The buttery-yellow walls with navy-blue accents may make you think you’ve wandered into a Scandinavian wine bar. But the menu at Willie’s, which comforts downtowners in fitting style from sunrise to nightfall, has just a few Nordic touches. Daytime visitors enjoy choice selections like tangy kielbasa salad–plump grilled sausages atop tart, lemony frisee or tatsoi … Read more
A woman finds herself torn between two loves, one with a beautiful body and one with a beautiful mind. Of course, the triangulated longing Thomas Mann wrote about in his 1941 novella The Transposed Heads, which was based on an Indian folk story, is a theme that keeps cropping up again and again. Ragamala Music … Read more
John Guare’s script could rightly be called the star of this classic Jungle Theater production, but the cast includes a surefire lineup of local stage wonders: Jungle artistic director Bain Boehlke, the indefatigable and inimitable comic actress Wendy Lehr, and the ex-Twin Citizen Rosalie Tenseth, who’s returned from New York to reprise, for a third … Read more
Next month the Guthrie will grab all the attention when it re-opens, but right now you need to train your sights on Northeast Minneapolis, where the long-shuttered 1920s-era Ritz Theater will once again open its doors. In its heyday the Ritz was the lynchpin of a friendly neighborhood entertainment district–back before people drove to the … Read more
Ever adept at adapting novels, the Hardcover Theater goes a bit off its own beaten path with A Princess of Mars. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ pulpy, eighties-era sci-fi book concerns a Civil War-era Southern gent who’s inadvertently transported to the red planet. There, he finds he has Herculean physical strength and, of course, falls in love … Read more
The most thought-provoking piece the Theatre in the Round has staged in some time, Bruce Graham’s play centers on two death-row inmates who strike up a friendship. As they reveal their circumstances, they raise the kind of questions that trouble a civilized society: What is an appropriate punishment for killing someone? What kind of crime … Read more
Theater companies, like most of us, are driven to find a permanent place to call home (see Ballet of the Dolls to the right). But the Skewed Visions performance troupe is at home as a nomadic concept; previous productions have been designed to suit such makeshift “stages” as a parked car and a private home. … Read more
Live! Onstage! Tonight at the synagogue! OK, this Minnetonka temple is an unusual venue, perhaps, forone of the world’s finest violinists, but lucky are the few who take advantage of a rare opportunity to see such spectacular musicianship in an elegant and intimate milieu. Israel-born Perlman plays “the Devil’s instrument” ferociously, as if he were … Read more
Another Texan songbird, Tish Hinojosa, retains the love of her home state by performing in both Spanish and English. She’s equally at home within the Latino music community, or with folkies like Lucinda Williams and Nancy Griffith, or touring internationally with her fellow “Global Divas,” Peru’s Susana Baca and Zimbabwe’s Stella Chiweshe. Her vision of … Read more
What to make of this latest Springsteen recording? On the one hand, it means he’s so hugely successful that he can make whatever kind of music he pleases. On the other, it shows that he’s cemented his star so far in the past that his latest endeavors can slip by unremarked upon, even by many … Read more