4.28.08: Judy Chicago at Flanders Contemporary Art

I was a little surprised to encounter a capacity crowd at last Wednesday’s lecture at MCAD by artist Judy Chicago. A diverse crowd at that—young and old, male and female, hip and conventional. Chicago is, after all, synonymous with Feminist Art, and supposedly we’ve moved on to a post-feminist era. Chicago pointed this out herself by way of introducing the topic, noting that many people, especially young women, consider feminism and feminist art passé. And she’s here to tell those people how wrong they are.

Chicago started by pointing out that the National Gallery collection in Washington D.C. is still overwhelmingly made up of the work of white males, a sobering fact for young women leaving what she describes as the “protective womb” of art school. She also noted that a million people have viewed her seminal work, The Dinner Party, over the years.

Chicago’s Dinner Party, which she completed in 1979, is the subject of a new show at Flanders Art Gallery. The actual piece—a triangle-shaped banquet table with thirty-nine settings—remains on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The table’s sides each represent a chunk of time from prehistory to the present. We start with “Primordial Goddess” and end with “Georgia O’Keefe.”

The show at Flanders consists of a large color photograph of the permanent exhibit and drawings of the design of each plate, along with illuminating text and a color photograph of the place setting. The Dinner Party draws you in with a feast of symbol and detail. For example, the Susan B. Anthony place setting features a crazy quilt border, a nod to a popular folk style of the time, and a red, fringed triangle representing both the symbol of the women’s movement and the red shawl Anthony often wore. The plates themselves echo the artistic style of the period—the plate devoted to Theodora, the empress of the Byzantine Empire, incorporates mosaic.

During her talk at MCAD, Chicago offered an abbreviated history of her career and of the evolution of Feminist Art that touched on some of the in-fighting among feminist scholars, which ironically relegates her own work to the margins for a period in the 1990s when, she says, women’s studies scholars got very, very confused. Chicago makes the case that Feminist Art encompasses far more than the work of a handful of women artists in the last few decades. She points to recurring compositional tendencies and visual motifs such as mirrors to underscore her claim that there is a specifically female point of view in art.

“I was told I couldn’t be a woman and an artist, too,” says Chicago. She first internalized this message, she says, but eventually rejected it wholesale and devoted her career to carving out a place for women in art history. With Feminist Art, Chicago and her contemporaries set out to create a counter iconography, to bring women to the table, so to speak. What better way to do than a dinner party? 

Judy Chicago at Flanders Contemporary Art continues through June 14.

4.25.08: Gem of the Ocean at The Guthrie

The last time I saw August Wilson alive was in the bathroom of the old Guthrie, minutes before the premiere of Fences, which until last night was the first and only production of Wilson’s work the Guthrie had ever done. As Wilson was washing his hands, and I mine, I felt compelled to say something, so I said the only thing I really could, which was, “Good luck tonight.” Most people in that situation would say “thanks,” but Wilson didn’t; he just nodded his head and gave me a little half-smile, as if to say, “Luck will have nothing to do with it.”

That was in 1997, and it was an historic night because until then The Guthrie had shunned Wilson’s work, an oversight many thought was egregious (and some thought outright racist), especially when the theater responsible for developing and expanding upon Wilson’s genius—Penumbra—was sitting right in the Guthrie’s back yard. During the Guthrie’s Garland Wright era, tensions were strained even tighter because Wright had publicly acknowledged that he did not particularly like August Wilson’s plays. Wright further maintained that Wilson was a contemporary playwright who had yet to stand the test of time. The Guthrie was a “house of classics,” Wright maintained, so it was under no obligation to produce the work of a playwright who had yet to achieve “classic” status.

Unfortunately, Wright took this position while he was busy producing such contemporary (and most would argue lesser) white playwrights as Max Frisch and David Storey, so his argument rang a bit hollow. The bottom line was that Wright didn’t like Wilson’s work, and that was that.

Until Joe Dowling came along. One of the first things Dowling did when he became the Guthrie’s artistic director was to extend the community olive branch to Penumbra, allowing Lou Bellamy and company to produce Fences on the Guthrie thrust, to widespread acclaim. For reasons I cannot fathom, and am reluctant to read anything into other than “oops, our bad,” that production of Fences does not appear in the official record of Guthrie plays—at least not the one on their website. Nevertheless, since 1997 Wilson’s reputation has continued to grow; his Century Cycle is rightfully considered one of the greatest achievements in American letters; and Penumbra artistic director Lou Bellamy has established himself as the most direct spiritual link we have to Wilson’s artistic soul.

So it should come as no surprise that Gem of the Ocean is itself a gem. Set in Pittsburgh in 1904, it is chronologically the first of the Century Cycle plays, and it addresses the struggles faced by African Americans whom the law has technically set free, but who are finding that the American power game is rigged. Freedom means paying for your own rent and food, which means getting a job, which means working for someone else—someone who is most likely white—and if the job they give you doesn’t put enough money in your pocket to cover rent and food, it means you have to steal a few things to survive, which, according to the same laws that set you free, makes you a criminal. “What good is freedom if you can’t do nothin’ with it?” laments Solly Two Kings—which is a theme that runs through the heart of Wilson’s Century Cycle.

Like many August Wilson plays, Gem of the Ocean starts slow and builds, but build it eventually does. Wilson takes his time establishing characters and laying the seeds of what will become the plot, and, like all of his plays, Gem ultimately delivers a powerful psychic wallop. The entire play takes place in the home of a woman named Aunt Ester, who is supposedly 287 years old. At first, the question of her age is understood as a metaphorical connection to the past, but by the end of the play that connection becomes alarmingly literal.

I am being deliberately vague because I don’t want to spoil it for you. Suffice it to say that in every way, Penumbra has brought it’s A game and A team to this play. James Craven (Solly Two Kings), Abdul El Salaam El Razzac (Eli), T. Mychael Rambo (Caesar), and Marvette Knight (Aunt Ester) have carried so many Penumbra productions over the years that it’s great to see them owning the Guthrie’s Proscenium Stage. The rest of the cast Austene Van (Black Mary), Terry Hempleman (Rutherford Selig), and Cedric Mays (Citizen Barlow) are solid as well, proving once and for all that Penumbra and director Lou Bellamy are the finest and most nuanced interpreters of the August Wilson canon in the entire world—and that is no exaggeration.

