first set to get warmed up and allow the various intoxicants the audience was ingesting to take effect. Then they would come out and blow your mind.

Ratdog followed a similar if somewhat mellower formula, playing an hour-and-forty-five minute second set that began with a couple of acoustic sing-alongs—“Dark Hollow” and “Me and My Uncle”—before kicking into high gear with an extended-jam version of “Corrina” which included a blistering solo by guitarist Mark Haran, a towering, contrapuntal turn on saxophone by Kenny Brooks, and a collective jam that had to convince long-time Dead fans that Bobby’s flame is far from burning out. These days, Weir is sporting a gray, well-trimmed beard, and wears nice slacks onstage instead of jeans, but he’s singing and playing as well as ever—though he doesn’t scream nearly as much or as loud—and is guiding this band with consummate professionalism. The new, improved Ratdog is tight and disciplined (which one could not say of the Dead themselves), and they have found a sound that is keeping those all-too-familiar Dead tunes fresh and alive.

The big bone Ratdog threw to Deadheads last night was the classic Dead closer of “Throwing Stones” into Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” a staple of their performances in the 1980’s and early 1990s that always ends with the audience singing the chorus “You know our love will not fade away,” along with the shave-and-a-haircut Bo Diddley clap that accompanies it. “Throwing Stones,” written by Weir, is probably the most political song the Dead ever played (it’s the politicians who are throwing those stones), so it made a kind of musical sense given the Franken connection.

Ratdog wasn’t about to bum anyone out with too much politics, though, so it sent the crowd into a frenzy with a boisterous, rafter-rattling encore of “Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad,” which, paradoxically, always makes everyone feel good. If you missed the show, don’t fret too much: Live CDs of every show on the tour are being sold here. Enjoy.

Set list:

1st set:

Truckin’

Loose Lucy

Señor

Crazyfingers

Boss Man

Lucky Enough

Jus’Like Mama Said

Tomorrow Never Knows

2nd set:

Dark Hollow

Me and My Uncle

Corrina

Althea

Iko Iko

Standing on the Moon

Throwing Stones

Not Fade Away

Encore:

Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad

3.20.08: Jersey Boys at The Orpheum

I took my mom to  Jersey Boys last night. She really wanted to go. She graduated from Robbinsdale in ’65, and used to go see local quartets exactly like Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons—four dudes with greasy hair and loud sport coats trying to sing like girls—at a dance hall on University called The Prom. You know, deeeeep in the past.

I know the show is critically acclaimed; It’s been an impossible ticket ever since in opened on Broadway in ’05. And I’ve heard there’s even an effenheimer cool factor—it’s set in Jersey, so they use tough guy Sopranos–type language (my mom dutifully parroted KSTP’s Rusty Gatenby geeky line about how “you hear a lot of f-words, and I don’t mean    fun.”). But really, how good could a musical about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons be? “Sherry Baby”? “Big Girls Don’t Cry”? I mean, those songs were good in Stand by Me, I guess. But it just seemed like the sort of show more suited to the cheesy stuff they used to have at the old Hey City Theater down the block rather than the Orpheum. It seemed like I was headed for bad dinner theater. And I was missing March Madness on top of everything else.

Did I make you wait long enough?

I loved it.

Best musical ever?

I mean, it’s a show about four duck-tailed Itals growing up in late ’50s New Jersey. Everybody was dressed like the opening third of Goodfellas, and they talked musical-speak, where every line is either a set-up or a punch line, but the story felt risky—it reminded me of The Wire season two, where a black show goes white. Like that Obama speech this week, when he talked about all the resentful white people who are bummed about affirmative action and inter-district busing and stuff. Well, I grew up on the pale elysian fields of White Bear Lake, so I’m not sure exactly what he was talking about—but after seeing Jersey Boys, I got it.

These four guys, the Jersey Beatles—Frankie Valli, Tommy DeVito, Nick Massi, and Bobby “The Genius” Gaudio—all came from a place in the country where there weren’t that many prospects. As Tommy DeVito (played with the perfect amount of sharpie smirk by Erik Bates) says early on, “You didn’t have many choices. You either joined the army, got mobbed up, or became a star.”

I mean, how is that different than Notorious B.I.G.’s hip-hop lyric from thirty years later: “Streets is a short stop/either you slingin’ crack rock/or you got a wicked jump shot”?

These Italians were fighting for the same scraps Biggie was fighting for in Brooklyn. In and out of jail for running card games or whatever other smalltime grift. Doing anything it takes to avoid working a straight job. Singing their Catholic asses off under street lamps, breaking into churches to practice on the organ, stealing moves from “the colored acts,” dropping out of trade school to write songs, and trying to convince some Jewish guy in Manhattan to record them and get them on American Bandstand.

