Lyra Baroque Orchestra opened its season Saturday at Hamline’s Sundin Hall with a French flair.

The first half featured ten of the orchestra’s musicians ­—two violins, a cello, viola da gamba, harpsichord, bassoon, and a pair each of flutes and oboes—on Francois Couperin’s Apothéoses.

Lyra’s artistic director, Jacques Ogg, gave some helpful verbal notes before the concert began, explaining the fascinating period of musical partisanship and nationalism in the early years of the eighteenth century that spawned the work.

During the reign of Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste de Lully controlled all the musical output of France, and because in those days the world revolved around the Sun King, it was illegal to compose music in the Italian style. (This is just a tad ironic, given that Lully was born Giovanni Battista di Lulli in Florence in 1632.) But Lully died in 1687, and Louis XIV in 1715, and after that, the strictures loosened to the point that Couperin (also ironically, born in Paris), could introduce the Italian trio sonata form to France, which he did by way of the Apothéoses.

The apotheoses are that of Lully, the poster child of French musical Académie, and Arcangelo Corelli, who defined Italian music in the same era. Both composers join Apollo and the muses on Mount Parnassus, and at the god’s persuasion, join the tastes of French and Italian music to create the perfection of music itself.

While the music is enjoyable on its own, knowing the story behind a programmatic work like this is the perfect way to get to know musical idioms. Given a helpful handle or two, it’s easy to identify the characters, and emotions and dramatic situations are vivid. A tiny flurry in the treble depicts Mercury’s descent to the Elysian Fields to announce the descent of Apollo from Parnassus, and the following grand gestures indicate the arrival of the god himself. There are even lesser mortal composers, gossiping and whining away.

Lyra’s playing was a little ragged at the start, with unsteady ensemble and intonation issues that are difficult to mask when only a handful of players are involved. But the group quickly gelled and gave a fine, spirited performance that was vivid and convincing. To me, the best moments were in the end of the second suite, when Lully (represented by the concertmaster, Lucinda Marvin) was accompanied by Corelli (played by principal second violin Inger Dahlin), and vice versa. Theirs was truly stunning, stylish playing that would have made Apollo smile.

The second half of the program was an instrumental suite from the opera Alcione by Marin Marais, another major musical figure in the courts of Louis XIV and XV.

The composer, depicted by Gérard Depardieu in the 1991 film Tous les matins du monde, was a student of Lully and a contemporary of Couperin, and as much of a superstar as a viol player has ever been. Alcione traces the myth of the lovers Ceyx and Alcyone as recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ceyx dies in a storm at sea, and the bereft Alcyone tries to join him in death, but the gods change them both into sea birds whose presence signifies calm, “halcyon” waters. For this, four more violins, two violas and a bass added rich, fleshy depth to the band. 

You can tell that Marais was a viol player—he gives them shapely florid lines, which were gorgeously rendered by Lyra’s low strings.

There was some really brilliant virtuosic playing in the upper strings and winds, especially during the tempest movement (which was a bit drowned out by the wind machine, a wonderful eighteenth-century special effect), and in the joyous final movement’s flute duet, sweetly played by Paul Jacobson and Rachel Hest, that undoubtedly characterizes the reunited lovers.

Lyra really has a perfect venue in Sundin Hall—it’s a bright, clean acoustic, and the size is appropriate to the smaller scale of sound that period instruments put out. The audience fills out the space rather than being overwhelmed by it, as well.

I found myself driving home wondering why early music has a niche following. But maybe it’s not a bad thing to be gelato in a world of Dairy Queen.

The local theater community turned out in droves for the 2008 Ivey Awards at the State Theatre on Monday night. Little House on the Prairie stars Steve Blanchard (Pa) and Melissa Gilbert (Ma) hosted the event, which honors outstanding achievements in local theater for the preceding year.

This year’s honorees were:

Workhouse Theatre Company’s ‘Night Mother, for overall excellence

Open Eye Figure Theatre’s A Prelude to Faust, for overall excellence

Interact Center’s Broken Brain Summit, for its innovative concept and idea

Frank Theatre’s The Pillowman, for unparalleled emotional impact

Ordway Center for the Performing Arts’ production of Cabaret, for costume design, scenic design, and choreography

Gremlin Theatre’s Orson’s Shadow for ensemble acting—honorees: Gary Geiken, Katie Guentzel, John Middleton, Carolyn Pool, Matt Rein, and Alan Sorenson.