Gem of the Ocean continues at the Guthrie through May 18.

4.22.08: A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Guthrie

About forty-five minutes into The Guthrie’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I was asking myself, “Dude, is Shakespeare played out?”

This was way before a be-spandexed Oberon, wearing a silver wig that would’ve worked on Monday Night Raw, rocked his soliloquy beneath a crystal ball like an Elizabethan Dee Snider.

Guthrie artistic director Joe Dowling gets a lot of kudos for his “fresh and sexy” take on Midsummer, some of it justified, some not so much. This is basically a revival of his 1997 interpretation, with some even more impressive visuals—the faeries have even incorporated some Cirque du Soleil-style high-wire acrobatics into their heavy metal pose-striking—and updated (sort of) cultural references.

The Strib and the PiPress have both gushed about Midsummer “pop-culture” references, which include “everything from Riverdance to the Macarena.”

Oh, and how about Barbarella? And Twisted Sister?

The faeries’ gags weren’t the only ones to have grown whiskers. In Midsummer’s venerable play-within-a-play, a troupe readies a performance of “The Sad Tale of Pyramus and Thisbe.” Well, one of the actors drank cans of Premium in a Gophers jersey, and another marched into the woods in his Boy Scout uniform. We get it, Joe—they’re fools.

But I want to be fair. For one thing, J. D. has to play it somewhat broad: he needs to fill three theaters within a $100 million complex on a daily basis. To complicate matters, he has to put butts in the seats with plays that were written in 1588. For another thing, we’re all about constructive criticism on The Morning After. So I went back and thought about which Dowling productions I’ve liked and which ones I haven’t. Then it occurred to me: It’s only Dowling’s Shakespeare comedies that I have disliked, mostly because they are so irritatingly cheesy. But if I like Dowling’s other work, maybe Shakespeare is the cheesy one, not Joe.

Fair question then: Can Shakespeare be funny in the   Judd Apatow era?

The afternoon after AMND, I went to the latest Apatow movie, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Like every decent comedy since Meatballs, Sarah Marshall is getting mixed reviews, but trust me (and by this point, you can trust the Apatow brand), it’s a pretty funny movie. It’s your standard farcical premise: dude gets dumped by girlfriend/dude goes to magical island to forget girlfriend/dude runs into girlfriend with new dude/old dude decides to court new girlfriend/old girlfriend notices old dude courting new girlfriend/old girlfriend dumps new dude to court old dude.

Remind you of anything?

The romantic logic isn’t exactly the same, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall doesn’t have any faeries, but it does have big, fat Hawaiians. And a hot chick that falls in love with an ass. And jokes that actually hit. Sure, there were people laughing at the Guthrie, but there was too much “I better laugh loudly or the people around me are going to think I’m stupid” laughter. (Yes, there is such a thing as Shakespearean laughter inflation.)

Regardless, the relevant dilemma remains: Is “When life gives you lemons, just say f*&k the lemons and bail” really that much funnier than, “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was”?

Uh . . . my point is—it’s all in the delivery. Shakespeare’s words can hang with Judd Apatow’s or Kevin Smith’s or Wes Anderson’s. Nick Bottom is the brilliant archetype for every pompous ass inhabited by Adam Sandler to Will Ferrell to Seth Rogan. Look, Puck was Bart Simpson four centuries before Bart Simpson.

Dowling’s Midsummer works when Dowling allows his actors to let the awkward friction—the heat of all great comedy (Freud argued that the mechanism of the joke, like the dream, was to facilitate the safe release of frustrated psychic energy)—to develop naturally. There are a couple of moments when Namir Smallwood’s Puck gives it back to the self-serious Faerie King, Nic Few’s Oberon, almost under his breath. But these subtle disses are overwhelmed by all the smoke and sequins and cheesy sound effects. And Stephen Pelinsky, as Bottom, works miracles with the props that he’s been given. But seriously, does Shakespeare really need to do prop comedy in every single scene? Sarah Marshall barely needed anything—in fact, its funniest sight gag comes courtesy of a little (okay, a lot of) full frontal male nudity. The rest of it was just words delivered with the right amount of whatever. But the comedy in Dowling’s Midsummer is stretched thin by dated cultural references sent up with the sophistication of a watermelon mallet. Puck doesn’t need a new rap—just fresh beats. (Yes, unfortunately, Puck actually does rap in this show.) 

Like the sonnet in the fourteenth century, twenty-first century comedy has come to be guided by what the Italians referred to as sprezzatura—making hard work look easy. And comedy is not easy. But Dowling is working so hard up there that you wish you could cringe under one of those plastic sheets they used to hand out at Gallagher concerts—there’s nothing funny or clever about what’s being thrown at you, you just want to avoid getting shtick all over your theater best.

Mr. Dowling, respectfully, rent Juno.

4.21.08: Minneapolis-St.Paul International Film Festival

I see a lot of movies. New releases in the theaters, old stuff on DVD, curated programs at such places as the Walker, DVR detritus from the Sundance Channel and IFC. Every April, when the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival unleashes a hundred-some films that demand attention, I can’t help but wonder when my vitamin D levels will bottom out. 

The two-week festival of global film, itself perennially in danger of flat-lining, kicked off over the weekend with about sixty titles, most of them playing at festival hub St. Anthony Main Theaters. Lobby bottlenecks and rump-busting seats aside, the movies I saw were well worth the contained chaos. I spotted festival-goers carrying seat cushions and unsanctioned theater snacks to weather their brutal screening schedules, and more than a few looking permanently disoriented. All considering, I think I held up pretty well.

The first screening for me was Traveling With Pets , a hypnotic little movie from Russia that had the arc of a good short story and some of the most beautiful cinematography I’ve seen all year. Russian stage actress Kseniya Kutepova (a Julianne Moore doppelgänger in a headscarf) plays a rural woman whose whole world opens up when the foul man she was sold to when she was sixteen drops dead. Newly liberated, she buys a flat-screen TV, punches up her wardrobe, and makes a not-so-elegiac pyre of the deceased’s belongings.

When the neighboring town’s resident cad tries to convince her he’s domesticated enough to share her bed, she tells him she doesn’t want another man but would appreciate a baby. Instead, a stray dog and a baby goat become her companions in the crumbling railroad-side hut she slowly begins to make her own. Gorgeous, lilting camerawork and a restrained tone that is by turns comic, sad, and slightly magical make for a quiet story of self-discovery that refuses to shortchange its dynamic, searching heroine with easy emotional payoffs. Put this film at the top of your Netflix queue if by some miracle it finds a U.S. distributor.

