Category: Article

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

What do you get when you put two eight-hundred-pound gorillas—er, Minnesota literary lions—in the same room? Hey, we’re just joshing! Truth is, Robert Bly and Garrison Keillor were entirely at ease with each other when Bly appeared onstage, along with his buddy Donald Hall, at one of Keillor’s “Literary Friendships” events last year. Which, come to think of it, may be why Keillor is introducing his elder at this talk. Bly’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but if he’s yours, it would behoove you to show up here since the man’s been making fewer public appearances of late, and (not to be too blunt) he’s not getting any younger.

Italian food had already gone from molto chic (oooh, pesto!) to ultrapedestrian shtick (humph, another Olive Garden) before carbohydrates, and thus pasta, went out of fashion. What has diners coming back to this cuisine, locally at least, is a mini-renaissance of neighborhood restaurants that focus more on Italian flavors than on heaping mounds of pasta. In fact, Brix doesn’t even bill itself as an Italian restaurant, though its menu says otherwise. Most of the pasta is made fresh in-house, and the dishes are riddled with rich Mediterranean flavors: tomato, pancetta, anchovy, saffron, olives. Here osso buco, which can go horribly wrong, is executed perfectly, with fall-off-the-bone tenderness. Plump roasted figs stuffed with gorgonzola sit majestically atop the carpaccio antipasto. And instead of checkered tablecloths and wicker-wrapped Chianti bottles, Brix’s space is modern yet warm, which speaks well to this next generation of Italian eaters. 4656 Excelsior Blvd., St. Louis Park; 952-698-2749; www.brixwine.com/home.cfm”

Lager-battered onion rings, homemade ginger ale, and Frogger on a flat-screen TV. Is there really any other way to spend your lunch hour? The Chatterbox’s new outpost in Highland Park, a onetime Perkins, has been refashioned as a hipster den full of vintage couches and paint-by-number artworks—though it seems slightly more polished than the original basement-chic neighborhood bar in South Minneapolis. But the huge skillet breakfasts, tasty burgers, and creative bar snacks are still noteworthy, as are the focaccia pizzas with their tangy, herby sauce and toppings like tiger shrimp and lemon pepper chicken. And nothing goes better with the Chatterbox’s cornmeal-fried pickles than a pint of their Chit Chat Ale (or maybe that’s just the disco ball talking). 800 Cleveland Ave. S., St. Paul; 651-699-1154