As Barack Obama delivered a rock star moment last night in Denver, a Minnesota-made documentary screened at the Walker that I suspect was also simulcast from Obama Command Central. David Axelrod, are you responsible for this?

Sure, The Listening Project is a documentary about the U.S.’s image crisis abroad. Really though it’s a call for a kinder, gentler American, a citizen of the world…an Obama American. The film’s unmistakable message: Wake up, America, and start listening, really listening to the rest of the world. We’re all in this together.

Chasing an idea hatched and bankrolled by Jim Pohlad (Carl’s son), Twin Cities-based directors Dominic Howes and Joel Weber deployed four everyman correspondents to fourteen countries to poll the masses about what they think about the United States. The filmmakers recruited as “listeners” a New Yorker who organizes grassroots youth activists and three Minnesotans (Breck history teacher Carrie Lennox, spoken word artist Bao Phi, probation officer Bob Roeglin) who also joined the directors last night for a post-screening Q&A.

Roaming the pubs, city streets, campuses, and living rooms of Kabul, Cape Town, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, Palestine, London, and other points on the globe, they found, if not consensus, a few predictable themes:

The world loves our music, our movies, our fast food. They hate our president.

They’re fascinated by our wealth, our power, even our narcissism.

But they wonder, “How much do Americans know (or care to know) about us?”

They have some requests:
Stop trying to make the world in your image.

Stop being the bully on the block, instigating problems that ripple through the smallest of nations.

And could you once get involved in a conflict that doesn’t benefit your bottom line?

The Brits and Russians warn (sympathetically) that we’re an empire in decline. Canadians sniff that our world view is shaped by fear and paranoia. The French manage to suggest both envy and superiority, with one jolly fellow lamenting his own embarrassing president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Sandwiched between man-on-the-street sound bites and very brief portraits of everyday folks whose lives we’ve bettered or ruined is. . .a beautiful travelogue.

Like a National Geographic spread come to life, the camera sweeps over grubby streetscapes, gleaming megalopolises, slums, shantytowns, and wide-eyed kids framed like Mary Ellen Mark portraits. These moments are edited into quickly paced montages set to Reid Kruger’s pulsing soundscapes and lonely piano melodies. The riot of images, music, and opinions is often heartbreaking but too easy.

The film asks us to listen to blistering critiques we’d presumably rather ignore and to pay attention to a world of people we normally dismiss—but it spends so little time with their stories that it actually demands very little of us. Well-intentioned populist agitprop, yes, but intellectually The Listening Project is a fairly shallow grab for the heartstrings. If the goal is to humble us, to knock us off our feet with reflections of our own bluster and ethnocentrism, there must be a more persuasive way.

Episode two, season two of Ira Glass’s This American Life on Showtime offered maybe a better approach. It followed an Iraqi man who had lived through the 2003 invasion and was now setting up booths in towns around the United States, advertising a simple invitation: “Talk to an Iraqi.” He hoped his own listening project would connect him with Americans who could explain why they supported the war.

And what did he hear? Mostly diatribes on the price that must be paid for freedom; windy summations about the daily safety and prosperity of Iraq, pre- and post-Saddam; bold exhortations about what the Iraqi people need and want. Few of the people he met used the encounter to challenge their entrenched opinions about Iraq or even to talk to the Iraqi right in front of them.

Listening? We don’t even know what that means.

Everyone has seen an eye chart at some point (if not all the letters on it). It's one of the most recognizable diagnostic tools. The chart's purpose is simple. It measures the strength of one's vision on a scale from 20/200—the big letters at the top of the chart—to 20/10—the little type at the bottom. New York–based artist R. Luke DuBois has adapted the ubiquitous chart for a novel purpose in his new show Hindsight Is Always 20/20, which opened at the Weisman this weekend.

DuBois substitutes words culled from State of the Union addresses from forty-one presidents and arranges them top to bottom by frequency, omitting the most common words (“a,” “of,” “the,” etc.) At the top, a single word followed by smaller words, first two, then four, then whole strings of them.

Hindsight Is Always 20/20 offers up layers of meaning and interpretation. On the one hand, the exhibition acts as a modern window into American history, and points us toward the concerns of each era. Buchanan's "Slavery" next to Lincoln's "Emancipation," offers a singular example. On the other hand, it asks a series of intellectual and aesthetic questions about the arrangement and resulting meaning of such information. DuBois describes himself first and foremost as a composer who happens to work in a variety of media, and those familiar with the information design guru Edward Tufte will see a definite affinity here.