The dirty history of rock ‘n’ roll is all there in this show—these guys were as big as the Beatles in the ’60s. They sold 175 million records. They cheated on their wives on the road. And fell apart over bad debt, not wussy, British-type “creative differences.” And their four outsized personalities—Frankie the Saint, Tommy the Hood, Bobby the Genius, and Nicky the Lazy Bum—are each distinctly drawn.

And yeah, those songs? “Sherry Baby”? “Big Girls Don’t Cry”? “Walk Like a Man”? “Who Loves You”? Way better than I remembered. I think the whole crowd—filled with a lot of people of my mom’s age and stage—morphed into one collective teenage girl on the strength of the Four Seasons’ harmonic voice meld. I’m sure this show can bring out the teenage girl in anybody, actually. The Four Seasons’ songbook is American opera—mass produced, gender-bending, and filled with off-the-dork hooks. If you don’t try hitting one Frankie Valli falsetto walking out of the theater . . .

Well, you’re a bigger man than I.

Jersey Boys runs through April 20 at the Orpheum Theatre.

3.18.08: The Drowsy Chaperone at Ordway Center

How many times has a Fringe show ended up on the stage of the Ordway? Well, at least once. Following its origins as a bachelor party entertainment , the musical The Drowsy Chaperone had an early incarnation as part of the Toronto Fringe Festival. The show betrays its Fringe roots in its general irreverence and outrageousness, but is now clothed in the guise of a big Broadway production.

This is a completely original show. “Original” is not a word you often hear applied to Broadway musicals these days, not in this era of movie adaptations and bloated Disney extravaganzas. But The Drowsy Chaperone is fresh and innovative, even though it trades heavily on 1920s nostalgia.

When the curtain rises, a musical comedy queen, identified only as Man in Chair, is sitting in his armchair, contemplating his old, original cast recording of the 1928 musical The Drowsy Chaperone. It’s a two-disc set of the entire show. (He enthusiastically shows off the jacket to the audience.) When he puts it on the turntable, the show comes to life right there in his kitchen.

The record is one of the running gags of the show. When the phone rings and he lifts the needle, the actors freeze. When the disc skips or repeats, it is reflected in the action. And when he puts the wrong record on, well, to tell would be to spoil it. Suffice it to say, it’s one of the highlights in a show full of highlights. The physical comedy is all carried off with great flair.

Man in Chair enthusiastically shares his arcane knowledge of the show, filling in all the background, reviewing the performances as they are happening, even giving us the warped performance histories of all the actors. Was there ever a more ingenious means of deconstructing a genre? His reflections might be obsessive, but they are also expressions of genuine love and bona fide wit.

The show itself is total fluff—as musicals of that period (with the very real exception of Showboat) absolutely were. Who can remember the plots of Gershwin or Porter shows? They were interchangeable. This one is the story of a wedding that almost doesn’t happen, but of course it does—along with a number of other romantic entanglements. But Bob Martin and Don McKellar’s book is full of enough really good gags, puns, and double entendres to carry it along.

It’s the songs that were the heart of those period shows, and the ones here by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison are tuneful and charming, a perfect evocation of the eras—from the tap number, where the dancers actually set the stage on fire, to the romantic ballads, to a tango number. The stage effects accompanying these numbers are not only spectacular, they are also quite inventive. The way they suggest an airplane taking off is a delight.

For all the spectacle of the show within a show, it is Jonathan Crombie, as Man in Chair, who walks away with the evening. Amidst all the artifice, he is a human being, wonderfully funny, but even more wonderfully real. His touching performance hits all the right notes. When he moved into the playing area and began mimicking the performer, I almost wept. How else can a true musical comedy aficionado enjoy an original cast album except by playing along? In his wide-eyed eagerness and enthusiasm, he was completely endearing.

The rest of the cast was also quite strong, creating an effective ensemble. A real treat was seeing Georgia Engel, playing the same role (Ted’s girlfriend, Georgette) that she did on The Mary Tyler Moore Show thirty years ago. The standouts were Andrea Chamberlain and Mark Ledbetter as the ingénue and juvenile—along with Nancy Opel, who was delightful as the title character.

The Drowsy Chaperone won Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Score, but not for Best Musical. Even hypothetically, that’s hard to understand. I mean, how can you have the best script and best songs, but not be the best show? It’s even more perplexing after you’ve seen the show. The Drowsy Chaperone is the most clever, most joyful—and, thanks to Crombie, sweetest—musical to come from Broadway in quite some time.

The Drowsy Chaperone continues at the Ordway through March 30.

3.15.08: Frozen at Park Square Theatre

When you pry open the mind of a serial killer, what do you get? It’s a question people never seem to tire of asking, one that provides fodder for endless movie and TV plots, fills twenty-four hour news cycles, and provides fuel for the eternal debate over the morality and efficacy of capital punishment. It also happens to be one of the questions at the center of Byrony Lavery’s Frozen, currently receiving a solid but problematic staging at Park Square Theatre.

