The easy recap of the MicroCon 2007, the comic book convention put on by the Midwest Comic Book Association at the State Fairgrounds last weekend, would open with a pat description of the pudgy Batman in full costume, the goth girl with red contact lenses, and the middle-aged guy in green corduroys with Captain America’s shield slung over his back.

But pointing at the geeks and laughing is too easy. And I have no right doing it anyway.

Because I’m a geek myself.

It’s a fairly recent regression. For the last few years I’ve dabbled in respectable comic books—so called “graphic novels”—written by New York Times–approved writers such as Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware. But at the MicroCon yesterday, while forking over another twenty spot to a dealer from the Krypton Comics shop in Duluth in order to complete my Marvel Secret Wars collection, I realized that I’m officially off the wagon. When I was ten, I was into Spidey and Cap and the Marvel Universe, but then came basketball and Larry Bird and, you know, friends, for the next twenty years. Then my girlfriend moved in with me a couple of months ago, and, faced with the terrifying prospect of growing up, I started pouring hundreds of dollars into superheroes again.

From the looks of my fellow attendees at the MicroCon, I’m not alone. This almost makes sense, because most comic books are actually aimed at an older audience now anyway; the dialogue is more sophisticated and the boobs are bigger. And most tellingly, especially regarding my old Marvel Universe, is how our old heroes are faced with contemporary dilemmas. When you read what writers like Paul Jenkins and Ed Brubaker (the modern comic geek follows writers, not the superheroes that they write) are doing with the Super Hero Registration Act and the well-publicized death of Captain America, respectively, I could argue that hip-hop and superhero comic books are the only popular art forms really dealing with our post-9/11 mid–Iraq War American culture. But that would mean taking comic books seriously, and that’s the last thing I want to do. Seriously.   

But walking around the floor of the Fair’s Progress Center (it almost sounds like a superhero’s lair!), browsing the quarter bins of more than forty dealers from around the upper Midwest, posing nerdy questions about “the Silver Age of comics” to said dealers, and salivating over “first appearance” antiques such as the Very Good Condition first-appearance-of-Wolverine Hulk #181 ($800), I felt that peculiar pre-adolescent freedom where you’re able to selfishly indulge in your own world—no homework, no helping dad with the car, no raking the yard. I tried not to take my head out of the fantasy sand too much, because, looking up, it became obvious that most of the people there were twenty-five to forty-five-year-old men. Geeky, out-of-shape, lonely men, awkwardly trying to relate to people that share their obsessive pleasure. There’s clearly something in the reptilian male brain that gets turned on by the obsessive impulse to collect, whether it’s some dude bidding for special-edish Nike Air Force Ones on eBay, or a guy with a basement sealed off for his record collection, or some man-child at the MicroCon looking to complete his original run of Brian Michael Bendis’s Powers. This loneliness is both by choice and by default: one dealer told me he got a divorce because his wife constantly nagged him about organizing all his comics—now he takes his massive collection from convention to convention.

There were a few women there—I ran into my buddy Heath and he had his ten-year-old daughter in tow. (Her favorite book is the teenaged superhero team Runaways.) But Heath’s daughter was definitely one of the few exceptions. Geek culture has always sent women mixed messages: on the one hand, women are attracted to badass females, from Elektra to The Bride, and on the other hand, the world of men-in-tights reeks of the “little boy” stigma, basically an infantile refusal to prioritize.

In that way, I’m one of the lucky ones. My girlfriend, for her part, not only supports my reinvigorated hobby, (as long as I mix in the occasional Tolstoy or Twain . . . without pictures), but  she’s a reader herself (she’s partial to Wolverine). In fact, she volunteered to come along with me to the convention. She even spent $10 of her own money on a signed copy of Tiempos Finales by local comic artist Samuel Hiti (one of more than fifty artists with booths at the show). She might even come to the big ComicCon this October. To me, she’s almost worth as much as an Action Comics #1.

Almost.

Like most everyone else in this Us Weekly, Access Hollywood–ized world of ours, I know more than I’d like about the assorted catfights and chemical dependencies of the Paris, Lindsay, and Britney set. Thankfully, I also suffer from a sort of pop culture amnesia whereby the individual players in these tabloid dramas become one big blur. Exhibit A: The pride of Ely, Minnesota—Jessica Biel. With nary a blip on my radar, Biel catapulted from a supporting role as the preacher’s daughter on the WB hit 7th Heaven to Hollywood ingénue who regularly dukes it out with Jessica Alba and Scarlett Johansson for Sexiest Woman Alive honors.

Until her solid turn in The Illusionist last year, the most interesting thing about Biel was her Minnesota roots (proudly displayed, by the way, on her website, JesseBiel.com) and her promising decision to follow in the hot-girl-who-can-kick-butt template of Angelina Jolie. (Her sneaky decision to get out of her 7th Heaven contract with a topless appearance on the cover of a men’s magazine also upped the charm quotient.)

Now our homegrown starlet is acting alongside Nicolas Cage and Julianne Moore in the sci-fi action stinker Next, which opened in theaters Friday. Directed by Lee Tamahori, whose previous credits (xXx: State of the Union, Die Another Day) don’t exactly portend good things, and adapted from a short story by novelist Philip K. Dick whose work sometimes does produce interesting films (Blade Runner, Minority Report), Next starts with a provocative premise and then quickly dissolves into the sort of ridiculousness only the crassest movie producer could love.

Cage plays a budget Vegas magician with an unfortunate talent: he can foresee the future—just two minutes, though, and only his own. That is, until he starts having dreamy visions of Biel, whose own future he can see into much further. Despite a really terrible haircut and the distant, crazed look that Cage is known for, his character stands a pretty good chance of winning her over because he knows exactly how she’ll respond to him. Romance isn’t in the cards though. Terrorists are plotting a nuclear attack on Los Angeles and Moore’s grumpy, humorless FBI agent sees Cage as their last hope. He doesn’t want any part of it.

There’s more to the story, of course, but not much more. And certainly not much that rings even remotely true. Action films have their own internal logic that often defies that of more character-driven narratives. When executed by pros even the implausibilities of their plots don’t matter because the thrill is in the ride, the unexpected twists and turns, the great special effects, the sense that the actors know precisely how absurd the story is and have gamely thrown themselves into the fray. Next has none of this. The dialogue is hollow, the villains so thinly drawn as to be nonexistent, and the performances by its Oscar-winning/nominated headliners perfunctory at best. To make matters worse, the whole thing has a cheap, thrown-together look that provokes unfortunate comparisons to movies produced long before CGI entered the popular movie lexicon. (When the action moves to the Grand Canyon—even a moving car—it looks like someone on the set is holding up fake backdrops.)

So where does this leave Biel? Marooned in a thankless role that requires her to look alternately pained, confused, sad, terrified, and, this being Hollywood . . . hot. It’s not a great performance, or even a good one. But it’s delivered with conviction and a sense that even dreck like this deserves to be taken seriously. And for that, Biel should too.

April 27, 2007

You should go to Zenon Dance Company’s twenty-fourth annual spring concert if for no other reason than to see Colleen Thomas’s “Catching Her Tears (44°N, 93°W).” Dramatic, inventive, and set to cellist Chris Lancaster’s live score—a lush mix of the lyrical and the apocalyptic—“Catching Her Tears” is one of the best pieces I’ve seen this year.

Consider Thomas’s richly evocative images: three women carry on an inert man, then dump him casually on the floor. A lightbulb flicks on; dancers enter with tiny pin-lights in their mouths. A woman and man scramble across stage in a continually collapsing form that looks first like a centipede, then like a praying mantis. Thomas is as adept at the tender (a footsy duet) as she is the creepy (three women enter on tiptoe, their upper bodies bent over, hands trailing the ground). The three women are like the sirens on a bad day, poking at their dead-looking man, lifting their skirts up for squeamish little dances. Lifted by a crescendo of Lancaster’s score, Thomas brings on all the dancers in a set of stellar collisions that might be the best moments from a soap opera season all jammed together—fast-forward baroque sex drama. Later, Thomas uses the same technique for pathos, mapping many Descents from the Cross on top of one another. But Thomas isn’t just a master of moments. All this amounts to something, too—a vast striving after expression and connection with a sweet, not saccharine ending: a woman holds a handful of tiny lights, then decorates herself with them, as if they were tears turned to diamond.

