I've often wondered what it would be like to lop someone's head off with a sword, or push someone I love from a great height to their splattery death below. I've never done these things in real life, though, because, among other things, the mess would be hell to clean up. Instead, I let storytellers invent gruesome, horrific tales to satisfy my bloodlust, and rather than go to jail, I head to the refreshment counter for more popcorn.

That's one of the beautiful things about stories: They allow you to go places and do things that in real life would get you into serious trouble. Stories also act as a kind of psychic pressure valve for society by allowing people to vicariously experience what it's like to be both a perpetrator and victim of unforgivable crimes (Saw V, anyone?) without making them suffer the real-world consequences. In short, stories turn humanity's dark side into entertainment.

Jason Grote's 1001, at Mixed Blood Theatre, is in many ways an homage to the power and necessity of storytelling. The play borrows its basic structure from the legends of A Thousand and One Nights (aka Arabian Nights), but updates it with storylines that overlap--sometimes humorously, sometimes tragically--into the modern world. The basic setup for an Arabian Nights tale is pretty much the same. King Shahriyar likes to sleep with virgins and chop their heads off in the morning, but he's running out of young women to slay. Enter Scheherazade, the daughter of one of the king's advisors, who forestalls her fate by mesmerizing the King with various stories--Ali Baba and His Forty Thieves, Sinbad the Sailor, and Aladdin's Lamp being among the most famous.

1001 is structured in a similar way and includes many familiar stories, but it also criss-crosses the space-time continuum to involve the lives of an Arab woman, Dahna (Fawzia Mirza) and Jewish man, Alan (Sid Solomon), who are graduate students living in modern-day Manhattan. Various narrators guide the plot along, connecting the traditional threads of such famous stories as Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin's Lamp with the modern-day travails of Dahna and Alan, who, it soon becomes clear, are connected to these tales by more than just culture and history.

Indeed, the play's Big Message is that life itself is one long, interconnected story with millions of little digressions. That message gets hammered home a little too forcefully at times, but the charm of it all is that 1001 doesn't take itself so seriously that it forgets to have fun. The narrators, particularly Randy Reyes, are irreverent and sometimes break out of character to respond to the audience. Also, the modern threads of the story make hilarious fun of Osama Bin Laden while still managing to deliver the point that today's current crises in the Middle East have roots that extend back hundreds if not thousands of years. And for all you ex-graduate students, playwright Grote includes a humorous digression in which Sinbad has a conversation on a beach with Argentinian poet and novelist Jose Luis Borges, who provides a historially accurate mini-lecture on how some of stories in A Thousand and One Nights, the iconic literary product of the Arab world, were actually written by Europeans. Entertaining performances by Emily Gunyou Halaas, Brian Sostek, and Andre Samples in multiple roles also make 1001 an easy play to sit through. It's short, too, clocking in at just over ninety minutes.

Thursday night, there were lots of high school kids in the audience, which makes sense, because this is a perfect play for teenagers. It's got enough irreverent humor to keep them entertained, but also acquaints them with one of the most ancient and important storytelling traditions of all time, and shows them how that tradition is relevant to their own lives in present-day, jihadist-threatened America. Plus, they get to see all kinds of beheadings, murders, betrayals, violence, debauchery, and sins against nature--all in the name of good-spirited, high-principled entertainment.

1001 continues at Mixed Blood Theatre through Nov. 23.

A world with YouTube needs curators. Amid the digital detritus of singing cats and lame dance guys, there’s certainly plenty of accidental art, but who’s going to wade through the flotsam to find it?

I nominate filmmakers Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett, two New Yorkers (by way of Wisconsin and Minnesota) who have channeled their natural irreverence to a far more pressing public service: rescuing inspired bits of weirdness from the heaps of VHS tapes deemed useless in our age of Blu-ray, DVD, and digital downloads.

As the low-fi viral video of its day, VHS was the media of choice for loads of inane corporate training videos, home movies, and public access shows. Recognizing that in this kitsch there’s a great deal of unintended humor, the guys scoured dumpsters, thrift stores, garage sales, and church basements for discarded tapes and even lifted some from former employers (McDonald’s in the early days and later Late Night With David Letterman, where one of Prueher’s jobs was to find embarrassing tapes from guests’ early careers).

Four years ago, Prueher and Pickett turned their collection into the Found Footage Festival traveling comedy show, in which they introduce and comment on their finds, a la Mystery Science Theater 3000. The festival helped finance their first feature film and has spawned DVDs, T-shirts, and talk of a TV show.

I’m bummed that their two-show engagement last night at the Heights Theatre turned out to be essentially a live version of their Found Footage Festival Vol. 3 DVD—but what the heck, the enthusiastic, near sold-out crowd made it an event. The Heights’ organist warmed up the audience by performing “Big Spender,” “Anything Goes,” and a medley of other chestnuts, though anyone who has seen a Found Footage show knows there’s nothing particularly quaint about the nostalgia Pickett and Prueher peddle in.

Their curatorial interests lie in low- to no-budget, early eighties, do-it-yourself video productions that are played completely straight because they really are that unbelievably bad. The mullets, Working Girl-era wardrobes, slapdash computer graphics, and make-do sets generate easy laughs, but the best clips are also brief windows into marginal characters and extremely obscure interests (like, uh, the guy who collects mucus from his mouth and heats it up with a blowtorch).

The stars of this latest batch of Found Footage include everymen philosophers trafficking homemade self-help tapes (Pretty Boy Floyd’s “Secrets of Pool Hustling”), public access nutjobs (“Cheering Makes School Fun” is hosted by creepy guy Jim Hawkins who is obsessed with middle-school cheerleading), and washed up celebrities slumming it in direct-to-video (Angela Lansbury lathers herself in lotion, naps, and takes a bubble bath in an “exercise” tape loaded with sexual overtones).

In a knife-fighting tutorial shot in some guy’s garage, the instructor stabs a hunk of raw meat to illustrate technique. Husband-and-wife videographers-for-hire Fred and Sharon of Kelowna, British Columbia, make a very unreassuring pitch for their services in the dismal promotional tape “Who Needs a Movie?”  And an industrial safety video from Minnesota's own Federated Mutual Insurance illustrates a series of workplace mishaps-waiting-to-happen (electrocution, stepping on a nail) in the completely unintended manner of a SNL skit. (Prueher and Pickett warn that they have a Federated mole who promises to smuggle them still more safety videos in the years ahead). 

The hometown hero, though, was Mike Geronsin, star of the public access gymnastics show “Mikenastics.” Our Found Footage hosts tracked down Geronsin in Coon Rapids and invited him to join them on stage (naturally, he made his entrance on stilts). Offering an explanation as to why he decided at forty-three-years old to clear the furniture from his house, jerry-build some gymnastics equipment, and record himself tumbling and vaulting through the hallways, he says his high-school wrestling coach had talked him out of joining the gymnastics team all those years ago and it seemed like time to reclaim the dream. Discard your VHS tapes wisely, people. At the next Found Footage Festival, this might be you.

As the TV on the Radio show let out last night, and the First Avenue crowd spilled onto the corner of Seventh and First, a short fat dude with a beard held up a sticker of the Grateful Dead’s “Steal Your Face” skull, the red white and blue one with the electric bolt. He held it forth as if it were a holy relic, and bellowed at the crowd like a mentally ill “The End is Nigh!” evangelical. “When Barack Obama wins, the time will come for the Grateful Dead!” He rushed down Seventh Street pointing to the plastic decal. “The Grateful Dead! One of the greatest groups of artists and musicians the world has ever known! Barack Obama will be President and the world will be ready for the return of the Grateful Dead!”