Actor Jairus Abts, for his outstanding performance as Hedwig in the Jungle Theater’s production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

Actor James A. Williams, for his portrayal of Troy Maxson in Penumbra Theatre’s Company’s production of Fences, by August Wilson.

Actor Kate Eifrig, for her portrayal of nine different Iraqi women in 9 Parts of Desire at the Guthrie Theater.

Dramaturg and actor Matthew Amendt won the Emerging Artist award.

The Lifetime Achievement Award went to Don Stolz, who founded the legendary Old Log Theater in 1940.

If you couldn't make it, check out video journalist Matt Peikin's three-minute distillation of the evening at Three-Minute Egg.

I will unapologetically state that Verdi’s Il Trovatore is one of my favorite operas and that it is not only a great opera, but a great drama. I can imagine eyes rolling at that statement, since Il Trovatore is traditionally dismissed as a contrived and silly story saved by Verdi’s astonishing music.

But Verdi didn’t consider it contrived or silly. And he was a master musical dramatist who fought ferociously with his librettists to improve the quality of their texts. So I am inclined to trust his instincts and explore what attracted him.

In medieval Spain, long before the opera begins, a witch was burned at the stake for supposed bewitching the son of Count di Luna. In vengeance, her daughter, the gypsy Azucena, kidnapped the child and threw him into the same fire. Now, many years later, Azucena’s son, the troubadour Manrico, and the Count’s other son, now the Count di Luna himself, are rivals for the lady-in-waiting Leonora. From Verdi’s pessimistic perspective, it cannot work out well for any of them.

There are certainly plot elements that defy contemporary credibility, like Azucena’s being in such a frenzy of rage that she throws her own child into the fire rather than the one she had intended to murder. But for Verdi, these absurdities were simply expressions of the inexorability of fate, of the futility of life, and of a world without meaning. To my mind, they point forward to the absurdist philosophies of the next century. This is a nihilistic work and Verdi's passionate music evokes that dark and elemental despair.

Minnesota Opera’s current production does not touch these philosophic depths. It does not even succeed at the task of simple storytelling. This was my companion’s first Trovatore and even with the surtitles, he frequently had trouble following what was going on onstage. He chose not the read the synopsis—and he shouldn’t need to. But there was just too much extraneous action that got in the way of the story. Many of director Kevin Newbury’s ideas, like what seemed to be an aborted attempt to crucify Azucena in Act Three, just seemed ridiculous.

Where was the horror that inspired Verdi? It wasn’t on the stage. Nor was it in the pit. There is blood and thunder in this score, but conductor Giovanni Reggioli’s erratic tempi robbed scene after scene of its power.

Allen Moyer’s minimalist set added little. The costumes of Jessica Jahn were pleasant but not particularly evocative. That is, when they were visible in D.M. Wood’s murky lighting. The story is dark; that doesn’t mean the stage has to be.

The singers provided the one bright light in this dismal evening. However, they were not stylistically on the same page. But the opera is partially to blame. Il Trovatore stands at the cusp of a new era, the end of bel canto and the movement towards what would eventually become verismo.

Baritone Lester Lynch proved a true bel canto stylist and his performance stole the show. Three singers from the Marinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia were not in that league, but proved adept. Soprano Mlada Khudoley’s Leonora exhibited far too many verismo mannerisms, but her lyric soprano was up to the role’s florid demands. Mezzo Olga Savova was a frequently thrilling Azucena. The weak tenor of Avgust Amonov made Manrico sound ineffectual and rough.

This was a polite Il Trovatore, which seems like a contradiction in terms, an absurdity in its own right. As moment after moment passed ineffectively, I found myself bored. By the end of the evening, I found myself angry that Verdi’s masterpiece had been so ill-served.

Il Trovatore continues at the Ordway Center through Sept.28.

