The Minnesota Fringe Festival is back, bigger than ever, with 168 productions being performed in 18 separate venues from Aug. 4-14. Following are some of the most promising shows (though half the fun of the Fringe is stumbling into a theater and finding your own gem).
Minnesota Fringe 2011
BEST BETS
You Only Live Forever Once (Four Humors Theatre)
—A James…
Human despair being what it is—a seemingly intractable element of the human condition—and human beings being what they are—blobs of flesh and brains that find it difficult if not impossible to be “happy”—there is plenty of tragedy for artists to mine, especially if the final objective is humor.
Pulitzer-nominated playwright Will Eno’s Oh the Humanity and other good intentions, a series of five playlets being…
The world lost a good man yesterday. Around 3 p.m. on Wednesday, with his family close around him, beloved local playwright Tom Poole passed from this world to the next, after suffering massive brain trauma from an accident eleven days earlier.
On the night of June 25, around 11 p.m., Tom was struck…
On October 14, the Guthrie’s current production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore will have the honor of appearing on PBS as the first show in a new, nine-part series of nationally televised art events airing this fall under the banner of the PBS Arts Fall Festival.
The series highlights arts events in…
The first time I experienced John Waters’ peculiar genius was in 1981, when I went to see his then-unknown film, Polyester, which was being presented in a strange new format called Smell-o-Vision—an experience that, the poster promised, would “Blow your Nose!”
To make Smell-o-Vision work, everyone in the audience was given a card…
Every child eventually discovers that their parents are not necessarily the paragons of virtue they pretend to be, and every bartender knows that the difference between society and savagery is about four Cosmos and a jello shot.
The question is, do we need another play to tell us that adults are just big,…
At long last, after years of tinkering and terabytes of speculation, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life—a movie made possible by the deep pockets of local film producer Bill Pohlad and his company, River Road Entertainment—has finally been released to a world that probably doesn’t deserve it. But we have it anyway, and…
We live in an era when almost everyone has a camera at their fingertips, and anyone, anywhere—even Osama Bin Laden—can dive as deep into the stink of human depravity as they desire. All of us have looked at photos that, once seen, cannot be unseen—yet we look anyway, because voyeurism—the act of spying…
It’s always a bit disconcerting for a white man like myself to write about a new play written by an African-American. The problem isn’t the minefields of political correctness through which one must tiptoe, or the opinion of some that white people shouldn’t be commenting on anything having to do with the African-American experience. No, the biggest issue is a nagging feeling that I just…
For whatever reason, the Twin Cities was chosen as one of the first markets in the country for the soft launch of Atlas Shrugged: Part 1, the first installment of a three-part movie adaptation of Ayn Rand’s controversial and widely scorned/worshipped (take your pick) novel about the virtues of enlightened self-interest and unfettered capitalism. If there was any conscious thinking behind this decision, it may…
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