As I rode my bike away from the scene, I thought, “Seriously? Did that really happen?”   

Have you ever missed something that you’ve actually attended? You were there, you saw what was going on, but it was so foreign to your frame of reference that you mentally bailed out on it as it was happening? Sometimes it’s due to circumstance—the person you brought with you is a bummer or just a distraction, or maybe you’re in a bad mood yourself, preoccupied with office drama or an outstanding bill or a recent row with your girlfriend or something--and you just can’t get into what’s happening right in front of you.

But maybe you just weren’t prepared, whether it was a movie or a concert. Maybe even a book or an article in which you didn’t invest your mind completely. Maybe you even finished it, only to half-realize as you’re doing it that you’re sleepwalking through this, and your ultimate retention percentage will be virtually zero. That’s the worst part: you know you’re blowing it as you’re blowing it. You actually know that it’s great while you’re reading or looking or listening, that you really should be spending more time in front of this self-portrait of Frida Kahlo, or you should be concentrating more deeply on these pages of Flaubert, but you just didn’t show up with the goods. Some art—arguably all great art—demands an investment prior to the experience. And when you experience it, there are times when you realize that you should have gone on wikipedia to look up that war a couple chapters back, or you should have listened to that record another couple times in the last month since you’ve had it. These are frustrating, impartial epiphanies.

So basically, I missed TV on the Radio last night. They opened with “Young Liars,” and I heard a great song. I wasn’t sure I felt a great song, but I definitely heard a great song. With the lead singer Tunde Adebimpe out there switching over between crooning like some sort of avant-garde jazz musician and growling like a rock star.

Well it's cold and it's quiet
and cobblestone cold in here
fucking for fear of not wanting
to fear again
lonely is all we are

Clearly this was something to which more attention should have been paid: these black hipsters from Brooklyn, with chunky eyeglasses and fantastic facial hair. Adebimpe held the microphone in his right hand and whipped his left forearm and elbow around like a blade. The lead guitarist, Kyp Malone was shorter and rounder, with a huge bushy beard (he actually does look like a black Jerry Garcia, which makes me wonder even more about that crazy town crier) and he sang both lead and harmony with a killer falsetto. And they had this white girl shimmy-shimmy-shaking in a spangled black dress that I’ve only since determined was Katrina Ford.

See, I was not an early adopter on this one. I own TVOR’s Return to Cookie Mountain and I listened to the new one they’re touring, Dear Science, on their Myspace, but I hadn’t spent much time with either. My ignorance was not shared. By the end of the set, Adebimpe had taken off his flannel and this sort of maroon blouse he had underneath it was soaked through. The crowd—pretty sure it was a sell-out--was delighted with the performance: clapping along, shouting out the lyrics, even dancing in spurts, or at least bobbing. The band came out for their encore and closed with their hit, “Staring at the Sun,” which I’ve heard before: sort of a more aggressively angular, Williamsburgh’ed-out Genesis song that has definitely made it onto a couple movie soundtracks or car commercials by this point.

The other two songs in the encore were great too, but I’m not really sure why just yet. I think Adebimpe was singing about how his life’s an open book on one and about how nobody really knows some girl’s name in the other one—both of them had strange percussion, and there was a lot of scatting and yelping en masse.

Throughout the whole set, both the music and Adepbimpe’s lyrics seemed opaque. You could tell he was doing something a little more indirect and poetic, like a Michael Stipe or a Win Butler--you could tell that there was something dramatic in these words--but I wasn’t able to decipher them. And you could tell the band was doing something interesting too, with weird atmospherics and jarring sections of drum and bass. And then to hear everybody else singing and clapping along—it was discouraging. When confronted with what this situation, on the brink of something the sociologist Anselm Stauss called a new "social world," unless you're in a completely dismissive place, it's impossible not to feel left out, and ashamed to realize that with a little effort, it didn't have to be this way.

See, that’s the thing about something new and weird—it can go either way, whether it’s Barack Obama or the Grateful Dead or any unexplored social world framework. I remember I took my buddy Dan to the comic book store once. I was looking for an Ed Brubaker Captain America comic. Up until that point, I’d never read Brubaker, but I read one of his Captain America’s and I realized here is something that I wanted to commit to--I wanted to read everything Ed Brubaker had ever written, especially every Captain America he’d ever written. So I was asking about this comic book up at Comic Book College and I was trying to explain to the comic book store owner what issue it was—“House of M storyline; one shot, maybe?”—and why it wasn’t included in any of the paperback compilations, and Dan looked at me and said, “Dude, you sound like a Scientologist.”

So obviously, Dan is intimidated by the world of Captain America comic books. Look, I get it. You're not going to want to explore everything. I’m fairly certain my father is never going to dive into the Barack Obama phenomenon. Myself, I’m probably never going to get into the Grateful Dead (FYI, all you Deadheads, I’ve really tried. Really. I just can’t do it. I’m sorry).  But there are some things that seem initially impenetrable, but that also start to speak to you—maybe only in tongues at first, but they start to speak to you. And you figure out that you have to invest in order to ultimately understand them.

Last night, I found one of those things. And after the show, I went home, and I listened to that first song, “Young Liars,” about nine times in a row. At this point, I’ve determined that it’s about the people you spend time with between serious commitments, whether romantic or intellectual or whatever. On the track, Adebimpe sounds so over it, singing about these people; very Julian Casablancas over it and kind of Julian Casablancas disappointed with the whole situation (unsurprising maybe: “Young Liars” is from TVOR's first EP in 2003, right in the heart of the era that saw the Strokes as kings of hipster New York). But Adebimpe sounds more upset with himself—and also maybe more upset with everybody else--that he and they are so over it. It’s an interesting point of view, and a powerful kind of indirect melody, and I realize I need to spend more time listening to it.

Unfortunately with these things, time elapses and sometimes you have to wait a while until you get another chance--if you ever do. Thankfully, TV on the Radio plays for a second time tonight, at an early show at First Ave.

I’m listening now.

The first ever U.S. retrospective of the work of post-war Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo opened this week at the Walker Art Center. The exhibition, which consists primarily of installation pieces and sculpture, is spread out over three galleries with work representing three decades of pure provocation.

Kudo has been described as having a "strikingly eccentric visual vocabulary," and the exhibition affirms this, emphatically. His seminal "Philosophy of Impotence"—a room peppered with hanging black objects, part phallus, part chrysalis—provides one of many examples.

The exhibition traces the evolution of his unique take on metamorphosis. From "Philosophy of Impotence," the exhibition moves on to more overt representations of a "new ecology" in which humanity merges with nature and the manmade world in a rather grotesque tableaux.

"Grafted Garden," an installation populated by wilting day-glow flowers, severed limbs, and the occasional pulsing electrode, places humanity on the same level as even the most reviled corners of reality. Kudo explains his opposition to the dichotomies of the West. "I wanted to tell Europeans that humanism and love and sex are virtually on the same dimension as such mundane commodities as instant soup or cigarettes."

It's impossible to ignore the likely influence of world events on Kudo's art and attitude. His notion of a "new ecology" that resembles nothing so much as a radioactive wasteland hardly seems coincidental. Those forced to assimilate to Japan's post-atomic landscape would surely find logic in Kudo's idea of metamorphosis.