Some film score composers churn out aural wallpaper that’s kindly dismissed as “movie music,” others overcompensate for directors who can’t deliver emotion without cueing a weepy violin solo or sentimental melody. And the consensus on the supposedly controversial Philip Glass? Either he’s a genius or an example of what can go very, very wrong when you don’t follow the shopworn mold of John Williams.

Specializing in what documentary filmmaker (and frequent collaborator) Errol Morris has dubbed the sound of existential dread, Glass writes maniacally repetitive compositions that seem to cycle for hours before coming to an abrupt end. In The Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line, Notes on a Scandal, and, most famously, Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy, Glass’s peculiar brand of musical dystopia partners quite well with what’s on screen. In a star pageant like The Hours, he traps you in an overwrought, overlong music video.

Glass’s critics point out that his hired-gun work for the movie studios is but a piece of a career that has always prized ubiquity over quality. And The Glass Sound is certainly everywhere: in twenty-plus operas, eight symphonies, numerous concertos, string quartets, piano and organ solos, and collaborations with David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Richard Serra, Twyla Tharp, Allen Ginsberg, and Patti Smith. If you’ve only heard Glass at the multiplex, you haven’t really heard the half of it.

It seems only appropriate that the man himself is now the subject of a largely adoring documentary that surveys the highlights of his distinguished career, gently probes the psyche of the genius, but doesn’t ultimately reveal a lot. Glass: A Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts, which had its area premiere last night at the Walker Art Center (where Glass has performed many times), doesn’t pretend to be a definitive biography or a particularly objective one. It’s the kind of breezy, loosely assembled love letter Sydney Pollack made about his architect buddy Frank Gehry and on those terms it’s a satisfying, entertaining 112 minutes.

Director Scott Hicks (of the tortured pianist drama Shine and also the Glass-scored Aaron Eckhart/Catherine Zeta-Jones foodie romance No Reservations) keeps a reverential distance from his likable subject. Dropping in on Glass family gatherings and professional assignations, he is an interloper who steals moments to ask about and observe The Process, but he isn’t, as far as I can tell, able to get Glass to sit still for many in-depth interviews.

The documentary is divided into twelve thematic chapters, starting with wife Holly’s tour of the maestro’s messy home office and ending in Germany for opening night of his latest opera, Waiting for the Barbarians. We hear from a smattering of Glass intimates (his first wife, his oldest son) and famous friends (Chuck Close, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen), visit him in the studio and before performances, and drop in at his seaside Nova Scotia retreat as he assembles homemade pizzas.

We learn that Glass was among the artists who colonized 1960s SoHo, introducing “minimalist music” to the scenesters sprawled on the floors of downtown lofts and galleries for his musical endurance sessions (made all the easier to endure with plenty of drugs). In 1976, he shook up The Metropolitan Opera with his avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach and though many other respectable engagements would follow, Glass was then (and has remained) something of a punching bag.

The movie shares some of those withering headlines from back in the day (“Music By Torture—6 Hours of Monotony”), but Glass insists that his lifelong “strong hate faction” doesn’t bother him. The film paints the seventy-one-year-old composer as a globehopping workaholic, distracted husband/father to wife #4 and two toddlers, and a spiritual searcher whose grab-bag of religious studies (Taoism, Buddhism, Judaism, the Toltec tradition) mirror his eclectic musical roots as the star pupil of sitarist Ravi Shankar and French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger.

Some of the film’s most revealing insights come from his sister, Sheppie, who scoffs at her brother’s marital requirements (“his wives must be half his age, plus seven”) and who speculates on how 1950s family dynamics played out for a Julliard-bound prodigy who shared his father’s love of classical music but not his desire for a traditional career.

Does all this add up to a particularly deep, rounded portrait of Glass? No, but that probably won’t bother anyone except those already tuned into his career. Glass: A Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts is perhaps the best we can expect of a drive-by documentary of this complex, stubborn talent. It’s as opaque and, at times, as maddeningly redundant as a Philip Glass film score. And the best thing about it is the soundtrack of Glass’s greatest hits.

Glass: A Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts plays through Sunday at the Walker.