The exhibition raises questions, but it also offers simple pleasures. The bold words topping each chart are like the introduction to a brain teaser, drawing you in and making you want to try to piece together meaning. Some are obtuse. Why on earth would Ulysses S. Grant use the word “Procedure” so regularly in his State of the Union? Or McKinley, “Puerto”? Others draw you in with their ominous tone. Truman’s “Soviet” and Hoover’s “Unemployment” come to mind. Or come packed with ironic humor. Nixon’s top word: “Truly.” Still others strike as possibly prophetic. Bill Clinton’s chart starts with “21st” followed by “Got Lost.”

Dig deeper and you’ll find other amusing and telling juxtapositions, too. On one line toward the bottom of the chart for Jimmy Carter, the words "abuse I've endured" meld into a rather loaded phrase. In the chart for Lyndon Johnson’s speech, the very contemporary phrase, "beauty police," pops up.

Perhaps the most striking juxtaposition of all though is between the chart for George Washington and the chart for George W. Bush. “We go from ‘gentlemen’ to ‘terror,’” says DuBois. “Had George Washington lost the election 250 years ago, he would have been hanged for treason to the British crown, and gone down in history as a terrorist—yet his number one word is ‘gentlemen.’ Now we have a president with the background of a gentleman—he is a Yale graduate—but he’s fear-mongering, trying to make us scared.”

Hindsight is always 20/20 runs through January 4 at the Weisman Art Museum.

As soon as I got home from August Wilson’s Fences under the direction of Lou Bellamy at the Penumbra, I went into the living room and opened up my Baseball Encyclopedia.

George Selkirk. Nickname: "Twinkletoes." Born: Jan. 4, 1908, Huntsville, Ontario. Died: Jan. 19, 1987 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Played right field for the Yankees from 1934 until 1942. Lifetime average of .290.

In the first act of Fences, the protagonist, Troy Maxon, a fifty-something former Negro Leagues baseball player, now working as a garbageman for a living, has just come home on a Friday—pay day—to split a fifth of gin with his buddy Bono. They’re both on Troy’s front porch in Pittsburgh. His wife, Rose, comes out to laugh with the two men. Right away,Troy starts bitching about George Selkirk.

“What’s that fellow they had playing right field for the Yankees back then?” Troy asks his buddy.

Like a woman who’s heard this argument many times before, Rose interrupts, “Selkirk?”

“Selkirk! Man batting .269, understand? .269. What kind of sense that make? I was hitting .432 with thirty-seven home runs! Man batting .269 and playing right field for the Yankees!”

When Rose tries to soothe her husband by explaining that there’s a lot of colored folks playing baseball now, that “folks had to wait for Jackie Robinson” to break the color barrier in 1947 (ten years before this scene takes place), Troy erupts again.

“I done seen a hundred niggers play baseball better than Jackie Robinson! Hell, I know some teams Jackie Robinson couldn’t even make! What you talking about Jackie Robinson. Jackie Robinson wasn’t nobody. I’m talking about if you could play ball then they ought to have let you play.”

It’s a provocative set-up—Wilson has the resentful, damaged Troy dismiss Jackie Robinson, the great savior of Major League Baseball's brand, right at the top. Instead, Wilson chooses to focus on a more obscure symbol as a legacy of the sick system of major league inequality that was in place before (and according to Troy, well after) Jackie broke in with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Wilson name drops George Selkirk, an average player playing alongside Joe DiMaggio on all those great Yankee teams of the thirties. Selkirk is served up as the generic, white obstruction of prodigious Negro league talents like Josh Gibson and Troy Maxon. (Troy is fictitious, of course, but have you ever heard any Josh Gibson Negro League stories? He might as well have been fictitious too.) It's a provocative enough detail to get a geeky fantasy baseball player like me, a guy who knows his Ken Burns and his WP Kinsella, to run home and crack his Baseball Encyclopedia. But August Wilson’s set-up is not why Fences is the best drama about sport that’s ever been written.