Restraint is also a strength of And Along Came Tourists , a German import that follows a young Berliner assigned to a year of civil service at Auschwitz, where he’s charged with caring for a concentration camp survivor who never left the camp. The old man has become the town’s go-to living history, delivering testimonials to indifferent school kids and the German execs that recently bought the town’s chemical plant. He certainly doesn’t want a young city kid, especially a German, intruding in his life—and the kid, who had hoped for a placement in Amsterdam, doesn’t particularly want to be there either.

All the elements fall into place for some fairly conventional (and, frankly, American-style) turns of plot. Our protagonist finds love with a young translator who grew up in the town and can’t wait to get out…by the third act. The boy and the old curmudgeon call a truce brokered over petty domestic arguments. And the kid intervenes when he learns the Auschwitz museum wants to push the old man out of his job repairing the suitcases that were taken from Jews.

There’s not a lot of dimension to the characters, but director Robert Thalheim plays the drama in a low key and has a capable cast that allows him to respectfully tackle the uneasy marriage of tourism, restitution, and resentment that permeates modern-day Auschwitz without overplaying his cards. His film is interested in what it means to live with and honor history, but it just as clearly wants us to know that it’s important not to let that history define us. This seems like a fairly noncommercial premise even in today’s indies-everywhere market, so kudos to the programmers for plucking it out of the festival circuit ether.

Talk about box office poison, the grim, low-budget Chinese film Little Moth  (playing again at 5:20 p.m. on April 29 at St. Anthony Main) turned out to be my Saturday night date with dystopia. A no-good husband and wife buy an eleven-year-old girl so she can beg for them on the streets. The little girl can’t walk, but the man won’t let his wife spend money on medicine that could treat her paralysis.

Soon, another child trafficker enters the picture, unhappy that the couple is working the same block where his one-armed boy also begs. One night, the man drinks too much and the boy escapes with the little girl on his back. The wife and shady-man-number-two take off after them, and the story only gets bleaker.

With no musical score to cue our disgust; a cast of amateur actors; and jittery, handheld camerawork, the film has a nonjudgmental, documentary-style aesthetic that isn’t quite so much detached as it is buffering. Imagine what Steven Spielberg would have done with the same story and one-hundred-times the budget. It’s not a pleasant thought.

The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival continues through May 3 with films, parties, and special events.

4.19.08: The Current’s Fakebook: Chuck D and Brother Ali at the Fitzgerald

Last night at the Fitzgerald Theater, after Brother Ali killed it with an extended a cappella version of “Letter from the Government,” Chuck D turned to Mary Lucia and said, “I really don’t see anything this good on television anymore—it’s like a cool talk show from the sixties.”

I realize The Current’s Fakebook series is supposed to be for the kids, and even I’m not old enough to remember Merv Griffin without using YouTube, but Mr. D is right: Fakebook does seem like a throwback to an earlier format of variety show. Brother Ali and Slug were the musical entertainment last night, and after Slug performed two numbers off his latest Atmosphere record, When Life Gives You Lemons… Lucia called him over to the couch, and Slug-o proceeded to tell a hilarious story about how teaching Tom Waits’s son how to rap culminated in getting Tom Waits himself to beat box on the new Atmosphere record.

Actually, forget Merv Griffin—you’re not going to hear a story like that anywhere but Fakebook. Not on The Daily Show, not on Ferguson, not even on other local talk shows aimed squarely at younger, hipper, underserved demos, like Drinking with Ian.

Which is why I hope MPR brings the series back next fall.

Let me clear something up from my last review, where I wrote about my problems with Lucia as a host (and received anonymous hate email this morning for daring to drink beer backstage last night in lieu of said review). Despite some of my quibbling over Lucia’s hosting skills, FAKEBOOK IS THE MOST ENGAGING BOOK EVENT OUTSIDE OF A DAVE EGGERS BOOK EVENT. Ok? Look, I’m not the president of Lucia’s Hateration. I care, people. I really, really care! And now I’m worried, because there seems to be a lot of thinking going on at The Current these days—thinking on everything from the programming of the playlist to the programming at the Fitz, even thinking on how the Current fits into MPR’s proverbial “mission” itself. And while thinking is usually a good thing, let’s not overthink this one: Do you think (well, other than you, you nasty anonymous emailer) that you still want smart, hipsterish twentysomethings and thirtysomethings crossing the river to go to book events, to possibly drink beer at these book events, and to possibly return to Minneapolis to talk about books? Well if you do, bring back Fakebook next fall, please.

Now that the community consciousness-raising portion of my review is over, let’s move on…to hating on Lucia.

I kid, I kid. Kind of. Because after listening to Chuck D chop it up with Lucia last night, I’m pretty sure that it’s impossible to keep this guy on topic. Lucia tried valiantly to curtail Chuck D’s half-hour rant on Chuck D’s love of geographical knowledge, only to have him veer off into a digression in which he proved how much he knows about Minnesota by telling everybody that he was the one who told Busta Rhymes to name himself after former Vikings wide receiver Buster Rhymes. 

I know, that digression actually was kind of awesome. And so was Chuck’s digression about how Eddie Murphy and Dr. J lived down the street from where Chuck’s family grew up in Long Island, and about how Charlie Murphy was always the funny Murphy—already telling those stories about Rick James back in the eighties—with the only caveat being, “Charlie Murphy had a tendency to rob you.” And Chuck rambled through a précis on 1987, the first great year in rap history, and he expounded on the strange greatness of Flavor Flav, and what it was like working with Rick Rubin and Spike Lee in their respective heydays. But when it came time to cut the affable talk-show shit, and really pull a number-one-Public-Enemy-it-takes-a-nation-of-millions-to-fear-Chuck D moment and speak on what’s going on right now, in what already seems to be a pretty historical 2008, (and to be fair to Lucia, she did try to steer him towards politics), he really kind of blew it off.

It felt like a missed opportunity. Especially on a night that opened with Brother Ali dedicating an incendiary reading (well, when is the good Brother anything but incendiary?) of “Uncle Sam Goddam” to the Reverend Wright, and on a night featuring the performance of two new Atmosphere songs on which Slug’s ability to channel the bitter classes has never seemed more timely or apropos. Maybe Chuck D was just leaving the politics to the Minneapolis guys.

