Recently by William Randall Beard

How many times has a Fringe show ended up on the stage of the Ordway? Well, at least once. Following its origins as a bachelor party entertainment , the musical The Drowsy Chaperone had an early incarnation as part of the Toronto Fringe Festival. The show betrays its Fringe roots in its general irreverence and outrageousness, but is now clothed in the guise of a big Broadway production.

This is a completely original show. “Original” is not a word you often hear applied to Broadway musicals these days, not in this era of movie adaptations and bloated Disney extravaganzas. But The Drowsy Chaperone is fresh and innovative, even though it trades heavily on 1920s nostalgia.

When the curtain rises, a musical comedy queen, identified only as Man in Chair, is sitting in his armchair, contemplating his old, original cast recording of the 1928 musical The Drowsy Chaperone. It’s a two-disc set of the entire show. (He enthusiastically shows off the jacket to the audience.) When he puts it on the turntable, the show comes to life right there in his kitchen.

The record is one of the running gags of the show. When the phone rings and he lifts the needle, the actors freeze. When the disc skips or repeats, it is reflected in the action. And when he puts the wrong record on, well, to tell would be to spoil it. Suffice it to say, it’s one of the highlights in a show full of highlights. The physical comedy is all carried off with great flair.

Man in Chair enthusiastically shares his arcane knowledge of the show, filling in all the background, reviewing the performances as they are happening, even giving us the warped performance histories of all the actors. Was there ever a more ingenious means of deconstructing a genre? His reflections might be obsessive, but they are also expressions of genuine love and bona fide wit.

The show itself is total fluff—as musicals of that period (with the very real exception of Showboat) absolutely were. Who can remember the plots of Gershwin or Porter shows? They were interchangeable. This one is the story of a wedding that almost doesn’t happen, but of course it does—along with a number of other romantic entanglements. But Bob Martin and Don McKellar’s book is full of enough really good gags, puns, and double entendres to carry it along.

It’s the songs that were the heart of those period shows, and the ones here by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison are tuneful and charming, a perfect evocation of the eras—from the tap number, where the dancers actually set the stage on fire, to the romantic ballads, to a tango number. The stage effects accompanying these numbers are not only spectacular, they are also quite inventive. The way they suggest an airplane taking off is a delight.

For all the spectacle of the show within a show, it is Jonathan Crombie, as Man in Chair, who walks away with the evening. Amidst all the artifice, he is a human being, wonderfully funny, but even more wonderfully real. His touching performance hits all the right notes. When he moved into the playing area and began mimicking the performer, I almost wept. How else can a true musical comedy aficionado enjoy an original cast album except by playing along? In his wide-eyed eagerness and enthusiasm, he was completely endearing.

The rest of the cast was also quite strong, creating an effective ensemble. A real treat was seeing Georgia Engel, playing the same role (Ted’s girlfriend, Georgette) that she did on The Mary Tyler Moore Show thirty years ago. The standouts were Andrea Chamberlain and Mark Ledbetter as the ingénue and juvenile—along with Nancy Opel, who was delightful as the title character.

The Drowsy Chaperone won Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Score, but not for Best Musical. Even hypothetically, that’s hard to understand. I mean, how can you have the best script and best songs, but not be the best show? It’s even more perplexing after you’ve seen the show. The Drowsy Chaperone is the most clever, most joyful—and, thanks to Crombie, sweetest—musical to come from Broadway in quite some time.

The Drowsy Chaperone continues at the Ordway through March 30.

I need to eat my words—or at least choke on them a little. In the current edition of Mpls.St.Paul magazine, I questioned Minnesota Opera’s decision to stage the American premiere of Reinhard Keiser’s The Fortunes of King Croesus. It’s an obscure opera, I argued, hardly a great work, the music isn’t particularly sophisticated, and there are probably some good reasons why it’s been relegated to the dustbin of operatic history. But in performance, the work turns out to be unexpectedly engaging, if not exactly a masterpiece.

