Gin is an easy game. Putting together three neat “runs” as quickly as possible, hopefully sticking your opponent with a confused muddle of cards, is good for big points. I started playing when I was kid, first against my dad on fishing trips, and then against some of the other boys in my Scout troop on camping trips. People have played gin in London and Vegas for ridiculously high stakes, but the game doesn’t have the shoot-‘em-up western cache that poker does, maybe because it’s played one-on-one instead of around a table full of rowdy dudes.

But whether it’s gin, poker, or blackjack, cards as a metaphor have always enthralled us on both stage and screen. We keep returning to the set-up: Mamet’s House of Games, Rounders with Matt Damon and Ed Norton, and now 21, the Kevin Spacey movie based on MIT grifter Ben Mezrich’s book Bringing Down the House. Invariably, all of these productions use card games to illuminate the ruthless ability to deceive, both ourselves and others, which is so necessary for success in America. It’s a simple and familiar emotional response: we’re supposed to sit there and cheer the heroes for having the courage to gamble, while simultaneously lamenting their inability to quit while they’re ahead.

The metaphor is so familiar that if it’s not played perfectly—if the dealer has too many obvious tells—the story can come off as horribly cheesed out. We get it, mother—we’re not supposed to gamble. But The Jungle Theatre’s production of The Gin Game is one extended card game in which the obviousness of the metaphor is the entire point.

The set up is simple: two senior citizens, Weller and Fonsia, meet on the porch of a slummed-out nursing home. Weller teaches Fonsia to play gin, and Fonsia proceeds to kill Weller in hand after hand. She just crushes him, over and over again, to the point where beginner’s luck seems like less and less of an option. Bain Boehlke’s Weller is physically decrepit, tottering around the stage, barely able to reach his shoes in order to shine them with the same hankie that catches his sputum. But Boehlke’s a big square man, and he uses that raw abscess of a voice he has to punctuate every “goddammit!” and “shit!” with vague connotations of a forgotten physical malice. And Wendy Lehr’s Fransia is just as weathered, but there are touches of feminine posturing—a tightened bun, an erect spine—that speak to a repression and a moral rectitude that may have been used too conveniently in the past.

As Weller continues to lose, things deteriorate from a warm, grateful back-and-forth between two obviously lonely old people, to the nastiness that comes with the helplessness of settling into uncomfortable old roles. The binary dynamic of the gin game—father vs. mother, luck vs. judgment, nerves vs. courage—become a relentless reminder of each player’s real-life past failures. The metaphor gets thrown in each character’s face to the point where they’re forced to confront their own shortcomings. But they can’t quit playing. As Weller points out bleakly, “What else are you gonna do?”

Like any game, gin matches nerves against will—you keep waiting for that last card to drop, knowing your opponent is doing the same thing. The Gin Game is a reminder of the physical nature of nerves and will. Wisdom only goes so far. As we age, our nerves don’t get any steadier and our will doesn’t grow any stronger. Probably the contrary, in fact.

The laughter in the audience becomes more and more hollow as everybody begins to see their own anxieties and hypocrisies emerge from the game. Just like old Weller and Fransia, as their game progresses on stage, it becomes impossible, back there in the dark, not to confront your own self.

But what else are you gonna do?

Raiders of the Lost Ark is a movie so entrenched in my early eighties childhood memories that I’ll never be able to judge it from a mature distance. I’m able to forgive director Steven Spielberg and producer George Lucas for the two disappointing Indiana Jones sequels that followed, and I can ignore my well-earned distrust of the fourth (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which opened on Thursday). But Raiders of the Lost Ark will never age badly because I can still remember when it was grade-school playdate material.

I was seven years old in 1981 when Harrison Ford made his debut as Indiana Jones, the nerdy-cool wiseacre archeologist battling the Nazis for the mystical Ark of the Covenant. I played with a Barbie-style Dr. Jones (detachable bomber jacket and felt fedora substituting for Barbie’s boring girly attire) and Indy quickly joined my motley cast of imaginary friends. I realize now how tame (and lame) that was in the spectrum of fan worship.

In the summer of 1982, a twelve-year-old Mississippi kid named Eric Zala and his fellow fanboys Chris Strompolos and Jayson Lamb began a seven-year project to produce a shot-by-shot Raiders of the Lost Ark remake. It included full-scale re-creations of the movie’s Nepal bar fire (Zala set himself and his family basement ablaze) and a re-enactment of the ending chase scene that required Strompolos (playing Indy) to be dragged from the back of a moving Ford pickup that had a brake system devised of pulleys.