The other pieces in the concert mainly provide an opportunity to see Zenon’s extraordinary dancers. It’s not that these other works don’t vibrate pleasantly before the eyes, but they simply don’t show such depth of choreographic thought or reach of dramatic emotion as “Catching Her Tears” does. Danny Buraczewski is a long-time Twin Cities favorite and his work is always crowd-pleasing—lots of sweeping limbs and happy smiles. If I found his “Evidence of Things Unseen” square and uninteresting, no matter; at least it gives Mary Ann Bradley a chance to swivel her liquid hips. Hungarian choreographers contributed two pieces to the program: Gyula Berger’s sweet, hypnotic “Vermont Counterpoint” and Márta Ladjánszki’s “Only You.” Ladjánszki messes around with crawling, barking, climbing, cross-dressing, undressing, and so on, making a sexual stew that’s not so hot. Hot, though, aptly describes Zenon’s men. They’re all eye-catching, but one in particular can’t be missed: suddenly you’ll see him fly in an impossible leap or execute a crazy flip that seconds later you won’t quite believe you saw. I call him Bryan “What the hell was that?” Godbout. Sean Curran’s “Coda” is a flat, unimaginative composition, but again here are the dancers; I particularly noticed Tamara Ober, feral in her attack but pure in her form. The dancers are Zenon’s pride and heart, and they are worth seeing, whatever they’re doing. I’ve mentioned only three of them here, and there are seven altogether in this concert: the rest are for you to discover on your own.

Zenon's Spring Concert runs through May 6.

Upon taking the stage in her local recital debut at the Ordway Center Wednesday night, the first impression Finnish soprano Karita Mattila made was her height. She was literally two heads taller than her accompanist, Martin Katz. And she had a voice to match her size. She is that operatic rarity—a true dramatic soprano. She is not a lyric soprano trying to fake it and push the size of her voice. She’s the real deal. And in roles from Beethoven’s Fidelio to Janacek’s Jenufa, she is also a consummate actress—most of the time, anyway.

In Samuel Barber’s Hermit Songs, Op. 29, she demonstrated a disappointingly generic approach to the texts, which are witty and often racy poems by medieval monks. Diction was also a problem. Without following along with the printed texts, it would have been impossible to know what she was singing. A warmer tone would also have been more in keeping with the music, but she seemed to warm up as she went along, eventually demonstrating both the humor and ecstasy that the material requires.

She was on surer footing with a series of eight songs by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Finnish composers. Ironically, she was more effective in communicating the pathos and passion of these songs than she had been when singing in English, even with the language barrier. This was unfamiliar repertoire, by composers Toivo Kuula, Erkki Melartin, Oskar Merikanto, and Leevi Madetoja, but Mattila made me want to hear more of it. Some of the pieces clearly had their origins in native folk music, but some were in the style of German lieder and one even felt like a full-blown operatic aria.

Actual German lieder opened the second half, with Mattila singing selections from the Spanishes Liederbuch of Hugo Wolf. (A costume change into a sexy Spanish gown brought a round of applause.) Here, she adopted a more sensuous tone that effectively communicated the darker passions of these familiar songs. Some of the texts are German translations of Spanish poetry, which gives the cycle its name, but they are also quintessentially German in their execution. Her performances were rich and detailed without ever becoming mannered, and even the most rapid passagework posed no threat to her exemplary technique.

Some authentic Spanish music closed out the program. An aria from Enrique Granados’ opera, Goyescas, was again hampered by diction. Her pronunciation was hard and Nordic, unable to embrace the lilting play of the Spanish language. Her voluptuous sound offered much compensation, however, especially in the soaring, high passages. A sequence by Joaquin Turina closed out the evening. These were among the most harmonically challenging works on the program, but she threw herself into the performances with a dramatic commitment and sense of élan, even dancing her way through her final number.

Martin Katz has been collaborating with most of the major recital artists of the last few decades. (His contribution is far too great to call it merely accompanying.) His sensitivity, mastery and experience added immeasurably to the musical experience. He was virtuosic without being flashy and deeply moving throughout.

The musical Hairspray opened at the Orpheum Theatre last night with all the glitz and glamour of an old-time Broadway musical. This might seem to be contrary to the subversive spirit of the 1988 John Waters film on which it was based, but it’s more fun to think that Waters’ twisted sensibility is infiltrating the mainstream.

The plot is roughly the same as the film, making some allowances for the economics of live performance. (Several characters are conflated into one.) In 1962 Baltimore, Tracy Turnblad, a plus-sized high school student, wants nothing more than to dance on an American Bandstand-like TV show. But breaking the weight barrier is almost as difficult as breaking the color barrier, and Tracy champions integration to the point of going to jail.

In the midst of Bush-era social policy and in the world of size 0 body fascists, the story has never felt more contemporary. The show not only maintains the movie’s conceit of having Tracy’s mother played by a man in drag (the incomparable Divine in the film), it actually explodes it. A basso Edna only adds to the comedy. The love duet between her and nebbishy husband Wilbur, “(You’re) Timeless to Me,” manages to be simultaneously a broad caricature and yet deeply touching.

Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan have written a smart book, appropriately smart-ass, using some of the best lines from the film, and never taking themselves too seriously. They parody movie genres from frothy fifties teen romances to hardboiled women’s prison movies.

Likewise, the score, by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, features numbers that pay homage to music from Elvis to the Supremes. It may be pastiche, but these are quality songs in their own right. Most effective are the big dance numbers, like “Good Morning Baltimore” and “You Can’t Stop the Beat,” inspiring some fresh and innovative choreography from Jerry Mitchell.

It was a minor frustration that the amplification system is quite inferior, often obscuring the witty lyrics.

Brooklynn Pulver is a dynamo as Tracy with a great voice and a compelling stage presence. Jerry O’Boyle is likewise effective as Edna. He may lack the cavernous low notes of Harvey Feinstein (for whom the role was written), but he knows how take the stage and make the most of every comic moment.

The real star of the production, however, is Yvette Monique Clark as Motormouth Maybelle, a black deejay. She belts out the first act finale, “Big, Blonde, and Beautiful,” riding atop the chorus and even claiming victory over the sound system. And in the 11 o’clock number, “I Know Where I’ve Been,” she adds real soul (pun intended) to the comedy.

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard a staid Orpheum Theatre audience screaming and stomping its feet throughout a whole performance. But with Hairspray, it makes sense. I was cheering right along with them.

Hairspray plays through April 29 at the Orpheum Theatre.

Admittedly, it’s hard to get excited about the tonal possibilities of the upright double bass—unless Israeli jazz virtuoso Avishai Cohen is playing it, in which case the emotional superlatives quickly go from mere excitement to shock, astonishment, fascination, wonder, awe, and delight, in roughly that order.

Playing last night at St. Paul’s Jewish Community Center, fresh off a weeklong gig at the Blue Note in New York, Cohen was in town to play for Jewish Independence Day, or Yom Ha’atzmaut, and to celebrate the worldwide release of his latest CD, As Is, Live at the Blue Note. Cohen isn’t particularly well known outside of jazz circles, but in the small universe of jazz bass aficionados, he has become somewhat of a flaming comet for the many ways in which he extends the reach of an instrument whose proper role, in many people’s eyes, is thump-thump-thudding behind a bluegrass band. Last night’s show was so lightly publicized that bassists around town were getting frantic calls from their friends two hours before the show, alerting them that the amazing Avishai Cohen was in town, so they’d better drop whatever they were doing and get down to the JCC (where?!) before it was too late.