What happens when the earth is neglected? Zorongo Flamenco Dance Co. asks this question in artistic director Susana di Palma’s new production, which is based on Federico Garcia Lorca’s play Yerma and divided into two separate shows, this month’s Romeria and October’s Marchita. This two-part structure is daring in itself, but Zorongo goes further than that: they’re presenting Romeria outside, on several stages at Minnehaha Falls Park.

When the production begins at the bandshell, it doesn’t seem that this gamble will pay off. Fellow audience members are too distracting—they talk to each other and on their cell phones, they come in, they leave, they block your view, they take pictures. It’s evident that the main characters—Yerma, the barren and abandoned wife (Adriana Meresma Fois); Juan, her careless husband (Timo Nunez; Raul Salcedo takes the part on Saturday and Sunday); and a crone, a witch of the old ways (Susana di Palma)—are all played by powerful and skilled performers, but their drama seems small and far away. The location doesn’t fit either: the bandshell awkwardly stands in for an interior.

But once the romeria (pilgrimage) begins, everything changes. The first scene over, we’re led down a long staircase (wear walking shoes!) through the woods. The green light filters through leaves, the smell of earth, the procession, the song that we’re encouraged to sing, all this changes the mood at once. By the time we arrive at the bottom of the stairs, the story of Yerma’s quest for fertility isn’t just something we’re watching; we are the romeria.

Even what you might normally consider a bother—the difficulty of seeing the dance through people and trees—becomes part of the experience. When Yerma dances her frustration, her wild-bird hands and her storm-weather shifts are given new meaning by a thin screen of branches. The disrespectful Juan’s modern attire and forceful hammer-beats seem all the more out of place, out of tune on this stage among trees.

The apex of the performance is just such a conjunction of story and nature. Yerma’s efforts to become pregnant through gentle sympathetic magic (having a pregnant woman step over her scarf) have been frustrated by her unkind husband. (Admittedly, in a modern context this element of the story is a little weak. What if the guy just doesn’t want kids? But we have to see the metaphor here: Yerma is not just a woman, she is nature herself.) So Yerma turns to darker magic: now it’s not just fertility she’s after, it’s revenge.

As the crone, di Palma beats out a spell on a stage lodged perilously in high rocks beside the stream. In this powerful moment, reality and performance blend. If di Palma were a real priestess (and in some way, artists are), we would see her this way: crowded together, straining for a view, and catching her violent incantations at last through birch leaves, the gliding stream’s sound in counterpoint to the driving flamenco beat. 
            
Romeria is a cliff-hanger—the full consequences of Yerma’s neglect and revenge will have to wait until Marchita, which happens at the Southern Theater, Oct. 16-19. But it is an experience in itself, and not just for the eyes and mind. By taking us through the park, by making us walk a romeria of our own, di Palma and company get their point across bodily. Minnehaha Falls Park, like all the nature that remains, is beautiful, and being in it calms, soothes, and strengthens us. But how often do we go into nature? How much, in our daily lives, do we care for the world that sustains us?

Romeria continues through Sept. 21, with free shows daily beginning at 6 p.m., zorongo.org

Is there anything more improbable than writing about music? As a critic of classical music, I constantly come up against the absurdity of trying to find concrete language for something so essentially abstract and ethereal. For that reason, I am even more in awe than I might otherwise be of John Marans’ play Old Wicked Songs, which is currently being produced by Theatre Latte Da in the Guthrie’s Dowling Studio.

It is 1986 in Vienna. Stephen Hoffman, a caustic America piano prodigy who is suffering from an artistic block, has come to study with the aging musician Professor Josef Mashkan. The petulant young man throws a fit when he realizes that the professor does not teach piano but voice. The teacher that Hoffman actually wants to study with has insisted he engage in this course first in order to teach the prodigy humility. Not only will he not be studying the great piano masterpieces, he will be forced to work on Robert Schumann’s romantic song cycle Dichterliebe (The Poet’s Love)–and not even as an accompanist! He is being asked to sing.

Hoffman finds this prospect utterly beneath him and rejects it completely, unwilling to admit that there is anything that Maskan can teach him. But in the face of the professor’s commitment to the music, unflagging determination, and great high spirits, Hoffman slowly begins to open himself up. The process eventually rekindles his passion.

