Art-A-Whirl

Grab a brochure, map out a route, and get ready to art power-walk instead of crawl. One of the things we like best about Northeast’s annual open-gallery weekend is an expansiveness that encourages you to explore—fifteen thousand visitors are expected to descend on this neighborhood, but unlike, say, the Uptown Art Fair, they won’t all … Read more

Your Heart Is No Match For My Love

The gloriously ramshackle Soap Factory once again throws open its doors to Minnesota’s fairer seasons with a show about the L-word – or, to be more precise, “the emotionally disarming process of falling in love.” So you’ve been duly warned about the potential risks of some of the art. For instance, to examine Rama Hoffpauir’s … Read more

Imperial Perfection: Chinese Palace Porcelain of Three Great Emperors

Maybe it’s true, as the saying goes, that heavy hangs the head that wears the crown—on the other hand, when you’re the emperor, you get all the best china. This exhibit of more than a hundred rare porcelains, drawn from a private collection in China, showcases the beautiful and highly detailed craftsmanship that graced the … Read more

Chris Larson

Larson is Minnesota’s answer to Matthew Barney. Both Yale art school alumni subject their not-unattractive physiques to certain trials; more importantly, each seems to operate from an alternate reality that makes full sense only to him. (We need more artists like this.) But where Barney is just plain out there, Larson’s world takes cues from … Read more

The Rivals

If he accomplished nothing else, Irish playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan could say that he found a new and memorable way to mangle the English language. Among the eccentrics and outsized personalities of his gentle satire of sappy romances, you’ll find a character named Mrs. Malaprop, mother of the word malapropism, whose complete indifference … Read more

Super Size Me

Would you like fries with that? After this film, probably not. Among the many public-relations bodyblows directed at the fast-food industry in the last few years, few have been so direct as this audience favorite at last year’s Sundance film festival. After he heard a McDonald’s spokesman claim that there was no link between obesity … Read more

The Golem

Even if you caught the original production of The Golem during its highly praised run in 1999, you may want to check back to see where the Jeune Lune folks will be taking their collaboratively produced fable: For the theater’s 25th season, they’ve created a more elaborate version that builds on the earlier one. The … Read more

Coffee & Cigarettes

A new Jim Jarmusch movie is always cause for celebration around here. Sure, he’s open to charges of languid pacing and, especially in earlier films, an indifference to plot. But there’s a beyond-left-field outlook to his best work, like Ghost Dog and Dead Man, that you just can’t find in any other English-language director. (Liking … Read more

Dr. Ox’s Experiment

Everybody thinks modern life moves too fast these days, but for the little village of Quiquendone, it’s literally true. At first, the townspeople in Jules Verne’s allegorical short story (getting its first non-operatic dramatic adaptation at the hands of local troupe Hardcover Theater) live peaceably rustic lives at rustic speeds, as if Newtonian physics were … Read more

The Marx Brothers Collection

Dyed-in-the-wool Marxists will note that this box set collecting seven of Groucho, Harpo, and Chico’s late-period movies is hardly definitive—their most anarchically funny work, Duck Soup and Animal Crackers, is missing. But we do have the two true classics they made with their most simpatico producer, Irving Thalberg, A Night at the Opera and A … Read more