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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) … Read more

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. … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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, … Read more

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 … Read more