Those who made it were treated to two tight, brisk sets of world-class jazz from a trio completed by nineteen-year-old Israeli phenom Shai Maestro on piano, and New Jersey’s Mark Guiliana on drums. Playing all original material—some from the new CD, some from past efforts, and some from upcoming projects—this group, formally known as The Avishai Cohen Trio, displayed a level of technical virtuosity and musical inventiveness rarely seen even in the best jazz clubs. Scene-followers on the lookout for the next young whiz with jaw-dropping chops will want to take note of pianist Shai Maestro, a kid from Jerusalem who has liquid lightning in his fingers. But Cohen is clearly the heart and soul of the group. And, unlikely as it sounds, his prowess on bass does ultimately steal the show.

Regularly referred to in jazz publications as a “genius” or “visionary,” and often discussed in the same breath as the great Jaco Pastorius, Avishai Cohen doesn’t just play bass—he embraces it, he dances with it, he slaps it, he strums, pops, pounds, bows, and bangs it, pulling every imaginable sound out of it, including speedy legato improvisations and inventive chordal textures that one doesn’t normally hear from the monster of all instruments. He can reach down and play a delicate melody on the upper register, then lean back and meet up with his band-mates in an instantaneous explosion of jazz-funk fury, flailing so fast sometimes that you’d swear he had six hands. All three musicians have a beautiful soft touch as well, which gives the band a tremendous dynamic range. Cohen is always in control, though, and plays onstage between the piano and drums, where he bridges the two and always keeps things in perfect balance.

Cohen’s compositions and arrangements are also worth mentioning, because they tend to be both musically adventurous and accessible at the same time. Some of the most interesting pieces played last night have yet to be recorded, but draw heavily from Cohen’s cultural heritage in Israel and Eastern Europe. Because this was a concert for Yom Ha’atsmaut, Cohen played quite a few numbers derived from traditional Jewish folk songs, but he always adds a jazzy, infectious twist. He even sang a couple of tunes, and his voice is as pleasingly mellow as his other instrument.

At the end of the show, Cohen reminded the audience that the music they just heard was “the sound of freedom.” Indeed, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in that crowd who didn’t agree that freedom, in the musical world at least, is in mighty good hands.

Note: Avishai Cohen’s new CD, As Is, Live at the Blue Note, was released today and is available at Avishai Music. For those who missed Monday night’s performance, don’t worry—the CD comes with a full-performance DVD that will explain what all the fuss is about.

There’s nothing nerdier than a white dude earnestly breaking down hip-hop, but based on the crowd for Nas’s show at Myth last night, I’m probably not alone this morning. Nas’s new record, provocatively entitled Hip Hop is Dead, is obviously trying to elicit outrage, or at least some kind of visceral reaction, from his audience—and it succeeds, even though it’s really just a new title for Nas’s compassionate gangsta-rap shtick. 

Before we get into Nasty Nas’s performance, let me just say this about the club: it’s always worth the drive. Getting to the VIP room at Myth is like going through airport security—a cop marks you with pen at the door, and then you’re given multiple ink stamps and multicolor bracelets when you get inside, and then you’re escorted by a massive bouncer through the labyrinthine stairs and passageways to your suite. But when you get there: club heaven. Great sightlines, cush leather banquettes throbbing to the heavy bass, flatscreens tuned to Sportscenter, private bathrooms, your own bartender.

All right, suburban gush over. Maybe it’s just the low nightlife expectations that begin to set in as you blow through Little Canada. By the time you actually get to Maplewood, you’re relieved to find cold designer vodka. 

Last night, against a huge “Hip Hop is Dead” backdrop with his DJ set up behind a black coffin and bouquets of white lilies, Nas came out alone, sagging in his jeans, with unlaced Tims and his shades wrapped tight. He shed his purple hoodie to reveal a cable of gold with a gauge thicker than my wrist. Was this a wry comment on hip-hop’s present-day excess or a nod to its “Paid in Full” past? Regardless, the man has presence. He spit out his first single, “Hip Hop Is Dead” of course, with a ferocity that you don’t hear on his records, where his voice is usually locked into a more demure, poetic mode. The crowd, split halfway between white dudes in cocked ball-caps and black dudes in cocked ball-caps, was immediately nodding and bobbing. After another rhyme from the new record, he started in on what everybody was there for, tracks from his ’94 debut, Illmatic. We weren’t there to be reminded of how great this album is—we know how great it is. We just wanted to hear it live, and we got half of it—“New York State of Mind,” “Represent,” “It Ain’t Hard to Tell,” “Who’s World is This?” and “Life’s a Bitch and then you Die”—in quick succession.

As he went through his catalog, a running theme became apparent. After playing most of Illmatic, he started preaching between songs (fitting for a “funeral”). Taking shots at how hip-hop’s forgotten its past, urging the crowd to “f**k radio!” slamming first George Bush and then rival rappers (“50 Cent sucks. Oh, you didn’t know?”) and promising that the rest of the show would be “6,000 feet underground.” But going 6,000 feet underground and arriving at “Hate Me Now”—a song from ’99 with a $2 million Hype Williams video where Nas and Puff Daddy were crucified like twin-Christs seemed to test the limits of irony.

See, Nas is like Jose Canseco in baseball, or maybe something like what KG is becoming in basketball. Nas was supposed to be the greatest of all time out of the gate—and he kinda was (he did, after all, help resuscitate East Coast hip-hop)—but just like Jose, after that initial success, he started fighting his own legacy. In Minneapolis (or rather, the greater Minneapolis area) we know what real “underground rappers” are and, for better or for worse, they don’t go multiplatinum and they don’t beef with Jay-Z, or for that matter, sign with Jay-Z’s record company. Nas is just indulging in a little ego-assuaging packaging; shrouding himself with well-earned artistic authenticity to obscure the fact that his new stuff just doesn’t quite measure up. That’s the curse of a great first record. Guaranteed career longevity, and you can close your show with “Memory Lane”—another dominant Illmatic track—but ultimately memory lane is a painful place to be. Hip Hop is Dead would be a great record, if it didn’t come from the guy who did Illmatic; conversely, Hip Hop is Dead is worth listening to because it comes from the guy who did Illmatic. But after an hour and a half of a blazing Nas show, heavily reliant on past greatness, you get the feeling that the title to his new record is just wishful thinking.

Film festivals require serious stamina. Five years ago at the Toronto Film Festival I set a personal movie-viewing record—four films in one day. When I found myself in the hotel room at 11 o’clock that night eating my first real meal of the day, I knew I had slipped over into that troubled class of people whose obsessions often drive them to forget life’s necessities. Like food. Or water.

If you love movies, though, it’s a price worth paying—or at least rationalizing. (Who wants to be the only one who misses the must-see hit of the fest while sitting in a dog John Travolta did to up his indie cred?) My strategy this weekend for making a dent in the ninety-plus movies at this year’s Minneapolis–St.Paul International Film Festival was considerably more sane—three movies, two days, and only the good stuff.

The first, a Saturday matinee at St. Anthony Main Theater, was the Danish film Bonkers (or Knetter, as it’s known less colorfully in its native Netherlands). Though ostensibly part of the fest’s “Childish Films” program, it’s certainly not without adult themes, which may explain why there were only three kids in the audience.

Jesse Rinsma (a Dakota Fanning look-alike) plays the nine-year-old protagonist, a cheery little girl who tries to hold her family together after grandma dies and she’s left alone with her manic-depressive mother. Convinced that a baby brother would change the family dynamics for the better, she sets out to find her single mom a mate, at the same time dodging a social worker who wants to put her in foster care.

