Tonight: The second week of my second-favorite theater festival begins. This Lone Twin show doesn’t scream of being a sure-thing, at least not in the way Cynthia Hopkins’s show did. (And I can’t be alone in saying that Hopkins put on the hippest night of theater I’ve seen in a long while.) But we here … Read more
Idiocracy, 2006. Directed by Mike Judge, written by Judge and Etan Cohen. Starring Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepherd, Terry Crews, and the narration of Earl Mann. A film so fundamentally lame that I’m not even going to provide you with a blurry still. This travesty is available anywhere you can rent lousy DVDs. Everybody … Read more
At last night’s Raking Through Books event, Michael Korie and Ricky Ian Gordon had me completely convinced that they had done the right thing in adapting Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath to the operatic form. “This is an opera in the way that Porgy and Bess is an opera,” said Korie. And I became giddy … Read more
Many people are understandably concerned about the status of their beloved companion animals in the afterlife. We receive queries on the subject all the time. Before I address that issue, however, I’d like to clear up a few semantic misunderstandings regarding Paradise. We’re decidedly old school up here, as you might imagine, and so far … Read more
Notes on a Scandal, 2006. Directed by Richard Eyre, written by Patrick Marber. Starring Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Bill Nighy, and Andrew Simpson. Now showing at the Uptown Theatre. Rare is the occasion when the movie houses have a good movie in them, much less two that open on one weekend. Children of Men opened … Read more
For the few (probably very few?) of you sharing my obsession with modern American opera: tonight’s Raking Through Books event features composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettist Michael Korie, the folks responsible for adapting the Minnesota Opera‘s world premiere of the Grapes of Wrath opera, opening early next month. At first, I thought this seemed … Read more
A man went out to his car one night, started the ignition, inserted a Chuck Berry disc in the CD player, and drove off into the darkness in search of space. He wanted to get out from under the street lights and the general overglow of the city, out beyond the tangle of freeways and … Read more
There is so much good to be done by simply roasting a chicken. The pre-roasted chicken that you can pick up at the grocery store is easy, yes. But the truth is that roasting your own is not that much harder. Master this task and you will be able to satisfy anyone, anytime. Let me … Read more
Two things: First, The Rake’s free screening of the film Letters from Iwo Jima is tonight; pick up your comps at Cafe Brenda (they’re probably gone) or here at Rake headquarters (we have a few). Second, Walking Shadow Theatre Company is presenting an evening of music and storytelling by Sxip Shirey, a composer and performer … Read more
All night in my dreams, a battle raged, destroying the only world I loved, bombs falling on the city where my beloved slept, in another house, another bed, on the other side of a lake. Deep in sleep, which I surrender to willingly, if seldom, I felt such despair and tried without success to kick … Read more