Maybe it’s Patty Wetterling fatigue. Or one too many Jon Benet Ramsey cases. Or the fact that Frozen was written ten years ago, Byrony Lavery is British, and England doesn’t yet have pedophiles lurking around every corner waiting to snatch little children and do unspeakable things to them in order to satisfy their deviant desires. Whatever it is, it makes Frozen feel less like a play than a starter script for a television show that was rejected on the grounds that it didn’t have enough action, the characters talked about themselves too much, and the killer himself didn’t seem evil enough.

The play revolves around three people: a serial killer named Ralph (played by Terry Hempleman), a psychologist who is researching a thesis called “Serial Killing: A Forgivable Act?” (Linda Kelsey), and a woman (played by Karen Landry) whose seven-year-old daughter was abducted, raped, and killed by Ralph.

The gist of Agnetha the psychologist’s thesis is that most serial killers are victims themselves—of mental deficiencies, brain injuries, physical and emotional abuse, or all of the above—and are therefore not responsible for their actions. “The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom,” she says. The mother whose daughter Ralph killed doesn’t see it that way, of course—at least not in the beginning—and she would prefer to watch him fry in an electric chair than explain away his crimes as symptoms of a disease rather than the acts of a sadistic monster.

The play is acted well, especially by Terry Hempleman, who does a brilliant job of portraying a character who is creepy but charming, likeable on the surface but rotten underneath. Both Linda Kelsey and Karen Landry turn in polished performances as well. It’s just a shame that this ensemble didn’t have a more powerful script to work with. The issues at the heart of Frozen have been explored so thoroughly in American popular culture that it renders the play almost charmingly naïve. And in the end, what does one make of a play that tries to tackle issues that any number of TV shows—Criminal Minds, Numbers, Law and Order, Cold Case, Medium, take your pick—all treat in more interesting, sophisticated ways? The writers of these shows have been wracking their brains for years trying to come up with ever more bizarre pathologies for killers, and in the process they have created a kind of sociopath-entertainment complex. Psychological deviance is the entertainment industry’s biggest cash cow; if it weren’t, there would be no such thing as Saw 4.

At the center of all these dramas is the essential question: Why did he do it? For the most part, the entertainment industry likes sick, twisted, easy-to-hate killers who are obvious wackos. That way, people don’t go to bed confused about who the bad guy is. The best thing about Frozen is that it doesn’t serve up an easy answer. It implies that Ralph was an abused child and that a bump on his head may have somehow damaged his brain, and that these somehow caused him to ultimately become a child molester/murderer—but it leaves the core question open. Ralph did horrible things for which he isn’t very sorry, so it’s up to everyone else to figure out what to make of him. The trouble is, if society digs too deeply and actually answers the why? question of serial killers—e.g., that they all have a cortisone deficiency hindering the development of the pre-frontal lobe in their cerebral cortex—then we as a society have to re-examine how we apply the ideas of right and wrong, as well as crime and punishment.

These are the sorts of questions Frozen asks but cannot answer (the title refers to the emotional core of a serial killer’s brain), and this is both its strength as a dialectic on criminality, as well as its deficiency in the area of drama and storytelling. The set is framed by pieces scratched, cloudy plexiglass patched together into a wall of sorts, suggesting that this is not an issue we as a society see very clearly. You won’t see it any clearer after watching Frozen, but if you’re TV is on the fritz and you need a psycho-pathology fix, Park Square will happily sell you a ticket.

Frozen continues at Park Square through March 30, parksquaretheatre.org

3.13.08: Beyond Ballroom Dance at the Southern Theater

Ballroom dance aficionados and devoted fans of Dancing with the Stars will find much to love in Beyond Ballroom Dance Company’s latest concert. All the dances are here, all the flourishes—head-snapping waltzes, swivel-hipped Latin dances, dramatic hands, sudden but dreamy lifts—all performed by some of the best local ballroom dancers. But those unfamiliar with ballroom might not find this concert the most convincing introduction—at least in the first half of the performance.

Beyond Mariusz Olszewski’s pyrotechnic turns, the finer points of ballroom technique get lost on a novice. Close and intricate partnering, which is so difficult, can slip by unnoticed, while ballroom’s oddities catch the eye: super-dramatic, verging-on-abusive relations between partners; exaggerated male and female roles, the women vixens or princesses, the men gigolos or courtiers; the oiled smoothness of each swiveling, hyper-extended step; occasional bursts of day-old humor. It doesn’t help that the two longer pieces in the first half (a short dance skit for pregnant Julie Jacobson is the third) both ignore their medium, treating ballroom as if it were a clear glass, not a particular form with a particular history. Scott Anderson’s “Time of the Season,” set to a collage of seventies protest music, opens with a seemingly non-ironic waltz set to Edwin Starr’s forceful “War” (“what is it good for”). The dancers even line up with smiling salutes at one point. Gary Pierce’s “Lilac Wine” suite is much surer, but it still utilizes ballroom clichés without much awareness. Both pieces also look under-rehearsed, with bobbles and awkward partnering marring the smooth surface.