At a lean eighty-three minutes there’s not much room for character development or subtlety, but director Martin Koolhoven has an eye for quirky detail and a winning way of balancing his rather weighty material with the sort of silliness you’d expect from a movie that introduces a circus elephant into the plot. The cast is immensely likable and the film’s family-is-what-we-make-it message is an easy one to root for. It’s not exactly Happy Feet, that’s for sure. But shouldn’t we all be a little grateful for that?

In many ways, Waitress, which screened Saturday night at Oak Street Cinema, is also a triumph of pitch-perfect tone and casting. In Hollywood parlance, it would be dubbed a romantic dramedy—equal parts romantic comedy and drama, which typically means it doesn’t fully succeed at either. The Fox Searchlight release (opening at the Uptown Theater May 11) comes off considerable buzz from the Sundance Film Festival, where everyone was still in shock over the recent murder of its writer/director, Adrienne Shelly, who has a supporting role in Waitress (and a small part in the Bukowski adaptation Factotum that was shot in the Twin Cities).

Keri Russell’s turn as an unhappily married small-town Southern waitress who falls in love with her ob-gyn has echoes of Jennifer Aniston’s role in The Good Girl, which also cast an impossibly attractive actress better known for her TV work (in Russell’s case the addictive Felicity) as a depressed service-industry wage slave with a good-for-nothing husband, an awkward new love, and an unexpected pregnancy. That Waitress is set in the South opens the door to a host of other clichés, not the least of which is the mythology of the healing power of Southern cooking (Russell’s character makes pies to match every mood and occasion). Here, as in Fried Green Tomatoes, though, there’s something sweet and respectful about the treatment because there’s enough nuance in the writing and enough commitment in the performances to warrant our emotional investment.

The last film of the weekend, the offbeat Australian comedy Ten Canoes, which screened at Oak Street on Sunday, would seem, on the surface, something destined for only the hardiest of film geeks. Filmed in a remote area of Australia’s Northern Territory and mostly in an aboriginal language, it’s a story-within-story set a thousand years ago that shifts from color to black-and-white and is told at a pace that one might generously call . . . leisurely.

The film’s English-speaking narrator (David Gulpilil) spins the tale of a tribal leader who, upon discovering that his brother is planning to steal one of his three wives, tells an ancestral story of murder and betrayal that seems likely to sour those plans. Gulpilil’s narration both comments on the action and interacts with the audience, reminding us that “my story is not your story, but it is a good one.” And this low-key charmer is indeed a good one.

Many have tried to read the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Film Festival its last rites. Certainly, there has been plenty of evidence to suggest that the cineaste’s annual pilgrimage might not live another year. These last two years alone have seen the unraveling of its steward, the debt-ridden Minnesota Film Arts; what looks to be the impending sale of Oak Street Cinema; and the heart-bypass surgery of Al Milgrom, literally the one man behind the show.

The eleven-day film marathon, though, kicked off its twenty-fifth festival last night at the Riverview Theater with a screening of Bamako, a small, powerful film from Africa that’s evidence enough that Milgrom best hang in there for another twenty-five years. Bamako’s executive producer, actor Danny Glover, was on hand to introduce the film (and field questions at a post-screening Q&A). Glover, in turn, was introduced by ex-Viking Hall of Famer Carl Eller, who clearly isn’t much of a film buff: he forgot the name of the movie. I hope he stuck around long enough to see what the fuss was about.

Written and directed by Abderrahmane Sissako and set in a courtyard in Mali (in fact, the courtyard where Sissako grew up) Bamako plays out an intriguing premise: what would happen if a poor village in Africa put the World Bank on trial for the continent’s economic, political, and financial crises.

Sissako cast real lawyers, friends, and associates as witnesses in this mock trial and then asked them to improvise their arguments in a makeshift outdoor courtroom presided over by magistrates in judicial robes. The impassioned arguments are sometimes hard to follow and as maddeningly abstract as you might expect when it’s globalization, privatization, and basically the whole Western world on trial. But it works because the film isn’t a straightforward debate on the World Bank’s culpability for Africa’s problems. In fact, remarkably little in this politically charged film is nearly so heavy handed or linear.

Maybe that’s because Sissako is as equally interested in capturing the quiet rhythms of daily life in the Malian capital as he is the polemics. Interspersed amidst the courtroom sequences, there’s a brief, poignant story of a bar singer who plans to leave her out-of-work husband and a spoof Hollywood western (which includes a cameo of Glover) that’s set in Timbuktu.

Even the courtroom proceedings have moments of humor. Toward the end of the film, a man who has been listening to the arguments observes that the trial has become annoying, undoubtedly Sissako’s nod to those in the audience who might be thinking the same thing. He has nothing to worry about. This surprising, subtle, original film is the kind of movie you hope to discover at a film festival. It’s not destined to play at the neighborhood gigantaplex or be particularly easy to track down on DVD, which is precisely why we can all be grateful that our homegrown fest lived to see its silver anniversary. Thanks, Al.

The Minneapolis–St. Paul International Film Festival runs through April 29 with screenings at the Riverview Theater, Bell Auditorium, Oak Street Cinema, and St. Anthony Main Theater. Here's the festival's full schedule and some "tips and tidbits" from Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.

Guthrie artistic director Joe Dowling would have you believe that his Irishness is not an important factor in his running of our most prestigious theater. “I am not the Irish artistic director; I am the artistic director,” Dowling told a crowd of 200 or so people at the College of St. Thomas’s O’Shaughnessy Education Center yesterday evening. The remark drew a ripple of knowing laughter from this crowd, however, because Dowling had spent the previous ninety minutes lecturing on the history of Irish theater and his direct connection to his homeland’s struggle for national and artistic independence.

Sponsored by the Minnesota International Center, the talk, “From Farquhar to Friel: Irish Theater in the World,” was a rare opportunity to hear Dowling speak passionately and at length about a subject so close to his heart. Most Guthrie-goers know, for example, that before he took the helm at the Guthrie, Dowling was artistic director of Dublin’s legendary Abbey Theatre, where he helped develop the reputations of such world-renowned playwrights as Brendan Behan and Brian Friel. Fewer may be aware that in 1963 Friel was an apprentice with Sir Tyrone Guthrie (himself an Irishman) in Minneapolis during the founding year of the theater, after which Friel wrote Philadelphia, Here I Come, one of the first plays Dowling directed at the Guthrie, in 1996. Not many people know, however, that when Dowling was sixteen, he saw Philadelphia, Here I Come so many times (nineteen by his count) at the Abbey that they started letting him in for free. Nor are many people aware of how deeply Friel’s play—about a young man in the 1950s who is leaving his family and moving to America—ended up shaping Dowling’s own life.

“That play spoke directly to me about how conservative and stagnant Irish life had become,” Dowling told the St. Thomas crowd. “It also taught me how subversive theater can be, and how in need of subversion our culture was.”

It may sound odd to hear the leader of our most mainstream theater speak so enthusiastically about the subversion of society, but Dowling clearly sees himself as an inheritor of the counter-cultural theatrical tradition handed down from the grandfather of Irish theater, George Farquhar, to Richard Brinsley Sheridan (School for Scandal), Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett, and many others. Indeed, one of the enduring mysteries of the creative universe is why Ireland, of all places, has produced so many great writers and actors relative to its size, population, and location. According to Dowling, the answer has to do with Ireland’s love of language and oratory combined with political realities that, for much of the country’s history, have sought to either extinguish or undermine Ireland’s national identity. This continual struggle for cultural independence is the fire in the belly of Ireland’s greatest writers, says Dowling, even though their instinct for social mischief often resulted in riots by Irish nationalists who felt that the purpose of theater, and the Abbey Theatre in particular, should be to spread pro-Irish propaganda.