Yet, dark as his visions are, Kudo's fixation with the possibility of renewal (even if into a form unrecognizable or even undesirable to most of humanity) keeps his work from spilling over into total nihilism. His later work, from the 1980s, features cocoonlike sculptures wrapped in dark and light string, as well as cast skulls and his trademark detached phallus with colorful string curling around and trailing behind, which bears the title "The Survival of the Avante Garde"—are indications that Kudo seemed to be casting his gaze inward later in life.

Kudo's overriding vision remains consistently dystopian, but his apparent cynicism isn’t meant as a wakeup call or even a cause for despair. Rather, the ugliness, the decay, the pollution, are all part of a process of metamorphosis, the outcome of which remains unknown.

Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis continues at the Walker Art Center through January 11.

Michael Brindisi’s production of Mel Brooks’ The Producers at Chanhassen Dinner Theatre deserves to be seen, if for no other reason than Jay Albright’s Max Bialystock. There are plenty of other reasons, but Albright, a perennial second banana, takes full advantage of his chance to play the lead and delivers a true star turn.

I’ll admit, I’ve always been prejudiced against the musical version of The Producers. First of all, the original Zero Mostel/Gene Wilder film is such a classic. How do you improve on perfection? And Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick could never emerge from the shadows of their predecessors. It was disconcerting to hear echoes of the original line readings in their performances.

Even more, there is no way that the original production deserved the record number of Tony Awards that it received. And it didn’t. It benefited from a kind of mass hysteria that overlooked the corny and frequently tired old gags.

But Brindisi’s direction redeems the material. He makes it seem much less superficial than it initially appears. This is a man with a true passion for classic musicals, and he treats this show as if it were one of the best, with genuine affection and not a whit of condescension. And the production’s energy and infectious high spirits are almost enough. What’s more, Brindisi is absolutely shameless; there is no gag too low that he won’t stoop to it. Which is exactly what this material needs.

In Albright, Brindisi has his perfect partner. The actor makes this sleazy Broadway producer—who raises 1,000% of production costs and then plans to stage a surefire flop, “the gay romp,” Springtime for Hitler, and pocket the excess—into a genuine a tour de force.

He is best in his solo moments, when he can demonstrate his flawless timing unimpeded. And no one can mug like Albright. When the avaricious Max is encouraged to give money back, his wordless reaction goes on for more than a few hysterical moments. And then he still gets a laugh on the line! His two-minute recap of the show from his prison cell is a comedic whirlwind.

He has a perfect foil in Robb McKindles’s Leo Bloom, the wimpy, nebbish accountant who actually comes up with the fraud scheme. McKindles is convincing as the nerd, but he also brings Leo into his own, making him a true romantic hero. McKindles makes “Till Him,” a song honoring his relationship with Max, a moment of genuine emotion. It’s a nice Brindisi touch.

There are so many outrageous bits, it would be impossible to chronicle them all. As if the queer director, in drag, singing “Keep it Gay” wasn't outrageous enough, Brindisi adds an appearance by Village People look-alikes. The song, “That Face,” starts out as a moment of innocent romance between Bloom and the secretary, Ulla. But when reprised, Max sings it directly to Ulla’s ass. I must be careful not to give all the delectable surprises.

But one more. When the director has to step in as the lead (when the star takes the admonition to “break a leg” literally), his consort says, “You’re going out there a screaming queen and coming back a passing-for-straight Broadway star.” It’s a delicious irony that it’s said to David Anthony Brinkley, who said the original of the line very recently in 42nd Street.

This show is the ultimate in political incorrectness. (Anyone with memories of any of Brooks’ movies will not be surprised at that or at the gross-out factor.) From Max dry humping an old lady on the sofa to chorus girls with twirling swastikas at her tits, there is something here to offend everyone. But that’s the whole idea. The point is not to take it too seriously—or better yet, not to take it seriously at all!

Brinkley did his own star turn as the director; he’s unafraid to indulge in over-the-top camp and remarkably confident in drag. And he has great legs! Zoe Pappas, as Ulle, has a great set of pipes, and she takes the dumb-blonde stereotype and makes it fresh and uniquely her own. Scott Blackburn also gets his share of laughs as the Nazi playwright. If only the real Nazis had been that stupid. From top to bottom, the show is cast from strength, even down to Keith Rice’s amusing cameo as Leo’s abusive CPA boss.

Nayna Ramey’s set is serviceable and witty (especially in the way that Brooks’ image keeps turning up). But it is the costumes of Rich Hamson that steal the visual show. From the opulent gowns of the opening night audience to the Germanic chorus girl costumes (two steins strategically placed, not to mention the use of pretzels and sausages), he created the visual equivalent of Brindisi’s outrageous production.

I will admit, I was surprised when I heard that Chanhassen was staging The Producers. The repertoire choices have become increasingly conservative in recent years. It’s nice to see them being a bit more adventurous. Here’s hoping the Chanhassen audience is not turned off by the subject matter and comes out in droves. They will have a delectably good time.

The Producers continues at Chanhassen Dinner Theatres through Jan. 31, 2009.

The pas de deux from George Balanchine’s Agon (1957) still startles with its transformation of the classical partnered dance. The two dancers maintain their courtly relationship (he offers, she accepts), but they are no longer characters (a man, a swan princess) acting out their love; they are ideas, compass points, architectural elements coming apart and combining, each time creating something new. Each configuration has a merciless and near-divine geometry: the man, kneeling, bridges his back towards the woman as she spans her legs perpendicular to him; he lies extended on the floor, holding her hand, while she stands above him in a vertical split. Each movement pushes to its outer limit of curve or linearity—the ballerina’s back bends until her head touches her foot, both dancers’ legs stretch into 180-degree leaps. Agon looks modern still, with its cold yet vivid world of design, thought, and desire.

This pas de deux, as performed by Kaitlyn Gilliland and Ask LaCour (both on loan from New York City Ballet; Gilliland is the daughter of Lise Houlton, MDT’s artistic director), is glorious to see. Unfortunately, it casts the rest of Minnesota Dance Theatre’s fall program in shadow. Even the Swan Lake pas de deux performed by the same two dancers can’t compete; the Lab’s modern set-up—performers level with and close to the audience—hinders Swan Lake’s blue-lit magic, but it only aids Agon.

The evening’s other three pieces (performed by MDT company dancers) are even less impressive beside Agon. Moments of sea-creature strangeness in Mathew Janczewski’s “Trebuchet,” a modern exploration set to grating nightclub sounds, don’t prevent the piece from feeling flat and a little forced, as if the dancers and the choreographer had two different understandings of momentum. After seeing the MDT dancers in nothing but leotards and trunks for their first two pieces, it was a relief to see Abdo Sayegh working a white suit at the beginning of Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s “Appearances”—but the joke was on me, as “Appearances” is mostly a vehicle for the women’s costumes, which showily switch from evening dresses to skirts to culottes to red majorette leotards.

Lise Houlton’s “Point of Departure,” which opens the evening, fared best. Houlton is not a full-time choreographer, which shows in the piece’s lack of a larger structure. Still, she has a dancer’s way with movement and a quirky musicality (she finds the jazz in Haydn) that make “Point of Departure” fun to watch. What makes the piece more enjoyable is that it’s clearly designed for MDT’s dancers, and it shows off their youth, strength, and energy. Maxamillian Neubauer bounds and spins his way through a solo; Melanie Verna and Sam Feipel wind sweetly through the complex involutions of a pas de deux.