Yes, it’s better than the great baseball movies, like either of the Costner masterpieces or The Natural. Even better than the great boxing movies like Raging Bull or Million Dollar Baby. Even Rocky. (It begs the question: why hasn’t Hollywood adapted Fences yet? Maybe because the whole thing takes place on a front porch? They can fix that, can't they? Denzel's old enough now. Let's make this happen.)

Wilson’s play is great on many fronts. Of course, it contains the most poetic baseball metaphors of all time, but it also contains the most humane defense of the baseball metaphor of all time. The first scene of Act 2, where Troy confesses to Rose that he’s going to be a baby daddy to another woman.

Troy: “You born with two strikes on you before you come to the plate. You got to guard it closely…always looking for the curveball on the outside corner. You can’t afford to let none get past you. You can’t afford a called strike. If you going down…you going down swinging. Everything lined up against you. What you gonna do. I fooled em, Rose. I bunted. When I found you and Cory and a halfway decent job…I was safe. Couldn’t nothing touch me. I wasn’t going to strike out no more. I wasn’t going back to the penitentiary. I wasn’t gonna lay in the streets with a bottle of wine. I was safe. I had me a family. A job. I wasn’t gonna get that last strike. I was on first looking for one of them boys to knock me in. To get me home.”

Rose: “You should’ve stayed in my bed, Troy.”

Troy: “Then, when I saw that gal..she firmed up my backbone. And I got to thinking that if I tried…I just might be able to steal second. Do you understand that after eighteen years I wanted to steal second.”

Rose: “You should have held me tight. You should have grabbed me and held on.”

Troy: “I stood on first base for eighteen years and I thought…well, goddamn it…go on for it!”

Rose: “We’re not talking about baseball! We’re talking about you going off to lay in bed with another woman…and then bring it home to me. That’s what we’re talking about. We ain’t talking about no baseball.”

Troy: “Rose, you’re not listening to me. I’m trying the best I can to explain it to you. It’s not easy for me to admit that I been standing in the same place for eighteen years.”

But what really makes this play great is the character of Troy Maxon. He’s stuck in the past, but by the end, we miss him. He’s mean and he’s gentle. He wrestles with the complexities of what it means to be a black father while at the same time perpetuating those complexities. He’s loud but he can be quietly desperate and he sings the loneliest lullaby I’ve ever heard. He preaches responsibility while simultaneously shirking it. He is fascinated by recreation, but he forbids his own son from dreaming. He loves his family, but he ends up alone. He follows the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Whether you’re a baseball fan like me, or whether you’re a militant feminist who thinks the Hennepin County stadium sales tax is a bigger injustice than the war in Iraq, you will be mesmerized by this performance. Sitting there in the Penumbra, watching James A. Williams rumble through this part under the direction of Lou Bellamy, you can’t help but think that you are amongst greatness. Bellamy and Wilson were close collaborators, and there is a rhythm to Wilson’s language that actors under Bellamy's direction get. The entire cast is incredible, but when Williams as Troy asserts himself at the end of the third scene, you will understand you are seeing something special.

“Woman…I do the best I can do. I come in here every Friday. I carry a sack of potatoes and a bucket of lard. You all line up at the door with your hands out. I give you the lint from my pockets. I give you my sweat and my blood. I ain’t got no tears. I done spent them. We go upstairs in that room at night...and I fall down on you and try to blast a hole into forever. I get up Monday morning…find my lunch on the table. I go out. Make my way. Find my strength to carry me through to the next Friday. That’s all I got, Rose. That’s all I got to give. I can’t give nothing else.”

Seeing Bellamy do Fences is historic. Srsly. Like seeing Garrick doing Shakespeare. Or seeing Jeter play shortstop for the Yankees.

Don’t strike out. 

The Guthrie’s musical version of Little House on the Prairie just opened, but it’s already more of a cultural phenomenon than a play. Before previews started, it had already sold out its initial run, and by the time it officially opened on Friday night, most of the tickets for a two-week extension had been gobbled up. The strength of the concept alone, it seems, was enough to lure the parents of every girl under the age of sixteen to the Guthrie, many of them first-timers who would otherwise be carting their darlings to a megaplex or the megamall.

