The Guthrie has emerged as a great place to see a show. The plays, absolutely, but also the straight-up musical performances by a singer or band. I first saw the Heiruspecs on the proscenium stage on the opening weekend, and loved it. The sound, the ambiance—that space is sexy, fun, and urban.
Last night Natalie Cole took hold of the Wurtele thrust stage. The show opened one instrument by one instrument, building a jazzy texture and rhythm—drums, electric guitar, keys, backup singers—and then on walked Natalie, who was received with loud applause and appreciative whistles. It was glam and dramatic, but not pretentious.

Cole is touring in support of her new CD, Leavin’, which was released in September and is a collection of cover songs, from such diverse sources as Fiona Apple, Sting, and Shelby Lynne. As she said last night, she does them with “Natalie Cole flavor.” Fiona Apple’s dark and suggestive “Criminal” was the only disappointment for me; instead of a lover praying for prosecution (and thus, a sort of redemption) for her manipulative ways, it seemed like a celebration. Just not the same.

But her cover of Shelby Lynne’s "Leavin’" was evocative and full of pathos, especially given her introduction: “I was not familiar with Shelby Lynne when this song was brought to me . . . but then I realized, mmm hmmm! This sounds a whole lot like me.” The verses were essentially spoken, but the chorus, sung mostly in Cole’s lower register, gave me the chills: “I’m leavin’/ This time it’s for good/ You should have treated me/ The way you said you would/ I’m leavin’/ And you can’t make me stay/ I’m tired of hurting you/ This ain’t no good anyway/ I’m leavin.’ ”

Cole’s voice, seemingly effortlessly, ran the gamut from sultry and smoky to powerful and soulful. She looked youthful and sophisticated in high-wasted tuxedo pants and suspenders, a striped t-shirt, and red patent-leather high heels. She’s a strong presence onstage, but appeared completely absent of any divaness.

This was no sit-down, snooze-through-it show: “This is not an Unforgettable show. [You might hear that] song, but that’s all you’ll be getting,” she warned. The crowd applauded appreciatively, and she finished off her ‘warning’ with “Amen! That’s what I’m talkin’ about!”

She grooved her way through many of the songs on Leavin’, mixing in some older smooth-jazz songs that I was less familiar with—except “Unforgettable,” of course—but still enjoyed immensely. But the real showstopper was the second-to-last song of the evening, “Whipping Post,” which I think was a take on the Allman Brothers tune. Cole flung out her arms, her bluesy howl filled the room, and the backing musicians took this as a cue to play urgently and loudly. It created a very real tension, a moment, in the show. Many musicians sing it safe, to keep their voices intact for a tour, but it sounded like Cole was pushing toward her hilt, making the audience believe she’d really been wronged and received  an undue punishment. “I’ve been tied to the whipping post/ I feel like I’m dying.” She was dying. I was convinced. Until she finished the song and smiled broadly.

She then ended the show with a delicate and pretty version of Des’ree’s, “Gotta Be”—lyrics full of lessons Cole has undoubtedly learned through her sometimes turbulent life: You gotta be bad/ you gotta be bold/ you gotta be wiser. You gotta be tough/ you gotta be hard/ you gotta be stronger. You gotta be cool/ you gotta be calm/ you gotta stay together/ All I know, all I know/ is love will save the day.” And as they started, one by one, the musicians bowed out, letting the guitarist and Cole finish the last strains.

The standing ovation began long before the end of the song.

By: Katie Derdoski and Megan Wiley

We attended the Red Hot Chili Peppers show together last night at the Xcel . . . and left with different opinions. While Katie does find RHCP pretty hard to hate, she feels they’ve stagnated in recent years and failed to put on a show they’re capable of producing. Megan agrees that as with most mainstream pop—and yes, this has become pop—the melodies and riffs are predictable and formulaic. But Megan was still impressed by the oohs and aahs of the bright lights and star power. And it didn’t hurt she got to go in the photo pit. So make sure to go check out the photos in the slideshow, too.

Setlist:
Can’t Stop
Dani California
Scar Tissue
Charlie
Fortune Faded
Readymade
Blood Sugar Sex Magik
Snow
Get on Top
Stadium Arcadium
Right on Time
Don’t Forget Me
Higher Ground
Tell Me Baby
Californication
By the Way

Encore:
I Could Have Lied
Give It Away

I was surprised that the Artists' Quarter was so empty for the first of Fat Kid Wednesdays' Singles CD-release shows. There were maybe thirty people there. The band is touring Europe very soon in support of the new record, yet somehow Twin Cities jazz lovers can't support this local jazz trio in their own backyard. It doesn’t make sense. (Kudos to Twin Cites Jazz Society and the AQ for their parts.)

I've seen lots of poorly attended shows where the artists are obviously disappointed and it reflects in their sound and presence. Not the case with this band. Bassist Adam Linz, drummer JT Bates, and saxophonist Mike Lewis were all joking around with one another throughout the show. Lewis was having so much fun, in fact, he actually laughed into his sax more than once.

In fact, every time Lewis plays, it’s clear that he’s having fun. His passion for music is apparent and his talent is top-notch. He’s as versatile as they come. And he’s entertaining. The great thing about FKW is the band members’ collective knowledge of the music that’s come before them, and their ability to manipulate that music to keep it fresh. The energy with which these guys play keeps their audiences enraptured—even if it’s just a handful of twenty- and thirtysomethings in a basement jazz club in St. Paul on a Wild game night.

