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August 21, 2010, 6:52 PM
By Tad Simons
Admittedly, it was not a great evening for reading poetry, or for having poetry read to you. The swampy and breezeless steam of August made it a much better night for Dairy Queen. But that didn’t prevent 100 or so hardy souls from cramming into a small, non-airconditioned room in The Soap Factory and listening politely to some of our area’s most accomplished writers and poets read from their latest work—work specifically written for the evening at hand.
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August 8, 2010, 11:04 AM
By Tad Simons
Is The Scottsboro Boys—the final musical from the legendary writing team of John Kander and Fred Ebb (Ebb died in 2004), who gave us Chicago, Cabaret, and Kiss of the Spider Woman—Broadway’s next big hit?
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August 1, 2010, 11:31 AM
By Tad Simons
Saturday night in St. Paul was one of those extraordinary summer evenings when everything seemed to click—a womb-like ambient temperature, no threat of rain, a scarlet and tangerine sunset, music on every street corner—and seemingly everyone was outside enjoying it.
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July 11, 2010, 12:56 PM
By Tad Simons
It is unfortunate that the only image of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire to endure in popular culture is that of a young Marlon Brando screaming “Stella!” at the top of his lungs. It’s unfortunate because, out of context, one might get the impression that the character Brando is playing , Stanley Kowalski, is heartbroken over something Stella has done—when in fact it is Stanley who, in a drunken rage, has just hit his pregnant wife, ransacked their apartment, and generally behaved like the abusive moron he is otherwise proud to be.
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July 2, 2010, 12:16 PM
By Tad Simons
With the advent of giant, high-resolution video screens, powerful lasers, ever-more-sophisticated sound equipment and acoustically superb sports arenas, it was only a matter of time before a band put all of these technological advances together into a show that would allow the band itself to recede into the background, unleashing the full force of 21st-century electrical engineering onto the assembled throngs. Tool is that band.
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June 10, 2010, 12:56 PM
By Tad Simons
The local arts scene is abuzz over Bravo’s new reality-TV series, Work of Art/The Next Great Artist, because one of our own—23-year-old Miles Mendenhall—is among the 14 contestants vying for the grand prize of $100,000 and a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The Soo Visual Arts Center held a special screening party, and folks at the Highpoint Center for Printmaking—where some of Mendenhall’s work as a Jerome Fellow is currently on display—must have been ecstatic, since the national spotlight is not something that shines in their direction very often, if ever.
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May 21, 2010, 10:58 AM
By Emily Howald
I’m not what you would a call a hard-core Lifehouse fan. Sure, I sing along when “Hanging By a Moment” comes on the radio—okay, maybe I have it downloaded to one of my more sappy playlists—but if you asked me how many people were in the band or what the lead singer’s name was, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to answer.
That all changed, however, after I attended the Lifehouse Studio C performance at Cities97 yesterday. After playing only two quick songs—“Halfway Gone” and “First Time”—for an audience of maybe 30 guests, I was smitten with not only the music, but also the lead singer, Jason Wade.
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May 5, 2010, 11:52 AM
By Tad Simons
When director Bartlett Sher agreed to direct the 2008 Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific—a production that went on to win seven Tony Awards—he told his cast, "We have to sing it better than the original, because through the mists of memory it has become so good." The road version of that award-winning Lincoln Center Theater production is now playing at the Ordway, and it's difficult to imagine it being sung any better. In fact, the singing is almost too good.
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April 29, 2010, 3:43 PM
By Tad Simons
Happy Town, ABC's new TV series set in a fictitious and ironically named Minnesota village called Haplin, immediately breaks Horror Story Rule No. 1: Don't drop your girlfriend off at midnight on an abandoned road, in a location that requires her to walk through the woods to get home. Bad things always happen in those situations, and so it does in Happy Town—though not to the teenage girl. (She'll get what's coming to her later, no doubt, because Horror Story Rule No. 2 is that teenagers who have sex must die. Horribly.)
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April 23, 2010, 3:16 PM
By Tad Simons
How could he not know? That’s the big question that hangs over David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, which opened Friday on the Guthrie’s Wurtele Thrust stage. More specifically, how could French diplomat Rene Gallimard not know that the Chinese opera star he fell in love with and kept as a mistress—often referring to her as “the perfect woman”—was, in fact, a man?
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