The addition to the cast of Melissa Gilbert, who played Laura in the television series, gave the production a bizarre sort of cultural resonance. Cast as Ma, Gilbert is all grown up now, as are the mothers in the audience who identified with her Laura when they were little girls. The result is a triple-dose of trans-generational nostalgia for anyone who read the books and watched the TV show, then gifted the books to their kids and bought the series on DVD.  Thus seeded in the collective American psyche, it appears that all the Guthrie needed to do was sprinkle a little Broadway-blessed water on this production, then step back and watch the thing sprout.

How one responds to the Guthrie’s Little House will ultimately depend, I suspect, upon how much one’s love for the books and TV show transfers to the stage. I will admit up front that I harbor no love whatsoever for the writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the only actress in the TV show I had any feelings for was the intensely cute Melissa Sue Anderson, whose most recent contribution to contemporary culture was as Beau Bridges’ First Lady in the TV mini-series 10.5: Apocalypse. Please understand, I was fourteen when Little House started, and spent the formative years of my boyhood admiring Michael Landon as Little Joe, the left-handed, Pinto-riding upstart of the Cartwright family on Bonanza. When Landon stopped shooting people and started being the respectable, sensitive, God-fearing patriarch of the Ingalls family, I lost all interest in him and immediately transferred my allegiance to Lee Majors in The Six Million Dollar Man, a show that gave an entire generation the most precious gift imaginable: a lifelong interest in prosthetics.

That said, there are a few things about the Guthrie’s Little House that ticket-holders and ticket-seekers ought to know. First, though Melissa Gilbert’s last official role was on the TV show Nip/Tuck, where she played a woman whose unnatural relationship with a pit bull results in the dog biting her nipple off, everything about Little House is so wholesome you could feed it to your kids for breakfast. Laura is already a teenager when the play begins, and it covers the time period when she becomes a teacher, falls in love and gets married, but her budding romance with Almanza Wilder (Kevin Massey) is as innocent as a sleigh ride and as predictable as Michael Phelps.

So don’t worry: There will be no unhappy surprises, just gentle clichés warmed over a nostalgic fire fueled by the time-honored rituals of the Broadway musical. Every song will swell to a heartfelt crescendo and provide glorious moments of sustained, piercing vibrato. There will be no doubt when to clap, as each number will end with an unmistakable one-two thump that says, “Put your hands together, people, a song has just ended!” There will be jovial working songs, sad songs about the lonesome prairie, songs about horses and farming and wheat—glorious wheat!—as well as joyous full-company production numbers that might actually convince you that homesteading on the Dakota prairie was a heckuva lot of fun. 

It will all be very professional, of course, and all of the singing will be first-rate, since most of the principle cast members are Broadway veterans (with the notable exception of Melissa Gilbert herself). As Laura, Kara Lindsay is rambunctious and charming, as she should be, and the show-stealer (every Broadway show has one) is Sara Jean Ford as Nellie Oleson, Laura’s bitchy schoolmate and romantic nemesis.

It’s all there—Pa, Ma, the girls, a cabin—just as you might imagine it. But if this show ever does find its way to Broadway, one can’t help but wonder if the aw-shucks innocence of the thing will be viewed by New Yorkers as more evidence that us Mid-westerners are a bunch of hopelessly romantic yokels. Or, will the show’s utter lack of cynicism communicate to jaded Easterners that our protected place in the breadbasket of America has somehow allowed us to maintain an enviable hold on certain facets of the American Dream lost to everyone else? Laura herself is universally appealing because she is a prototypical teenager who doesn’t much like the script society has handed her. And it’s understandable why girls of every age see her as a beacon of spirited independence. But the rest of Little House on the Prairie is a nostalgic fiction that lives almost exclusively on the musical stage, in songs and sentiments far too corny to express any other way and have anyone take them seriously.

Of course, it’s just a musical based on some books and a TV show, so no one is required to take it seriously. And that may be its saving grace, because in the end, the Guthrie’s Little House on the Prairie is just a lot of good-hearted, high-spirited fun—and that’s all it is, by golly.

Let’s hope it’s enough.

Little House on the Prairie continues at The Guthrie Theater through Oct. 19, guthrietheater.org

Sorry Cyndi Lauper fans, this post—and Macy’s 2008 '80s-themed “Pop Candy Arcade” Glamorama—was all about MC Hammer.

Well actually, the blockbuster concert/fashion show/fundraiser for the Children's Cancer Research Fund, now in its seventeenth year, is about kids like Josh Abbott, a brain tumor survivor who started the evening off with a rousingly appropriate “Yo, let’s start this” to a packed crowd at the Orpheum. But by the time the first models took the stage, the checks had been written, first cocktails downed, and the crowd was ready for a show.