But we know MDT’s dancers; it’s no news that they danced well. I was more curious to see the guest stars from NYCB. Ask LaCour is the epitome of a leading man: handsome and tall, with an open style and long, straight lines. A pas de deux does not offer a complete display of a man’s dancing, but LaCour made everything he did look easy. (And he gets extra credit for smoothly partnering a ballerina so tall that in attitude her foot grazes the back of his head.)

Kaitlyn Gilliland is not LaCour’s opposite number. Instead, she is something far stranger: not a princess who happens to be dancing, but a being made for dance. Her first big lift in the Swan Lake pas de deux, when her legs fly suddenly into a leap, lit up the stage; it was a promise fulfilled. Her balance in arabesque was a fairy tale. With her seven-mile legs and liquid feet, Gilliland wears the steps differently than most dancers, and with her form—impeccably thin, but given curvy voluptuousness by her hyper-extended joints—she has an otherworldly appeal. (George Balanchine would certainly have wanted to set a dance or two on her.) Dancers so tall and mobile often have trouble fully inhabiting their dancing—there’s so much to take on!—and Gilliland’s Odette suggests she could go farther. But her work in Agon is already stunning: diamond-hard yet waterfall-luxuriant. Don’t miss her while she’s in town.

Minnesota Dance Theatre’s Extreme Odyssey continues at The Lab through Oct. 19.

Filmmaker Mike Leigh makes funny-sad chronicles of the daily slog set in notoriously class-conscious England. His stars are doughy working- and middle-class Londoners with thrifty wardrobes and a repertoire of verbal and physical tics. They live in cramped flats decorated with tacky curios or in vanilla starter homes of upward mobility. At first these characters seem like caricatures, until you realize it’s the people we’re so used to seeing in movies that are the parodies.

Most American movie characters are fantasies—consistent, predictable, superhumanly self-aware, and blessed with dependably better hair and makeup. Leigh’s ensemble comedies bring into focus the far more fascinating and messy minutia of everyday life, where most of us have little grasp of the big picture and muddle through in our own disorganized way. The drama in Leigh’s films turn on micro shifts in relationships, how parents and kids relate or don’t, how couples grow and don’t. Conversations often go nowhere (as they tend to in life) and characters continually push against or retreat into prescribed roles. Work, sex, food, and family preoccupy because that’s the stuff of most lives.

In ten feature films over almost four decades (and many more for British television), Leigh’s distinct oeuvre has been deservedly showered with prizes but quite modest commercial success. His most widely seen movies (Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy, Vera Drake) picked up Oscar nominations; his most controversial, Naked, was infamously pilloried by feminists. His latest, Happy-Go-Lucky (opening October 24 at the Uptown), is a paean to optimism and maybe a sign of a softening of the salty Brit whose 1992 MoMA retrospective was titled "Life Could Be Better."

This month the Walker Art Center is feting Leigh with its own retrospective, highlighted by last night’s Regis Dialogue with the sixty-five-year-old writer/director whose curmudgeonly reputation precedes him. Regis Dialogues are formatted a bit like Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio but handier for revealing outsize egos than James Lipton’s lovefest. LA Weekly film critic Scott Foundas successfully wrangled director Milos Forman at April’s Dialogue, but was outmatched this time by a droll, occasionally testy Leigh whose meandering monologues and frequent plugs for his new movie made for a fun but disorderly dissection of his craft.

The evening’s frequently one-sided conversation kicked off with Leigh’s stories of his youth as a theatrical doctor’s son, growing up in a working class neighborhood of Manchester, England. A voracious consumer of American films (the only ones playing), he wondered, “Wouldn’t it be great to sit in a movie and see people acting like people and not like people in movies?”

At seventeen, a scholarship sent him to London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he trained as an actor (but rejected the school’s rigid pedagogy). He also sampled for the first time a world cinema that had much more in common with the movies he wanted to make than those he grew up watching. His drive to make relatable narrative films drawn from life seemed square to some of his contemporaries in the 1960s London scene who were watching Warhol’s films just like their counterparts in New York.

Leigh paid his dues working in the theater (onstage and off) throughout the decade until actor Albert Finney, also from Leigh’s hometown of Salford, financed his first feature, Bleak Moments. Released in 1971 to great reviews, the comic study of four awkward, lonely singles previewed some future themes. “One endless preoccupation is the collision of people with a sense of humor and those without a sense of humor,” Leigh offered following a clip of Bleak Moments’ excruciating botched seduction.

The film also showcased his particular talent with actors, who he works with in an unusually collaborative (and as he pointed out several times) misunderstood manner. When Leigh first casts his films, there is no script. “The film doesn’t exist. We’re going to discover the film” is his proposition to his casts, by now a repertory for great character actors (Jim Broadbent, Timothy Spall, Sally Hawkins, ex-wife Alison Steadman).

Occasionally, Leigh begins with a particular idea he wishes to explore. In Vera Drake it was the notion of a 1950s London housewife who has a secret life as an abortionist, and in Secrets & Lies it was the journey of an adopted woman who seeks out her birth mother. For films like Naked and All Or Nothing, Leigh acknowledged “I just had a sense of the spirit of the thing” going in.

In all cases, he starts by working privately with each actor to build a character from the ground up, work that’s informed by research and the creation of elaborate backstories that will inform the final performances but likely never make it into the movie in any overt way. During the many months of rehearsals that follow, the characters meet for the first time and improvise within situations Leigh devises, often in the lived-in locales from which the films are eventually shot. From all of these improvisations, narrative possibilities unravel and are shaped by Leigh into a final, tightly choreographed shooting script.

Recalling the ten-hour rehearsal for Vera Drake’s climactic scene in which Imelda Staunton’s character is arrested at her daughter’s engagement dinner, Leigh said it “was very traumatic for everyone involved, including me” to be there when the movie’s central concern was revealed. His actors never know anything that their characters aren’t privy to, so Staunton didn’t know her character was going to jail at that moment and the actors playing her family didn’t know of her secret life . . . only Leigh, juggling each of their trajectories in the weeks preceding, waiting for the big reveal.

So how can Leigh’s longtime producer (and Thin Man Films partner) Simon Channing Williams court investors to bankroll pictures made in this way? “I’m the guy with no script. I can’t tell you the story. And I won’t talk about cast,” Leigh told an audience member who asked about the limitations of finding financing for his films.

Adding that Williams is “out there now with a begging bowl” try to drum up money for their next film, he acknowledged that his organic, actor-centered approach has put a definite ceiling on the scale of movies he can make. It’s also given him incredible freedom. I feel lucky, he said, “to have made eighteen films where no one has interfered at any stage.”

Screenings of Mike Leigh’s films continue at the Walker through Oct. 25.

Stand-up comedian David Cross used to have a bit in his routine about the remarkable consistency of the redneck dialect, even when separated by vast geographic area. "F__ you, maan, Ahm from Statesburuh, Jorja," he would twang, before traveling thousands of miles to the west in an instant: "Well, f__ you, maan, this's how we do it in Bozeman, Montanah." Finally: "Hey, f__ all y'all, this's how we do it in Ankradge, Alaaskuh!"

