rakemag Now that the Bush administration has set its eyes on Iran, it’s a good idea for us to learn something about the people it’s thinking about bombing. This film, a satire about a hapless cat burglar, gives us a few clues about our friends in the Middle East. For one thing, they have a wicked … Read more
We’ve often passed the signs for the Hinckley Fire Museum while driving up north, but we’re embarrassed to admit we thought this institution involved a display of historical fire trucks. The museum is actually devoted to an 1894 catastrophe in which a wall of fire destroyed over four hundred square miles in and around Hinckley … Read more
Cottman takes photographs to save things. That could be a Minneapolis street scene that looks for a moment, in a certain light, like Harlem in the nineteen-thirties. Or it could be a sweet second of his mother’s life, or a glimpse of women doing the secret things that women do. One of the Twin Cities’ … Read more
Offering a seasonal counterpoint of sorts to its parade last summer, Intermedia Arts brings together an assortment of automobiles, trucks, motorcycles, and snowmobiles atop frozen Lake Minnetonka. Bedecked in feathers, cork, jewels, and various other flotsam, the hardiest artcars will putter along the lake’s two-lane ice highway, cranking the tunes and the heat. www.artcarparade.com
This month, The Gates, the saffron fabric extravaganza by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, goes on view in Central Park; but right here in Plymouth we’ve got a quintessentially Minnesotan take on destination art. For No Name Exhibition’s first wintertime show, a couple of dozen artists have braved the vast white expanses of a frozen Medicine Lake … Read more
The young Alfred Maurer was the Thomas Kinkade of his day, churning out proper and commercially appealing paintings that earned him lots of money and fans–until he started cavorting around Paris! It was only when he met up with those pesky French that he discovered modernism and threw away all his popular success. This exhibit … Read more
As an Asian-American woman and African-American man trade insults, slurs, and outrage, you might think this play is vintage Penumbra, a socio-political episode wrought from American race relations. But when sexual tensions enter the fray–given the electric, Tony-and-Maria attraction between these two, they should be exchanging kisses, not insults–Slippery When Wet becomes something altogether sharper … Read more
This little company carries the torch for intimate opera productions–this time it goes after Puccini’s mother of all operas, the subject of countless tributes, knockoffs, and parodies. Read more about La Boheme in our Rakish Angle section. The Loring Playhouse, 1633 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-343-3390; www.latteda.org
With the American psyche thoroughly addled from attention deficits and hyperactivity and sensory overload, it could be that many of us are physically unable to sit through four hours of Shakespeare–especially the super-sized political epic Henry V. With that in mind, we especially appreciate artistic efforts to distill Shakespeare’s work into more approachable forms. Performance … Read more
A teenage girl chafes at the seriously uncool old-world restraints her India-born parents impose on her, in a story that’s kind of like Bend It Like Beckham without the soccer ball. This girl, Sujata Bhatt, is hooked instead on television. She uses it to blot out her parents, their juicy family secrets (surely those are … Read more