Zala detailed on 602 individual storyboards the scenes he’d shoot. He designed many of the film’s costumes and props (including a giant fiberglass boulder) and acted as the production’s extras wrangler, corralling neighborhood kids for long, sweaty shoots during their summer breaks. His finished film, Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, is such a remarkable case study in DIY filmmaking (pre-digital video, mind you) that it stands out in a cyberworld now crowded with fan films.

Seventeen years after the hometown premiere of their film, the guys got a call from horror director Eli Roth. Incredibly, he had passed their Raiders remake onto Spielberg himself. Out of curiosity (or maybe legal due diligence), Spielberg watched the movie, wrote Zala and crew a congratulatory letter, and eventually met with the guys for a screening of an Indy blooper reel.

Fast-forward to today: Zala and Strompolos are currently shopping around an idea for their long-overdue follow-up, What the River Takes, which Zala describes as a “Southern gothic adventure film.” And one day we may see a feature film about the making of their Raiders remake. Producer Scott Rudin has the rights to the story, with graphic novelist Daniel Clowes working on the screenplay.

The Parkway Theater is screening Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation on May 24-25, with Zala on-hand to introduce the movie and take questions after each show. The welcome serendipity is courtesy of the .edu Film Festival for Minnesota high-school filmmakers. Ticket sales from this weekend’s screenings of The Adaptation will help cover the costs of the ComArts High School-sponsored festival yesterday at the Parkway and give a wider audience to the event’s winning Best-of-the-Fest student shorts; they’ll play alongside Zala’s film.

Yesterday, the student filmmakers got to meet Zala and hear from local film intelligentsia Melody Gilbert, Bobby Marsden, David Hughes, James Byrne, Kyja Kristjansson-Nelson, and Coleman Miller. They also saw their own short films projected on the big screen. Advocacy pieces dominated the documentary category; downbeat avant-garde themes stood out in the animation/experimental segment; while school tiffs, romantic entanglements, and pissed-off zombies provided fodder for the narrative filmmakers.

Heads up to film school talent scouts: keep your eye on Rosemount High School’s Annie Burger. Her nine-minute Charlie Chaplin tribute, “Opportunity Knocks,” which won Best Narrative, is a knockout—the work of a junior Zala in our own backyard.

Zala, now a boyish, bearded thirty-seven-year-old, addressed a small group of students at last night’s first screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. He was wearing a Skywalker Ranch T-shirt, but, interestingly, mentioned nothing of that other Indy film that’s causing all the fuss this Memorial Day weekend. Which is maybe just as well.

Raiders of the Lost Ark, as everyone by now knows, was Spielberg’s and Lucas’s homage to the thrilling, cheesy 1930s/40s serials they loved as kids. And there is still something almost childlike about the film. It oozes a youthful enthusiasm for movies that you don’t sense as much in the audacious sequels. It’s not surprising Zala and countless other young fans have been obsessed with duplicating its every frame—the original was itself two name-brand filmmakers’ adolescent wish fulfillment, albeit on a multimillion-dollar scale.

Sure, I’ll be in line for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull one day soon, but I’m glad I spent the day with Zala and his local acolytes. They’re making movies under considerably thriftier conditions, but I suspect they’re working more in the spirit of the original Indiana Jones than anything you’ll find at the multiplex this weekend.

Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation and the .edu Film Fest Best-of-the-Fest shorts play Sat., May 24 and Sun., May 25 at The Parkway Theater.

It’s not every day that you discover a new American dialect. But if you see Bulrusher, by Eisa Davis, at the Pillsbury House Theatre, that’s what you’ll find—along with some fine acting and an interesting new play penned by the niece of 1960s peace activist Angela Davis.

The play takes place in Boonville, a small town in northern California’s Anderson Valley, near Mendocino, where a peculiar slang called Boontling is spoken. The cool thing about Boontling—as opposed, say, to the made-up jargon tossed around in Diablo Cody’s Juno—is that it’s a genuine form of American speech developed by immigrant German farm workers in that region of California during the late 1800s and early nineteenth century. When the residents of Boonville are “harpin’ the ling,” they are speaking the language of their ancestors and, in a way, flashing a kind of linguistic tattoo that identifies them as true locals.

The words of Boontling are like nothing you’ve ever heard before. An applehead is a girl, gorm is food, lizzied means pregnant, moldunes are breasts, a sneeble is a black person—and the program includes about a hundred other expressions and euphemisms, many of them having to do with sex, body parts, bodily functions, and various forms of gossip. All of  which is understandable, because there doesn’t appear to be anything else to do in that part of the world except pick fruit, drink, have sex, and talk.