Luckily, Jean Marc Genereaux (of So You Think You Can Dance) comes to the rescue in the second half with “Puppetmaster.” Genereaux takes a simple scenario of character dolls and the woman who thinks she’s manipulating them, and breathes life into it. The costumes—simply sleek in the first half—also come to life, with a sparkly white bolero jacket for one dancer-doll, an over-feathered rock tutu in black for another, an innocent white debutante dress, and a see-through shirt worn with an eye-mask. Like any good ballet choreographer, Genereaux’s aware of his form, and he choreographs to its id. The deb doll’s sweet floating waltz is ballroom’s dream of love, while the rock doll’s acrobatic spin with the masked bandit is ballroom’s equally enthralling nightmare. Genereaux sets broken-doll awkwardness against smooth partnering and breaks up the machismo of the male dancers, all without leaving the ballroom medium. This is one path to follow in transferring competitive ballroom to the concert stage: choreography that works with, not simply glides over, the form itself.

Beyond the concert itself, part of the fun of attending this concert is seeing the local ballroom crowd in all their finery—and seeing them take their impromptu turn on the stage at intermission. (If you go, put on your dancing shoes and brush up on your foxtrot.) Watching amateur couples, skilled but natural, made me think that concert ballroom has a lot of territory left to explore if it can shed its competitive clichés—another possible choreographic path. Let’s hope Beyond Ballroom will explore both ways in future.

Beyond Ballroom Dance continues at the Southern Theater through March 16.

3.12.08: August Sander's People of the 20th Century at the Weinstein Gallery

It took me a while to make my way to the Weinstein Gallery for the first time. I finally stopped in a few months ago to see the Alec Soth exhibition, Bogota Days.  Once there I quickly realized why it’s a magnet for great shows. The space is spare and simple, the light natural. Nothing interferes with the art. It’s unusually accessible for such high-caliber fare. The current show, a sampling of photos from August Sander’s influential People of the 20th Century project, is no exception.

The show consists of twenty-three large reproductions of black-and-white photographs taken by Sanders during Germany’s Weimar Republic period following World War I. A painter stands at his easel pasteboard in hand. A bricklayer effortlessly balances a load of bricks. A pair of middle-class children pose in their knickers and ribbons. A high school student strikes a foppish pose, a cigarette dangling for his right hand. Sanders turns an anthropological eye on German society across social strata, his stated goal being “to see things as they are.” But his images are anything but clinical.

The arc of a country road receding into the distance behind a farmer in his Sunday suit, or the perfect symmetry, not to mention the unwitting humor, of three rumpled “revolutionaries” perched on a stoop. Sander excels at simple compositions that hint at a world alive with every sort of person. Even though his intentions may be anthropological and his mindset the product of early twentieth century thought with regard to photography as an art form, his images manage to capture the uniqueness of the subject, and this paradox keeps Sander relevant. It’s also why the Nazis banned his work in the 1930s—because it didn’t support the vision of Germany as an Aryan redoubt.

Fans of the portraits of Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon or the documentary sweep of Robert Frank’s Americans, will recognize Sander’s influence. The direct gaze of the subject, strong compositions striking in their simplicity, the ambitious effort to document a time and place with an objective eye—all are hallmarks of Sanders work, and all good reasons to see this show.

Through April 12 at the Weinstein Gallery.

03.09.08: Steve Earle at the Pantages

As a college-educated, Kanye-loving, card-carrying hipster, last night, I was having a classic whatwhitepeoplelike dilemma: Did I really have to Tivo The Wire finale so I could see Steve Earle? How would I be able to concentrate at a quiet, respectful acoustic show at the Pantages knowing I was going to be two hours behind on the finale of The Greatest Television Series Ever? What if somebody spoiled the ending for me on twitter or something?    

I bit the DVR bullet and ended up going--and I’m glad I did. Because I saw Earle play the best acoustic, radical leftist, folk-rock show I’ve ever seen. For two solid hours at a capacity Pantages Theatre, Earle put on an incredible performance, equal parts storyteller and virtuoso guitar/banjo/lute player. He played part of the concert alongside his new(est) wife, the beautiful and talented Allison Moorer. There were several incredible moments coming on the strength of his twenty-two-year-career, but many came on the strength of his newest record, the Grammy-winning, roots rock/hip-hop mash-up masterpiece Washington Square Serenade. Yes, I loved the new stuff.

It might have been one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.

But last night’s Steve Earle highlight was still a three-minute scene on a television show.

In season 5, Earle played Walon, a recovering addict who leads a Narcotics Anonymous meeting at a Baltimore church and acts as a twelve-step sponsor to The Wire’s hardest case, the fresh on-the-wagon junkie, Bubbles. Last night, the two men met on a park bench to talk about how much credit a man should get for doing the right thing. Walon handed over a crumpled piece of paper. Bubs read, “You can hold back from the suffering of the world. You have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.” Bubbles looked up, “Franzie Kafka, who’s he?”