Cross’s joke trades on our familiarity with the shared stereotypes attributed to a class of people which Newsweek, in a recent article about our moose huntin’, six-packin’ VP nominee, more euphemistically referred to as “regular folk.”

As soon as I walked into the Gremlin Theatre to see Theater Pro Rata’s production of Tracy Letts’ Killer Joe, it was clear this play was going to be about regular folk. The set was strewn with familiar anthropological clues: tin foil on the TV antenna; a calendar poster of hot rods above an ugly couch with torn upholstery; a kitchen floor painted to resemble cheap linoleum tile; a kitchen counter full of empty beer bottles and a sink full of dirty dishes; and an empty bucket of KFC on top of a dingy refrigerator.

And then Sharla (Katherine Kupiecki) walks in and answers the door wearing only a ripped Hard Rock Café t-shirt—bare-assed and full-bushed. At the screen door is her idiot small time dealer of a stepson, Chris (Clarence Wethern), coming to ask his dad, Ansel (Sam L. Landman) for more money. After Chris tells Sharla to put on a pair of panties, she wakes up Ansel. Father and son sit on a couch in the middle of the night, and as dad lights up a Marlboro, Chris rolls a joint from a bag hidden under the couch cushion. “Where did you get this stuff?” Chris asks with some skepticism. “You,” Ansel says.

Sure, it’s a shocking tableau for the theatre, but you’ve seen these people before—these regular folk—maybe on reality TV shows like Cops, or maybe at your family Christmas party. Killer Joe is actually set in some rural someplace outside of Dallas, Texas, in an era (judging from what’s playing on the radio) twenty-five years back, at least. But with the stock market doing what it’s doing, and with all the chatter about regular folk and Wal Mart Republicans, this play could be set somewhere outside of Lakeville, sometime tomorrow. (I mean, people in Lakeville listen to Johnny Cash and drink beer in their underwear. They’re just like us, right?)

Either way, it’s clear that these characters live a long way off either Wall Street or Main Street. “I’ve never even had $1,000,” Ansel complains in the middle of Chris latest get “rich” quick solicitation. This one is (as regular folk say?) a real hum-dinger: hire a hit man to knock off Chris’ mom and Ansel’s ex-wife, and collect on her $50,000 life insurance policy. They would split the cash four ways, with $25K going to the hit man, Joe, and the rest split between Chris, Ansel, Sharla, and Chris’s guileless, sleepwalking twenty-year-old sister, Dottie, who is the one named as the beneficiary to her mother’s policy.

There’s only one hang-up: the hit man, a shady Dallas detective named Joe, won’t take the job unless he’s paid his $25K fee up front. “No exceptions,” he says. But just before walking out on Chris and Ansel, Joe hesitates at the door: “I would consider a retainer.” He means Dottie, whom Joe interrupted doing “[her] kung fu” in front of the television set before Chris and Ansel arrived for the meeting.

It’s against this backdrop of empty buckets of “K-fry-C” and empty beer bottles that Killer Joe makes its moral inquiries. There is real nudity in this play, and there is fake blood, but both feel necessary to lending its two white-trash love triangles weight. Chris plays matchmaker here, but this isn’t a Jane Austen adaptation, and he’s no Emma. Nor is Dottie—played by Katie Willer with a sensitivity and a naiveté reminiscent of the Glass Menagerie's Laura Wingfield—a victim straight off the set of Maury. Underneath Dottie's veil of dazed idiocy, she seems to be calculating just how limited her options are: a doomed matriculation into a local “modeling school,” or a doomed relationship with a contract killer. 

And then there’s Joe. Zach Curtis is a big man, and his size and weight allow him to let Joe’s latent malice play peekaboo with his geniality—it’s as if Seth Rogen had a great big love child with Anton Chigurh. And while Joe is twisted (he sees Dottie in the same way he saw the southern bank of the Red River when he was a boy—as property) he might be the only character that really cares for her. Killer Joe might be as regular as these folk get.

I was late for church last night, arriving at the Cedar about halfway through the Fleet Foxes’ first song.

Like every low sinner, I do the same thing every time I’m late to mass: linger in the back, near the entrance, and adopt an unobtrusive stance, humbly clasping my hands and slightly bowing my head, praying that the better Christians, anxiously glancing back at this interloper, would quickly return their attention to the altar. I did make it in time to hear the Foxes second song, “White Winter Hymnal” in full. Five voices harmonizing on a simple story about getting the children ready for sledding, or something:

I was following the pack
All swallowed in their coats
With scarves of red tied ‘round their throats
To keep their little heads
From fallin’ in the snow
And I turned ‘round and there you go
And, Michael, you would fall
And turn the white snow red as strawberries
In the summertime

It was pretty music, and the audience was in absolute thrall with these five guys, playing their mostly analog-era instruments, singing in harmony just like, as has been pointed out by seemingly everyone who’s heard them, a latter day CSNY. The Foxes have built a loyal following in this city—this was their third local show here in the last year or so, on the strength of only one E.P. and one full length. In fact, they sold this show out at the Cedar so fast that they added an earlier 5:30 show.

They played a couple more songs, “Ragged Wood” and “Your Protector.” They were both beautiful four-part harmonies filled with natural imagery, and the Foxes sang them with great feeling, closing their eyes and finding each other’s voices in the dark. I moved closer to the stage to get a better look at them. Some of them had long hair; maybe unwashed, definitely unbrushed. Four out of five of them had beards. One sported skinny jeans and an army jacket with rolled-up sleeves; another a silk vest over a pale-green windowpane-patterned shirt. They all wore exotic looking vintage leather boots. This was haute couture, commune-style.

The Fleet Foxes looked like good guys, as good for you as the organic kefir in the dairy case at The Wedge. Listening to a string of songs about coming down from the mountain, and crossing the stream, and laying on the grass in the orchard, I thought: any of these babies would’ve fit perfectly on the Jeremiah Johnson soundtrack. During a break, somebody shouted, “YOU LOOK LIKE JESUS!” and the Foxes’ alpha singer smiled beatifically.

The only time the crowd spoke up was during the breaks. (Evidently, peaceful quiet and sublime harmonization will conjure a heckler out of even the most earnest assembly.) But seemingly on every song, as soon as the Foxes played the first few notes, they would receive polite and enthusiastic recognition applause. You know, recognition applause—the simultaneous, exuberant “we’ve been waiting for you to play this all night!” The same type of applause that a seasoned performer, like a Dave Matthews or a Paul Simon, will get at an acoustic concert. But these guys were just five kids from Seattle with one L.P. to their name, and the crowd—all skinny jeans and thick-framed glasses and vintage t-shirts—looked much hipper than a co-ed DMB crowd.

I was confused.

Who were these modern-day hippies and why were they so popular? Was it because The Current was in love with them? Did Barack Obama have something to do with this? Most importantly, it didn’t look like any of their fans were even coming close to freaking out. Weren’t hippies supposed to be about peace and love and, at the very least, good marijuana? There wasn’t much dancing, not even much smiling, just a lot of crossed arms and serious nodding along. What exactly were these Fleet Foxes aficionados, these modern day hippies, on? Just organic kale and microbrew, or something stronger? 

I went outside to the Cedar’s little patio for a cigarette to think about all this. Some blonde kid immediately interrupted my reverie. “Hey, man,” he said. “Great show in there. Really liked how you would sustain the fourth inversion.” Wait, what? Do you think I’m in the band, kid? “Oh, no, I’m sorry,” he said. “You look exactly like the keyboard player.” I really do not, but as long as I had his attention, I asked him why he loved these guys so much.