Marans’ use of the Dichterliebe is not random. The arc of his scenes coordinates with the progression of the music. In his depiction of Hoffman and Maskan’s detailed and prodigious analysis of the songs, he touches the composer’s soul, and even manages to expose the emotional content behind simple chord progressions. In so doing, he provides fascinating insights into the joy and sadness at the heart of all great music.

The audience is let in on the thrilling process of artistic creation. There are moments when the collaboration takes on a white-hot intensity. Hearts soar as the music takes flight and the audience is carried away on that journey as well.

You don’t have to be experienced in classical music to appreciate the drama. My companion is only a casual listener, but he found the evolving relationship between the two men completely engaging.

But if classical music is your forte, you will find some delicious inside jokes, such as Hoffman mimicking Vladimir Horowitz playing Liszt, Wolfgang Brendel playing Beethoven and, most scathingly, Glenn Gould playing Bach.

The script is full of wit, and the repartee between these two smart men sharp and clever. But at its heart, this story is as dark as Schumann’s song cycle. During the course of the action, Kurt Waldheim, a reputed Nazi, is elected President of Austria. The dark history of World War II and the atrocities at Dachau cast a shadow over the personal intimacy the two men share, because Mashkan harbors a secret that could potentially destroy the relationship.

Marans’ script could hardly be better served than it is in Latte Da’s production. This is a labor of love for director Peter Rothstein. His voice teacher in college was a Viennese musician, so there is an element of autobiography to his tender and compassionate reading of the play. He directs from the heart and strives to make the most direct connection possible with his audience. And here, he succeeds completely. The result is a deeply moving experience that affirms our collective humanity through the power of music.

Rothstein’s casting also ensures the success of his production. Raye Birk brings a dry wit to Mashkan, but there are deep layers of pain to his clown. And Jonas Goslow makes Hoffman’s transition from an arrogant prig to a deeply caring human being utterly believable. But their true success is as a team. In the nuanced relationship that they establish, they create a single whole, just as singer and accompanist do in performance.

Add to that the detailed, evocative set of John Clark Donahue and the subtle lighting of Marcus Dillard and this is a class act all around.

It’s perfectly appropriate that Mashkan's secret comes out in the context of the final song of the Dichterliebe. Maran’s intertwining of the story with the music is brilliant. But in the end, even he has to acknowledge the ultimate ineffability of music. He chooses to end his drama appropriately–and very effectively–with the long and moving postlude to the cycle.

Old Wicked Songs continues at Guthrie Theater through October 5.

There’s too much to say about Merce Cunningham’s Ocean, copresented this weekend by Northrop, St. Benedict, and the Walker Art Center at the Rainbow Quarry—too much about Cunningham, about this production, about Ocean itself. If I went into all that, I’d have no space to tell you what it was like to be there. Suffice it to say that Ocean is BIG, big: It headed The New York Times list of this season’s dance events; it exhausted a small army of dancers, musicians, funders, technicians, organizers, and even bus drivers. I’ll refer you to my preview article in the September issue of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine for the rest, and get on with the work itself.
            
The music. One minute before showtime, a clarinetist at center stage tunes the four corners of the orchestra; she might be calling the four winds. When, a moment later, Andrew Culver’s music begins on all sides, it’s an army that suddenly crests the walls of a canyon, hanging for a moment at the rim before rushing in. David Tudor’s electronic score adds thunder that might shake loose the quarry walls. Or, in a quieter mood, whale-song and bird cries—while the live musicians seem almost like human voices, scattered here and there in the audience. You hear rain to your right; it takes a long time to recognize it as part of the score. Later, a heartbeat charges the last minutes of this teeming cosmos of sound.
            
The movement. It’s hard to understand how Cunningham’s 1950s audiences could have been shocked by his movement style; today, Cunningham looks more classical than most ballet. Certainly his work demands classical virtues of dancers: they need strength, discipline, and integrity to get through his one-legged landings, his arduous sequences pieced together without the help of slur-steps, his unassisted promenades and développés. These last two items—slow revolutions and extensions, performed on one foot—once featured largely in ballet, but were given up for the showier maneuvers of pas de deux. Cunningham’s steps are not pyrotechnic but planetary, giving a sense of geometrical planes that radiate out into space, slow or thick elements the dancers move through. Even in playful or witty moments, exacting precision remains. The image that sticks is a single dancer in a pose that gleams with victorious effort.
            