And they got it. The crowd rocked along as models sporting Celine, Donna Karan, Marc Jacobs, Just Cavalli, and Tommy Hilfiger did their little turns (or, in some cringe-worthy cases, danced) to Prince, Bell Biv DeVoe, Michael Jackson, and other '80s/mid-90s delights. But the real magic happened after MC Hammer, donning a sleek white track suit, joined by no less than ten pop-and-lockin’ back-up dancers, came out blazing. He killed with “Turn This Motha Out” and “Two Legit Too Quit”—I mean, the man can move.

Looking half his forty-six years, he used every bit of the stage, as well as every watt of energy the enthusiastic crowd put out. And when he left the stage without performing his signature “ U Can’t Touch This,” effectively taking the joy, hopes, and dreams of the audience with him, he came back almost immediately, playfully asking us whether he forgot something before the “Superfreak” sample started and the crowd went totally mental. We loved every second of it—and he loved that we loved it. It was a night to celebrate survivors, and MC proved last night that he too had persevered.

Not that I am comparing what MC Hammer did to surviving cancer, but the thing you have to understand about Stanley Kirk Burrell, who became “Hammer” when he worked as a ball boy for the Oakland A’s and one of the coaches decided he looked like Hammerin’ Hank Aaron, is that he was a normal guy who spent four years in the Navy, started singing in some clubs, and became an overnight sensation when he decided to sample a Rick James song. “U Can’t Touch This” was everywhere. “Stop, Hammer Time,” was a national catchphrase. People wore Hammer Pants, seriously yo, Hammer Pants. And they thought they looked good. The ball boy from O-town, overnight, had more money and fame than he could have imagined. He won three Grammys, released one more mega-hit signal, and then fell off the face of the Earth.

Actually, it might have been better if he just disappeared. But Hammer instead became the butt of the joke—the pants, the eyeglasses, the highly publicized bankruptcy he faced for a staggering $14 million in debt. The man is given credit (by some, and by all means, discuss) as the first hip-hop artist to bring sampling of pop oldies into the mainstream, make it OK for advertisers to tap hip-hop artists as spokespeople, and he was tight with Tupac. But all that was forgotten. He was more fun as a punch line than a pity case.

But Hammer didn’t stop. He found god and became an ordained minister. He got married and has five kids. He’s started a website. Designers like Dior Homme and Louis Vuitton are creating Hammer Pant–esque styles for their Fall/Winter 08–09 lines. And he happily accepted an invitation to perform at a concert benefiting Children's Cancer Research, and, to steal a phrase from a coworker, MC pounded.

Cyndi closed the night with “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” and the girls did, and they danced. Then we hit the after-party and had a little more.

The Ordway's new musical biography of George M. Cohan seems intent on mining the composer’s classic American songs for box office gold. And judging by the audience’s reaction opening night, they probably have not miscalculated. But the evening left me feeling enervated and demoralized. The only thing that depressed me more than the show itself was the audience’s enthusiastic countenance of it.

The major problem is David Armstrong’s book. According to the Ordway website, it purports to present “a fresh, contemporary view of a celebrated musical theater icon.” But it is really little more than a collection of backstage clichés. The dialogue is often cornier than the excerpts of the scenes from Cohan’s musicals. The plot is overly melodramatic and lacks subtlety. Even worse, it is undramatic. For example, when Cohan’s first wife leaves him out of neglect, it’s hard to muster much interest because her character was barely established in the first place.

Too often, the scenes seemed like just feeble hooks on which to hang the songs, though there are some indisputably great ones, such as “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” “Over There,” “Harrigan” and of course, the title song. But a number of songs are decidedly second rate, and the overall production makes a few missteps that could have been avoided.

I was most troubled by a speech of Cohan’s at the top of Act Two patriotically celebrating the United States’ intervention into World War I. In the current political climate, it would not be hard to read this speech as a justification for our invasion of Iraq, and I suspect that’s why it got so much applause. But opinions on the war vary, and I personally don’t appreciate it when patriotism gets hijacked by reactionary politics, and if the producers didn’t realize this would be a sensitive issue—well, they should have.