The album, FKW's second recording on French label Hope Street, was recorded at Minneapolis's Fur Seal. The new CD has interpretations of obscure jazz songs by the greats, including Ornette Coleman, Jerome Kern, and Oscar Hammerstein, mixed in with FKW originals. You can only buy it at shows, so don't miss them at their upcoming performance The Cedar November 16, or Mondays at the Turf Club's Clown Lodge.

Despite the big-blue-spaceship whimsy of Jean Nouvel’s new Guthrie, there’s still that serious good-for-you-ness that looms large over a night at the new G. It’s still the theatre. In fact, the avant-garde architecture probably adds to the heaviness. You’re supposed to be impressed. To pay attention. You’re supposed to chortle during the appropriate moments. You’re a bad person if you fall asleep during the second act. So last Friday, when I went to see Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers, I prepared myself for some serious theater. This wasn’t $15 at the local multiplex. I wouldn’t be having fun. I would be paying attention to themes and forecasting plot points by reading into symbolism, and at all times appreciating the actors’ performances. I would be wearing a jacket.

It seemed like it was going to be a lot of work.

To top it off, this was supposedly Simon’s serious play. This wasn’t Felix and Oscar in The Odd Couple. Or Christina Applegate in Sweet Charity. This wasn’t from his big Broadway oeuvre. Lost in Yonkers won Simon his Pulitzer, not in the swingin’ 1960s, but in 1991. This was a WWII play—set in the era of Simon’s childhood, but written in the throes of the first Gulf War. For Simon, Lost in Yonkers was like Spielberg leaving Jaws and Indiana Jones behind to make Schindler’s List.

The play in set in Yonkers in 1942. The set is an old woman’s apartment, with perfect details that the Guthrie consistently nails: lace doilies on the puke-green davenport arms, an overwrought grandfather clock in the corner. (Grandma’s house never changes, does it? It reminded me of my own grandmother’s TV room, in Brooklyn Center, forty years later.) And from the moment twelve-year-old Artie and fourteen-year-old Jay open their mouths and warp the zippy one-liners with their exaggerated, elongated New Yawk vowels, it’s clear that Simon is still out to entertain, to make us laugh. When crazy Bella, Artie’s thirtysomething aunt who’s never left her mother’s house, asks him if mother heard her come up the stairs, Artie asks, “How, isn’t she partially deaf?” Without a beat, Bella answers, “Sure, but the other part hears perfectly.”

And on it goes. Except that there is something dark going on underneath all those zippy one-liners. In the first scene, Artie and Jay are being abandoned by their father, who recently lost his wife—their mother—to cancer. Dad, bankrupted by hospital bills, desperately takes a salesman’s job, selling scrap metal in the southern market in order to pay his debt to a loan shark. He’s decided to leave the boys to his crazy, permanently-childlike sister Bella, and to his stern, emotionally unavailable, German-Jewish mother in Yonkers.

That German-Jewish mother, Grandma Kurnitz, (played with the perfect amount of cold, forbidding heft by Irish actress Rosaleen Linehan) is the focal point of the play. Before she even makes her first appearance, her presence is felt—the terror of the controlling, emasculating mother slowly crawls up your forearms as you hear Kurnitz’s cane coming down the hall…STOMP…STOMP…STOMP. She’s the Jewish Godzilla.

Lost In Yonkers is a play about the tension between the first Me Generation and their parents, in what would go on to become the century of the self. Grandma Kurnitz’s children, Eddie, Bella, Louie, and Gert, are focused on the self--their own plans and get-ahead schemes, and how to circumvent the people and responsibilities that distract or compromise those plans. Equipped with the language of psychoanalysis, they constantly invoke Freud’s “I” when talking to their mother, who listens, bewildered and paralyzed—her immigrant lessons of toughness, self-reliance, resourcefulness and honor lost on these full-grown adolescents. In whiny, mewling speeches (but also funny, whiny speeches), they all take turns accusing their mother of having an inability to show love or affection, using this amateur psychoanalysis to point out that it’s all a result of her own childhood trauma (at the hands of the Nazis), which has begotten their childhood trauma, and which is now threatening Artie and Jay’s childhood. Simon hardly has to invoke his trademark vaudeville pitter-patter to satirize this sibling society—it twinges us because it still goes on in our own families.

The happy ending is a cop-out, but I expected that (it’s Neil Simon, after all, and while later in his career he may have realized that dark endings to dark plays win Pulitzers, I’m sure he always knew dark endings don’t sell tickets). And I expected the great acting and the great scene work too (it is the Guthrie). But I didn’t expect that we would be dealing with the heavy mother-daughter, mother-son intergenerational turmoil. (Yonkers makes some of the other archetypal Simon characters seem more warped and damaged in retrospect—Oscar Madison with his rumpled clothes and his dysfunctional disorganization. Felix Ungar and his obsessive-compulsive, control freak cleanliness. Get thee to a pharmacist!) The darker material is still handled with Simon’s light, just-funny-enough touch, allowing us to laugh our way through things that might be too painful otherwise, yet leaving just enough pain to linger on. Enough to remind us that last night, we went to the theatre.