The dance. Famously, Cunningham pulls his steps together into larger sequences with the assistance of chance, but what does this backside-of-the-embroidery information have to do with a viewer? Nothing, really. But given this keyword chance, you might notice the randomness of your own attention—how you see a dancer’s shape in the background, think about tomorrow’s schedule, then are caught by the sudden exaltation of a leap. You might quit worrying about seeing the dance and pull back to a general attention in which the matrix of moves and dancers is a miraculous vision into a concentrated span of life, that truly narrative-less twisting and work, meeting, parting, and beauty. Here, you catch a symmetry just as it dissolves: every dancer on one foot, still, or a diagonal line advancing. Here, two dancers coincide in a tender duet, lifting, touching, and mirroring each other for a precious few minutes you are lucky to have seen.
            
The design. Light and the saturated colors of the costumes (simple unitards or, later, translucent shift dresses) act as temperature in Ocean. White lights flick on and flood you with a cold wind. Dancers in blue-black unitards have the same effect, but when new dancers enter in sun-gold and red, warmth returns. It’s an illusion of warmth, because the quarry is quite cold when the sun goes down, so cold that steam rises from the dancers’ bodies—evidence of their work. The ruggedly worked walls of the quarry go nearly invisible during the performance, but their towering presence remains—and reappears in the electrifying white light of the last few minutes. Those minutes are counted by four large television screens mounted at the four corners of the stage. This strange feature mostly makes you aware of the mercurial passage of time: how ten minutes can go by in a blink, how much intricate action can fit in sixty seconds.

But time has another resonance in Ocean. Despite the surround-sound, despite the busy dance, Ocean holds a deep silence. You are silent while this spectacle is brought to brief life; when it ends, you go on with your noisy life, while this vision vanishes into the actual silence of underwater, perhaps, or of granite. The surrounding rock walls are felt in the darkness as monuments of time and silence. It’s this that gives special urgency to the last few seconds, ticked off on the clocks, as one dancer, having held out moving as long as he can, rushes off stage just as the dark veil falls.

Seeing Ice Cube rap in a nearly empty Myth nightclub, I was reminded of how country music treats its greats. By the time they were in their fifties, Johnny Cash and George Jones were ignored, considered to be too old to share radio playlists with the younger, flashier black hat acts. Ice Cube isn’t even forty yet, but as a black dude in America, it makes sense that the industry would pasture him a decade before the average country star is handed his AARP card.

But Cube's still making records anyway. Evidently, his latest, Raw Footage, reached the top of the rap charts (for whatever that’s worth in today’s music economy). Rapping to a couple hundred die hard fans who had made their way to Maplewood and paid $35 to see “the Godfather of Gangsta Rap,” Cube was as petulant and defiant as he was on his politically scathing classics from the early 90s, like AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted and The Predator. “Every time I go on tour, I hear the same stupid question,” he said. “Ice Cube, when you gonna retire? Well, I’m never gonna retire.”

This wasn’t Hollywood Cube. He wasn’t doing the black-Chevy Chase thing that he’s been doing onscreen; he was spitting hot fire dating from 1989 to the present. He did songs I knew from the NWA days like “Straight Outta Compton,” to solo hits, like “It Was a Good Day,” to songs I didn’t know, like  “I Got My Locs On,” his duet with Young Jeezy off the new album. That voice is still a serious bark, but Cube is funny too (he wrote Friday for God’s sake). I enjoy any entertainer who can coax a crowd, no matter how modest, to chant “Ain’t No Party like a Minnesota Party because a Minnesota Party Don’t Staahhhhp!” And by way of introducing his new single, “Do Ya Thing,” he dropped some Compton philosophy on us: “When you’re the lead dawg, your view always change. But when you’re a follower, when you’re back in the pack, all you get to see is ass.”

The DJ mix was murky, and to my ears, Cube brought more energy to the classic material than the new stuff, but it’s probably my fault for not paying attention to his music career for, oh, the past 16 years. Which made the scene at McNally Smith Music College on the afternoon after the concert kind of surprising.

