Author: Christy DeSmith

Just the other day, tickets for the next Cirque du Soleil show in Minneapolis went on sale. Cirque du Soleil has a lot to answer for in these parts. Five years ago, Charlie and Julie Zelle took their children, Charlotte and Nick, on a family trip to see the trampoline queens and contortionists at a…

About two years ago, a Northfield, Minnesota, man named Fred Herzog had a vision that made him weep for hours each day for weeks on end. “Jesus came to me and said, ‘You are crying out to the souls of people in South Minneapolis,’” he said. “When I discovered South Minneapolis, it was narrowed to…

One day each spring, thousands of partygoers descend on St. Paul’s West Side to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. On the other 364 days, the parade route along Cesar Chavez Street—including the business district branded and marketed as District del Sol—is something of an urban hamlet. Geographically protected by the Mississippi River from years of downtown…

Opera is not for entry-level art patrons. Generally, it’s something you dabble in only after mastering theater, orchestra concerts, show tunes, music videos, and punk rock. When you finally arrive at the altar of a 225-pound operatic Valkyrie, well, it’s sort of like what Richard Gere said to Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman: “Those who…

“I’m not materialistic or anything,” said Dave King, sprawled on his living room shag carpet with his infant daughter. “I’m just interested in being around things people have really labored over.” King, of course, knows well what it means to labor over one’s work. As a songwriter and drummer for Happy Apple, the Bad Plus,…

If you were a Minneapolis bohemian ten years ago, you might have found yourself packed into a downtown nightclub for what was then one of the city’s most popular bands, the Beatifics. Back then, the band was promoting its first album, How I Learned to Stop Worrying, a collection of gloomy love’s-lost lyrics and power-pop…