“Some writer,” Earle says.

“Read his books?”

“F--k no.” 

In its three minutes this scene summed up the greatness of the show: the ability of its characters to put across highfalutin’ socially progressive ideals and then to puncture those ideals with the gallows humor of the real world. In this sense, even though Steve Earle is a Methodist from Texas and Wire creator David Simon is a Jew from Baltimore, as artists, they’re simpatico. They’re both storytellers obsessed with the large scope of history and the microscope of character, specifically how history’s losers simultaneously get screwed over and screw it up for themselves.

Back to what I’m actually getting paid to do: during the first half of Earle’s show, he sang songs off his early albums, songs about a junkie heading downtown with a pistol and a hunnert dollar bill, a horse thief getting ready to walk out into a shoot-out, and a convict sitting on death row for killing a gas station clerk. He sang these older songs solo, accompanying himself. But then he brought out a DJ for the new songs and it was hard to ignore: Steve Earle’s gone sort of hip-hop.

There were clues on his last album, Jerusalem, but his new record Washington Square Serenade has made this move explicit. And it’s hard not to think that The Wire must have had some part in this direction. Yes, his roots-hop version of Tom Waits’ “Down in the Hole,” complete with drum loops and scratching effects, was The Wire’s theme song this year (and he closed last night’s set with it), but Earle’s clearly in love with more than the drum loops, but with the message and aura of hip hop. Washington Square is an urban album--definitely fifty-year-old folkie urban, but urban. 

The Wire is a study of the Darwinian nature of an American city--of how the political and civil systems of Baltimore corrupt even the best intentioned, and how a city evolves while staying the same. And one of my favorite songs on Washington Square, “Life Down Here,” a song that Earle sang with his wife last night, also addresses the nature of a city. But instead of Simon’s perspective, the perspective of an ex-newspaperman, Earle addresses it from the perspective of a country boy who’s moved to The Village. Check out the talking blues introduction:

Pale male the famous redtail hawk performs wingstands high above midtown Manhattan
Circles around for one last pass over the park
Got his eye on a fat squirrel down there and a couple of pigeons
They got no place to run they got no place to hide

But pale male he's cool, see 'cause his breakfast ain't goin' nowhere
So he does a loop t loop for the tourists and the six o' clock news
Got him a penthouse view from the tip-top of the food chain, boys
He looks up and down on fifth ave and says "God I love this town."

I was thinking of that hawk when I got home after the concert to watch another predator, Marlo Stanfield. The way Marlo blew out of a real estate party on the harbor front to return to the corner. The way he disarmed a hopper and took a bullet on the forearm, and his black eyes, as he wipes the blood off his $5000 suit….

Greatest. Show. Evah.   

03.07.08: Older Than America screening at the Walker

Call me grumpy, but I think it’s time we stop pretending that we’re adventurous moviegoers. Ang Lee does not qualify as adventurous. Neither does Guillermo del Toro. Almodóvar, genius that he is, isn’t all that outside the mainstream.

For all the awards-season blather about the diversity in the multiplexes and at the Academy Awards this year, I see very little evidence to back it up. These days, if a movie is set in another country, in another language, and isn’t part of some studio’s Oscar campaign, it has a week-long shelf life….in a so-called art-house theater…after Juno has finished its three-month run.

All the more reason to get thee to the Walker Art Center for its indispensable Women With Vision series, a global hotpot of movies by and about people who are virtually invisible outside the film festival circuit. The three-week series opened last night with the premiere of Older Than America, a Minnesota-set thriller that takes on the physical and mental havoc inflicted on generations of Native Americans forced to attend federally funded Christian boarding schools. The stated mission of these schools, the last of which closed in 1975, was chillingly unambiguous: Kill the Indian, Save the Man.

Shot in the Cloquet area two years ago and moving on to a big premiere at South by Southwest  on Monday, Older Than America explores the ripple effects of cultural genocide on the lives of a small group of family and friends on the Fond du Lac Reservation in northeastern Minnesota. Central to its crowded story is the character of Rain, a teacher who has terrifying visions we quickly realize are tied to the trauma her mother experienced in the town’s since-shuttered boarding school. Rain’s mother was institutionalized in the local psychiatric hospital by a Catholic priest (Guthrie vet Steve Yoakum) who has a creepy sort of hold over Rain’s aunt and sinister plans for Rain as well.

First-time director Georgina Lightning (also the film’s co-writer and star) introduced the screening last night along with actress Tantoo Cardinal and Minneapolis’s own mini-mogul, producer Christine Walker. A Cree from Hobbema, Alberta, Canada who moved to LA to become an actress, Lightning has been nurturing the project in one form or another for years, frustrated at how little has been told about the boarding schools and how far-reaching its effects have been in the Native community where suicide, alcoholism, and abuse rates are off the charts.