When the final version of Croesus premiered in 1730, Keiser was a major figure of the early German Baroque. He was an influence on the young Handel. But he was provincial, writing for the opera house in Hamburg, which had its own style. He did not subscribe to the developing international style of opera seria that Handel championed. So in the sweep of history, he was forgotten, somewhat unfairly as it turns out.

Ostensibly, the story is that of the myth of Croesus, King of Lydia, a wealthy and arrogant ruler who is defeated in battle by Cyrus, the King of Persia, and humbled. The primary focus, though, is on his son Atis and the love pentagon that surrounds him. This labyrinthine plot is typical of Baroque opera: Atis and Elmira love each other, but she is pursued by Orsanes, who later tries to stage a coup. He is loved by Clerida, who is in turn loved by Eliates, who Croesus leaves in charge when he goes off to war. As is typical of the Baroque, everything ends on a happy note, however implausibly.

This is certainly pleasant music, full of many clever and interesting moments. But while sounding Handelian, Keiser was not the musical dramatist that Handel was and the work suffers as a result, with long stretches proving tedious. The score has been significantly cut, but it could have been tightened even further.

The performances made as strong a case as possible for the opera. The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra was in the pit, rather than the Minnesota Opera’s usual pick-up orchestra, and it made a difference. SPCO played the intricate score with clarity and precision, not to mention a real sense of the period style. Conductor Harry Bicket led masterfully.

Of the singers, the Elmira of Susanna Phillips was the standout. She had an attractive soprano and a dazzling facility for coloratura. She was also a powerful actress, becoming the emotional center of the opera and giving the frequently superficial music real heart.

The novelty of the opera is that Atis is mute for much of the first act, until the shock of seeing his father captured restores his voice. Vale Rideout was a strong actor throughout, a convincingly ardent lover. When he sang, he revealed a warm and romantic tenor.

As Orsanes, baritone Brian Leehuber was also quite compelling, following up his highly praised performance as Tom Joad in last season's world premiere of The Grapes of Wrath. Once again, he commanded the stage, both vocally and dramatically.

For being the title character, Croesus had remarkably little stage time. But tenor Paul Nilon made the most of it. He convincingly portrayed the character’s transformation, making his emerging humanity truly moving.

The secondary romantic couple was less successful. As Clerida, soprano Jamie-Rose Guarrine proved musically faceless, unable to bring the music to life. And tenor Christian Reinhart had neither the voice nor the bearing to be convincing as the man Croesus would leave in charge in his absence.

As the stock comic servants, Dan Dressen and Andrea Coleman played the cynical, worldly-wise pair with tongue-in-cheek delight. They were underused.

This production was a big hit when it first premiered at Opera North in England, but to my eyes, it let the singers down. Director Tim Albery created individual moments that were quite effective, but he didn’t seem to have any overall dramatic concept to tie all those moments together. Too often, the singers were left stranded in long static stretches. And the truly dramatic moment of Atis finding his voice was completely passed over.

The production seemed to be set in the 1930s, with the Persians as the fascists and Cyrus costumed as Mussolini, which was problematic when it came to the happy ending. That speaks to the lack of visual as well as dramatic coherence. Leslie Travers’s costumes were spectacular, but seemed more interested in spectacle than in conveying dramatic meaning. (Elmira’s outfit was particularly ineffective, making her look more dowdy and matronly than a romantic heroine should.) His sets were likewise striking, but impractical. Strewing the stage with the fuselage of Croesus’s downed airplane created an obstacle course for the singers.

There were plenty of cheers, but this was the first Minnesota Opera production I can recall that did not get a standing ovation. That is, I think, telling of the audience’s reaction to this operatic novelty, and it matches my reaction. The experience was, at best, a qualified success.

As far as I’m concerned, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd is a great American opera, despite being written in the popular idiom. (It’s reported that Sondheim is driven crazy by that contention, but then artists don’t always fully appreciate the art they create.) The complexity of the score is well beyond your average musical. The thematic use of music to tell the story, the rich melodic structure, and the complexity of the ensembles makes it an incredibly sophisticated work of art.