Shrugs. It was still better than anything on TV.

4.16.08: Voltage: Fashion Amplified at First Ave.

When rock stars and models get together, it’s usually the models who make the rock stars look good. Last night, at Voltage: Fashion Amplified, it didn’t quite work out that way. Voltage is an annual showcase of the best up-and-coming TC design scene (Abby Van Ness has the fashion lowdown on StyleParlor) accompanied by the music of up-and-coming TC bands. The models—and the clothes—are supposed to take center stage, and the six live bands are essentially arm candy, there to make the girls look better and add a little oomph to the show.  Together, good music and good fashion should have made for a hot night. But as many of the girls and fashions fell flat, the bands were left to pick up the slack—and not everyone was up to the task.

Zibra Zibra was, but even they fought to keep the energy level up. Outfitted in spandex superhero suits, purple crotchless cowboy chaps (which made me uncomfortable, even with tights underneath), and a zebra-striped onesie courtesy of a featured designer (all the bands were outfitted by designers), the clothes more than matched the band’s frenetic vibe. While the boys in the band were thrashing around onstage and having a ball, the inexperienced models, donning hippie-ish fashions from Standard Issue and Pomije, seemed lost and uncomfortable on the runway. The crowd wasn’t into it, either, mostly because First Ave. had packed the hall so tightly that moving—much less dancing—was out of the question. By the time Zibra Zibra left the stage, so much energy had drained out of the room that the show’s voltage meter was barely twitching.

And it stayed that way through the next two bands. The Haves Have It, led by two chicks with electric guitars (full disclosure: I’ve never liked chicks with electric guitars), failed to connect with the crowd. The music seemed to fit seamlessly with the Belle and Calpurnia Peaches fashions—loud and disjointed—but it wasn’t exactly an aesthetically pleasing match. Then, with the crowd already in a mild coma, it came time for the show’s “breather,” wherein pretty, romantic fashions by Max Lohrbach and George Moskal met with the band Bella Kosha. Unfortunately, the band sounds just like its name: pretty kosher. No risks, just two girls (vocals, violin) in snooze-inducing black dresses supported by three guys (guitar, percussion) in snooze-inducing tuxedos pants playing a somnambulant set marred by technical problems.

By that time people were yawning and I was reduced to begging for more crotchless chaps. What I got instead was local rock-scene staples White Light Riot, but that was enough. Dressed up like Panic At the Disco (long, colorful velvet coats, waistcoats, top hats, etc.), White Light came to the stage with all the gusto of a band that dreams of playing Madison Square Garden. Their energy seemed to inspire the girls onstage, many now feeling comfortable on their third trip down the runway. Some even had a spring in their step while modeling Amanda Christine and local Project Runway alum Katherine Gerdes. And, since the crowd had been cut by a third after the two previous sleepers, there were even—gasp!—hints of movement throughout the thinned crowd.

Then, as if the show’s producers could sense they had revived a dying crowd, they sent hip-hop hybrid MC/VL to add the final shot of adrenaline. Tall, skinny, curly-haired Viscious Lee in white jeans, white wind jacket, and short, mustachioed Mighty Clyde in a red version of the same, the boys looked like they’d stepped out of a Def Jam look-book circa 1985, and had a sound to match: Beastie Boys and Run-DMC-inspired jams that sampled everyone from AC/DC to Aretha.

With the freedom of two mikes and no clunky guitars, MC and VL took command of the runway before the models came out, strutting, rapping, and using every inch of available space to whip the crowd up. By the time the girls started down the runway, donning Swank Dollar and Red Shoe’s eighties-inspired outfits, the ladies were strutting as well, energized—and occasional harassed by—the emcees, who seemed to be living out a model-filled rap video fantasy. The crowd went wild—at least as wild as they were going to get—dancing, waving and, for the first time all night, actually smiling.

The show should have ended there. It was 11 p.m., and three hours of fashion-rock fusion felt like more than enough. So, as the last band of the night, The Birthday Suits, took the stage, most of the crowd, including my ride, decided to dip out early. From what I hear, I didn’t miss much, and the buzz on Seventh Street was all about the two white-boy emcees who saved the show.

Maybe next year Voltage should stick to the hip-hop scene. Move over rockers, the emcees are coming to steal your girls.

4.15.08: Standard Operating Procedure and Errol Morris at the Walker Art Center

To most eyes, the Abu Ghraib photos offer irrefutable documentation of an inhumane horror show that needs no further contextualizing. The photos say it all. Or do they?

Errol Morris’s arresting new documentary, Standard Operating Procedure , digs into the content and context of the most infamous of those photos and finds that for all the abuses perpetrated at the Iraq prison, it was photography that was ultimately deemed the crime.

In the Bush administration’s preferred narrative, Lynndie England and her fellow “bad apples” were rogue military police whose hundreds of digital photos offered ample evidence of aberrant but isolated behavior. We know now that the soldiers of the 372nd MP Company were following orders from military intelligence whose own directives to “Gitmo-ize” Abu Ghraib were coming straight from the office of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

While the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side   follows the administrative trail sanctioning torture, Standard Operating Procedure investigates the photos that exposed them to the world. Who took the photos, when, why, and what was just outside the frame? Morris’s film argues that the photos themselves can’t tell us anything for certain about Abu Ghraib because, like every photo, they were stripped of context the moment they were taken. We can tap the debatable memories of those who were there at the time, but we can’t rely on those isolated still images to come anywhere close to telling us the whole truth.

Of the film’s many remarkably intimate interviews (including a surprisingly frank one with England herself), Sabrina Harman’s stands out. The smiley young specialist is a regular, eerie presence in several Abu Ghraib photos, always offering a cheery thumbs up to accompany the grisly scenes being staged for the camera. In one shot, she strikes a pose next to the bloody corpse of Manadel al-Jamadi, a prisoner who was beaten to death by a CIA interrogator and then thrown onto ice on the shower room floor before his body could be snuck out of the cellblock.

In the film we learn that Harman took twenty tightly cropped, gruesome shots of al-Jamadi’s corpse—pictures so detailed they look like they could be the work of a forensic pathologist. Was she amassing documentation so she could report the murder, or was she collecting sick trophies to take back home? Morris excerpts letters Harman wrote to her partner in the States that clearly indicate the former. There’s plenty of rationalization and self-preservation in them, but they’re hardly the words of a monster.