The play itself takes place in 1950s, when Boontling is on the wane and more educated members of the community, like the schoolteacher Schooch (the boontling term for schoolteacher), have begun discouraging their children to harp the local ling, lest it trap them there forever. Bulrusher is the name of a young black girl that Scoolch raised from an infant, after she was found by locals floating in the reeds down by the river, “just like Moses.” Scoolch doesn’t allow Bulrusher to speak Boontling at home, but this turns out to be not just an elitist preference on his part—it’s also a symbolic way of protecting Bulrusher from the history of the region and the coarseness of the locals, both of which figure heavily in Bulrusher’s mysterious past.

Pillsbury House’s production is only the third time Bulrusher has ever been performed (it was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize last year), and director Marion McClinton is on record as saying that it’s the most important play he’s read since August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. That’s overstating the case a bit, but playwright Eisa Davis has clearly studied her August Wilson and has crafted this play in a way that uses many of Wilson’s favorite devices (which Wilson borrowed from Milton, Homer, and Shakespeare, but that’s another story). Watch Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean (at the Guthrie) and Bulrusher back to back and you’ll see what I mean. Both plays feel on the surface like a series of slice-of-life vignettes, but build to a powerful psychological climax that explains the characters’ peculiar behavior and grounds them in the context of a brutal and ultimately undeniable history.

With solid performances all around, especially by Christiana Clark as Bulrusher and James Williams as Lucas, Bulrusher offers an interesting take on the black experience in America. Bulrusher is black, but lives in Mendocino County, where she is one of the few black people in the entire valley, so her experience of racism is completely different from that of her friend Vera, who comes from Alabama (the play’s most contrived conceit, and one August Wilson would have deleted in a nanosecond). 

Some reviewers have complained that Bulrusher is hard to follow because there’s so much Boontling slang, but I found it easy enough to get the gist from the context, and found it no different from seeing something by Shakespeare, say, that uses unfamiliar expressions, or running into words in a book of which you don’t know the exact meaning.

You may not know what “bilchin’” or “ricky chow” are going in, but by the time you leave, it won’t matter—you’ll just be impressed by another well-done play at Pillsbury House.

Bulrusher continues at the Pillsbury House Theatre through June 14,.

A few years ago, Best Buy introduced a weird retail idea into the Twin Cities marketplace: eq-Life. It was a single store that contained such consumer electronic gizmos as iPods and laptops, as well as a small pharmacy, shelves full of herbal supplements, and various health and “lifestyle” products. The staff was specially trained to make your journey of purchasing these products a streamlined, efficient, and informed one (i.e. they'd show you how to use that iPod so you didn't have to bother your thirteen-year-old son). I don’t know if any of those stores are left, but I get the feeling that the demographic eq-Life was trying to hit is the same educated-culturally-savvy-liberal-working-mother demographic KT Tunstall has successfully blown to folk-pop-loving smithereens.

The fetching Scotswoman played the State Theatre for the Minneapolis stop on her Drastic Fantastic tour, an all-acoustic affair that drew in a sisterhood of Tunstall fans—gangs of middle-school girls, lesbian couples, and droves of  Desperate Housewives on a gals' night out. Yes, there were men—Tunstall is a certified hottie and genuinely talented, so her appeal is no mystery—but not many wandering around unescorted.

"I went to Mill Ruins park today—it's like the Rome of Minneapolis, isn't it?" Tunstall told the audience in her mild Scottish accent. She is the ultimate low-maintenance cool girl, effortlessly sexy in her blue jeans and loose sweatshirt-y top. Totally relaxed, she jokes around with the crowd. When synchronized young voices yell out "We love you!" she looks up from tuning her guitar to observe, "It's like a big love sandwich in here, isn't? A love sandwich…with concrete as the bread.”

Tunstall is the woman society hoped would be produced by equal funding for girls' athletics in public schools—strong, confident, healthy. Up on stage, she belts out her spirited tunes in a husky, blues-tinged voice that jackrabbits up for unexpected falsettos when she wants to add even more drama to her phrasing. Her back-story is folkie-authentic; Irish-Scottish heritage with a little bit of Chinese thrown in for exoticism, years in the trenches working in other bands, then finally out on her own and pulling off the incredible triumph of selling actual albums! (Is she the folk Norah Jones?) Drastic Fantastic is only her second studio album, and it debuted at number nine on the Billboard album charts.

