Author: rakemag

Given Minnesotans’ time-honored inferiority complex, it’s good to be reminded from time to time that our little corner of the world holds some importance, especially in the world of music. Case in point: For three years now, the continent-bridging Minnesota Sur Seine Festival has successfully lured some of Europe’s most outstanding jazz musicians (mostly French) to play alongside homegrown talent. Highlights from this year’s lineup—which has expanded to include hip-hop, spoken word, and rock ’n’ roll—include local rappers Brother Ali setting his rhymes to the music of Minnesota/French jazz combo Ursus Minor (October 19, Fine Line Music Café), and the youthful Minneapolis jazz trio known as Fat Kid Wednesdays playing alongside B’net Houariyat , a high-energy, all-women Moroccan quintet of singers, dancers, and percussionists (October 21, O’Shaughnessy Auditorium). 651-292-9746; www.surseine.org”

For its thirtieth year, Penumbra is staging an entire season of musical productions—returning to what, we think, is the company’s strength. The setting for its first offering is, appropriately, the Harlem Renaissance, and is built around the twenty-nine songs composed by ace stride pianist Thomas “Fats” Waller at the height of his Jazz Age stardom. The rollicking title song, originally recorded in 1929, showcased the composer’s wit as well as his formidable piano chops, and helped cement his place in the music pantheon. With a standout cast of singers, including Aimee Bryant, T. Mychael Rambo, and Jevetta Steele, Penumbra aims to recapture the boisterous spirit of an era, as well as the playful virtuosity of a legendary artist. 270 N. Kent St., St. Paul; 651-224-3180;
www.penumbrattheatre.org”

The faculty of the University of Minnesota’s theater arts and dance programs are swimming in so much genius that its productions, done mostly to invite students into the process (and thus, away from the pressures of generating income), are among the most inventive in town. This fall, puppeteer Michael Sommers and physical theater specialist Luverne Seifert (both instructors) have turned their attention to an adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s anti-Stalinist novel, The Master and Margarita. And they’ve enlisted some other notables to help paint the chaos: playwright Kira Obolensky, choreographer Shawn McConneloug, and Eric Jensen, a musician and composer known for his work with Theatre de la Jeune Lune—along with thirtysome university students. The show will be presented outdoors, the better to evoke the chill of 1930s Moscow. Bundle up! 101 Pleasant St. S.E., Minneapolis; 612-624-2345; www.theatre.umn.edu”

As with many Off-Leash performances, this one takes place in a garage—a quaint, thirty- five-seater situated behind the home belonging to co-artistic directors Paul Herwig and Jennifer Ilse. “It’s unbelievably unpretentious and really Midwestern,” Herwig has said, with a chuckle. “In New York, nobody has a garage!” As is likely evident from its title, this latest Off-Leash production pays homage to Philip Guston, the American painter who forsook his prominence among mid-twentieth-century abstract Impressionists and turned instead to creating peculiar pink wastelands cluttered with all manner of junk. 612-724-7372; www.offleashearea.org”

Theater Latté Da truly excels at plucking gems from the canon of American musicals, dusting them off, and sexing them up for today’s audiences—all the while somehow retaining their original sweetness—the stuff that endears us to such musicals in the first place. Now Latté Da puts a “raunchy, vaudevillian twist” on Gypsy, the 1959 Broadway production loosely based on the memoirs of burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee and featuring lyrics by a then-young Stephen Sondheim. Jody Briskey, a local singer with a remarkably big voice, stars as Mama Rose, the overbearing stage mother who pushes her daughters into showbiz and belts out the chestnut “Everything’s Coming up Roses.” 1614 Harmon Place, Minneapolis; 612-339-3003; www.latteda.org”

Few local troupes can reliably whip up strange magic the way the Dolls do. The troupe’s signature aesthetic—an amalgamation of modern dance, ballet, jazz, and physical theater—incorporates enough gorgeous costumes and giant set pieces so that their productions bubble over into sheer fantasy and spectacle. The new show doesn’t skimp on lush, over-the-top style; its story follows a mysterious, wand-wielding doll maker and the girl who covets his designs. The production on October 27 includes a special costume ball and gala. 651-224-4222; www.balletofthedolls.org”

Stephen King’s written several thousand books, many of them several thousand pages long: scientific and philosophical treatises, a forty-six volume encyclopedia of an entirely imaginary universe, plus cookbooks, home-repair manuals, and unorthodox handbooks on child rearing. There’s also nearly a dozen memoirs, each largely contradicting the others, not to mention persistent rumors in Internet chat rooms naming him as the pseudonymous and purportedly unreliable biographer of public figures as diverse as erstwhile Cars frontman Ric Ocasek and former Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Len Dawson. And then, of course, he’s written novels about psychopaths and vampires and that sort of very popular thing. He was once run over by a car and nearly killed, and may have written a book about that. But we know for sure that he has a new book, Lisey’s Story, about someone named Lisey whose husband is dead. It’s kind of a romantic ghost story and features a blurb from Nora Roberts, who knows about that sort of thing.

Richard Ford is one of the truly great landscape artists of the American moment, and his trilogy of Frank Bascombe novels (The Lay of the Land is the third) feels like it’s been carved out of the hard time that marked the last decades of the twentieth century. Appearing as they have every ten years or so, these razor-sharp chronicles of a beleaguered suburban everyman have the eerie quality of time-lapse photography. Lay of the Land takes place at the close of the century and finds Bascombe blundering through his fifties, still halfheartedly selling real estate and surveying the bland mess he’s made of his life with a mixture of resignation and regret. Ford’s creation will forever be compared to John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, but Bascombe’s travails are much weirder, funnier, and—ultimately and intimately—more familiar.

The tiny literary journal Rain Taxi seems to top itself every year, lining up an increasingly impressive array of authors and other writerly types for its one-day book festival. Among this year’s eleven presenters: Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will read from her new book Half of a Yellow Sun; rock historian Steven Lee Beeber, author of The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk, will kick it with the Current’s Mary Lucia; and Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant will discuss what fantasy means today in light of their experiences writing their own stories, publishing the zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and editing the fantasy half of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Besides all those events, you can go trolling for used-book treasures, browse a host of literary magazines, schmooze with exhibitors from local publishers and other arts organizations, mess around with making (not writing) your own book, get a load of local celebrities trying to spell “solipsism,” and let loose with the kids at a party to celebrate the final book in Lemony Snicket’s Unfortunate Events series. 1501 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis; www.raintaxi.com/bookfest”

Goldberg is known for the best-selling Bee Season, a novel that adeptly portrays a family’s unraveling in its desperate search for some sense of fulfillment. In her follow-up novel, Wickett’s Remedy, Goldberg’s smooth writing continues to make suffering, this time from World War I and influenza, seem beautiful. The book is filled with voices: the dead whisper in the margins and newspaper clippings tacked on to the ends of chapters. While it seems a bit contrived on the page, it should make for an interesting bookstore reading: Do you suppose she travels with a chorus to incant in the background? 3225 Galleria, Edina; 952-920-0633