Morris talks to four of the other seven implicated MPs (he wasn’t allowed access to the two in prison, Charles Graner or Ivan Frederick) and to indignant former brigadier general Janis Karpinski; contract interrogator Tim Dugan; and Brent Pack, the special agent charged with analyzing the photos for the military. Morris’s 116-minute film is distilled from 200 hours of interviews, enough research to produce a companion book  with New Yorker contributor Philip Gourevitch that will be published in May and also fuel a series of thoughtful essays on his New York Times blog.

The film never feels overwhelming because, like the best of Morris’s documentaries, it’s a piece of cinematic detective work that uses a whole arsenal of feature filmmaking tools—3D graphics, computer animation, elaborately constructed sets built on sound stages, ghostly re-enactments, and, of course, the director’s own specially designed Interrotron camera—to reconstruct events for which there are often multiple, competing narratives. Morris’s weirdly seductive style of documentary filmmaking is sober Frontline journalism that’s been channeled through the lens of David Fincher. The miracle is that a man as gifted as he is so regularly makes movies about subjects that matter.

If you were lucky enough to attend the advanced screening of Standard Operating Procedure Tuesday night at the Walker (Sony Pictures Classics limited it to a small group), you also got the rare treat of hearing a chatty Morris and his longtime set photographer, Nubar Alexanian, talk about the movie, photography, and why Bush should be impeached. I’d give you a recap, but as Morris reminds us, my re-enactment would hardly be adequate.

Standard Operating Procedure opens May 23 at the Lagoon Cinema .

4.12.08: Milos Forman at the Walker Art Center

Milos Forman will forever be the guy who makes movies about eccentrics and outsiders, the Czech émigré who loves American costume dramas, the filmmaker who gave Courtney Love her detox wakeup call. He has a slew of awards (including two Best Picture and Best Director Oscars) and is a magnet for A-list actors, yet he isn’t a name brand in this country like Scorsese or Coppola. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t have a visual aesthetic that screams, nor a well-funded enough publicist. Maybe it’s because his films aren’t as easily categorized. 

The Walker Art Center is giving Forman his long overdue props this month with a retrospective that spans his remarkable artistic evolution. It follows him from the pitch-perfect, low-budget, slice-of-life comedies he shot in Communist Czechoslovakia at the crest of the Czech New Wave to his eclectic ensemble of American adaptations and biographies that include Hair, Ragtime, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus, and The People vs. Larry Flynt.

Screenings of Forman’s films will continue at the Walker through April 22, but last night the seventy-six-year-old director was in-house for a freewheeling Regis Dialogue with LA Weekly film critic Scott Foundas that focused largely on the director’s early work. If Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr (the Walker’s last Regis Dialogue subject) was interviewee as enemy combatant (repeatedly scolding critic Howard Feinstein, grabbing his notes and, at one point, exiting for a smoke break from which it wasn’t so certain he’d return), Forman was the well-mannered, gregarious houseguest.

Of course, Forman is as practiced in the art of the non-interview interview as any showbiz lifer, but he’s also a born raconteur whose colorful, peripatetic biography includes thirty-six years living under the Nazis and the Communists, followed by another forty in what is arguably the equally Kafkaesque world of Hollywood. He has plenty of stories to tell, and the enthusiasm and good humor to tell them well after all these years.

Orphaned by the age of ten after losing both parents to the Holocaust, Forman recalled shuttling between relatives before a short stint at a boarding school for war orphans. The school was so remarkably well funded, it became the school of choice for the progeny of Czechoslovakia’s new Communist Party poobahs and its old capitalist elite. “The school became the envy of kids who weren’t even orphans,” Forman joked in one of the evening’s many great one-liners.

After studying screenwriting at the Prague Film Academy, Forman directed (and co-wrote) his first features, Black Peter and Loves of a Blonde (both, blessedly, available on DVD). Curiously, the films would find much of their humor in familial and generational dynamics, something Forman admits he could only observe as an outsider looking in. “People were nice to me because I was the poor orphan. With their own children, they didn’t feel they needed to be so nice.’”

Those first films were shot mostly with non-actors to whom Forman would talk through [but not give] the script and encourage to add their own words if they forgot their lines. Though these are some of the funniest of Forman’s films, there’s an endearing, sweet, unmistakably melancholic edge to them as well. “The reaction of all of us making films [in Czechoslovakia] in the sixties was not to [the movies of] our idols but to the stupidity and superficiality of social realism. I wanted to show real people doing real things, experiencing real emotions.”

As Forman and his New Wave contemporaries attracted attention in the West, the hardliners at home took note. “Suddenly, we were hard to ignore. These were the only movies that brought hard currency to the country.” 

Though hardly the work of a subversive, Forman’s third feature, The Firemen’s Ball, attracted a little too much attention. It was deemed mocking of the common man and banned in Czechoslovakia for twenty years. Forman began courting Hollywood and making plans to live in the States permanently, an idea that seemed even wiser after the Russian tanks rolled into Prague in 1968.

His first U.S. film, Taking Off, would share the low-fi satire of his Czech work, this time with a very American subject—middle class parents searching for their daughter in the hippie jungle of New York’s East Village. From hereafter he’d find a new voice. “At the time, I thought it was very cool if a film didn’t have any ending, if it just stopped,” he said. “That’s not very well accepted in America.”

Remarkably, he would follow four years later with an adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a novel even a friend deemed too “Americana” for Forman. “I told him, ‘For you it’s fiction; for me it’s my life. The Communist Party was my [Nurse Ratched].”

The film would pick up five Oscars and establish Forman’s Hollywood credentials, but it never had the support of author Ken Kesey, who campaigned hard to commandeer the project despite the objections of the producers. “Always, I’m on the side of creative people versus money people; I guess it’s self-preservation,” Forman said. “But I have to say in this case that Ken Kesey went a little askew. The screenplay he wrote was not a screenplay but another version of the book. He also insisted he play McMurphy and that he direct the film.”    