As such, the current national touring production does not do Sondheim’s masterpiece much justice. The work’s greatness is totally obscured by this production’s gimmicky concept and staging.

The show, like the current Tim Burton film, is based on a nineteenth-century melodrama about a mad barber seeking revenge for injustices perpetrated against he and his family years before, by slitting the throats of the perpetrators. He is in cahoots with Mrs. Lovett, who bakes his victims into unsavory meat pies. Hugh Wheeler’s book attempts to take the show to a higher metaphoric level of class struggle, but it works best as a Grand Guignol horror story.

The touring production is basically a chamber version of the show, where ten actors not only perform all the roles and act as the chorus, but also play all the instruments. As a result, the accompaniment is incredibly thin, and so is the vocal ensemble, which doesn’t even come close to delivering Sondheim’s full-throated choruses the way they are meant to be sung. And their greatest sin is to make the incredibly witty and incisive lyrics all but incomprehensible.

Directed and designed by John Doyle, this production won the Tony Award in 2006 for Best Revival and was acclaimed in New York. But to my mind, its stylized theatricality robs the story of both its horror and its humanity. Since the entire cast remains onstage for the entire show, the effect of Sweeney’s razor has little consequence. And the fact that cast members are playing instruments—even in the midst of their scenes—becomes distracting, limiting any kind of human interaction. When Mrs. Lovett comes onstage blowing two notes on a tuba, it just trivializes the whole proceedings.

Judy Kaye’s Mrs. Lovett is the bright light of the production, however—which is as it should be, because that part is written to steal the show. Kaye plays the outrageous character with enough subtlety to be both funny and menacing, and her rendition of  “A Little Priest” is the highlight of the show.

Despite his he-man swagger, David Hess’s Sweeney is about a size too small for the role. He does not dominate the stage, vocally or dramatically, as the mythic character should. And in the most extreme moments, he becomes so melodramatic that he loses all his humanity, depriving the story of an added level of emotional involvement and, indeed, tragedy.

As Johanna, Sweeney’s long lost daughter, Lauren Molina sings with an unpleasantly shrill soprano and plays the role so broadly that she loses all sense of being the sympathetic ingénue. Benjamin Magnuson makes a strong stab at being the romantic hero that tries to rescue her, but the production defeats him and it is impossible to care about their fates, once again robbing the show of its heart.

By contrast, the Tim Burton version currently in theaters has all the passion, danger, and pathos that’s missing from this production. In fact, the best local version of Sweeney Todd I've seen was at Bloomington Civic Theatre, where director John Command treated the story with both the grandeur and the humanity that it deserves. This version, despite its New York pedigree, feels done up on the cheap.

Sweeney Todd runs through February 10 at the State Theatre.

I think Charles Gounod’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, currently being produced by Minnesota Opera, gets a bad rap. That’s true of Gounod generally. Granted, neither of his masterpieces, not this one, based on Shakespeare, nor his Faust, derived from Goethe, are anywhere near as profound as their sources. But that doesn’t mean that Gounod “pillaged” those great works, as one critic accused!

I admit to having a soft spot in my heart for this sentimental work, but to appreciate Romeo and Juliet, it’s probably best to forget Shakespeare’s play altogether, though plot details will remind you time and again. The opera is, in reality, an extended five-act love duet, briefly interrupted by such bothersome necessities as arias, choruses and ensembles, and it is in the perfumed lyricism of its love music that it rises to the heights.

That said, even I have to admit Romeo and Juliet is not top-tier opera. Great singing on the part of its leads is necessary to make a strong case for it. And in Ellie Dehn and James Valenti, Minnesota Opera struck gold. I might have wished for a warmer, rounder sound from the two, but that's a minor quibble.

Dehn’s Juliet had the coloratura for a dazzling "Waltz Song" and a voice large enough to encompass the demands of the potion aria. Valenti’s Romeo had a clear, ringing top that was thrilling and the power to soar over the ensembles.

Call me a philistine, but it doesn’t hurt that the two looked their parts and acted with youthful exuberance. Director David Lefkowich gave both characters an active physicality that resonated passion and erotic energy and built to an ecstatic finale.