Philosophically, Dowling clearly identifies with this tradition of theater as a sometimes incendiary catalyst for social change. To what degree it influences his current artistic choices is debatable, but it’s worth keeping in mind when George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara opens at The Guthrie on May 11, and Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa hits the main stage this fall. In Dowling, we have a director whose connection to Irish theater is so deep and personal that it can’t help but seep into the marrow of his work at the Guthrie, even when he isn’t directing. It’s a fair bet he did not choose these plays simply to please Guthrie patrons. Chances are, he has something else in mind—something a little less benign than an evening of pleasantly distracting entertainment. No one is going to riot over these productions, but one gets the feeling from listening to Dowling that he wishes they would, at least once, if only to keep a time-honored tradition of Irish theater alive.

The Ivey Awards popped up three years ago as a way to honor the Twin Cities theater community. Its founder, Scott Mayer, has done a phenomenal job of building enthusiasm for the event. Last night, board members, Ivey evaluators, actors, artistic directors, and yes, arts journalists and critics, were invited to the Orpheum Theatre for a two-hour schmoozefest, complete with an open bar and amuse-bouches. Rarely has networking been so fun. A big standing ovation goes to Scott and everyone else who helped make last night happen!

St. Paul’s mayor, Chris Coleman, gave a speech about the importance of the arts, not just for its revenue but for its communal and spiritual value. Without theater, he said, we will have lost a part of our humanity. Mayer spoke proudly about the sixty-plus professional theaters in town (which elicited lots of hooting and clapping), but he also noted grimmer statistics. He said that some shows have been canceled to due to zero attendance; that some houses were not even half full; that even our Tony Award–winning companies—Theatre de la Jeune Lune, the Guthrie, and Children’s Theatre Company—continue to need our support. We finally have an awards show that celebrates the breadth and diversity of our theater community, and it’s our job—your job, my job, our friends’ jobs—to help keep it alive.

He offered up some excellent suggestions on how to do so:

+ Pledge to see a show every month by at least one company you’ve never heard of. Here are some ideas: Burning House Group is doing Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw May 10-27; Torch Theater, led by actor Stacia Rice, is doing A Thousand Clowns through May 5. Starting Gate Productions’ King Lear, directed by Matt Sciple, opens May 18. Sciple, by the way, is currently playing Ahab in physical theater director’s Jon Ferguson’s take on Moby Dick, called Or the White Whale (closes April 22). I can think of dozens of other off-the-radar companies I’d recommend seeing. The Ivey Awards website has the most comprehensive listings in town.

+ When you go see a show, bring a friend. According to Mayer, if you saw one show a month by a company you’ve never seen before, it would take you about five years to patronize all of them. Did you know that the Twin Cities has more theater seats per capita than New York City? It’s true.

+ If you aren’t already on the board of a theater, join one. If you haven’t donated to a theater, do so.

Sometimes it’s hard to recognize the value of something until it’s gone. None of us want to be the person lamenting that they’d “never seen that show that was supposed to be amazing” or “wished I had seen something by that company that that now-really-successful director used to run.”

I’ve often felt that regret, and it’s my job to see theater. At this year’s Iveys, I hope to have seen at least one show by each of those sixty-plus theaters. I might not be able to do it, but I think it’s an honorable goal.

The Ivey Awards will be held September 24 at the State Theatre in downtown Minneapolis. I hope to see you there.

The black-and-red patent leather stilettos were the first giveaway that something other than dinner and drinks was afoot at the Loring Pasta Bar last night. The sound of violins drifted through the high-ceilinged space and the woman standing in those memorable heels was skillfully making her way across the dance floor.

The Sunday night milangas at Loring aren’t a secret. The Mandragora Tango Orchestra has performed tangos most Sunday nights at the bohemian-style eatery for the last five years. They perform from 7-9 p.m and draw a crowd of regulars as well as the occasional Spanish major from the nearby University of Minnesota looking for a mini-lesson in Latin culture.

The Loring is a bit of a revelation in that it manages to evoke relaxed refinement—a signature vibe of Old World meets the contemporary. Candles and white napkins mix with red lampshades and giant windows that open onto the street to make the atmosphere a perfect fit for the music.

The orchestra features a rotation of talented musicians. Last night, the ensemble included the group’s founder, accordionist Bob Barnes, along with a bass player and two violinists who perform on an elevated platform under a painted arch. True to billing, the group delivers “nostalgic tango that stirs the soul and moves the feet.” A half dozen couples who know their way around the intricate footwork of the tango populated the dance floor to complete the scene.

To quote my companion, the experience was "otherworldy."

I hate to admit this, but I've never seen Duluth folk singer/guitarist Charlie Parr perform live. He's been on several bills of shows I've attended, but always as an opener, and I've always arrived after his set. My timing was no better last night when I went to First Ave. for the CD-release party for Duluth slowcore trio Low's new album, Drums and Guns. Doors were at 6:30, I showed up at 8 and had missed all of Parr and the first couple songs by Sweden-based Loney, Dear. I can tell you, however, that Loney, Dear is now on my watch list. The lead singer's falsetto voice and the band's variety of instruments—guitar, bass, and drums backed by organ, synthesizer, tambourine, and others—keeps it interesting. Also, the band was unafraid of showing its enthusiasm, which is refreshing to see in this emo-angsty rock 'n' roll world we live in.

Low's set had me smiling the whole time. And that's saying something, since so much of their material is depressing. This band may be called slowcore, but last night it was more like snailcore, they played so slowly. But it was so passionately and earnestly played that it was enrapturing. The only downfall was the guy videotaping the entire show, who stood in front of the stage almost at the band's height.

Low played almost every tune from Drums and Guns, which was a thrill for me, since I was unable to take that CD out of my player for the first month I had it. They played the beautiful downer "Dragonfly," catchy "Sandinista," head-bobbing "Hatchet," heart-wrenching "Violent Past" and "Murderer," and my favorite song off the CD, "Breaker" (which, incidentally, has a really funny video on YouTube).

Luckily for me, the early showtime at First Ave. meant I had plenty of time to make it over to the 400 Bar before local electro-pop group Halloween, Alaska went onstage. I missed Cepia, but arrived during Ela's set. It was my first time seeing Ela—which is fronted by Askeleton's Bill Caperton and Knol Tate and backed up by Heiruspecs drummer Peter Leggett and bassist Sean McPherson. I dug their emo indie rock sound, and it seemed the college crowd did as well.

Halloween, Alaska is currently recording its third CD, which drummer Dave King told me last night will probably be out this fall. The band's setlist pulled heavily from its last disk, Too Tall to Hide, including "A New Stain" (which much of the crowd sang along to) and L.L. Cool J's "I Can't Live Without My Radio" (which I couldn't help but sing along to). The band also mixed in some new tunes it's been working on.

Singer James Diers made sure to promote the compilation CD they had for sale last night. Halloween, Alaska was one of several local bands to contribute to For Callum, a benefit disk featuring everyone from Jawbreaker to Bill Mike to Story of the Sea, the proceeds of which go to a care fund for one-year-old Callum Robbins from Baltimore, who was born with Spinal Muscular Atrophy.

Someone died at the fundraiser I went to at SooVAC last night. In fact, it was a virtual bloodbath. Graphic scenes of death were everywhere, and the evening culminated in a body splayed on the floor amidst the fashionably dressed crowd. There was even a crime-scene investigation by a real-life police officer.

OK, the graphic scenes were of dolls, the “body” was that of an actor, and the cop was off duty, but still . . . . A typical night at the gallery? Not so much. Good fun? Most definitely.

The event, titled "Our Wildest Dreams: A True Crime Evening of Music, Art & Mystery," was a fundraiser for a forthcoming documentary by Susan Marks, the force behind the book Finding Betty Crocker and an accompanying documentary about the cultural icon. Our Wildest Dreams trades wholesome, corporate domesticity for a sordid, unruly view of life behind closed doors.