Over the next thirty-three years, Forman would make only seven films, but for each, he expresses great affection for the serendipity that brought them into his life. During one early visit to New York, he saw the first public preview of Hair; ten years later he would finally get the rights (and the financing) to make it a movie. Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, which he saw on a London stage in 1980, would become his ticket back to Prague after ten years in exile and also his return ticket to the Oscars. Most recently, there’s Goya’s Ghosts, a historical melodrama whose backdrop is the Spanish Inquisition and the Napoleonic Wars. It was written a year before the Iraq War, but Forman sees some eerie parallels.

There was an eight-year gap between Goya’s Ghosts and the release of Forman’s previous film, the Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon. One gets the sense that Forman may take another eight for the next one.

“Every film is two years of your life and when you get older you start thinking harder about what you want to spend two years on.” Besides, he needs time to recover after a film is in the can. “It’s like my love just left me, he said. “Sometimes you’re not ready emotionally to start a new relationship.”

4.12.08: Rusalka at Ordway Center

I hate the way Minnesota Opera is marketing its current production of Antonin Dvorak’s Rusalka. Billing it as “The Little Mermaid without the happy ending” is condescending to the audience, to the opera, and to Hans Christian Andersen’s original story. Must everything in our culture end up being Disney-fied?

Rusalka follows the plot of the Andersen fairy tale fairly closely—until the end, where it veers in the opposite direction from the Disney cartoon. A water nymph, Rusalka, having fallen in love with a mortal Prince, desires to become human. Against the advice of her father, a water gnome, she takes the potion of the Witch Jezibaba and becomes human, despite the potentially tragic consequences. When the Prince betrays her, those consequences unfurl—the Prince dies. But that fate would be too easy for Rusalka: She is also cursed to spend eternity alone.

There is much that is mythic in fairy tales. In the language of children, they reveal some of humanity’s most profound truths. Dvorak’s romantic score hints at these deeper realities, conjuring the unconscious realms that Freud was contemporaneously exploring. But director Eric Simonson didn’t seem able to hear or exploit them.

On the most basic level, Simonson seemed unwilling or incapable of creating a sense of magic onstage. This is a fatal flaw in an opera about a water nymph. The results were ultimately enervating. If I hadn’t had the professional responsibility of reviewing it, I would not have stayed through the end.

Simonson staged the supernatural figures of Rusalka’s father, the water gnome, and the witch Jezibaba like Russian peasants. There was little fantastic or otherworldly about them. Robert Pomakov lumbered about the stage, barely showing much interest in what was going on around him. More disastrously, Dorothy Byrne’s Jezibaba came off like a comic character. She wasn’t dangerous or frightening, even when she conjured the horrifying consequences of Rusalka’s request.

Given Simonson’s earthbound direction, it should not be surprising that it was Alison Bates’ devious Foreign Princess, who seduced the Prince away from Rusalka, that came off as the most fully realized character in the production.

Kelly Kaduce, who made such a splash as Rosasharon in last season’s The Grapes of Wrath, was less successful as Rusalka. She never seemed able to inhabit her part. I never felt either her great longing to become human or her great despair at the tragic results. Her "Song to the Moon" in the first act, the opera’s most famous number, was beautifully vocalized, but little more. And her plaintive aria in Act III left me unmoved.

Likewise, the Prince of Brandon Jovanovich was little more than a stock operatic tenor. At his first entrance, for example, he sang of feeling sad, but there wasn’t much sadness in his performance—though he did redeem himself somewhat with a fine death scene.

It was the work of projections designer Wendall K. Harrington and lighting designer Robert Wierzel that generated the real magic. They created the underwater realm and then, in an instant, transformed it into a forest. And the forest that was idyllic in Act I became nightmarish in Act III. There was something mythic in their succession of images, but it is unfortunate that the essence of Dvorak's opera resided only in the visuals.

Rusalka continues at the Ordway Center through April 20.

4.11.08: Exit Strategy at Mixed Blood Theatre

As more and more people are discovering every day, growing old in the United States of America isn’t as much fun as the brochures suggest. But that doesn’t mean plays about aging can’t be fun; and if Exit Strategy at Mixed Blood Theatre is any indication, the more miserable we are in our dotage, the funnier those plays are going to be.

Bickering is the key. There’s nothing more entertaining than watching two people who’ve known each other forever snipe and argue over the same little annoyances they’ve been complaining about for decades. I mean, it’s funny to watch a mom scold her teenage son for not putting the toilet seat down, but it’s much funnier to watch an eighty-year-old woman nag an old man for the same infraction of bathroom etiquette, because you can’t help but think, “My god, she’s been harping on that same topic for fifty years, and hasn’t learned that the nagging men about their bathroom habits is a waste of time, or that the best defense against a raised seat is simply to check it before you sit down!”

At any rate, I think it’s funny—but maybe that’s because I’m a man on whom such nagging is lost. Granted, the woman nagging me might not find the humor in it, but after seeing Exit Strategy, I now feel certain I can assure my wife that although she may not find my irritating habits funny now, all she has to do is wait thirty years—then they’re going to be hilarious.

Co-written by ex-Pioneer Press music and theater critic Roy Close and Bill Semans, who also plays Alex the visitor in the play, Exit Strategy is an old-fashioned play in the sense that it doesn’t try to do too much, and what it does attempt, it gets just right. The press teasers for Exit Strategy suggest that it’s a sort of Bucket List for the stage, but the play is less about some old people who refuse to stop going for the gusto than it is a vehicle for some high-quality bickering and a great deal of trenchant but amusing conversation on the nature of sex, death, aging, and various aspects of bodily health.

Set in a tenement hotel that’s going to be shut down in a month, the play revolves around three characters in their seventies and eighties: May, the seventy-something manager of the hotel; James, a gay, eighty-two-year-old ex-actor and resident of the hotel; and Alex, a visitor who enlists them in a caper that ends up forcing May and James to reassess the way they are going to live the rest of their lives.

Though May and James aren’t married, they certainly bicker like they are—and that’s half the fun of the show. James is an aging queen who just wants a warm place to sit and a cigarette every now and then, and May seems determined to make sure he doesn’t get them. Charles Nolte delivers a tremendous performance as James, and as May, Shirley Jean Venard is wonderfully acerbic, lacing all of her comments with an acidic, world-weary cynicism. Both have exquisite comic timing, and they have been gifted with a script that gives them plenty of great dialogue to play with, all steeped in the uncomfortable truth that growing old is a slow process of continual loss—of dignity, independence, love, respect, passion and, eventually, life itself.