His production is an outstanding success, almost good enough to convince that the opera itself is first rate. He was creative without being intrusive, maintaining the integrity of the work. There was a heightened theatricality—for instance, using dancers to interpret and underline the action--and a refreshing commitment to having the characters behave like actual human beings.

The physical production (sets by Erhard Rom, costumes by Jennifer Caprio, lighting by Steve TenEyck) mirrored this down-to-earth realism with an engaging simplicity. Clever use of projections gave the whole an added emotional resonance. These artists provided an ideal setting for the jewel of Dehn’s and Valenti’s performances.

Occasionally, the use of the dancers (particularly during the orchestral interludes) became a bit intrusive, as if Lefkowich was worried that he had to keep things moving to keep the audience engaged. But that minor misstep was more than made up for by his thrilling fight choreography.

Note must also be made of the excellent work done by the chorus, especially in the Act III finale, where Mercutio and Tybalt are killed and Romeo is banished. Both vocally and dramatically, they carried the scene. Of the supporting singers, Adriana Zabala was the standout, singing the trouser role of Stephano with true Gallic grace. Some of the subsidiary characters left something to be desired, and if Kelly Markgraf’s Mercutio lacked the last degree of gossamer French elegance, he still sang his "Queen Mab" aria with great wit and style.

It was conductor Ari Pelto who occasionally let down the side. He fell too far under the spell of the romance, lingering excessively over some of the love music until the action began to drag and the sentimentality became cloying. But when it counted, particularly in the big finales, he rose well to the occasion.

Whether or not his work is your cup of tea, Gounod delivers the goods of an exciting and moving lyric opera. And overall, Minnesota Opera's production is about as convincing a representation of that opera as I can imagine.

Romeo and Juliet plays through February 3 at the Ordway Center for Performing Arts.

Alex Ross sure knows how to do a book tour! As classical music writer for The New Yorker, Ross is one of the most erudite commentators on the arts in the country today, and he’s the author of the new culture history, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Not content to just talk about music, he brought along the Turtle Island String Quartet to offer musical examples and made the event a party.

Being a frequent and avid reader of his writing in The New Yorker, I came expecting a challenging and inspired conversation. And until near the end, I was disappointed. Little of what he said had the depth of his writing. His reading of excerpts from the book just pointed out how facile much of the presentation really was.

For example, in talking about the early twentieth century, the two big stories he focused on were the riots inspired by the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Shostakovich’s composing under the oppression Soviet domination. For most of the people familiar with Ross and interested in hearing him, those would be familiar stories. And there was nothing particularly new or revelatory in his retelling.

Part of the problem may have been that the event was being taped for broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio. Fred Childs, host of Performance Today on National Public Radio, was the moderator. Ross could only answer the questions he was asked. And while Childs’ questions might generously be called populist, they were, in reality, rather shallow and superficial. 

The presence of the Turtle Island String Quartet also felt out of place. These were splendid musicians and their performances raised cheers, particularly in a work by Cuban saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera and excerpts from their new CD, A Love Supreme: The Legacy of John Coltrane.

But they seemed to have little connection with the main point of the evening. In fact, Ross had plenty of illustrative musical examples of his own that he played on his computer. Those might have been more extensive had the quartet not been present. And worse, they seemed to be part of the dumbing down of the evening. They followed a discussion of Milton Babbitt, one of the twentieth century’s most challenging and difficult composers, with an excerpt from West Side Story. It’s hard not to be cynical and think that their presence was primarily a marketing decision.

All that said, there were indeed moments of great wit and genuine insight in the discourse. Ross started out rejecting the whole term “classical music,” feeling that it burdened even the most forward-looking compositions with the stigma of music from the distant past. “Awesome music” was his suggested replacement (though he acknowledged that we are probably stuck with classical). He spoke of the 1920s as an era of an “explosion of possibilities” in terms of the synthesis of popular and classical styles and drew some significant parallels with our own age.