Her breakout came with the strangely titled "Black Horse and Cherry Tree," a song I promise you’ve heard many, many times on Cities 97. It's the one where the chorus is just a woman singing emphatically: "No, no. No, no no no. No, no—you're not the one for me." Tunstall was an unknown in the U.S. until an American Idol contestant performed the single in '06 (it was Katharine McPhee, and she ended up losing to Taylor Hicks), but after that "Black Horse" went bananas on iTunes and KT Tunstall songs were fast-tracked into that whole who-needs-album-sales? economy of licensing songs for films and TV shows. When she played it at the State, some of her fans were so stimulated that they get up out of their seats and tried to dance. "No, no. No, no no no," says the security guard, who won't let these women, who have probably not broken so much as a recycling law in their lives, near the stage.

Safety is a problem with KT Tunstall—she's too safe. Folk, or folk-rock, should be at least a little bit rebellious. It’s one of the few careers available in which nonconformity is a virtue. But with Tunstall's songs infusing pep and energy into the opening of The Devil Wears Prada or the soundtracks to Grey's Anatomy and Ugly Betty, she's about as nonconformist as Whole Foods. Her persona is authentic, but she’s marketed a bit too well for my tastes. Then again, her fans couldn't care less.

Her big hit right now is "Suddenly I See," and she brought it out to close the show. (Yet to come was the three-song encore, including Chaka Khan's "Ain't Nobody.") Tunstall was inspired to write the track after seeing a picture of Patti Smith, but it's traveled far from its avant-garde inspiration: Hillary Clinton uses it at rallies, even though Tunstall has said that if she could vote in the U.S., she'd be an Obama woman. Again, the ladies boogied out of their seats and down to the stage. Tomorrow they will attend yoga classes and drink bottled water and eat yogurt that tastes like key lime pie and regulates their bowel movements, but tonight they are dancing. But this time, there were so many of them that the security guy didn’t even bother trying to hold them back.

(Warning for all my civilian readers: inside hipster joke forthcoming.) Hey, I love the new Santogold album, but I still went to M.I.A. at Myth last night. Call me nostalgic. (Civilian reader tip: laugh here.)

Seriously though, last year’s hipster princess, the Sri Lankan rapper Maya Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A., really did perform in Maplewood. I mean, had to see that, right? Even though the show was coming only five months after she so memorably went knocking on the doors of First Avenue’s Hummer Hummer last November.

The production values at the Myth are always exquisite, and M.I.A. made full use of them. She performed in front of a large, maybe fifty-foot-by-ten-foot video screen that spanned the length of the stage. Atari-inspired graphics and quick-cutting footage of multicultural children dancing in various third-world gutters was the backdrop, as M.I.A. bounced her exotic Colombo-via-London-via-Brooklyn cockney off her trademark window-rattling beats.

As a draw, M.I.A.’s globalist exotica is just behind her bamboo banga beats and her overt sexuality (she raps from this weird frog crouch that is imaginatively obscene, and she ends a lot of her bars with a Monica Seles-pitched diphthong of a whelp). The hyperactive energy and color of her stage show seem to be borrowed from a refugee camp anywhere in the world. She came out last night wearing purple tights under white quilted designer hot pants, wearing some sort of Peruvian wool jacket, silver lamé Chuck Taylors, a platinum-bob wig, and gigantic sunglasses. The hipsters in the packed club had followed her lead, dressing just as colorfully, just as exotically.

The ironic thing here is that Myth is actually more multicultural during any of its popular dance nights—The M.I.A. Nation is as white as the people that voted for Hillary in West Virginia last night.

Did anybody read Frank Rich’s column on Sunday, “Party Like it’s 2008”?  Well, Rich’s point about the out-of-touch cable-television-pundit class is made clear by watching all these young middle-class white kids in Maplewood shaking it to songs like “20 Dolla,” where M.I.A. raps over a bastardized Pixies riff in the voice of the collective Third World radical:

“We goat rich we fry/Price of living in a shanty town just seem very high/We still like T.I./We still look fly/Dancing as we shooting up/And lootin just to get by.“

Just like Biggie and 2Pac, M.I.A.’s art is a powerful, necessary reflection of what’s wrong with our culture—it's just that instead of Bed-Stuy or Long Beach, she takes her stories and stances from the global ghetto. Some question Maya Arulpragasam’s authenticity in the same way they questioned 'Pac’s once upon a time. But even if it was necessary to have actually called your boyfriend in Darfur on a sat phone in order to rap about it, M.I.A. has come close enough in real life—she fled Sri Lanka’s civil war with her family in the 1980s and spent time at a refugee camp in India before making it to London and attending an art school there, where she learned both the graphic and sonic techniques necessary to make her background relevant to all these hipster kids.