Though the film has yet to be made, the premise is intriguing, if quirky. The tale plays on our seemingly tireless fascination with forensics based on what Marks describes as “the nation’s insatiable appetite for programming like CSI.” Marks seems to have a knack for finding the unusual angle to a familiar phenomenon. In this case she tapped straight into out collective fascination with both death and domesticity. She uncovered a most peculiar forensics tool—dollhouses used to recreate crime scenes—designed by one Frances Glessner Lee. The houses are still used to train investigators at the Maryland facility where they are housed.

Each dollhouse recreates a crime scene complete with tiny corpse dolls who represent actual murder victims. SooVAC's walls were lined with black-and-white images of suspicious doll death in all its variations:

Doll hanging from a noose? Check.

Dolls shot as they lay “sleeping” in bed? Check.

Doll laying face down at the bottom of the stairs? Check.

You get the idea. The photos' heavy shadows and unrelenting focus on blood and guts evoke the crime scene photographs of Weegee—except, of course, with dolls.

By the end of the investigation (though by no means the end of the evening, which also featured live music and an ample supply of chips, pretzels, peanuts and peppermint patties), a love triangle had been revealed, the body in question had disappeared, and two “people of interest” had been taken into figurative custody. Not a bad night’s work on the homicide beat.

The great and sometimes maddening thing about guitar magician Dean Magraw is that you never know quite what you’re going to get. He can be an inspired acoustic jazz picker, as he was on his debut album, Broken Silence. He can team up with another musician and provide little more than tasteful backup, which he did on his latest release, Raven, with accordionist John Williams. Or, as he displayed without a doubt last night at the Artists' Quarter during the CD-release party for his latest venture, Unseen Rain, Magraw can make an electric guitar do anything he wants—including make it sound like a dolphin.

Dressed plainly in a mottled red bowling shirt and baggy brown pants, Magraw took the stage with Fat Kid Wednesdays drummer JT Bates and bassist Jim Anton, and promptly began playing some of the most technically accomplished, musically adventurous jazz I've heard in quite some time. What Magraw, Bates, and Anton have created is an experimental jazz trio that’s both loose and tight at the same time, with enough discipline to keep the music structured, but plenty of freedom to roam out to the otherworldly edges of the sonic universe and back. Bates is a freakishly talented drummer who, like Magraw, gets an astonishing variety of noises out of a standard drum kit. And bassist Anton always seems to have the perfect answer for Magraw’s playful high-jinks on guitar.

Most of the tunes on Unseen Rain are original compositions. They range in character from the woozy, restrained textures of the title track to "Isabella,"a smooth-jazz tune roughed up just enough to make it interesting, all the way to a truly bizarre thing called "Plum Blossom," which features Magraw on a Fender Stratocaster playing a kind of weird, ghostly electronic slide that ends up sounding like whales, dolphins, and several other creatures that aren’t necessarily of this earth. In between, there are also several trans-cultural gems, such as "Keep the Faith," a composition that fuses Indian and Middle Eastern tonalities with Western jazz and rock in a way that makes you feel as if world peace may actually be possible, as long as no one opens their mouth to interrupt the music.

This is all done in the playful, even traditional, spirit of jazz exploration. To emphasize this fact, Magraw and crew threw in a few numbers by John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and John McLaughlin, each of which they stretched and made their own. It’s my sincere hope that Unseen Rain isn’t the only disk Magraw, Bates, and Anton decide to record; there’s too much sonic territory still left for these guys to explore.

I have to confess: I don’t really get narrative dances. Why use a poetic art to tell a prosaic tale? Watching the great story ballets (Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, etc.), I twiddle my thumbs through the stagy, sometimes incomprehensible mime, waiting for the transcendent moment when the story falls away and leaves pure emotion. So I approached the Ballet of the Dolls’ The Secret Annex: A Room with a View, a dance based on the story of Anne Frank, with trepidation.

Perhaps I’ve been bored by the stories of classical ballet because those who mount the productions often see the stories as dispensable, a mere pretext for beautiful dance. Director and choreographer Lisa Conlin certainly doesn’t see the Anne Frank story that way. She tells the story through a series of danced vignettes, and shapes the dancers’ steps to their characters’ emotions—weepy arabesques for Anne Frank’s melancholy mother, bold strutting and stamping for the fiery Van Daans, and sprightly footwork for Anne herself. Her concern with the story is also supported by her Dolls collaborators, all of whom have plenty of experience with story dances (the Dolls’ specialty). Conlin and Devin Carey mix a smooth and evocative score for the piece, and props and costumes show the period. It’s the dancers, though, who bring the tale to life. All are skilled at embodying character (not just emotion), throwing personality into every step; I especially liked Colleen Tague’s vain Mrs. Van Daan and Jim Lieberthal’s fretful Dr. Dussel.

But Conlin’s craft doesn’t carry her through scenes of high emotion. Twice she brings the dancers together, abandoning character, in a mostly-unison dance. Here Conlin tries to suggest fear and militarism with jazz steps (most of The Secret Annex is ballet)—jutting, shaking shoulders, wide-spaced legs, and frontal looks. The Nazi salute may have been robotic, but to imagine Nazism as a machine is to forget what’s worst: that the machine was made of fairly ordinary people. Here Conlin needs to reach beyond narrative and into emotion.

Conlin also has trouble with Anne herself. We know Anne Frank through her voice: she was a thinker, an individual, a writer, a curious young girl. Conlin tries to get Frank’s introspection across to the audience through one spotlighted dance in which Anne splits into two selves. The trouble is, this is our only glimpse at the inner Anne, and it’s so late in the show that it’s confusing. It’s also hard to watch. Conlin gives the Anne dancers (herself and Marisha Johnson) drippy lyrical choreography that neither dancer can manage.

The Secret Annex is not a brilliant work of art, but then it doesn’t aim so high as that. Conlin chiefly wants to bring the audience into the story, and she does, particularly through the character of Victoria, a girl from the present who pores over Anne Frank’s diary. In one striking scene, Victoria shines a flashlight on each character as she wanders across the darkened stage. That is, Conlin implies, all we can do at this distance—and what we must do. We can’t help Anne Frank, but we can look at her life. And we can look together, through Conlin’s narrative dance.

The Secret Annex plays through April 15 at the Ritz Theater.

Reviewing what he called Cervantes’ “unreadable masterpiece,” Don Quixote, Martin Amis declared, “While we are obliged to adapt to the great strange books of the past, they are obliged to adapt to us.” Recently, I was reminded of Amis’s theory of literary relativity when I read that Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is once again in the news: a former Black Panther in St. Louis Park is trying to get Huck removed from his daughter’s advanced English Lit reading list. As somebody who not only loves the book, but finds Twain’s story about the emergence of a hick’s moral conscience in an amoral community still vital at a time when race and immigration issues are still, uh . . . unresolved, I was disgusted by this suburban parent’s shortsighted attempt to remove the book on the grounds of shifting PC rectitude. I was particularly dismayed by Gilbert’s primary objection: Twain’s repetition of the word “nigger.” It smacked of the pseudo-scientific accounting the Ratings Board uses to measure offensive content—but this was Huckleberry Finn, not Grindhouse. Was Gilbert really that tone deaf? Didn’t he realize Mark Twain is on his side? After all, Twain is a man who said, “I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.”

Then I saw The Merchant of Venice at the Guthrie.

And it made me angry.

Possibly for the same reasons Huck offended Gilbert.

Both works have been dogged by controversy over the years—whether it’s theater patrons calling for Merchant never to be performed again because of its inherent anti-Semitism or parents seeking to remove Huck from the classroom. But while both Huck and Merchant are works by artistic geniuses, one is a nineteenth-century novel meant to be read by the individual and therefore subject to the individual’s interpretation, and the other is a seventeenth-century play written to be interpreted by a director, in this case the Guthrie’s venerable Joe Dowling. So no matter how much your English teacher natters on, or how your local columnist, or even your daddy feels about Huck Finn, your encounter with him is usually one-on-one, on the page (the Children’s Theatre’s de-niggered version notwithstanding) whereas you usually meet Shylock on the stage. Unfortunately, meeting Shylock at the Guthrie, amidst a horde of well-meaning Minnesotans who were all too willing to chortle at his miserly-Jew schtick, made me queasy. Could there be a PC cop of my own buried somewhere in my synapses? Or is nausea just what happens when you choke down a fireball of fury to avoid disrupting a play?