In fact, it was in discussing the current the state of music that he became much more absorbing, making a strong case for the interconnectedness of pop and classical genres. He played excerpts of pop singer Björk and of Dawn Upshaw singing a song cycle by Osvaldo Golijov, making a strong case that if you did not know, you might legitimately think that the former was the classical piece and the latter the pop one.

It was in his assessment of the future that Ross became the most passionate—and the most compelling. Far from seeing the fracturing of twentieth-century music as signaling the end of concert music, he sees it leading to a renaissance, a new golden age of infinite possibility. He sees the traditions as not dying, but multiplying, so much so that it’s hard to keep up. In reframing the issue, he offered exciting possibilities, even for the most traditional of symphony orchestras. And he left me wanting to read the book.

An invitation-only audience gathered in Guild Hall at Plymouth Congregational Church last night to celebrate the eightieth birthday of composer Dominick Argento. I recently complained in the Star Tribune that there were appallingly few events to commemorate that milestone. This soiree, organized by VocalEssence director Philip Brunelle, was exactly what was called for.

The festive evening was a fitting tribute to a man who is essentially Minnesota’s composer-in-residence. He has written for Minnesota Opera, Minnesota Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, even the Guthrie Theater, to name only the largest organizations. But the evening took on a national, even an international feel with letters of congratulations from composer Conrad Susa, mezzo soprano Frederica von Stade, and baritone Håken Hagegård.

As befits Argento’s oeuvre, the program featured primarily vocal music. Offering a retrospective of his career, the selections covered almost fifty years—from 1958 to 2007. Soprano Maria Jette almost encompassed that entire span with her two selections, one of the Six Elizabethan Songs from 1958 and the unaccompanied "Silver," written for her in 2004. She called Argento her "favorite composer” and told the story of how she tricked him into composing for her. Jette’s love for Argento was apparent in her performance, as it was in performances throughout the evening.

What was truly astonishing in the juxtaposition of songs from six decades of work was Argento’s amazing consistency. His unique voice revealed itself early, and he has been true to it throughout his career.

Upon hearing this wide profusion of music, my reaction was to revere Argento all the more. He swam against the stream of his era, eschewing the intellectual and academic avant-garde compositional styles of many of his contemporaries. He is an unabashedly emotional composer, unafraid to wear his heart on his sleeve and to indulge in rich, old-fashioned lyricism. His goal is always to connect with his audience and to sensitively communicate the essence of the text he is setting, and he is usually successful.

On this occasion, he had some of the best singers in the Twin Cities getting those emotions across. I was impressed by the different generations of musicians who came out. The evening opened with excerpts of his 1968 song cycle, Letters from Composers, performed by tenor Vern Sutton and guitarist Jeffrey Van, who had originally premiered it. On the other hand, baritone Bradley Greenwald was just a child in 1967 when the opera The Shoemaker’s Holiday, from which he sang an excerpt, was premiered. And Sonja Tengblad, just a year-and-a-half out of college, gave one of the most affecting performances in an excerpt from Argento’s youthful opera, Colonel Jonathan the Saint, from 1962.

Brunelle and Sonja Thompson were the accompanists throughout. Brunelle also played a piece for piano four-hands, "For the Angel Israfel (Whose Heart-Strings Are a Lute)," with his son Christopher. Speaking of fathers and sons, Michael Sutton played "Impromptu for Michael Sutton," which Argento wrote for Michael's father Vern’s fiftieth birthday. The evening had many such intimate and personal moments, but then again, Argento’s music often inspires that kind of reaction.

If there was a disappointment to the evening, it was a bit too much formality. The singers simply performed and then got off the stage. Only Jette took time to share some personal reminiscences. I know that several of the singers have very funny Argento stories they could have shared. But that is the merest quibble in the face of so much excellent music-making.