But for all that, there were compensations:

This is a dance show par excellence. The proficiency of the ensemble, along with the creativity of James A. Rocco and Jayme McDaniel (responsible for the direction and choreography), made for some stunning displays. Frankly, I often find dance interludes to be deadening longueurs, but these complemented the musical numbers beautifully.

I was initially skeptical of the decision to put the orchestra onstage, fearing that it was an attempt to avoid needing to create a much of a set. But it proved a wise choice. It did indeed simplify the need for scenic elements (though designer Chad Van Kekerix was fully able to create a real sense of period). But playing the action fully downstage, without the obstacle of an intervening orchestra pit, created an improved sense of intimacy.

In addition, the costumes by Gregory A. Poplyk were spectacular, adding much visual interest. And, being the Ordway, there was more than a little eye-popping spectacle. The extravagant display at the end of the first act, with its pyrotechnics on stage and streamers descending on the audience, seemed like a New Year’s Eve celebration on steroids. It felt a little extraneous to what was actually going on onstage, but it was hard not to be swept along by the sheer ostentatiousness.

What kept me most interested were the biographical elements. Cohan’s history was fascinating. He basically, single-handedly, invented what we now think of as the Broadway musical, as distinct from the older genre of operetta. The script is full of scenes from some of the early shows, like Little Johnny Jones, that, for musical comedy aficionados like me, were especially illuminating. Armstrong would have done well to replace any number of his own creaking scenes with more such excerpts.

And sweeping all other considerations aside was Sean Martin Hingston’s performance as Cohan. He owned the stage, masterfully capturing the charismatic, larger-than-life persona that was a large part of Cohan’s success. His singing voice filled the theater, ringing to the top balcony, and he had the courage not to disguise Cohan’s less admirable traits (the man was arrogant and unwilling not to have his way, even if it meant being deceitful). Hingston was refreshingly smarmy, especially in the scenes where Cohan manipulated to prevent the formation of the actor's union.

In the end, my reservations about this show probably don’t matter. Its energy and Cohan’s music are probably enough to make it a commercial success. It’s just a pity that it couldn’t be an artistic one as well.

Yankee Doodle Dandy continues at Ordway Center through August 17.

Last night, Habib Koité and Bamada kicked off the Twin Cities Pan African Festival, a six-day feast of music, dance, film, and visual art organized by the Diverse Emerging Music Organization (DEMO) to “celebrate the African diaspora and Twin Cities’ African community.”

The Malian band drew an all-ages—but predominantly white—crowd to the Cedar Cultural Center, which is usually dark in July and August but has turned the lights on for the event. (However, they did not turn on the AC, if they have any—the thermostat on the wall said 85 degrees when the concert ended around 10 p.m.)

The first thing I noticed when I walked into the hall was that there was a narrow fringe of chairs trimming the walls, far from the stage. As more people arrived and found chairs stacked in the corners, they created more rows—until the announcement was made that the floor would be needed for dancing and they might want to move. It turned out the predication was right—the band was hotter than the room, propelling the evening with a driving and mesmerizing groove that is at once regional and worldly and had the packed floor moving.

Koité, who leads the band with vocals and guitar and an occasional recorder, is surrounded by five other musicians who play a blend of Western and Malian instruments: guitar, bass, violin, and a drum set were paired with a wooden xylophone called a balafón, a kora (a lute with a bowed neck and a gourd and cowskin resonator), a n’goni (an oblong wooden lute), and some talking drums.

Koité’s guitar playing was occasionally decorated with the light, ornamental turns of phrase common to Islamic musical styles, and his singing was sometimes earthy, sometimes nasal, and sometimes percussive and scatlike.

Their music has a dominant pop feel, and a secondary “ethnic” sound. Because African music had such an influence on the American folk and rock traditions, I found myself pondering chicken-and-egg questions about what I was hearing.

The melodic and rhythmic thoughts were short—anywhere from four beats to four bars—and ranged from simple to complex, and then repeated with little or no modification for the duration of the song. The tunes settle into a groove and stay there, their interest coming from the interplay of the layers laid down, and from virtuosic improvisational solos. The result was mesmerizing. As a listener (or dancer), you can follow or respond to any number of musical thoughts or combinations thereof.