The film does not yet have a theatrical distributor, has a mostly Native American cast (Wes Studi, Adam Beach, Dennis Banks, Tantoo Cardinal) and was financed largely by a California casino tribe. It was, Lightning is proud to point out, a sovereign production—not a product of Hollywood money or Hollywood thinking. “I never had anyone looking over my shoulder or questioning my choices,” she said during the post-show Q&A. “This story could never have been told this way if it hadn’t been told by a Native American filmmaker and if it hadn’t been made with Native American money.”

There’s a lot to admire about Lightning’s decision to call her own shots. Yet, curiously, by choosing to make a mystery story out of what is otherwise a thorny tangle of relationships and compromises born of a devastating legacy, she’s turned a powerful piece of history into a Hollywood genre film—one that calls for more plot, less character, no nuance. Her film suffers greatly for it. It feels rushed and the dialogs stilted.

Here’s the thing though: You’d be a fool if you underestimated the value of a film (and the power it can have) when it represents people and stories normally neglected by commercial filmmakers. If you’re used to being forgotten by Hollywood, such a film can be an oasis. Take a look at what’s playing at the Walker’s Women With Vision series these next few weeks. It’s time for something new.

Women With Vision continues at the Walker through March 29 with feature-length films and shorts from around the world and our own back yard.

03.07.08: 9 Parts at the Guthrie

Before 9 Parts of Desire last night, I stopped off for a drink in the Target Lounge, the tight little bar tucked back beneath the Endless Bridge. There are three specialty cocktails on the menu this March, this Women’s History Month, each honoring one of the three female leads performing on the three Guthrie stages. I ordered the astonishing jack and coke: simple, just Jack Daniels and Coca Cola over ice, garnished with—wait for it—nine maraschino cherries. One wet, red cherry for each character lead actress Kate Eifrig portrays in the one-woman show. By the end of the drink, I had nine stems jumbled in front of me on my cocktail napkin.

Overkill? Sure, but 9 Parts of Desire begins with a similarly heavy handed metaphor. Eifrig comes out to play in a gigantic sandbox, with only a few props strewn about: some charred books, empty picture frames and a portrait of Saddam Hussein, a large washbasin and a Persian rug. Her character, an Arab woman swathed in a jet-black burka, obscuring everything but the angular planes of her face, is carrying a basket of blackened shoes. In halting English, with a strong Iraqi accent, the woman explains that she has come to the ancient banks of this river to wash the soles of these shoes.

Soles, souls. Get it?

Ambitious in its austerity—written by the American-Iraqi playwright Heather Raffo—9 Parts gets much better after that first scene. And it must be a dream role for Eifrig. She gets to go Eddie Murphy in Coming to America on it, using only her physical and verbal gifts and what seems to be one of those wrap dresses that come with their own wear-it-101-ways! DVDs. She portrays a downright Churchillian ex-pat watching the war from London, chewing scenery in a regal Kathleen Hepburn accent. She does a tweenaged Iraqi girl that can distinguish between the sound of a RPG and a bomb dropped from a plane as easily as two different boy band singles. A hunched over old woman who takes us through a bomb shelter where her family was gruesomely boiled within, Slaughterhouse Five-style, by a Gulf War I incendiary bomb. An American woman trying to connect to her relatives in the middle of a firefight. And a decadent, bourgeoisie Iraqi artiste whose flamboyant Cruella De Ville cackle belies her humiliation by the government officials she sleeps with in order to keep painting her nudes.

There are some thrilling moments for Eifrig, and it must be incredibly rewarding to stretch as an actress in this way. That is what we love about one-woman plays, right? The volatile emotional hurly-burly, with an incredibly talented, Joan Allen-beautiful woman like Eifrig going to the wall for the audience. At a great one woman show, I feel like Marcello in 8 ½, when all of his ex-girlfriends are collected in one room (this is every man’s fantasy, deep down). A great one-woman play is an intoxicating experience.

But let’s not get carried away. Shakespeare asked, “Can we desire too much of a good thing?” and 9 Parts might be just that. It’s definitely timely (even though this news cycle, the war isn’t polling as well as the economy), and it has some compelling perspectives. For instance, the children wearing bullets jacketed with depleted uranium around their necks, leading to the despair of an Iraqi doctor overwhelmed by a steady flow of cancer and genetic mutations. Or that sultry bourgeoisie painter who chides us for injecting ourselves in an ancient dispute, who heckles the audience for our naivete, for daring to “Love like an Iraqi woman--to love like you can’t even breathe!” 9 Parts submerses you in facts and anecdotes told by a virtuoso performer, but at times, you feel talked at. For despite the multi-layered, po-mo collage of a story, there is no great unifying aesthetic experience. If you pay attention—and granted, most of us are no longer paying attention, so getting all these POVs in an hour and a half has a certain value—but if you do pay attention, you can get all of this stuff from the fog of multimedia available to us 24/7. It’s fine if you’re going to divide this war into pieces in an attempt to comprehend it, but you should leave us with something.