The final work was 2007's Three Sonnets of Plutarch, a masterful song-cycle receiving its U.S. premiere in a stunning performance by Minnesota Opera Resident Artist John Boehr. Not only did the work not betray any signs of the diminishment of age, it revealed Argento at the top of his game. It is as accomplished and passionate as anything he has written. So Happy Birthday, Dom! And when you’re done celebrating, I can only hope you’ll get back to composing. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

“Opera as theater” has been a major buzz phrase for the last several decades. It refers to the idea of doing away with all the exaggerated gestures and stereotypical posing that had made opera an object of ridicule. Theatre Latte Da’s La Boheme embodies that ideal. Even with reduced forces, like a minimal chorus, the production beautifully communicates the tragedy of Puccini’s young bohemians.

This production at the Southern Theater is a remounting of a show originally staged in 2005 at the Loring Playhouse. I did not see the original, but I can't imagine that the larger Southern doesn’t improve the staging and provide more resonant acoustics.

Michael Hoover’s set makes innovative use of the space, creating a sumptuous environment in which the story can unfold. This was unmistakably Paris, but not the Paris of travelogues—the Paris of dreams.

Peter Rothstein’s direction follows the same principle. The action is essentially naturalistic, but not limited by reality. It is realism, but an enhanced, romanticized realism. The character’s actions are those of normal human beings, but with a heightened theatricality and passion that allowed my heart to soar. At its best, such emotional flights are what opera can inspire better than any other art form.

Music director Joseph Schlefke has re-orchestrated the opera for piano, guitar, accordion, flute/clarinet and violin. It is hard not to miss the lush Puccini orchestra, but this unique sound contributes to the creation of the unique environment.

Successful as this production is, it makes painfully clear just how difficult it is to balance operatic singing with naturalistic acting. In the opening scene, the poet Rodolfo (tenor James Howes) and the painter Marcello (baritone Nathan Brian) are the embodiment of young bohemians. They have fresh, natural voices and cavort about the stage with antic enthusiasm. Their musical performances are not entirely suave or polished, and they tend to sing unsubtly loud throughout, but their vigor and energy sweeps away all reservations and they end up creating utterly believable characters.

When Mimi (soprano Meghann Schmidt) enters, she seems part of another production altogether. Hers is a voice of true elegance and refinement, but it seemed mannered by comparison. However, in the tragic scenes of Acts Three and Four, she came into her own, her rich instrument taking the drama to a whole other level. Her death scene actually moved me to tears. Howes, on the other hand, was in over his head at this point, both vocally and emotionally. It’s hard to have it all.

There is only one major misstep in the production. Rothstein moves the time period from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s, which is not really significant (this story of young love is universal) until he introduces a Nazi element. This was an unnecessary addition that detracted from the real story. For instance, baritone Bryan Boyce's moving performance of Colline's coat aria was upstaged by the presence of a Star of David on the lapel. The fact that there was no real payoff for the political intrusions just made them all the more extraneous.

Rothstein’s direction masterfully balances the rapidly shifting moods of comedy and tragedy. The bohemians Howes, Brian, and Boyce, along with bass Roy Kallemeyn as the musician Schaunard, made a strong vocal quartet as well as a genuinely funny comic team. Mention must also be made of soprano Jill Sandager, who plays an exceptional Musetta, with a sexy voice and persona to match.

Clearly, the dramatic (and musical) values of this production were heightened by the intimacy of the Southern Theater. I look forward to the day when Rothstein has a large company and a big budget at his disposal to work his magic writ large.

La Boheme plays through November 18 at the Southern Theater.

I must admit that I am not a big fan of Adam Sandler movies. Too often, he takes low comedy to subterranean depths. The Wedding Singer is different. It is an endearing film that, if it doesn’t cry out to be made into a musical, at least stands up well to the transformation. The result, now playing at the Orpheum, is a charming confection.

The show closely follows the plot of the original. Set in 1985, Robbie is the lead singer of a band that primarily entertains at weddings, and he’s dumped by his own fiancé on the eve of their nuptials. He finds consolation in the friendship of a waitress, even though she is engaged herself, but to a real jerk. The inevitable fact that the two will end up together is never in question.