And it’s clear how much fun she has putting on those of us who lack an irony sensitivity meter. The highlight of last night’s show was the mash-up of “10 Dolla” and “Boyz.” First, she called up all the girls in the crowd to come on stage. It was mayhem, with maybe 100 women forcing M.I.A. to the very edge of the stage, just in front of the monitors, as she rapped about a Chinese prostitute climbing the ladder. “What can I get for ten dolla,” M.I.A. called out to a stage full of Minnesota girls. They responded, “Any ting you want!” After the girls were sent off, it was the boyz’s turn. Again, they crushed the stage, and she had them hollering along to their own song. ”How many no money boyz are crazy/How many boyz are raw//How many no money boyz are rowdy/How many start a war.”

Yeah! Fun times! Oh…wait.

VocalEssence concluded their American Masterpieces tour (a season-long series of concerts and educational programs throughout the Midwest) last night in Stillwater at Trinity Lutheran Church with a program called A Slice of Americana. The concert and tour were part of a wider National Endowment for the Arts initiative designed to celebrate our national musical heritage by highlighting significant American choral composers and works.

A note from NEA Chairman Dana Gioia applauding VocalEssence artistic director and founder Philip Brunelle for his national leadership of the choral component of this endeavor read, “Not only do we want more Americans to hear this great music, we want to cultivate a love and appreciation for it for future generations.”

Knowing this intention, I listened to the concert with perhaps a different filter than I would have had the concert been conceived as a sampler rather than a cross-section, and found myself pondering, what defines “Americana?” And whose Americana is it?

The first half of the concert was dedicated to “classical” American choral repertoire (perhaps choral art music would be a better way to describe it) and showed the group’s strengths to great effect–the sense of ensemble and highly polished details, diction so impeccable you don’t really need to follow the lyrics in the program, and the expert attention to the text that brings the music to life. Oh, and the chocolaty warmth of the bass section. That especially.

The opening selection, “O Praise the Lord of Heaven,” written by William Billings in 1794, was the only work on this half composed before I graduated from high school. The rest, while a very small sliver of our American choral pie, shows that modern American composers still are still making discoveries in choral music as they keenly explore the delta of music and language in rangy and highly individual ways.

Works by Twin Cities composers Stephen Paulus and Libby Larsen were placed alongside those of William Bolcom and Aaron Jay Kernis, but the two standouts for me were the lesser-known composers. Brent Michael Davids’ evocative “Zuni Sunrise Song” featured bird whistles handcrafted by the composer and spun by the singers, percussive and dancelike chanting by the men, and nasal incantations by the women. Unfortunately, the poetry was not listed in the program, but the work draws on a Native American song about the dawn. Eric Whitacre’s “Water Night,” which sets an English translation of an Octavio Paz poem, was musically as sensual as the text. Whenever I hear a Whitacre piece on a program, I kind of wonder why anyone ever programs anything else. He simply has a knack for setting gorgeous texts gorgeously.

The “intermission” of the seventy-five-minute concert was more of a break for the singers, who needed it more than the audience, was a treat: Charles Kemper played Gershwin’s “Embraceable You” and made it sound like Chopin. (Or perhaps Chopin with a martini.)

Brunelle introduced the second half, which was all folk songs and spirituals, to the mostly gray-haired audience, with a story about a high school choral conductor he met who didn’t know the folk songs on the program. He argued that this was our shared cultural heritage to celebrate and pass on to the next generation. This statement provided a lively debate with my concert buddy, who didn’t know the songs either, on the ride home. (He pointed out that if he was supposed to get to know them by coming to the concert, it would have been helpful to have the lyrics in the program.)

While VocalEssence sang arrangements of “Oh, Dear, What Can the Matter Be?,” “Gentle Annie,” “Black is the Color,” “Cool Water,” and “Skip to My Lou,” I tried to determine, other than learning them in school, whether folk songs really played into my understanding of myself as an American. As much as I enjoy their nostalgic beauty, I couldn’t persuade myself that nineteenth-century American folk songs are relevant to my generation. We simply don’t sing them.

However, you can only appreciate your musical heritage if you are given the opportunity to hear it. Whether these tunes are masterpieces that will live on for generations is a matter of opinion and posterity, but Brunelle and VocalEssence gave us a wonderfully performed taste.

Thousands of artists received funds through the Works Progress Administration and other New Deal programs during the 1930s and early 1940s. Some of the artists became household names—Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, and Cameron Booth, to name a few. Many others did not, but their work became part of the fabric of American culture in the form of post-office murals and handicrafts. By the People, For the People: New Deal Art at the Weisman offers up the full spectrum of work from this era.