There is also a conversational aspect to their music, coming from an almost gamelike call-and-response; Koité would challenge a band member to imitate a complex melody or play beyond their instrument’s range. (He played this game with the audience, too, but wisely kept it to simpler phrases.)

On vocals, Koité had these conversations with the percussionist, whose talking drum tucked under his armpit responded not only rhythmically but melodically note for note. He seemed to be the audience favorite, and had a charisma on stage that was impossible to take my eyes off—the level of physicality and intricacy of his drumming and the mystery of how he coaxed the different sounds and pitches from his instrument was fascinating.

The audience was a big part of the entertainment, too, as the band brought people up on stage one at a time to dance, the drums egging them on. Moves and grooves were coming out of the unlikeliest of people on the dance floor, as well. “You can tell who has taken African dance classes and who hasn’t,” my friend noticed. Regardless of ability, the music seemed to infect everyone with pure, unstoppable enjoyment, and the happy crowd coaxed a few encores from the band.

Personally, I’ve never been a big fan of the traditional circus. Sad clowns, stupid human tricks, animals in tutus—it’s the sort of entertainment I imagine would be effective at Guantanamo Bay.

Fortunately, the circus arts have evolved over the years, due largely to the popularity of Cirque du Soleil and other circuses that dispense with the animals and rely entirely on imaginative acrobatics and exuberant spectacle to keep the kiddies entertained. One such circus is St. Paul’s Circus Juventas. The difference is that in Circus Juventas, it’s the kids who do the entertaining.

If you’ve never been to a Circus Juventas show, you owe it to yourself to go see Ravens Manor, this summer’s big event, if only to be reminded what children are capable of with the right coaching and parents who truly believe the cable holding their precious daughter forty feet in the air, upside down, by her ankle, is going to hold.

Circus Juventas isn’t just a circus for kids—it’s the largest youth circus in the country, and easily one of the best. More than 600 kids participate in the circus school program, and the top students put on a show every year. This year’s theme was inspired by Disney’s Haunted House ride. It involves a woman who lost her only true love at sea and spends the rest of her life locked up inside a gothic mansion, and involves some zombie boyfriends, a swamp princess, and lots of girls in neon dreadlocks. But the “plot,” such as it is, is just a pretext for the various circus acts, which are numerous and spectacular—so spectacular that it’s hard to believe these are local high school and college kids during the day.

We’re not talking somersaults and handstands and a bunch of pity-clapping from parents. These kids put on a show that includes an astonishing variety of eye-popping circus tricks from around the world—tricks with names like the Mexican Cloud Swing, The Spanish Web, the German Wheel, the Russian Bar, and the French Trapeze. They also juggle fire: ten of them, simultaneously, toss torches back and forth as casually as if they were tossing each other a pair of car keys (though most of them probably don’t even have their learner’s permit yet). Which raises an interesting question. I mean, how do you explain to your son that yes, you can juggle fire all you want—but don’t even think about driving to the grocery store by yourself.

Like Cirque du Soleil, the “acts” are really theatrical episodes that involve one set of skills or another—climbing ropes, dangling from long ribbons of silk, swinging from the rafters—and evolve into a kind of moving sculpture backed by music so operatic and bombastic you’d swear that any second a girl is going to slip free of her rigging and fly for real. In one particularly stunning scene, half a dozen performers are jumping out of the mansion’s windows down onto trampolines and back up to the windows, over and over again, such that it looks like they really are defying gravity. It’s amazing—just the sort of thing you would not want your kid to try at home.

Another treat is that mandolin player/violinist Peter Ostroushko and his band composed and play the eerie score live (his daughter, Anna, performs the French Trapeze and Spanish Web), and all of this music has been compiled onto a new CD. Ostroushko’s band lends just another layer of professionalism to Ravens Manor, a show that demonstrates beyond a shadow of any possible doubt that Circus Juventas has evolved into a world-class organization since its inception in 1994. The big bonus is that a couple of times a year they throw their doors open and let us jaded adults inside to see what a bunch of lithe, strong, determined kids can do if they set their minds to it, have the proper instruction—and their parents' permission.

I’m not sure I’d let my daughter swing from the rafters and juggle fire, but it’s sure a lot of fun to watch someone else’s kid do it.

Ravens Manor continues through Aug. 17, but tickets are selling fast. A small warning: unless they figure out how to condense it, the show is more than three hours long, which could test the patience of the littlest audience members.