Writers Chad Beguelin and Tim Herlihy transplant whole scenes from the movie into the musical, which should not be surprising given that Herlihy wrote the original screenplay. The book is sweet, but also quite smart. Such a story cannot help but be sentimental, but its wit helps it avoid being treacly. The use of pop culture references from the 1980s adds much humor. From Billy Idol and Cyndi Lauper to Flashdance to big hair and glam rock, the show gently makes fun of the superficial decade. And the elaborate physical production does it full justice.

The original film uses actual eighties hits in its soundtrack. The faux-eighties songs by Matthew Sklar and Chad Beguelin are innocuous and forgettable, but they do capture the style and the energy of the decade. The strong dancing chorus is the propulsive force behind the show. The homage to eighties dance styles is particularly amusing.

Unfortunately, the two leads are the weak links. Whatever else you might say about Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore in the movie, they had personality. Merritt David Jones and Erin Elizabeth Coors are rather bland, whitebread knock-offs with none of the individuality of the originals. It doesn’t help that the show is written in much broader strokes and with far less subtlety than the film. Jones and Coors sing well and make the love story touching, but too often they melt into the background.

The show really gets its energy from the supporting cast. As the second bananas, a bandmate of Robbie’s (Justin Jutras) and his sort-of ex-girlfriend (Sarah Peak) are two tough streetwise kids from Queens, and their non-stereotypical performances almost steal the show. Penny Larsen as Robbie’s sexually voracious grandmother, John Jacob Lee as a Boy George wannabe, and Nikka Wahl as Robbie’s ex are also standouts.

The Wedding Singer belongs to a long line of shows, including Grease and Mama Mia, whose impulse is primarily nostalgia and, from the demographics of the opening night audience, it’s transgenerational nostalgia. The Wedding Singer clearly wouldn’t exist without the model of those earlier, superior shows. Five minutes after leaving the theater, it’s hard to remember a single tune, but for the two-and-a-half-hour duration, it’s pleasant entertainment.

The Wedding Singer plays through September 30 at the Orpheum.

It’s nice to see Minnesota Opera staging Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball). It’s one of Verdi’s masterpieces and should be better known. Though ostensibly the tale of a tragic love triangle, it is actually a profoundly political meditation on the responsibilities of a ruler.

As such, Minnesota Opera’s decision to return the opera to its original setting in the glittering court of Sweden’s King Gustavus III was apt. (The censors in 1859 Rome forced Verdi to change the location to colonial Boston, with the king demoted to colonial governor to avoid representing regicide onstage, despite the improbability of a masked ball in Puritan Massachusetts.)

Amidst an atmosphere of unrest and threats of assassination, the mercurial Gustavus loves Amelia, the wife of his dearest friend and closest ally, Count Anckarström. The king is struggling with conflicting impulses, represented by the two men closest to him, the aristocratic and virtuous Anckarström and the flighty and pleasure-loving page, Oscar. As a monarch with absolute power, Gustavus chooses to pursue Amelia. His noblest nature wins out in the end, but not before Anckarström misinterprets the flirtation and exacts revenge.

Director James Robinson clearly takes the work seriously. From the opening curtain, he created a palpable sense of menace. Allen Moyer’s immensely inventive set has Gustavus’s chamber buckle and break apart, making it as if the fortuneteller, Ulrica, has emerged from the bowels of the earth to prophesy Gustavus’s death. And the claustrophobia of the scene in which Anckarström confronts his wife heightens the drama. However, the surrealistic representation of the gallows in Act Two was distracting, and the final masked ball—typically a spectacular showpiece—was something of an anticlimax, in part because of James Schuette’s drab, gray costumes.

Robinson was particularly effective in using the chorus, staging them with telling detail. In many ways, the chorus is the star of this production, and they responded with some robust singing. But Robinson seemed at a loss in the great Act Two duet in which Gustavus and Amelia admit their love, leaving the actors stranded on an almost completely bare stage. In the final act, Robinson also chose to upstage the pair’s final duet with a distracting puppet show, an odd choice that was out of character with the rest of the production.

Conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya was best at building toward grand climaxes. Elsewhere, however, the music tended to lose momentum. Charles Taylor sang quite elegantly as Anckarström, though he lacked the kind of dark sound required to fully exploit the character’s rage. And his acting was mostly a collection of stock operatic gestures.