The show draws from the museum’s impressive collection of New Deal art. It’s organized by a mish-mash of aesthetic and topical themes: work and industry, abstraction, photography, the University and Minnesota, women. The themes only serve to underscore the premise of the show: that New Deal art encompassed far more than social realism. The Weisman folks even managed to come up with a few examples of Surrealism, which gives you an idea of  how eclectic and interesting this show really is.

The New Deal programs placed emphasis on regional folkways and traditions as subject matter. By the People contains many examples, but Lucia Wiley’s series based on the legend of Paul Bunyan—and, more broadly, the world of logging—caught my eye. She based a series of post-office murals on the oil illustrations, which resemble woodcuts in style. In one, Bunyan nearly fills the canvas. On one knee, head bowed, he cradles a young ox. The other images in the series swirl with energy, but the simple exchange between ox and man is oddly touching.

The show has a little of something for everyone. The colorful abstract paintings of Alexander Corrazo in one room, documentary photographs of Marion Post Woolcott in the next, and a handful of local landscapes of the Twin Cities circa 1940 in the next. The exhibit also highlights the work of women hired as New Deal artists, and will serve as the foundation for a series of lectures and seminars on this fascinating period in American art.

Through July 27, Weisman Art Museum.

Pictured: Dorothy Lau, Workers-Five O'Clock, ca. 1935-1940, oil on canvas

Taken on its own terms, Ordway Center’s production of Cabaret is dazzling. The full resources of the theater, both financial and technical, are on vivid display in the physical production, from the Emcee’s first entrance, descending on an illuminated sign, to his swinging out over the audience with a gorilla.

But I couldn’t get past the persistently nagging feeling that all this glitz and glamour was, in reality, antithetical to the original story. In 1930s Berlin, Sally Bowles, a singer at the Kit Kat Club, romances American writer Cliff Bradshaw on the verge of the Nazi takeover of Germany. From its beginnings in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and the play I Am a Camera by John van Druten, the story has emphasized the seedy decadence of Weimar Germany. Kander and Ebb's musical version maintains the dark sleaziness of the original source material, but that tawdriness is nowhere to be seen on the Ordway stage.

Ordway producing artistic director James Rocco makes the case for the production’s historical accuracy by referencing University of Minnesota professor Eric D. Weitz’s New York Times bestseller, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. According to Rocco, “What this research reveals is that the look and feel of Weimar Berlin cabarets and nightclubs were not all that different from night spots in New York, London, and Paris during the same period.” The Ordway’s production focuses on the glittering cabarets that Hitler kept open to fool an unknowing nation of citizens who continued to party while Berlin was burning. Such high-class establishments obviously existed. But would a garish character, such as Sally Bowles, have worked in one? And if she did, wouldn’t she have earned enough to pay for her own lodgings rather than having to crash with Cliff pleading poverty?

The production team seems to have overlooked these logical flaws in their zeal to create a magnificently opulent set. And, frankly, all such concerns are swept aside by the strong energy and staging of this show.

The revisions to Joe Masteroff’s original book go uncredited, but they are delicious. Adding the conceit of Brechtian conventions is smart and helpful in the staging while also being an appropriate evocation of the period. The emphasis on homosexuality further evokes the liberated attitudes of that age and hearkens back to the Isherwood original.

Bill Berry’s direction is glitzy, but it’s glitz with substance. He finds the abundant humanity as well as the horror in this dark show, especially as the Nazi influence becomes increasingly omnipresent. And there are plenty of clever bits and touches that will surprise even those who have seen several other versions of Cabaret. For example, the “girls” of the orchestra are played by men in elaborate hag drag, and Bob Richard’s choreography in the dancing chorus is splendidly fresh and energetic. 

There is nothing subtle about the staging; it is a broad, no-holds-barred spectacle from beginning to end, including the portrayals of the individual characters. That over-the-top mania works perfectly for the Emcee (Nick Garrison), who is outrageous but pulls it off by capturing the period’s decadence. Tari Kelly’s Sally is somewhat less successful. Her performance is too loud and brassy and would have benefited from a little delicacy here and there. That said, her performance of “Maybe This Time” rivaled even Liza’s from the film.

Next to the Emcee, the strongest performance is Suzy Hunt as Fräulein Schneider, Cliff and Sally’s landlady. She became the emotional heart of the production and made the most of her two songs (cut from the film), “So What,” a statement of her fatalistic philosophy, and “What Would You Do?” a painful justification of her decision to break off her engagement to the Jewish Herr Schultz. Her lacerating performance truly raised the show to the level of tragedy. Allen Fitzpatrick’s Schultz was not in her league, but his sweet naiveté proved endearing.