For the last three years, Ice Cube has awarded “The Ice Cube Scholarship” to a lucky freshman at McNally Smith. It’s a big deal—a full ride for four years, worth about $20,000 annually. This year it went to Josiah Kosier, a guitar player (John Mayer and Jimi Hendrix are his heroes) from Watertown, S.D.

After presenting Josiah with his scholarship, Cube sat in a leather chair with his Washington Nationals hat pulled low and a super blinged out diamond and platinum bracelet around his wrist. He sat on a small riser in an auditorium packed with eighteen- and nineteen-year-old kids and the gangsta rap teddy bear took a few questions. He was polite and clearly interested in telling the kids what he knew. And they had done their homework--they were either savvy enough to know how to wring everything they could out of Ice Cube's wikipedia entry or they were bona fide students of hip hop. They started out by asking Cube about the first contract he signed with the notorious Jerry Heller. And then they wanted to know what he thinks about selling music on the Internet. All of the questions, in fact, concentrated on the business of music, rather than the art. He had solid advice for the kids: “Until you’re started and ready to sign a contract, it’s better to blow up on your street.”

When the QA wrapped up, Cube came back to the green room and answered a few questions from the media. I asked him what motivates him to make music, now that he’s making millions off movies. “Movies are really restrictive,” he said. “They have a strict blueprint, and you have to build the house according to that blueprint. But I love beats and rhymes. I love speaking for people that can’t speak for themselves—hip hop is a great tool of understanding.” Somebody asked him what movie performance he’s especially proud of. He said, “Boyz in the Hood, of course. That showed everybody how we lived in South Central. But then I wrote Friday as a lighthearted look at how we live. People thought it was just a horror show, but we had a lot of fun. It wasn’t all ducking from drive-bys.” Another lady asked him about the content of his lyrics, and he told her what he told the crowd at Myth before he started rapping, “Gansta Rap Made Me Do It” the night before. Cube explained that like all art, gangsta rap is a mirror. “And if you’re ugly, you don’t break the mirror,” he said. “You fix the face.”

Imagine being one of the finest musicians in the country, at the peak of your career and abilities, then waking up one day unable to play your own music. That’s what happened to fingerstyle guitarist Billy McLaughlin in 2000, when a neurological disorder called focal dystonia rendered his left hand—the one called upon to execute the intricate fretwork of McLaughlin’s fiendishly difficult compositions—unusable.

Doctors told McLaughlin his music career was over and advised him to find another line of work. But after many dark nights of the soul, McLaughlin persevered and re-taught himself how to play his own compositions left-handed. He began performing in public again a couple of years ago, and did a show at the Guthrie Monday night to a crowd of appreciative fans, many of whom (like me) had come to see how much of his former glory McLaughlin has been able to recapture. (McLaughlin has also become a popular speaker on the motivational speaking circuit, since he embodies the never-say-die fortitude that most companies wish their salespeople had. According to McLaughlin lore, he’s taped a fortune cookie message to the dashboard of his car that reads: “Many people fail because they quit too soon.”)

At the Guthrie last night, as McLaughlin stared out at the crowd in the theater’s Proscenium stage, he seemed almost unable to believe that he was there himself. By his own reckoning, the last time he played the Guthrie was twelve years ago, in the old building, and he never thought he’d have the opportunity again. But there he was, guitar in hand, making music in his new way, which looks weird but sounds beautiful. McLaughlin now plays with the neck of his guitar pointing toward the ceiling, more like a cello player, and creates sound using hammer-ons and pull-offs with various taps and slides. His left index finger taps out the bass notes, while his right hand does the heavy lifting. No strings are plucked and he does not use a pick—it’s a unique style, his own invention, created out of desperation and necessity. He’s simplified the arrangements somewhat, but the essential character of the music is there, and there’s an added layer of amazement if you know what the guy has had to overcome just to get back in the game.

But the truly remarkable thing about McLaughlin’s musical comeback isn’t just that he re-wired his brain to play the guitar in a different way. He’s also composing new music and exploring the possibilities of the guitar combined with a string quartet. Last night, McLaughlin played with what he’s calling his Eclectric Quartet—two violins, viola, and cello—playing tunes he recorded last year with a full orchestra on a limited release live CD called Into the Light.