Merchant is traditionally placed on the comedy side of Shakespeare’s canon, and unfortunately, Dowling plays it by the book. But this isn’t a case where the audience can simply judge the material for itself; Dowling’s choices directly affect the audience’s perception of the play’s tone. And by encouraging his actors to play it broad and go for big laughs, he wastes one of the most complicated villains in literature. With such an irritatingly delightful treatment, focused on the Portia-Antonio-Bassanio triangle, he distracts the audience from Shylock’s seething desire for revenge. In the context of Dowling’s light, entertaining direction, a dark, complex Shylock would throw the play’s balance off, so we get a whiny Shylock, played by Robert Dorfman with the nasal affectation of a Borscht Belt comedian. It’s clear from Dorfman’s portrayal that Dowling doesn’t want Shylock to steal the show. Tellingly, Dowling’s Shylock delivers the famous “Do we not bleed?” speech sitting down.

Maybe this interpretation is faithful to Shakespeare’s original intent—a gay farce where the one-dimensional Jewish bad guy suffers his comeuppance, to the mob’s delight. Maybe Dowling is right not to give Shakespeare the benefit of the doubt—to avoid retroactively injecting subversive angst where there is none. But I believe he wasted an opportunity. Merchant demands to be transformed, to be drastically adapted to an audience for whom anti-Semitism is no longer a punchline. Or perhaps I should say for whom anti-Semitism should no longer be an effective punchline. After all, Shakespeare was never too Shakespearean to cash in on a cheap laugh. Most of his dick and fart jokes still work—even some 400 years later—but I felt strange that his pork material was getting such big belly laughs in 2007. Like Twain, Shakespeare is portraying racism and its consequences (although Twain’s minority characters demonstrate a humanity that The Bard’s tend to lack), but listening to Guthrie theatergoers cracking up at Jew jokes made me horribly uncomfortable. Angry, even. I found myself thinking the same thing my Jewish buddy was thinking when we saw Borat. At the end of the movie, he turned to me and said, “I thought it was hilarious, but I can’t help wondering what they were laughing at.”

Maybe that’s what Gilbert was thinking when he got to the part where Huck’s redneck pap is incredulous that the “gov’ment” allows a freed slave to vote: “I was just about to go and vote myself, if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out.” Twain’s nasty satire can elicit the same deep laughter Shakespeare’s pork jokes were getting at the Guthrie. And while I would argue that Twain’s satire has a more noble intent than Shakespeare’s comedy, if you filled a theater up with Huck Finn readers, would everybody be laughing for the right reasons?

Bottom line, I think my reaction to Merchant was different than Gilberts’ to Huck. I’m not asking for the play to prematurely end its run. I’m not asking for a surgeon general’s warning, or the formation of a multicultural citizen’s panel to review the appropriateness of the Guthrie’s productions. I’m just a guy on a blog picking on Joe Dowling’s choices.

And isn’t that what this country is all about?

I was looking forward to the season finale for the Electric Arc Radio show for weeks. When I heard The New Standards (Chan Poling, John Munson, Steve Roehm) were performing, and that Al Franken would be making a special appearance, I knew it'd be a can't-miss performance.

If you're not familiar, Electric Arc is the story of what happens in a house where four writers live. (Watch mspmag.com's behind-the-scenes video.) The story is told from the stage of the Ritz Theater, where the cast members read their scripts and drink beer. None of these writers really live together, and the plot has many more than four characters, including those of each episode's guest musicians, who are written into the script. There's also a house band and a narrator. I've lost count, but suffice it to say, that's a lot of people on stage.

Last night the stage was even more crowded than usual with The New Standards' baby grand piano, upright bass, and vibraphone wedged between the house band and the cast. The New Standards opened the show with a jazzed-up rendition of the Clash's "London Calling" followed by, of all songs, OutKast's "Hey Ya!" The mood was set for the best performance of the season.

This twenty-fifth episode was the most musical episode ever, and was more sexed-up than the other episodes this season. (One might assume these writers are experiencing a sexually frustrated spring.)

To wrap up the season, the house members each found their "essence":

Sam met a girl at the Hobby Lobby with whom he thought shared his deep love for rocketry. Turned out she was only interested in Sam's other rocket. The two explored this misunderstanding in a rap song that made me blush and almost made me cry from laughing so hard. 

Steph got a lesson in domestication from Old Lady Dickinson, who taught her how to make ham sandwiches.

After listening to five hours of techno music, Brady decided to beat down his BFF, Alan Greenspan, and set out to cut down Greenspan's treehouse. Brady and Greenspan ended up at couples' counseling at the Jewish Community Center, where they sought help from therapist Chan. Chan had designed "The New Standard" in couples' counseling—musical therapy—and so the BFFs' first treatment was in song. What other song could be more fitting for this sexual-innuendo-laced episode than Britney Spears' "Toxic"? Even Chan laughed as he sang the lyrics, "With a taste of your lips, I'm on a ride/You're toxic, I'm slipping under/With a taste of a poison paradise/I'm addicted to you/Don't you know that you're toxic?"

Herbach and the very Irish Andy Sturdevant had an entertaining exchange earlier in the program, but Herbach's shining moment was a send-off song to close the show, where he sang about picking up a ho(e) and ho(e)ing the earth.

The icing on the cake was when Al Franken came onstage. I was a little nervous he might just come out and say his campaign spiel and then leave out some back door, but instead he came out and wrote himself into the plot, saying he was Alan Greenspan's nephew and was named after him. Then he jokingly said he and Tom Davis did the same Electric Arc script at Dudley Riggs thirty years ago—but without The New Standards, since they weren't around—and that these guys will be hearing from their lawyer.

He started his senate campaign talk with a wink: "As a politician, I just want to say that the arts are so important." Franken was the perfect ending to the season: both he and Electric Arc are smart, funny, and walk the line between over-the-top and tongue-in-cheek.

The next season starts in September. I recommend buying season tickets.

Listen to Herbach's song and Franken's Electric Arc debut.

I don’t know how I almost missed that Lindsey Buckingham was in town this weekend. My husband informed me on Thursday that he and another Buckinghamophile friend of his were planning hitting the Saturday night show at the Pantages. I felt a thump in my stomach. I couldn’t miss this show. Thankfully, the guys were eyeing some sixth-row seats through Tickets Now and there were three available. I was in.

First let’s talk venue. The Pantages is fabulous. At about 1,000 seats, it’s truly intimate. Plus, with a full liquor license and treat-you-like-adults mentality, you can bring your drink into the theater. Nice. Our trio was directly in front of Mr. Buckingham and his trio, and two rows in front of his beautiful (much younger) wife and their two tweener-age children. How did we know it was her? Hmmm. The rock star–looking wife walked to her seat from the front of the house with two young children, and upon taking their seats, all three inserted earplugs.

LB took to the stage solo about twenty minutes after the official 7:30 curtain call. The crowd responded with admiration—but at a level you would expect from a roughly thirty-five-to-fifty-five-year-old crowd that looked like KQ meets Cities97. Buckingham was hip and laid back. An aging boomer, he was confident, yet casual, donned in no-name jeans, black boots, loose-fitting black V-neck T-shirt (untucked), black leather jacket (slightly oversized), a simple silver chain with small pendant, and a wedding ring. This was definitely not an arena show. He picked up one of his signature custom guitars, stepped to the mike, and broke out into "Not Too Late," the first song from his new CD, Under the Skin, that was released last fall. His first solo work since Out of the Cradle, about fifteen years ago. (He said he’s working on another CD as well.)

