The Primrose Path: 'Of course I'm loud, I'm Russian'

Categories: Theater
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Photo by T. Charles Erickson
Kyle Fabel (Lavretsky) and Suzy Kohane (Liza) in the Guthrie Theater's production of The Primrose Path.
Going to The Primrose Path, the world-premiere production now at the Guthrie Theater, means watching a show at war with itself.

Is it a comedy? A romance? A commentary on the Russian ruling class during the middle of the 19th century? The script never can decide, leaving the audience with a bumpy ride. 

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Elevator Repair Service gets contemporary in latest work

Categories: Theater
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Photo by Ariana Smart Truman
The company of Fondly, Collette Richland.
For its latest project, experimental theater company Elevator Repair Service chose to do something that is pretty standard for most ensembles.

"We wanted to shake things up and push our boundaries. There were things we hadn't done. One of those was work on a play," says director John Collins, who helms ERS's latest piece, Fondly, Collette Richland. "There is nothing groundbreaking about a theater company doing that, but it was something that would challenge our accepted practices." The show runs Thursday through Saturday at the Walker Art Center.

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Alice in Wonderland: Whimsy on top of whimsy

Categories: Theater
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Photo by Dan Norman
Brandon Brooks and Autumn Ness.
You usually know what you're going to get with a production of Alice in Wonderland: a young girl, a late rabbit, and lots of imagery that would fit in well on a Syd-Barrett-era Pink Floyd album.

The Children's Theatre Company's adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass has all that, along with a driving visual style that brings the madcap magic of the book to full life on the stage.

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Director Josh Cragun on Tesla's predictions: "The dude was talking about the iPhone."

Categories: Theater
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Photo by Mathieu Lindquist
Zach Morgan 
Nikola Tesla, the oft-forgotten inventor who died impoverished in 1943, has been getting a bit of attention as of late with posthumous celebrations of his contributions to science, and his eerily correct predictions about 21st century life. For their latest show, Nimbus Theatre takes stories of the inventor's life as a starting point for their new play, Tesla, which opens this weekend.

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An Iliad: War goes on, and on, and on

Categories: Theater
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Photo by Aaron Fenster
Stephen Yoakam as The Poet.
Homer first wrote about the events in The Iliad nearly 3,000 years ago. Lisa Peterson and Denis O'Hare's An Iliad shows us that little has changed in the interceding centuries.

Stephen Yoakam, under the direction of Benjamin McGovern, gives a riveting performance as the Poet in the Guthrie Theater's production of the 2010 play.


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Pop Up Musical: Songs for the short-attention-span era

Categories: Theater
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Image courtesy the Producing House

VH1's Pop-Up Videos was first broadcast in 1996 -- ancient history in pop-culture terms. So it does seem like the latest offering from the Producing House is a bit behind the curve. Then again, the VH1 show got a revival in 2011, so perhaps this production is just catching the nostalgia wave.

Just like its TV ancestor, Pop Up Musical presents hits mixed in with bits of trivia about the tune, the composers, and the singers. In this case, the songs are drawn from the Broadway songbook. The performers are talented locals. And the "pop ups" are decidedly low-tech: just cardstock signs held up by singers during each of the songs.

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Old Log Theater to be sold

Categories: Theater
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Photo courtesy the Old Log Theater
The oldest professional theater in the Twin Cities area will soon be under new ownership for the first time in nearly 70 years.

Don Stolz began working at the Old Log in 1941, directing Ned McCobb's Daughter. He did the show as a favor to one of his teachers, figuring he would stay for just the one production. Instead, he made it his life. He purchased the business in 1946, and has been a constant presence there over the last 67 years.

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The Moving Company returns with Out of the Pan Into the Fire

Categories: Theater

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Nathan Keepers and Christina Baldwin
Photo by Dominique Serrand
For their latest effort, the Moving Company mined a rich storytelling vein: fairy tales. In the end, they weren't interested in retelling a single story, but instead grabbed characters and situations from different tales and put them into a sort of theatrical blender.

Out of the Pan into the Fire features the four core members of the Moving Company: co-artistic director Steven Epp and Dominique Serrand and artistic associates Nathan Keepers and Christina Baldwin. Epp and Serrand were longtime members of Theatre de la Jeune Lune, and Keepers and Baldwin worked with the company many times before it folded in 2008.


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Path for Guthrie world premiere pleasant for creators

Categories: Theater

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L-R: Roger Rees (photo by Tom Bloom), image from a promo poster, and Crispin Whittell (photo by Mike Habermann)
For years, actor and director Roger Rees has loved Ivan Turgenev's second novel, even though it never was all that popular outside of Russia. One issue? An awkward title that translates, at best, as "Home of the Gentry."

So when Rees teamed up with playwright Crispen Whittell to adapt the novel, they knew they needed a new title. Enter Shakespeare, and The Primrose Path.

"It is there in the 'Scottish Play' and Hamlet. It's about attractive ideas that very often lead to misery. It is a very apt title for the play. Things that look fancy may not be so good. If you eat a big piece of cake, you'll get fat," Rees says.


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Too many empty calories in I Love to Eat

Categories: Theater

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Lauren B. Photography
Garry Geiken as James Beard, the culinary maestro

Like James Beard, the sole character in James Still's play, I love to eat. I also love to cook -- that was forged by my chef father and a childhood spent experimenting in the kitchen. I cooked my way through high school and college, and made more money in restaurants than I did at my first couple of newspaper jobs.

So I'm definitely in the market for a play about Beard, especially as his no-nonsense, "food for the people" cooking aesthetic closely matches my own. And the moments in Still's play that focus on Beard's own love affair with food are engaging and delightful. Sadly, those get muddled with a lot of extra material that may tell us more about the character, but don't show us what really made him tick.

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Garry Geiken on playing James Beard: "I learned how progressive his ideas about people and their relationship to food was."

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