The last time anybody heard from Eric Utne, it was the year 2000 and he had just walked away from the magazine he’d founded and run for almost fifteen years. The Utne Reader was faltering. It had published a “Y2K Citizen’s Action Guide,” which predicted a radical reorganization of society that never happened. Circulation and … Read more
Renowned author Judith Guest talks about “the terror of chance,” taking what you want, and falling in love with your characters. I can vividly recall my first reading of Judith Guest’s Ordinary People twenty years ago, in the bleak midwinter of my sophomore year of high school. When the book’s main character—the mortally depressed teenager, … Read more
Zenon Dance Company serves up another feast of new choreography that, as always, is precisely executed by this superior troupe. This year’s fall concert features a sampling of new work by two of our local favorites as well one New York import. Local choreographer Wynn Fricke—whose poetic, individualistic and often fantastical work was recently performed … Read more
If you saw Jeune Lune’s Tartuffe a few years back, you won’t want to miss this second helping of farce à la Molière. The Miser was market-tested in Boston earlier this year, where Jeune Lune co-created the production alongside Harvard’s American Repertory Theatre. Now Jeune Lune is returning the Bostonians’ hospitality by inviting them to … Read more
Mixed Blood Theatre is tackling another heady subject; this time it’s the space allotted to African and African-American artists by the whitewashed institution of fine art museums. In Permanent Collection, a new-on-the-job African-American museum director squares off with a white curator concerning the space made available to nonwhite artists. This new play by Philly playwright … Read more
Close your eyes and listen to the Jungle Theater’s reprise of Dylan Thomas’s dreamlike Under Milk Wood, which it’s staging for a fifth time to stretch through this year’s holiday season. While there’s little to see in this radio play, there’s plenty to hear—a beautiful, lyrical ramble of poetry, all spoken during a day in … Read more
The Minnesota Opera vows to pump up the authentic Japanese flavor of Madame Butterfly this time around. Productions of Puccini’s masterpiece about a geisha who gets crossed by an American sailor rely too often on caricatures of Japanese culture—especially the geishas in their campy kimonos and sets festooned with rice paper. Up to now, the … Read more
Just last month, Jamie Hook took over as executive director of Minnesota Film Arts, which is responsible for the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival and the repertory movies shown at the Oak Street Cinema. In Seattle, where Hook spent much of his adult life, he was known as an unconventional and talented wild man … Read more
If you had to, you could call Bill Frisell a jazz guitarist, but he is really a master at seamlessly mixing a wide range of musical genres, having collaborated with everyone from Elvis Costello to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. One of Frisell’s best albums, 1997’s Nashville, was recorded with members of Allison Krauss’s Union Station … Read more
The genius of Jonathan Richman is that he knows he does “Jonathan Richman” better than anyone else ever could. Normally describing a singer/songwriter as “wacky” seems to be a writer’s polite way of saying this guy is really a childish boob, not a real songwriter. Richman would be the exception. He is a goof, his … Read more