In the press kit for Exit Strategy, it’s noted that the people involved in the production of this play have a combined age of over 500, and together they have logged more than 300 years in theater. This may help explain why there’s such a gentle, knowing quality to this play—a willingness to discuss some of the brutal truths about aging combined with the courage and wisdom to laugh at them. For example, James and Alex discuss bowel movements they way teenagers talk about sex: Whereas Alex prefers to stay regular by making sure that he eats enough fiber, James replies, “I use a stool softener. It’s quite lovely.”

That “quite lovely” hints at a private aesthetic experience that anyone over sixty in the audience will recognize. Likewise, May’s matter-of-fact pragmatism is the by-product of a life that didn’t turn out quite the way she planned, of dreams deferred and detoured. So when Alex the visitor proposes the theory that a nap a day can “add years to your life,” she snaps back, “You say that as if it’s a good thing.”

The great thing about Exit Strategy is that it strikes such an entertaining balance between tragedy and comedy, ultimately providing a sense of reassurance that life isn’t over until it’s over, and until the lights go out, interesting things can still happen. And even if they don’t, all those tedious things you’ve been doing for the past forty years are eventually going to be hilarious, given the time and perspective to make them so.

Exit Strategy continues at Mixed Blood Theater through May 4.

4.10.08: Marc Bamuthi Joseph: the break/s at Walker Art Center

Let’s start with the overview, so we can get on to the good stuff. Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s world premiere the break/s, a "mixtape for the stage” as the subtitle describes it, is an impressive extension of hip-hop as an art form. Wheeling through speech, rhythmic spoken word, dance, beat-box, and mixed beats and mixed film, is a story at once personal and universal, a story about identity, race, and love—an important story for our time.

“I am becoming one of them,” Joseph worries—“them” being the people who don’t get it, the fence-builders, the bland and blind majority. “I want a Lexus and justice,” he tosses off, cutting to the heart of a paradox of black success. There’s more, lots more, but let him tell it. You should go see the break/s if you like hip-hop. You should go if you want to know more about hip-hop. You should go if you think hip-hop is not a vehicle for those high art ideas and emotions, because you will be converted, and the sooner the better. You should take friends, you should settle in, you should open your eyes and let this ride take you.

The audience will help. This is a noisy, ready audience; this is an audience in the know. The woman behind me moans “I like that,” and finishes Joseph’s sentences—“if you don’t commit to spinning on your head, you will break your neck”—then moans again, with barbed wire in the soft part of the sound. I want to know what she knows. I want to be her. But not in the world beyond the theater, where my white life is probably the easier one—which revelation leaves me not locked outside her experience, not buying it on Amazon, but finding my own sources of smaller but similar emotion, my own slightly less experienced growl and purr. All Americans have black in them, as Ralph Ellison observed. Not that there aren’t still differences—and at times Joseph opens them up. (“What do you think of white people in hip-hop?” asks his collaborator Soulati [Tommy Shepherd] to nervous laughter before the show begins.) But the break/s is a place for that black and blue streak—everyone’s, anyone’s.

While the audience lulls and awakens your social self, stellar design does the same for your senses. Joseph credits a host of people with backing his mostly solo performance (live music provided by Soulati and DJ Excess), but the result is never muddled. At times, single elements stand out: a plane of blue light that slides up from ground to ceiling, a projection of static that covers the entire stage like a skin. At times, the design—light, set, music, video—is that good kind of too much that causes you to close your eyes when biting into an especially delicious dessert—but you can’t close your eyes because Joseph is dancing.

Sensory overload, evoking emotional overload, evoking life. The design helps to reveal some of the inner workings of hip-hop as well: What we call “soul” is a pitch-perfect juxtaposition of tragedy and comedy, of dark and light. Soulati builds his vocal music from a series of loops, each as he records it becoming a history that he works with and against. And what is a rhyme in spoken word? Rapid-fire, it can be a bullet, too-much hitting home because you don’t have time to get your defenses up. Slower, a rhyme is a tag, touching ground, a little “hello, I’m here” that humanizes the verbal landscape the way graffiti humanizes the urban landscape. The break/s reveals hip-hop as a style that deals with and evokes a too-fast life journey through a landscape of extremes.

There’s more than a bit of journey, of the Odyssey, in the break/s. Like Odysseus, Joseph roams around the world seeking home. He’s understood, misunderstood, loved, ignored, brought low, and raised high everywhere he goes. Like that wily hero, Joseph’s a great storyteller, a complete performer. Joseph even has a son he wants to go home and be a father to (Telemachus) and a woman he wants to love (Penelope), but his own striving identity keeps him away from her. Over and over Joseph starts over with “this story begins in the middle”—in medias res, the standard beginning of any epic, because if you went back and started at the real beginning, it’d take you forever to tell this story.

Last thoughts: we have to talk a little about the dance before I send you off to see this show. Hip-hop has none of the pretended lightness of ballet. Instead, the ground is a mother, giving force to the continual elasticity of the dancer, giving energy that finds its way out in a continual elaboration of joints and muscles. In the break/s, dance breaks out periodically, then is cut off; truth demands that the dance be denied at times, that neither we nor Joseph are allowed to feel its saving conversion all the time. We have to wait for it, need it. Joseph evokes the runaway slave, and hip-hop is recognizably a dance of escape. Again unlike ballet, hip-hop holds no points in air, no platonic ideals of the steps performers touch or miss. Instead, what you are trying to do is shake it loose—work free from the cruelty of the moment into the love you know is out there. Through the break/s, Joseph lets us feel that cruelty, and that release.

the break/s continues at the Walker Art Center  through April 12.

4.6.08: It’s a Beautiful World at Rogue Buddha Gallery

While I missed the Friday night opening for the Scion Installation Art Tour exhibit It’s a Beautiful World at the Rogue Buddha Gallery, an abundance of empty Colt 45 cans still in evidence the next afternoon suggested a lively gathering. Gallery owner Nicholas Harper says the party drew upwards of 300 people.

Now in its fourth year, this is the first time the Scion Tour has come to Minneapolis. Minneapolis is the second-to-last stop on a nine-city circuit that wraps up in Los Angeles with a charity auction of the art in the show. And if Scion rings a bell, that’s because you’ve probably seen one driving down the street at some point. The Scion line of cars is an offshoot of Toyota designed to appeal to the city-smart younger set, which describes the vibe of the show pretty well, too.

