Laurie Van Wieren’s “like a movie I saw once,” which graced the Bryant-Lake Bowl stage last weekend, and is definitely worth seeing if Van Wieren ever does it again, is short and sweet, forty-five minutes of Minneapolis’s most engaging performers at play. Chan Holman (new to me, but clearly on a star path) sings standards in silly ways: “Ch-Ch-Changes” becomes a sputtering aria, while Holman switches octaves on “Blue Velvet” so that her voice bottoms out. When she’s not being silly, she thrills; Holman’s real voice is a nightclub queen’s, strong and sultry. Michelle Kinney (a noted cellist) accompanies her on, of all instruments, an accordion, which she later lugs around stage as if it’s her albatross.

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It has been more than a decade since the original Rent craze swept the country, and though Broadway moved on after the show closed on June 1, 2008, many fans clearly haven’t. The Orpheum was packed for the Broadway tour’s opening night, starring original cast members (and stars of the big screen version) Adam Pascal (Roger) and the absolutely amazing Anthony Rapp (Mark).

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Can’t wait until Sunday to stand in line at Target for the new Prince CD? Last night, at 7:07 p.m., His Purpleness launched a fan site, lotusflow3r.com, where the faithful can download his new albums and gorge on photos, music videos, and all sorts of other material—all for the princely sum of $77. (The 3-CD set will sell for $11.99)

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Artistic director Joe Dowling announced the Guthrie Theater’s 2009-2010 season today. And, as is usually the case when a new Guthrie season is unveiled, 2009-2010 will contain a curious mix of the familiar, the fresh, and the downright fusty. 

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These days, the word “musical” conjures visions of green witches and mega-casts—over-the-top productions with soaring symphonic scores, elaborate sets, enough actors to populate a small village, and lots of shrill, brassy singing by people who have somehow figured out how to turn the dial on their esophagus up to “11”. 

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As it happens (but not very often, really), author Tim O’Brien has a son named Tad. And, as he shared with a nearly full house at the Hopkins Center for the Arts Thursday night, young Tad’s first words were not garbled attempts to mouth the words “mama” or “papa”. No, young Tad’s first words were, “’Tis a tale told by an idiot.”

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If you’re looking for a hot, steaming bowl of Irish dysfunction to warm up your St. Patrick’s Day festivities, head on over to the Guthrie’s Dowling Studio to see Frank Theatre’s By the Bog of Cats, by Irish playwright Marina Carr. There you’ll meet Hester Swane, the scorned and seething center of a play that aspires to Shakespearean heights of familial wickedness.

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Maybe you’ve noticed—Facebook is freaking people out. And this anxiety of the new seems to be intensifying, because now—as every newspaper writer in the country has pointed out—mom is on Facebook. In this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Peggy Orenstein is the latest “oldster” (her term) to ask what it all means—these crazy solipsistic kids with their tagging and their status updates. More specifically, Orenstein seems to be concerned that things are different than when she came of age herself, in the “postage stamp era,” when you could go away to college without the scrutiny of high school buddies who knew that you used to have bangs, or were on the traveling math team, or that you loved Garth Brooks. She asks if it’s possible to reinvent yourself, to “get busy with the embarrassing, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity,” as she puts it, with your “450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?” It’s a rhetorical question, really, and she seems to think the answer is no.  

Well, come gather round people wherever you roam. Because on Friday night at the Walker, I saw Examined Life, a documentary by Astra Taylor that follows around eight of the most acclaimed and established contemporary philosophers—big time priests and priestesses of the mind, thinkers revered within the marble halls of academia, but whom most of us probably wouldn’t recognize if we flipped past them holding court on CSPAN. Philosophers like Cornel West, Peter Singer and Martha Nussbaum. Taylor gives each of them ten minutes to make their point (she spent twenty four weeks editing all her footage down, natch), and almost invariably the point is this: after 3000 years of philosophy, the times they are a’changin’.

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Recently, Ron Rosenbaum wrote a—well a rant, really, for Slate.com titled “The Worst Pop Singer Ever”, in which he used the recent death of painter Andrew Wyeth, whose work is arguably both dreadfully sentimental crap and American genius, to account for the unfathomable popularity of the Piano Man, Billy Joel.

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Those still grieving the untimely departure of David Foster Wallace’s splendid consciousness from this earthly plane can take solace in a couple of interesting posts by local writers—ones who have moved on to the next stage of literary grief: wondering what it was all about, anyway?

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