3.2.08: Arts of Japan at Minneapolis Institute of Arts

It’s almost spring. A recent trip to the west coast provided a vivid presentiment of the changes to come: cherry trees in full bloom. The pink blossoms reminded me not only of the season but of connections to the Pacific Rim. On a visit to the remarkable Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, we happened upon a kabuki performance the evening we visited, putting Japan squarely front and center in mind. I was already anticipating a trip to see the new MIA show, Arts of Japan: The John C. Weber Collection, and the Asian inspirations of my San Francisco foray sealed the deal.

The show, which features more than 100 pieces from the collection of Dr. John C. Weber, runs the gamut of Japanese art—from hanging scrolls to folding screens to sculpture and textiles. The large, paneled screens and dozens of robes stand out right away. Cherry trees show up, too, in small details and as the main subject of two mid-seventeenth-century screens. “Blossoming Cherry Trees in Yoshino,” with its verdant rendering of a wild cherry tree grove, is a particularly lovely example, capturing the distinctive curve of the cherry tree trunk and evoking a refined world view complete with golden, scalloped-edged clouds drifting across an eternal spring.

At the other extreme—and equally engaging in their way—are the screens depicting famous battles described in Japanese epics as well as shrines and other celebrated spots in Japan. Where the cherry tree grove feels timeless, these renderings of moments in history offer something specific. They tell a compelling story with an astounding level of detail, drawing the viewer in with both their style and substance.

The many examples of robes—the long flowing sleeves of the furisode, the katabira summer robe, and the uchikake wedding robe, to name a few—provide a very different but no less compelling canvas for both symbol and story. A light blue robe depicting night fishing with cormorants suggests a way of life. An apple-green robe decorated with a landscape plays on motifs from classical literature. A bright red robe with wisteria vines and golden waves evokes a highly refined view of the Japanese landscape.

The show also offers an abundance of silk hanging scrolls, including Utagawa Toyaharu’s “brine maidens.” The painting’s flirtatious subjects are hard to resist. The artist founded the Utagawa school, which influenced ukiyo-e painting and printmaking, a movement popularized in the Edo period by the
likes of Hokusai and Hiroshige, and the connection comes through noticeably in the shape of the waves with their curves and curls.

There’s much more to see. But for me, the cherry trees alone make this show worth the price of admission.

Arts of Japan: The John C. Weber Collection runs through May 25 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

And check out our slideshow of exhibit pieces!

03.01.08: The Fortunes of King Croesus at the Ordway

I need to eat my words—or at least choke on them a little. In the current edition of Mpls.St.Paul magazine, I questioned Minnesota Opera’s decision to stage the American premiere of Reinhard Keiser’s The Fortunes of King Croesus. It’s an obscure opera, I argued, hardly a great work, the music isn’t particularly sophisticated, and there are probably some good reasons why it’s been relegated to the dustbin of operatic history. But in performance, the work turns out to be unexpectedly engaging, if not exactly a masterpiece.

When the final version of Croesus premiered in 1730, Keiser was a major figure of the early German Baroque. He was an influence on the young Handel. But he was provincial, writing for the opera house in Hamburg, which had its own style. He did not subscribe to the developing international style of opera seria that Handel championed. So in the sweep of history, he was forgotten, somewhat unfairly as it turns out.

Ostensibly, the story is that of the myth of Croesus, King of Lydia, a wealthy and arrogant ruler who is defeated in battle by Cyrus, the King of Persia, and humbled. The primary focus, though, is on his son Atis and the love pentagon that surrounds him. This labyrinthine plot is typical of Baroque opera: Atis and Elmira love each other, but she is pursued by Orsanes, who later tries to stage a coup. He is loved by Clerida, who is in turn loved by Eliates, who Croesus leaves in charge when he goes off to war. As is typical of the Baroque, everything ends on a happy note, however implausibly.

This is certainly pleasant music, full of many clever and interesting moments. But while sounding Handelian, Keiser was not the musical dramatist that Handel was and the work suffers as a result, with long stretches proving tedious. The score has been significantly cut, but it could have been tightened even further.

The performances made as strong a case as possible for the opera. The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra was in the pit, rather than the Minnesota Opera’s usual pick-up orchestra, and it made a difference. SPCO played the intricate score with clarity and precision, not to mention a real sense of the period style. Conductor Harry Bicket led masterfully.

Of the singers, the Elmira of Susanna Phillips was the standout. She had an attractive soprano and a dazzling facility for coloratura. She was also a powerful actress, becoming the emotional center of the opera and giving the frequently superficial music real heart.

The novelty of the opera is that Atis is mute for much of the first act, until the shock of seeing his father captured restores his voice. Vale Rideout was a strong actor throughout, a convincingly ardent lover. When he sang, he revealed a warm and romantic tenor.