The premise is simple: all of the art takes its cue from the show’s title. The aesthetic ranges from cartoonish to surreal to abstract to figurative, from both emerging and established artists, many of them recognizable to those acquainted with contemporary artists. The media is just as diverse—painting, photography, sculpture, and collage.

A few pieces that caught my eye: LeRat’s The Universal Soldier, a black-and-white stenciled painting of a soldier cradling a child. The foreground is filled with foliage, which, combined with the soldier’s bowed head, gives the scene a strange forlorn tenderness. Kenton Parker’s photo of New Orleans ruins with a riff on the “As Seen on TV” logo—a red sign with block letters spelling out “Not as Seen on TV”—comments rather more whimsically on another American tragedy.

Harper singles out Caia Koopman’s Migrant Respite as a piece that resonates for him based on its technical merits and figurative style. The painting offers up a whispy-haired waif set against a fairy tale backdrop, flowers in the foreground, rolling green hills, a tiny cottage dwarfed by a wind mill, a tree with a burning heart. He also points to Mike Giant’s vivid color photo of an almost deserted El Salvador street with ominous, low-hanging clouds and brightly colored buildings in yellow and green; a picture of desolate, dilapidated beauty.

It’s a Beautiful World continues at the Rogue Buddha Gallery through April19.

4.4.08: James Sewell Ballet at O’Shaughnessy Auditorium

James Sewell Ballet’s spring concert opens with a work by dancer and artistic associate Penelope Freeh. Freeh is one of the Twin Cities’ most underrated choreographers, and her “Table Waltz” compels viewing by its detailed exploration of flex and point, the awkward and lovely sides of sensuality, from a froggy jump of immature wanting to the breathtaking romance of a round-her-partner’s-shoulder twirl. Freeh is presenting her work in this summer’s Fringe Festival in early August; don’t miss her razor-edged but beautiful ballet explorations.

I wish I could like the evening’s new work, “Social Movements,” because James Sewell’s ballet, set to music and concept by Steve Heitzeg, comes with such a stock of good intentions. But good intentions, alas, often weigh down artistic work. With section titles such as “Protest,” “Green,” “Displacement,” and “Equality,” you know you’re in for some heavy-duty sincerity, and sure enough, with the exception of the playful “Green,” “Social Movements” sinks under its painful literalism. Sewell’s best technique here is playing his sleek, graceful dancers against encroaching forces of ugliness and constriction. The effect of this technique isn’t negated by its obviousness: When the dancers’ buoyant stage-leaps crash against a wall of dark-clad figures, you can’t help but feel something. Sewell also sneaks in some lovely little bits of courtship dance. But overall, “Social Movements” loses its artistic force in stale polemic.

A more unalloyed pleasure in the extraordinary JSB dancers comes with the live improvisation “If This Then What.” Sewell takes a few cues from the crowd (opening configuration, music on or off to begin with), and out come the dancers, with no preconceived idea of what they’re doing. But these dancers show the best of contemporary ballet training: weightless in jumps and swan-graceful, they’re also strong and unafraid to be awkward for effect, working their complex coordination for every last twist of a flow of energy through the body. Improvisation isn’t typical ballet territory (it’s much more common in modern dance), but JSB dancers take it on with humor and appetite. The night I saw it, “If This Then What” didn’t produce a dance masterwork, but it did bring the dancers closer to the audience, at the same time that their skills set them apart from most of the rest of us.

The last work in this concert, JSB dancer Sally Rousse’s “By the Gypsy River Banks,” is also concentrated on the dancers. In this somewhat internal work, the dancers search through blindness and sight, sometimes almost turning from the audience in their quest for a cure, a method, an answer. Hefted upside-down by the partners, legs over the men’s shoulders, the women trail one arm on the ground. An enigmatic ritual of death and healing goes awry; the dancers sit on the floor, lost. But one woman gets an inspiration: she arranges the rest in a circle around her, dances for them, and starts them dancing too. There is no answer or cure, only a path, a how. Their how is ecstasy, a free-flowing dance companionship that spreads from the stage over the audience in a felt release. What a lovely way to be returned to our own lives—with the energy of these beautiful dancers.

James Sewell Ballet’s spring concert runs at the O’Shaughnessy Auditorium through April 13

4.01.08: High School Musical at the State Theatre

As an awkward, skinny, bespectacled sixth grader, I always dreamed that high school would be like it was on the stage at the State Theatre Tuesday night—a place where the geeks and the jocks would intermingle, where the basketball team never lost a game, and where you’d find true love sitting next to you in chemistry class. Of course, the real deal is nothing like it was on the stage last night. Diversity was disparaged, cliques never mingled, and true love was generally found at the bottom of a beer keg.

High School Musical originated as a made-for-TV Disney movie, and it remains a typical Disney-style spectacle. Inside the four walls of East High, Jocks, Brainiacs, Thespians, and Skater Dudes start off the show by keeping to their cliques (relevant song: “Stick to the Status Quo”) and end the show by all coming together for the good of society, belting out “We’re All in This Together.”

In between, the show features plenty of feel-good bromides (“you can be anything you want to be”) and high-school clichés—the popular yet obnoxious blonde drama queen and her queer best friend; the big-man-on-campus jock who falls for the exotic Brainiac new girl; and an animated, artfully dressed, liberal-minded drama teacher—all played for as many laughs as possible. And, predictably, the show is strongest when the company dances and sings—which is good, because the strong vocals make up for the fact that the acting seems a bit forced at times.

On the surface, High School Musical may seem like nothing more than a typical Disney product, complete with saccharine sentiments, stolen kisses, and a feel-good ending, but the story is laced with thoughts that challenge the same ideas the songs seem to be championing. In “Stick to the Status Quo,” for example, the song is about staying in your clique and knowing where you belong, yet the jock solos about his love for baking crème brulee, and the overweight science geek breaks out into her favorite hip-hop jam. Also included are life lessons about teamwork, loyalty, and friendship, all of which are refreshingly sensible, no matter what your age.

And while most of the kids in the theater probably don’t even know what “the status quo” is, HSM gives parents a convenient vehicle for discussing the real-life issues alluded to in the show. It can also help remind parents about the perennial conflicts and challenges of high school, and offer some helpful guidance about how things have changed—and how they have stayed so very much the same.

Disney’s High School Musical continues at the State Theatre through April 6,.