In that company, Louis Hobson, as the very “nice” Cliff, made little impression. He is ostensibly the lead character, but the role is so pallid and underwritten that it’s not his fault that he receded into the background. He is at his best when singing and has a strong baritone that enlivened even his mediocre songs.

One of the most exciting elements of this production is that it is a coproduction of the Ordway, Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre, and the American Musical Theatre of San Jose. Opera companies discovered years ago that coproductions are essential for survival, but it’s a relatively new concept for nonprofit theaters. More such coproductions are in the works, which speaks to the Ordway’s excellent stewardship of its resources.

Cabaret continues at Ordway Center through May 18.

So if you’re going to have a black guy play Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar, it better be Corey Glover. If you’re a guilty white person like me, you still might squirm a little bit when you see Glover take his forty pieces of silver to hand over Ted Neeley’s J. C. I mean, the historical Christ probably looked more like Osama bin Laden than Barry Gibb with Jennifer Aniston hair extensions, right? So having a black man betray a white Jesus with a kiss in front of a predominantly white audience at the Orpheum could be interpreted as an irresponsible move. But the casting is defensible on two prongs: (1) If you’re going to do a rock 'n' roll passion play, you need rock stars—and Corey Glover was the only African American to front a big rock band (Living Colour) in the forty years between Jimi Hendrix and that dude from Bloc Party. (2) If anybody can illicit sympathy for having issues with Jesus, the guy that sang the Grammy-winning 1988 hit “Cult of Personality” can.

Neeley, of course, is reprising the role he transubstantiated in the original 1973 movie version of Superstar—and even though he’s now way past thirty-three years old, if you’re sitting back far enough, he still looks good in the robes (even the crucifixion diaper, actually). And he can still sing: He comes close to bona fide Axl Rose range, going from a warm Seger baritone to what Chuck Klosterman once referred to as Rose’s “crazy devil woman” voice.

Actually, Neeley’s Christ—or should I say Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Christ— is a very specific cultural interpretation that has a lot in common with Axl W. Rose. First of all, they both love the Elton John/Queen, almost operatic hard rock, with gigantic guitars, strings, and over-the-top vocals. They both were country boys living in the big city amongst groupies and sinners—Indiana Axl had his Michelle, and Jesus of Nazareth had his Mary Magdalene; they both were hella judgmental towards the people in their new homes (Axl penning Hollywood-is-a-New-Sodom ditties like “Welcome to the Jungle” and “One in a Million,” Christ using his own crazy devil woman voice to kick the merchants out of the temple). And they both had insane martyr complexes—Axl with the "November Rain"/"Don’t Cry"/"Estranged" video cycle, where he imagines himself dying alone repeatedly, and Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane , asking first, plaintively, “Will no one stay awake with me, Peter, John, James? Will no one wait with me, Peter, John, James?” and then, in devil woman voice, “Whyyyyyyyyyyyy, whyyyyyyyyyy should I die?!?”

In a way, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s J. C. is, like Axl, the paradigm for the perfect rock star. Maybe even a painful reminder to people like me, who actually miss rock stars. Some people don’t—and you guys can have Weezer and Deerhoof and Stephen Malkmus. But I miss my rock stars. And outside of nostalgic video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, do we have any contemporary musical messiahs? After Axl, we had a few reluctant prophets: Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder had J. C.’s sensitive side down, but they were reluctant Superstars. The post-grunge guys, Chris Martin and Thom Yorke, are both holier-than-thou enough, but they seem so proggy, and hidden behind technology, so English. The Strokes are more like a cool clique of apostles than The Second Coming. I dunno, Jack White? Isn’t he a little too wan? And some people see Mary Magdalene in Meg, but I really don’t. I guess there’s always Bono—but have you ever really seen Bono angry? Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Christ gets angry, and he sort of has a sexy girlfriend, and he’s full of angst about his position in the world. You could make the argument that hip hop has cornered the market on superstars—remember P. Diddy and Nas rapping up on twin crosses on “Do You Hate Me Now?” But most of the superstar rappers, like Jay-Z, who actually refers to himself as J-HOVA, or “God MC,” have the persecution complex down, but lack the element of introspection, the “Why me, Lord?” that comes with the responsibility of trying to do the right thing.

Which brings me to an old Yoda quote: “No. There is another.” Like Axl and J. C., I also would rather hang with the sinners than cry with the saints, so with that in mind, my sex columnist friend, Alexis, is always asking me, “What do you white boys love so much about Kanye West?” This is the perfect opportunity to give her a definitive answer.