“Well, I’m a classically trained musician myself,” he said. He then stammered through a convoluted explication of inverted harmony theory and the potential for different vocal “colors,” until I thanked him and got up to head back in. “Sorry. I’m such a music dork…” he trailed off. He clearly had something else to tell me. “Hey, have you heard of that drug, Adderall?” Yes. “Well, I’m on that right now! Everything’s racing. I can’t even get drunk.”

Wow. Go easy on those pills, brother.

Rock ’n’ roll has a humor problem. There have been funny videos, and funny rock-star presenters at award shows, and even funny reality television shows starring rock stars. But when it comes to rock stars actually making funny music, historically, there's been a deficit.

Over the years, there have been blips of funny: from John Lennon to Johnny Rotten to Gene and Dean Ween. And there is Weird Al, of course. Sometimes Dylan can be funny. When I was a kid, Axl used to make me laugh (but looking back, I think maybe he just made me nervous).

Unlike hip-hop or country, rock seems to be too obsessed with being cool or angry to crack a joke. Maybe this is because it’s a starter market, a commercial medium aimed at mainstream adolescents, and most adolescents aren’t in the market for laughing at themselves yet. Sometimes rock can seem ridiculous—KISS, Oasis—but these bands don’t really intend to fill the role of the clown, they just end up filling a void with their bombast and lack of self-awareness. And many of the rock bands that intend to be funny—Barenaked Ladies, Harvey Danger—usually end up sucking.

Which is why The Mattoid was such a revelation.

I first saw The Mattoid open up for the comedian Doug Stanhope at the Triple Rock in the fall of 2005. I spent most of the show trying to determine the nationality of their lead singer. A great big yeti of a man, with a bizarre singing style where he would pucker his lips at the mic and gurgle in a sing-song way strangely reminiscent of the Muppet Show’s Swedish Chef. But he would also hit these Meatloaf-quality arias—beautiful actually, and though they were filled with emotion, they were nowhere near as loud or over the top as the ‘loaf’s. And then there were The Mattoid’s lyrics: dark and full of drugs and sex, but somehow hopeful in a very simple, man-child-like way. The Mattoid counted off “1, 2 . . . 7, yeah!” and launched into what would become my favorite Mattoid song, “Funeral Party.”

The priest is here/and the casket is ready
Body inside/looks nice and steady
Let’s pray for the man/for the last time
Pray for the man/for the last time
Praise the lord!
And we’ve got to go on with the funeral party!
Yeah!

It was ridiculous. The Mattoid was the funniest rock ’n’ roll band I’d ever seen (way funnier than Doug Stanhope that night, incidentally). Their music was cool. It had this stripped down, Velvets sangfroid. Clearly The Mattoid is set to "who cares?"--and the lyrics were funny because they seemed to be tossed off as carelessly as the music. "We've got to go on with the funeral party--yeah!"--that's funny. But was it funny because the songwriter only had a rudimentary control over our language, and was simply latching onto an at-first-blush oxymoron? Or was it a double-switch--was he putting us on with the naïve foreigner routine, like a Borat or an Andy Kaufman, and smirking at our yeah! rock culture as we laughed at his pidgin English?

The whole band was staying at Ian Rans’ place that night. I ended up there, and was able to determine that The Mattoid’s lead singer—The Mattoid himself, basically—was Ville Kiviniemi, a Finn stuck in Nashville after blowing through Vegas and New York. The Mattoid shared his bottle of absinthe with me. The Mattoid gave me his masterpiece album, Hello. The Mattoid told me the most vital force in American rock was Toby Keith.

I stopped wondering if he was putting me on or not. I don’t think The Mattoid really even knew himself. 

For the last three years, I tried to push The Mattoid onto my friends, but I was only able to get a couple of them interested in his strange Finnish brand of humor. At some point, I figured I would never see The Mattoid again, and I despaired that without the opportunity to see him live, nobody would ever know what I was talking about when I was blathering on about a Finnish lounge act from Nashville who sang about “Makee-makee-makee-makee/lovey-lovey-lovey-lovey.”

Then The Mattoid returned. On Wednesday night, it opened for another reclusive Nashville band, the Silver Jews. Most people were obviously there for the Silver Jews, but it was a late show and by ten o’clock, the room was full for The Mattoid. Finally, I thought, The Mattoid has risen, and I would have witnesses! These people would understand what I had been talking about for all those lonely, lonely years.

(BTW, the Silver Jews were playing for the first time in Minneapolis, and they probably deserve their own review. They played from an incredible catalog of slacker intellectual country songs that I’ve never heard before, but that most of the crowd was clearly there to hear. The Silver Jews’ lead singer is David Berman, evidently a poet/songwriter who tried to kill himself in 2003 by overdosing on crack in the Al Gore suite in Nashville’s nicest hotel. Berman looks like an alt-country Allen Ginsberg—he’s balding, has a big black beard, and wore this hipster western-trim sports jacket, along with tinted glasses that had thick plastic frames, and a fat belt buckle that read “Joos.” He sings in a strangely tentative baritone, and each song began with the most incredible first line: “Squirrels imported from Connecticut, just in time for fall. . .” or “I’m drunk on a couch in Nashville in a duplex near the reservoir. . .” Some of his songs were also very funny, in an incredibly sad, but too-deeply-ironic-to-be-maudlin, way.)

The Mattoid took the stage, immediately diving into a song about how he’s going to hunt a reindeer and lie with a “Ruskie girl” on the midnight sand. Ville has lost some weight and grown a triple-looped samurai-style ponytail, and his stage presence wasn't as alien as it was three years ago. He seemed to play to the audience more confidently, or maybe he was just in the mood to clue more of them onto the joke this time. He contorted his face into more obvious impressions of rock agony and ectasy, grunted more often, and cried, "The Fins built the pyramids!" to a gale of laughter. But the thick Finnish accent was still there, and he still used it expertly when introducing a song. There was an obvious detachment between those of us in the audience and The Mattoid. People were uneasy: they knew this big foreigner was ridiculing somebody--himself?--but they weren't sure who was the target. 

He covered the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby,” but first, he scorned us for our love for “this band called the Beatles.” Then he called Eleanor a foul name, before singing the song about “all the lonely people,” rolling his eyes and editorializing throughout, “look at you!” Then there was a interminable intermezzo in a song about a drugged-out tourist trip to the pyramids. He had all of us holding our arms up and our hands together making pyramid points. When this proved to be too confusing, with only about 50% participation, he gave us an excuse: “It’s okay,” he said. “It was your first pyramid-along.”

After the show, I walked up and reintroduced myself. I asked him if he still thought Toby Keith was the most vital force in American rock ’n’ roll. “No, no,” he said. “Now Sarah Palin!” Then the Mattoid laughed. He was laughing at somebody, but I didn't know who it was.

A Joe Satriani concert is a freak show of sorts. One can almost picture him as a guitar-playing geek being pitched by a circus barker: “Come one, come all—come see the amazing Satriani, a musician whose superhuman speed defies the laws of nature. Watch as his fingers multiply right before your very eyes. Witness for yourself his devilish fretboard magic. You will be amazed! Astounded! What kind of creature is he? No one knows. Only one thing is for sure:  No mere human can play like this!”