As Orsanes, baritone Brian Leehuber was also quite compelling, following up his highly praised performance as Tom Joad in last season's world premiere of The Grapes of Wrath. Once again, he commanded the stage, both vocally and dramatically.

For being the title character, Croesus had remarkably little stage time. But tenor Paul Nilon made the most of it. He convincingly portrayed the character’s transformation, making his emerging humanity truly moving.

The secondary romantic couple was less successful. As Clerida, soprano Jamie-Rose Guarrine proved musically faceless, unable to bring the music to life. And tenor Christian Reinhart had neither the voice nor the bearing to be convincing as the man Croesus would leave in charge in his absence.

As the stock comic servants, Dan Dressen and Andrea Coleman played the cynical, worldly-wise pair with tongue-in-cheek delight. They were underused.

This production was a big hit when it first premiered at Opera North in England, but to my eyes, it let the singers down. Director Tim Albery created individual moments that were quite effective, but he didn’t seem to have any overall dramatic concept to tie all those moments together. Too often, the singers were left stranded in long static stretches. And the truly dramatic moment of Atis finding his voice was completely passed over.

The production seemed to be set in the 1930s, with the Persians as the fascists and Cyrus costumed as Mussolini, which was problematic when it came to the happy ending. That speaks to the lack of visual as well as dramatic coherence. Leslie Travers’s costumes were spectacular, but seemed more interested in spectacle than in conveying dramatic meaning. (Elmira’s outfit was particularly ineffective, making her look more dowdy and matronly than a romantic heroine should.) His sets were likewise striking, but impractical. Strewing the stage with the fuselage of Croesus’s downed airplane created an obstacle course for the singers.

There were plenty of cheers, but this was the first Minnesota Opera production I can recall that did not get a standing ovation. That is, I think, telling of the audience’s reaction to this operatic novelty, and it matches my reaction. The experience was, at best, a qualified success.

2.29.08: My Favorite Kind of Pretty at the Southern Theater

Jon Ferguson’s latest physical-theater work, the love-fable My Favorite Kind of Pretty, takes place in a pretty, quirky pastel world inspired by the artwork of Minneapolis’s Jennifer Davis. Ferguson and his design collaborators—stage designer Erica Zaffarano, composer Pablo, and prop master Jim Hibbeler—recreate the way Davis unfolds her constantly surprising world in one small panel after another yet keeps a consistent overall feel. The bright clothes of the heroine–her fuchsia cable-knit bathrobe, her anklet socks—make her the perfect inhabitant for a miniature house with an even smaller white picket fence. A rainbow path leads to her door, and her closest friend is a pink songbird. But the cuteness has its ragged edge: a weather-balloon moon with a frowny side, a toothy monster-head out of a child’s picture book, a trio of rabbits with darling English accents who keep meeting horrible fates, and the songbird itself, which, when launched into “flight” by the heroine, simply lands with a thud on stage.

This milieu of sweetness and dark is matched by the onstage action, a mix of the metaphorical, the absurd, and the real. The hero gets jealous of the heroine’s previous relationship with the moon (it doesn’t help that the moon claims they slept together “five times a day”) and takes a toy train to get away, but his emotion is real enough. When he finally slays the green demon of his jealousy and brings its paper-bag head back to the heroine, she cries out, “You’re back! And you brought groceries!”

Ferguson’s characteristic directing style pays off handsomely here: the characters play to the house as well as to each other, reacting to stage props (wine glasses glued to a table for easier transportation, for example) with mild astonishment. But they are also completely, pathetically absorbed in their emotions (smiling beatifically during a love montage dotted with tissue paper hearts tossed by visible stagehands). Sara Richardson and Ferguson, as the hero and heroine, win the audience’s affection, but Jason Ballweber’s mercurial Fate steals the show with (among other things) his condor impersonation.

I wish Pretty had been showing around Valentine’s Day: The show seems made to give new life to that sticky sweet holiday. Somehow, Ferguson pulls off the trick of keeping us laughing at the characters without ever introducing contempt for them, with the wonderful result that Pretty plays like the love child of Monty Python, Jane Austen, and The Princess Bride. However, I would recommend Pretty not as a first date show but as a date-night show for couples, because its subject is not that pixie-stick rush of crush, but rather the stranger territory of long-term love.

One montage is a pitch-perfect encapsulation of marital tensions—their silliness as well as their tenacity. When the hero and heroine overcome their troubles and set sail on the roof of their little house, love-flag flying, you’ll want to overcome the argument about who does the dishes and kiss your spouse. And if the show ends with a completely unexpected baby arriving via USPS, it’s easy to forgive Ferguson for the non sequitur: by that time, his own new baby (with versatile performer Megan Odell) was sleeping soundly in the back row of the house.

Jon Ferguson’s My Favorite Kind of Pretty continues at the Southern Theater through March 9