O Kanye, how great Thou art. On one of his first big hits, “Jesus Walks,” off his debut album The College Dropout, he raps about the responsibility of being the voice of his generation (after surviving a serious car accident, no less). “God show me the way because the devil tryin’ to break me down/the only thing that I pray is my feet don’t fail me now.” He grew up with his single mother in the Midwest, before going on to become a success in the biggest media transmitter cities in the world. He cultivates a martyr complex, on topics both great—“George Bush doesn’t care about black people!”—and small—the Grammys. On songs like “Heard ‘Em Say,” and “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” he’s not afraid to examine his own petty obsessions, nor the larger system that produces those obsessions. He’s always doubting himself and then finding strength in his faith (“Stronger”), in that angsty, petulant, Andrew Lloyd Webber Christ way.

And he does it all with fresher beats, and a much fresher haircut.

Ragamala’s Minneapolis concert marking the company’s fifteenth season opens with “Ardhanareeshwara Stotram,” a dance of the dual creation divinity, Shakti/Shiva. A statuette in a delicately curved posture, draped in colorful silk and adorned with gold bangles and flowers in her hair, Aparna Ramaswamy also shows a coiled, grounded strength in her stamping feet and flashing eyes. The dance follows a hymn, showing Shakti’s bracelets in one line and Shiva’s live snake jewelry in the next, Shakti’s mercy and Shiva’s dreaded power. Ramaswamy is alternately rose and diamond; the weaving, playfully darting dance of her head and eyes contrasts with her sudden jumps and lunges.

Classical dances (such as Native American fancy dance or ballet), if not ossified, embody a culture’s ideas of beauty and divinity. Watching this new creation in the classical Indian tradition of bharatanatyam, choreographed by Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy (mother and daughter cofounders of Ragamala), it’s hard not to wonder how differently Western history might have turned out if we had imagined our gods this way, or dared to represent them in the body of a young woman dancing (Western classical dances show royal couples or noble abstractions rather than gods). But while the classical ideals of other cultures might have immediate appeal, only deep education can bring us inside those ideals, showing us their roots and their dark side. So we might envy bharatanatyam’s curvy, swaybacked stance, so different from ballet’s ramrod uprightness, or covet the dancers’ bright clothes and red-painted feet, but it’s hard to know the meaning or true cost of those items.   

The Ramaswamys aren’t primarily interested in showing the dance of another place and time, though. Their work is firmly grounded in Indian classical tradition, but the result could be called American contemporary dance in the truest sense—dance of the multicultural America, the meeting-ground America. This is best seen in the other two pieces in the concert. Here we see Ragamala’s trademark crosscultural collaborations—sometimes unlikely combinations that turn out, under the Ramaswamys’ intelligent guidance, to have deep sympathies. “Yathra (Journey)” joins bharatanatyam with Indian music played by a sitar and cello duo, with projected motion drawings by Terry Rosenberg in the background.

Along with fusion, kaleidoscopic complexity of composition is another contemporary element in Ragamala’s dance. Dancers come in from all corners of the stage, meeting and joining in a unity splintered by a new dancer’s sharp entrance. The part speaks for the whole: a brief frieze of women with longing hands stands in for a history of grief. “Yathra” is a quietly moving, beautifully oblique piece, one that any American audience can grasp intuitively.

“Sva (Vital Force)" yields an even more immediate connection. Here, Ragamala’s stellar dancers perform alongside the Tokara Wadaiko Ensemble. Japan’s Taiko drumming does not partake of the tradition of drummers as crazy guys who lurk in the corner: this is unapologetically buff, bare-arm, samurai drumming, played on big drums whose hits reverberate in all the empty spaces of the body (my heart is still echoing). And here, Ragamala joins bharatanatyam’s classical style to a certain modern force. I’m not sure what to call it—democracy? women’s rights? freedom under the law?—but whatever it is, it had opening night’s sold-out crowd straining forward. It’s not that bharatanatyam alone needs this modernity—more that any classical dance needs this modernity to reach today’s American audience. Ragamala shows a way into the twenty-first century for all classical forms. The thrill that the dancers feel in their own strength and grace rolls across the audience; their happy and powerful beauty is one we understand and aspire to.

This concert’s vital choreography, skilled collaborators, and outstanding dancing all make it easy to see why Ragamala’s been on national and international tours for the past eighteen months, and why they’re booked well into next year. It’s also a reminder of how lucky we are to have Ragamala here in the Twin Cities.

Sva (Vital Force) continues at the Southern Theater through May 4.

Photo credit: Ed Bock