Tuesday night at the State Theatre, hundreds of Satriani’s fans set aside their guitars and crawled out of their basements to see the gifted one in action. Depending on which “greatest guitarists of all time” list you refer to, Satriani is usually somewhere between the twentieth and fiftieth best guitarists ever, and if extra points are given for technical virtuosity and speed, he often makes the top ten.

Satriani’s liability is that he specializes in a brand of brash, muscular instrumental rock that dispenses with lyrics and choruses, vaulting the extended (and some would say self-indulgent) guitar solo to its own peculiar art form. This may help explain why the ratio of men to women in his audiences is about twenty to one. As dozens of graying men with a day’s worth of stubble stood in line for beer, I spied one woman leaning against a pillar with a grande cup of Starbuck’s coffee in her hand. “It can’t be that boring,” I joked as I walked by, and she just arched her eyebrows, as if to say, “You have no idea.”

Love him or hate him, Satriani is the embodiment of the virtuoso rock guitarist, an artist who has freed himself from the shackles of standard rock (all that singing is chick stuff) so that his crazy, wailing solos can climb ever higher into the stratosphere. The envy of guitarists and air-guitarists alike, Satriani is in his fifties, but he still plays like a crazed sixteen-year-old. He is also experiencing a surge in popularity these days because when actual crazed sixteen-year-olds hit the expert level in Guitar Hero, they run into Satriani’s “Satch Boogie,” a song so fast and difficult to play that it has sapped many a teenager’s will to live.

And so they gathered at the State to see Satriani live, if for no other reason than to make sure that the genius they’ve witnessed on YouTube isn’t some clever trick of video-editing. Our kids crave authenticity; they still admire genuine skill—and they got plenty of it Tuesday night. Satriani dug into the vault for tunes like “Ice 9,” from his first album, Surfing with the Alien, but also played plenty of numbers from his latest, most ostentatiously titled album, Professor Satchafunkilus and the Musterion of Rock (musterion is Greek for “mystery”), which is more of the same: pile-driving drums and punchy bass (by the great Stu Hamm) that provide the launching pad for Satriani’s savant-like musical odysseys.

In person, Satriani is short, skinny, and bald, and his skin is ghostly white, as if he still spends most of his time in his basement, safely protected from the sun’s harmful rays. He even wears sunglasses onstage. But he’s also an accessible musician, one who promises the gift of awesomeness to anyone willing to practice until their fingers bleed. He has set the bar of musicianship ridiculously high, but there it is—and whether you try to beat him on Guitar Hero or in real life, the challenge is formidable.

Before he hit it big, Satriani was just another guitar teacher in Berkeley, California, and I do admire his teacher’s sense of history. Minneapolis was only the fourth city on his U.S tour, and the opening act he is featuring on this tour is a band called Mountain, which you have to be a real rock ‘n’ roll trivia nut to appreciate. Mountain is a band from the 1960s that actually played at the original Woodstock, but never made it into the “official” Woodstock movie, and so has become a mere footnote in rock history.

In the evolution of rock, Mountain is usually regarded as a  pre-metal band that paved the way for such harder, steelier acts as Metallica and Judas Priest. Frontman Leslie West is touted as someone who picked up the flaming twin batons of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, and drummer Corky Laing was one of the first to use twin kick drums, a staple of every heavy metal band in the world today. Miraculously, Mountain is enjoying a resurgence of late. Why? Because their song “Mississippi Queen” is included in Guitar Hero 3! (Never underestimate the power of Guitar Hero to reenergize a career).

Last night’s nifty bit of history had to do with the fact that Mountain’s latest album is a full-blown tribute to Bob Dylan called Masters of War. (It’s the album Dylan would have made if he had gone from electric to metal.) Last night, Mountain was playing in the State Theatre, a property once owned by Dylan, and West sang, of all things, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” snarling the first two verses solo with an edgy electric vamp, then bringing the rest of the band in to rock the tune loose in a way that would make Joan Baez blush, updating the urgency of Dylan’s lyrics with an appropriate amount of twenty-first-century growl and crunch. Sung on a day when the Dow dropped more than 500 points, while John McCain and Barack Obama were debating who should be the next president, Mountain brought with them the not-so-gentle breeze of history, amplified to the point of pain.

Which felt just about right.

This show should have been a musical comedy queen’s wet dream: some of the greatest songs ever written, show tunes both familiar and novel, sung by an amazing group of women. For the most part, the show lived up to expectations, but with so much fine talent and material to draw on, it’s not unreasonable to expect a bit more.

From arranger David Lohman’s witty use of “Beautiful Girls” from Follies as the opening of the overture, this was a sophisticated entertainment that feted talents from Ethel Merman and Mary Martin to Angela Lansbury and Carol Channing, from Barbara Cook and Elaine Stritch to Julie Andrews and Barbara Streisand, from Patti Lupone and Bernadette Peters to Chita Rivera and Liza Minnelli, from Betty Buckley to Audra McDonald and Heather Headley.

Then why did I leave even the slightest bit dissatisfied? Because director Perrin Post and Lohman were just too enthusiastic. I kept wishing they would both just take a Valium and get out of the way of their remarkable performers. The Ordway’s production is the third incarnation of this show (which I saw in its first production at the Loring Playhouse in 2004) and it’s the tightest one yet, which is a real plus. But it’s also overproduced, overdirected, and overarranged, to the detriment of the performers.

When scoring for the ensemble, arranger Lohman can be revelatory. For instance, the arrangement of “Sunday,” from Sunday in the Park with George, nicely exposed the intricacies of Sondheim’s harmonies. But Lohman frequently fusses too much. For example, Holly Schroeder was out-Stritching Elaine Stritch in “The Ladies Who Lunch” from Company. So why did Lohman have to bring in all the other women and undercut the last verse’s wonderful sense of self-mockery? 

Director Post seemed unable to get out of her singers’ way as well. Too often, she had her singers flying about the stage unnecessarily, and her exaggerated blocking of “Glitter and Be Gay” from Candide did nothing to help Kathleen Bloom’s valiant attempt at the coloratura.

When she let her performers just stop and sing—as she did with Jody Briskey’s rendition of “Meadowlark” from The Baker’s Wife—the result set the heart flying. But all too often the directorial choices were rather odd. For instance, why, when “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” from  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was intended to celebrate Carol Channing, did the performance recreate Marilyn Monroe’s performance from the movie?

Post, who conceived and directed the show, has written a witty commentary, introducing each of the women being feted. It’s ironic, though, that when she tells us things that most everybody knows about, say, Julie Andrews, she doesn’t bother to set up even the most obscure of the songs. If someone didn’t know the show She Loves Me, they wouldn’t have a clue what was going on in the song “Vanilla Ice Cream” (though Ann Michaels sang it splendidly, all the way to the high B).

Mimicry is a unique talent; impersonation rather than interpretation. And there were some performances, like Jen Burleigh-Bentz’ channeling Ethel Merman in “The Hostess with the Mostes’ on the Ball” from Call Me Madam, or Michelle Carter doing Chita Rivera in “Where You Are” from Kiss of the Spiderwoman, that were spot on. But for the most part, the singers wisely opted for putting their own personal spins on the material.

