Year: 2006

There really is only one thing that can melt through our puritanical will to stay home and hunker down through the cold months: barbeque. Now that we have a Baker’s Ribs in Eden Prairie, we’ll brave any weather to bask in the inner heat that only good sausage can kindle. The smoky barbecue links at Baker’s are made with a spiced beef-and-pork mixture that nearly bursts through the skin of each plump package. This Texas-based chain offers a variety of meats, slow cooked over oak and accompanied by a bracing sauce that burns past the competition’s. 8019 Glen Lane, Eden Prairie; 952-942-5337

Fiery, doomed love isn’t just for gay cowboys; prairie girls can get it real bad, too. In this play by local writer Melanie Marnich, a young, small-town wife succumbs to a crush on a handsome neighbor, and becomes entangled in a dangerous constellation of personalities and tempers. Based loosely on the 1622 play The Changeling, this brutal romance covers the heady intoxication of new love and the bloody and terrifying repercussions of infidelity in a deceptively wholesome Midwestern setting. 820 18th Ave. N.E., Minneapolis; 612-605-8497; www.emigranttheater.org

It’s heartening to note that this annual event has added themes in recent years–perhaps it means that so many women are now making films that the focus has been narrowed. In its thirteenth year, the Women with Vision festival showcases filmmakers from Chile, Iran, Kenya, Cameroon–as well as Europe and the U.S.–who have faced political obstacles in creating their work. Classic 1950s noir by artists blacklisted as communists; glimpses into the lives of young women in Iran; and an exploration of spousal abuse in Cameroon are highlights in a wide-ranging program of several dozen films. But Deepa Mehta’s India trilogy deserves its own mention. For the last film in the series, about a child bride trying to make her way in the world after her husband dies, Mehta encountered enough violent protest from her fellow citizens that she was forced to finish the film in Sri Lanka. 612-375-7622, www.walkerart.org

Jeune Lune has gotten so good at opera that almost everything it does in the genre deserves mention. The company’s strategy involves stripping away layers of orchestration from the score, because it can neither afford a full orchestra nor fit one into its space. The result has been opera productions that are short, punchy, and intimate, with a cast of singers who also happen to have great acting skills. This time, artistic director Dominique Serrand and singers Bradley Greenwald, Christina Baldwin, and Jennifer Baldwin Peden heat up Mefistofele, a little-known Italian opera that’s based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s telling of Faust. 105 N. First St., Minneapolis; 612-333-6200; www.jeunelune.org

Our favorite self-loathing performer/writer from the Minnesota Fringe Festival is back for another helping of self-humiliation. Amy Salloway may be riddled with insecurity, but her writing is loaded with so much skill and good humor that her pain winds up being our pleasure. So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz! harks back to the days when she and Gertz–the two un-coolest kids in all of Camp L’Chaim–hooked-up. 1635 Hennepin Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-486-5757; www.mnartists.org/Amy_Salloway

Stereolab’s fondness for Moog synths and vintage Vox and Farfisa organs blur the band’s lineage. This could be fifties post-jazz or nineties post-rock; the only thing that’s clear is that they are French. They are also hazy, moody, sexy, offhandedly cool, and dislocated from pop culture, which is to say that Stereolab’s music is more about atmosphere than message. Core members Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier have entertained a revolving cast of musicians, each of whom have dropped a little something-something into the Stereolab sound, but we still mourn Mary Hansen, the singer whose voice wove itself so silkily around Sadier’s on the band’s 1996 album Emperor Tomato Ketchup. Hansen was killed in a bicycling accident in 2002. The band is finally starting to sound like it’s finding its way without her. 612-332-1775; www.first-avenue.com

Cantus started ten years back as a collective of the St. Olaf College Choir’s finest male graduates. They were not just fine singers but also, as it happens, pretty fine-looking to boot, which could help to explain the troupe’s staying power. Cantus now celebrates its first decade with a concert that flits through the group’s unusual repertoire, which includes Smokey Robinson’s “Who’s Lovin’ You” and a pop rearrangement of “Danny Boy.” But the program’s highlight is sure to be the finale, a Cantus-commissioned world premiere by Wisconsin-born composer Lee Hoiby. It’s inspired by one of the many “deliver-in-case-of-death” letters to come out of Iraq, addressed to the wife and children an American soldier left behind. 612-435-0046; www.cantusonline.org

Dear Elvis: We love you. You are the crown prince of geeks the world over, a shining example to funny and funny-looking folks everywhere, and anyone with compromised vision can thank you for keeping plastic horn-rimmed glasses in stock and in style. You’ve written so many great songs, both smart and jumpy punk, and perfect, unforgettable pop. But your music, lately? It’s time to level with you: The lounge act has grown stale. Why are you putting out yet another smooth piano jazz album? Aren’t you done with that yet? Is this what happens when you marry Diana Krall? No offense–we wish you endless bliss together. But she’s so much better at the slinky, chic jazz thing, let her do that by herself. And you? Elvis, you belong in a stinky bar, spazzing out onstage in front of a loud, unruly band. See you there soon, OK?

What a hoot to try on Patsy Cline’s persona–minus the car accident, the plane crash, and all the heartbreak in between, that is. With a hipster-hoedown wardrobe, a good-time band, and an audience that appreciates country music, Neko Case has had scads of fun reviving Cline’s swingy, traditional sound with a dash of foxy urban attitude. She hails from the Northwest, attended art school, and started out as a punk rocker and sometimes-member of the New Pornographers, so Case can’t lay claim to dead Southern relatives who played banjos with their teeth, or whatever passes for cred south of the Mason-Dixon line. But with her new album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, Case lays Cline to rest and heads toward a much more distinctive and arresting sound. Spiritual, dark, and relying on a knack for storytelling that transcends genre and region, these songs reveal a fascinating lyrical voice that her previous works only hinted at. If this is the down-deep Neko Case, we’re crazy, well maybe not so crazy for loving her.

When it comes to frenzied musical numbers, no one in Hollywood history has been as audacious–or parodied–as Busby Berkeley. Less a choreographer than a master of the chorus line, Berkeley’s style borders on the orgiastic. Films like Footlight Parade, Gold Diggers of 1933, Dames, Gold Diggers of 1935, and 42nd Street feature his trademark scenes in which legions of dancers move as one. Dozens of identical blondes gyrate in outfits that make them appear to be a flowering artichoke; leggy swimmers kick in an “aquatic zipper” while Berkeley’s probing camera swoops beneath their thighs, creating, in the words of one critic, “a tunnel of dreams.” The Dude’s nightmare in The Big Lebowski was inspired by Berkeley’s cinematic spectacles; this DVD set will allow them to infiltrate your dreams as well.