Cynthia Lawrence made her Minnesota Opera debut in 2000, in the lyric role of the Countess in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. Pushing her voice to meet the requirements of heavier, spinto roles such as Amelia has left a noticeable break between her chest and head voices, along with a shrill and wobbly top. But her singing was frequently thrilling, whatever the ultimate cost.

As Gustavus, Evan Bowers was full-throated from his first entrance. He handled the music with finesse and created a dashing character. But he lacked that last measure of nobility to truly convey the character’s self-sacrifice. His death left me unmoved.

It was Nili Riemer, in the trouser role of Oscar, who delivered the most satisfying performance. Her quicksilver soprano made easy work of the punishing tessitura and demanding coloratura. What’s more, she made the foolishly self-important youth a delight at each appearance.

Jill Grove’s Ulrica was in the same class. Her dark, cavernous voice seemed to emerge from the bowels of the earth. Along with a thrilling top and eerie stage presence, she made the fortuneteller mysterious and captivating.

For all its faults, much of this production was stirring and did the great composer proud. And in the end, Verdi won out. His humanity and depth of feeling carried the day.

A Masked Ball runs through September 30 at the Ordway.

The Spamalot juggernaut has steamrolled into town, sweeping all criticism before it. The 2005 Tony winner for Best Musical might not be quite the biting social satire that the original film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, was, but can years of sold-out houses on Broadway—and now around the country—be wrong? Well, maybe. The laughs are silly and often stupid, but they are also unrelenting, which is exactly what you would expect.

Lovers of the original film will find much that is familiar onstage at the Ordway. This fractured retelling of the King Arthur legend may have pretensions of skewering the romantic notions of chivalry, but it’s really just an excuse for grown men (and women) to behave outrageously—and for the audience to enjoy the experience vicariously. Who doesn’t enjoy a killer rabbit? Or people being slapped across the face with a fish?

It may be tacky to say that Spamalot makes an art out of flatulence that is befitting of the titular canned meat, but even if it is, it’s no tackier than the show itself. At its heart, however, the musical seems to draw on a different tradition than the film. The bad puns, the potty humor, the queer bits, the unconvincing drag and the rows of scantily clad chorines have always been part of the Monty Python oeuvre, but they also hearken back further to the old English pantomime and music hall traditions. That was certainly true of the original TV series, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but it’s even more obvious in this incarnation.

What’s particularly enjoyable is how the creators (original Python Eric Idle writing the book and lyrics and collaborating with John Du Prez on the music) strive to modernize those traditions. Camelot comes right out of Las Vegas (the Round Table is a roulette wheel). And there is a wonderful Carmen Miranda number for a very fey Sir Lancelot and the boys. There’s more to this show than meets the eye—or at least I’d like to think so.

What I found quite unexpected was that the big production numbers, like “You Won’t Succeed on Broadway (if you haven’t any Jews),” were the most inventive and interesting parts of the event. They are clearly intended to be tasteless and offensive send-ups, but they still manage to be well-executed and loving homages to the genre as well. That’s not an easy balance to maintain, but when it succeeds, it gives the whole experience an added element of sweetness and heart that makes the antic clowning more palatable—and funnier.

The Ordway production is nothing short of lavish. No expense was spared, with elaborate special effects and even pyrotechnics on frequent display. But in the Broadway of Disney and Andrew Lloyd Webber, over-the-top production values are almost de rigueur. (Though Idle and Du Prez do get their revenge: much of the music for the Lady of the Lake is a subtle but deliberate lampooning of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hyper-romantic style.) Visually, it’s Tim Hatley’s costumes that are the true works of art; they are stunning to look at and contain more visual allusions than there are musical ones in the score.

Offering an actual critique of Spamalot is pointless, because it’s more than just a show—it’s a phenomenon. It’s juvenile and silly, often profoundly so, but there is always a place for such well-done low comedy. For the next couple of weeks, that place is Ordway Center for the Performing . . . uh, Arts.