Many elements of the show that struck me as odd were matters of personal preference. I didn’t think “And I Was Beautiful” was the best song to represent Angela Landsbury in Dear World. And many songs were overly truncated to keep the show to a reasonable performing length. I would rather have had fewer songs, sung completely. What I wouldn’t give to hear Holly Schroeder sing all the bitchy verses of Noel Coward’s “Why Do the Wrong People Travel?” from Sail Away.

Misgivings aside, the performance was a catalog of successes:

• Briskey was almost indistinguishable from Norma Desmond when she sang “With One Look” from Sunset Boulevard. Someone should mount a production of it for this woman.

• Likewise, Michaels nailed the ubiquitous “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” making the song uniquely her own.

• Burleigh-Bentz was heartbreaking in “Your Daddy’s Son” from Ragtime.

• Carter captured the innocence and charming naiveté of Mary Martin, singing “Neverland” from Peter Pan.

• Schroeder, an expert belter, demonstrated that she also knows her way around a ballad with a touching “Quiet Thing” from Liza Minnelli’s breakthrough, Flora, the Red Menace.

• And Bloom proved that “Le Jazz Hot” from Victor, Victoria was a real jazz number, not just a drag novelty.

This is not a perfect production. Would I have made other choices about repertoire or performance? Obviously. And so, likely, would everyone else in the audience. But this is a company that takes this great music very seriously. And there are more than enough wonderful performances that override any other concerns.

Broadway’s Legendary Ladies continues at the Ordway Center through Oct. 26.

Well, “her gays” were out in force Friday night when Kathy Griffin performed to a sold out house at the Orpheum Theatre. And she did not disappoint. This was one of her campiest, bitchiest shows ever. Her straights were there as well. In fact, I was a bit surprised at the diversity of the demographic. There were the expected twenty- and thirty-somethings, but there seemed to be an amazing number of affluent fifty-something couples as well.

She took the stage like a major rock star, to a standing ovation and deafening cheers. This was an audience that was primed. She had had the audacity—and good sense—to serve as her own warm-up act. The evening began with ten to fifteen minutes of video clips of her appearance on sitcoms (Seinfeld) and in movies (Beethoven’s 5th), as well as on talk shows and, of course, her reality show, My Life on the D-List.

I came to the event a little concerned. I loved her routines Straight to Hell and Strong Black Woman, which make frequent appearances on Bravo. I was afraid she was going to rehash a lot of familiar material. But I underestimated Griffin’s fertile, twisted imagination. This was a totally new show.

And it was a completely current one. She started out talking about the vice presidential debate of the night before, reveling in the mockery of “vice president Tina Fey.” She skewered Sarah Palin’s hypocrisy, but, as might be expected, was less interested in politics than in celebrity, focusing on pregnant daughter Bristol. (“What’s with those names?” she asked. “Bristol? Track? Willow? Who does she think she is? A movie star like Gwyneth Paltrow?” [who named her daughter Apple]). Griffin made much of Palin’s Katie Couric interview when the woman could not name a single newspaper or magazine that she’d read. Griffin made even more of Bristol's redneck boyfriend’s profanity-filled My Space page—where he insisted that he didn’t want kids…

(She basically steered clear of attacking Obama, confessing that she didn’t find much about him that was funny. She professed real admiration for Michelle Obama, who she dubbed “Blackie O.”)

Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton were frequent targets, though those barbs are starting to get tired, as are her continual putdowns of Barbara Walters and The View. She commented on Clay Aikin’s coming out on the cover of People magazine (“such a shock”), but her riff on the supposedly-dottering old Larry King verged on the nasty.

She tried to focus much of mockery on the Emmys, where she was an ubiquitous presence. She won her second award at what she called the “Schmemmys,” the Creative Arts Awards, (when she announced that, she raised both hands and gave the world the fingers) and she presented at the Prime Time Emmys.

But she was especially wired last night and her monologue was more than usually stream of consciousness. She was all over the map. Sometimes, with all her digressions, she would be in the middle of three stories at once. But to her credit, she always got back to them and made each story pay off. That is the sign of a true master.

She made much of Oprah’s showing up at the Emmys with her “friend” Gayle and found the Desperate Housewives to be “really not nice. They got jaded real fast.” To Terry Hatcher’s insistence that she had never had any plastic surgery, Griffin retorted, “What? You just woke up Korean?”

The one moment when she drew in the fangs was when talking about presenting with Don Rickles. She did an homage to the eighty-two-year old comedian that was sweet and touching, yet tart and funny at the same time.

As usual, her best target is her mother. She is at her funniest when imitating the potty-mouthed eighty-eight-year old and her boxes of wine. “Bottles are for rich people,” she quotes her mom as saying. And Mom rejected any kind of caregiver with, “The last thing I need is a Polack going through my underwear drawer.” It started to become clear where Griffin gets it…

At one point, I began to notice that her targets were primarily women. When talking about California governator Arnold Schwarzenegger, she saved her choicest barbs for wife Maria Schreiber. When excoriating the awful five Emmy cohosts, it was Heidi Klum whom she singled out. It began to feel a little misogynistic. But maybe I’m reading too much into that. It may simply be a case or ridiculing what you know…

I’m not sure that I would find her very amusing up close and personal. Her encounter with “nemesis” Ryan Seacrest at a restaurant was cringe-worthy. Talk about a lack of boundaries. But from the distance of the stage, she remains one of my favorite people to spend time with.

Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge isn’t one of his better-known plays, but The Guthrie’s current production makes a good argument for raising the play’s stature in the Miller canon. It’s got a tighter dramatic arc than Death of a Salesman, the play it most closely resembles, and the main character, Eddie Carbone (played by John Carroll Lynch, a Coen brothers favorite) is every bit an everyman as Willie Loman, but without the element of weird dementia that infects Willie’s brain.

Eddie’s dilemma is fairly commonplace. He and his wife have been taking care of their niece, Catherine (played by Robyn Rykoon) since she was a little girl. Now that Catherine is a big girl, and attracting the attentions of a man Eddie doesn’t like (one of a pair of illegal immigrant dockworkers the family is harboring until they get on their feet), Eddie gets angry, jealous, and mildly homicidal.

The play takes place in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, literally in the shadow of the Brooklyn bridge, where most of the men work loading and unloading ships. Aside from the slow unraveling of Eddie’s frontal cortex, it’s the illegal immigrant theme in this play, which Miller wrote in 1962, that makes it look prescient. You half expect Lou Dobbs to show up and start railing, “This is the kind of crap I’m talking about, people—undocumented aliens taking jobs and women from red-blooded American workers. What has our nation come to?”

Dobbs never shows, but Richard Iglewski does, in the form of a lawyer who acts as a kind of Greek chorus for the tragedy that is about to unfold. From the beginning, you know the thing is going to end badly; it’s just a question of who is going to kill who, when, and why. Guided by Ethan McSweeney’s unobtrusively intelligent direction, the noose slowly tightens around Eddie’s neck, until all his good intentions eventually lead him down the exit ramp to hell.

The set, staging, casting, and direction all feel perfectly suited for this play, which is a testament to McSweeney’s talent for putting the text and characters first, rather than shellacking it with his own ideas about what the play “should” be trying to communicate. Miller’s message in A View is as ancient as the Greek dramas upon which it is based, but seeing it unfold in a contemporary drama, with characters the audience can relate to, gives the play’s final moments a much more immediate impact. These are simple people trying to get along in a complex world, which is of course a recipe for disaster—and, when it’s done well, great drama.

A View From the Bridge continues at the Guthrie Theater through Nov. 8.