The result is a kind of acoustic-guitar-based chamber music that typically begins with McLaughlin establishing a theme or mood that the string ensemble surrounds with a warm bath of tones, expanding the breadth of the music and periodically picking up the theme or providing counterpoint to whatever McLaughlin is doing on the guitar. It’s a very classical approach with interesting results. And a tune like "Church Bells," which was written after McLaughlin learned how to play left-handed, suggests there are plenty of dimensions to this guitar/chamber hybrid that McLaughlin has yet to explore. Check it out here: For those of us who were fans back when McLaughlin was in his prime, there’s not much left to say except welcome back, Billy—and don’t ever quit.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that local guitar guru Dean Magraw was also on the bill playing solo acoustic, and he was followed by an up-and-coming phenom from Topeka, Kansas, Andy McKee. McKee is one of those guitarists who uses all the tricks in the fingerstyle playbook—tapping, slapping, odd tunings, partial capo—and has added a few of his own. McKee’s claim to fame is that he's one of the most popular musicians on YouTube. Rather than describe what he does, though, I’ll just let his guitar speak for itself. The following link is to a tune called "Drifting," which he played last night. It's been seen by more than 15 million people.

On the eve of the Republican National Convention, as hurricane Gustav was bearing down on Louisiana, and word got out in St. Paul that CNN’s Anderson Cooper had grabbed his rain slicker and fled to New Orleans, it was beginning to look as if hosting the GOP convention wasn’t going to be any fun at all. But that didn’t stop The Wide Stance Political Theater Comedy Collective—an ad-hoc group of local actors and writers who evidently couldn’t bear to watch Jon Stewart get all the good lines—from having a little fun of their own at the Playwrights’ Center.

It only ran for three nights, but the collective’s production, The Wide Stance: A Theatrical Essay on the Two-Party System, was a hilariously subversive piece of guerrilla theater that lampooned just about everything in the two-party system, exposing the idiocy of our political rituals in ways that only sharp, stinging satire can. Smartly written by local playwrights Tom Poole and Joseph Scrimshaw, The Wide Stance was ad-hoc, low-budget, what-the-hell theater at its best—just the sort of thing that would never appear on television, because the truth would hurt too much.

The show starts with the scene of a man with a bomb strapped to his chest and a gun in his hand who is threatening to kill his wife if he doesn’t get universal healthcare NOW! The scene ends, the actors take their bow, and from there the play goes “interactive.” An audience member jumps up and objects to the brevity of the show, another audience member objects to the objection, then the two form opposing political parties that appeal to the audience for advice on how to “improve” the show. An audience “enthusiasm meter” is brought out and the audience is polled as to whether the show should be more masculine or feminine, or how many product placements it should have. Each time the audience registers its preference, the actors re-do the scene, incorporating elements the audience said it wanted to see.

The joke is that every time the audience-approved “content” is incorporated, the show gets more and more absurd. Meanwhile, a news team dedicated to covering the unfolding drama does periodic reports that incorporate input from bloggers—input that invariably involves Lindsay Lohan and strays further off-topic as the play progresses, distorting everything the actors say or do. When a “third-party” jumps into the fray to stage an “ironically non-violent coup d’etat,” the leaders of the other two parties implore the audience to continue to “work with them” to “create a better show.”

It never happens, of course, and audience members are free to interpret that sad fact any way they want. I, for one, interpreted it all to mean that America would be better off as a benevolent dictatorship run by writers and artists. But then I remembered Barack Obama’s messianic christening at Denver’s Invesco Field on Thursday night, followed by John McCain’s what-the-f*** announcement of Sarah “Who?” Palin as his vice-presidential running mate, followed by the spectacular irony of a huge hurricane pounding New Orleans on the day the RNC was scheduled to nominate John McCain for president, and the news that Sarah Palin's seventeen-year-old daughter is knocked up—and I thought no, this is a great country just the way it is. The everyday American drama is so juicy these days that it's tough for writers to keep up. One of the only things left for us to do is make fun of it, and follow Louisiana governor Bobby Jandel's sage advice: hope for the best, and prepare for the worst.