Here’s the thing about Lindsey Buckingham: If you think it’s all about Rumours and Fleetwood Mac, you’ve missed the artistry of this man and his talents. The Fleetwood Mac we all know and love, though a sum of the parts, is deeply rooted in what Lindsey Buckingham brought to the table. He’s responsible for the FM sound. That voice is so embedded in our culture. A voice with such power that the Pantages could barely hold it. Add to that an amazing control of a guitar—my cohorts that evening likened LB’s five-finger playing style to that of Mark Knopfler’s—and an equally distinctive sound that’s as signature as that iconic voice. For me, one doesn’t exist without the other. I leaned to my husband toward the end of that first song and said, "I think I’m going to weep." I felt that way several times throughout the show. We all agreed, that voice is a weapon.

I neglected to bring a notebook and pen—so the order of things doesn’t play into my report. What did he play? Several from his new CD, which is greatly influenced by his life today, and that he spoke about onstage. Since the big Fleetwood Mac reunion tour, Buckingham has become a husband for the first time and father to three children. The emotion he has always brought to his music is that much more evident with these life-changing events. For me, the live experience was enhanced knowing that his wife and two (of his three) children were behind us. I felt the love. Really. (At the end of the show his wife and kids were already backstage. Buckingham played a solo song and as he approached the back of the stage, his son ran out and jumped into his arms. Killer.)

The pace of the show was perfect. This is a guy who knows how to work an audience. He’s mastered it at a much bigger level. A group of our size—peanuts. He wove enough Fleetwood Mac—"Monday Morning," "Never Going Back Again," "Go Your Own Way"—to keep all of us singing along. And when they launched into "Tusk" we were pretty much on our feet until the end of the show. I swear you could hear Christine McVie on "World Turning," though she obviously wasn’t there.

This was the kind of experience that you would see on VH1 and say “God, I wish I could see someone like that in a venue like that.” I’m confident it will remain on my top ten list of live shows forever.

Last night I had the pleasure of seeing K2 at the Jungle Theater. I had read Patrick Meyers’s script a few months ago in preparation for an interview with the director, Bain Boehlke (who’s also the Jungle’s artistic director) and thought, “Wow, what a dumb script.” I don’t often think that about scripts, so I asked Bain why he would choose to stage such a thing. His response? “It’s the kind of technical challenge that the Jungle likes.” (You can read my column about the show here.)

Indeed, Bain and set designer Joel Sass did build an awesome set, complete with a convincing ice ledge, an avalanche, and a ninety-degree climbing wall—actor Kevin D. West, who trained with climbing instructor Carolyn Hansen, clambers up the wall three times over the course of the play with increasing fatigue. Sound designer Sean Healey also manages to achieve the near impossible. His soundscape of rushing wind and the portentous silence of one of the tallest mountains in the world possesses a texture and rhythm that subtlety moves the play along. “How do you make the sound of a mountain?” he asked me. I don’t know, but he did it and he did it well.

Oftentimes, a script will read badly on the page because scripts aren’t meant to be read. They’re meant to be performed. To my delight and relief, actors West and Tim McGee (left, photo courtesy Michal Daniels) made me believe that they were two old friends trapped in a life-threatening situation, stranded on one of the most dangerous mountains in the world. They molded this play into something greater than its words. But let’s face facts: two guys stuck on an ice ledge 27,000 feet above sea level aren’t going to have enough oxygen to talk for ninety minutes. However, we must suspend our disbelief when we walk into a theater, and despite its flaws, K2 is worth your time. Best to go on a warmer day, though. After a night of watching two guys freeze to death on a mountain, the last thing you want to do is walk outside into fifteen-degree weather in April. Minnesota can be cruel.

After the show last night, the audience stuck around for complimentary desserts, which included creamy strawberry cheesecake, not-quite-defrosted cream puffs, and to-die-for chocolate cake, plus the requisite wine and beer. (Hey, theater people like to eat free food and imbibe. What can I say?) The audience seemed as impressed with the chow as they were with the show.

To top off the night, I drove over to Open Eye Figure Theatre's new space in South Minneapolis for a friend’s birthday bash. The former space of Patrick’s Cabaret is a perfect fit for Michael Sommers’s dark and inventively sentient shows. Open Eye’s new theater has yet to be unveiled to the public, but when it is, you should get thee to an Open Eye show. Until then, check out K2. Rarely does theater ascend to such heights.

K2 runs through May 20 at the Jungle Theater.

Flaneur Productions’ short works showcase, Dérive, began with two constraints: a fragment of text—apocalyptic, bizarre—and a location—a windowy room on the top floor of the now-defunct Northwestern Casket Company. You might think this would result in an evening of linked performances (Flaneur apparently did), but the result says more about how different artists use material than about connection between the works.

Vanessa Voskuil can’t touch material without changing it utterly. (Disclosure: Voskuil is a personal friend of mine.) From the moment dancer Robert Haarmon rushed into the darkened room on a blade of light, trailing a cloud of dust, I was in another world. After a spasmodic struggle in near dark cut sometimes with stabbing light, to a soundtrack of industrial scratches and grinds (the work of Ben Siems), Haarmon escaped from most of his clothes and walked calmly through the audience. He pressed the button for the elevator: in the darkness the door dinged and slid open, and the brilliant metal shined like angels as Haarmon stepped in. Meaning? If you can’t state one, you won’t miss it. In Voskuil’s work, image leads sense.

Charles Campbell’s Strange Blind Love is a sketch for a longer work exploring the film Dr. Strangelove, and it feels that way. Material is a junkshop for Campbell to raid. His finds are sometimes strange and sometimes confusing, but they’re all held together by a demented charisma. It doesn’t make sense when Campbell’s bloody-mouthed Strangelove rolls his illuminated wheelchair up to a black light and howls out “We'll Meet Again” on a vacuum cleaner, but it doesn’t matter, either.

The original material’s at its most invisible in Hijack’s Prick and Cellulite. It’s not that the dance duo doesn’t use material—more that the team picks at and embroiders it until it’s utterly changed. I saw majorettes, ballet, sex, ideas about display, and erectile dysfunction; I’m still trying to put it all together. On the surface, though, any audience member can enjoy Hijack’s intricate and constantly moving dance, their high-gear performance, and their sense of humor.

(Elliott Durko Lynch was unable to perform “due to injuries sustained while doing the hustle.” Too bad—I was looking forward to seeing Lynch’s quirky imagination. Besides, anybody who can hustle energetically enough to sprain something is clearly a performer worth seeing.)

Christian Gaylord’s Out of Mind commented on the evening’s idea: four performers groped around, sometimes slipping off blindfolds to tell disconnected, unfinished stories, then wind up clutching one another’s hands, talking ecstatically of the connection they’ve found. The performers spoke with conviction and acted with skill, but the piece suffered from soap opera dialogue (“I can’t go on like this”) and, more seriously, didn't hold together on its own. If the rest of the evening supported the theme of connection in darkness, then Out of Mind would've made more sense.

Sense is not Bedlam Theater’s thing, and Everybody Loves the End of the World, by Bedlam’s John Bueche, is more a loud fantasy on the mystery script’s apocalypse than a developed idea. A fridge and range stripped to their frames, a few madcap rag-flinging moments—something more interesting stirs here. But the piece relies too much on shrieking and idiot repeating, as if Bueche and company expected a grade-school audience.

Overall, Dérive is uneven: some magic, some interest, some tedium. Its laudable ambition for subtle connection isn’t realized, though I hope the organizers will try again. What arises from the evening is a sense of space and time. During the second half of the performance, the windows were unshuttered, and the audience saw sunset over Minneapolis, then dusk, then night. For an evening, this dingy old factory was enlivened by art, and we were part of it.

The showcase continues tonight, tomorrow, and on April 9 and 12-14.