Your weekend outlook: the (w)rite of spring
This weekend is burgeoning with more events than I know what to do with: book signings, dance concerts, theater, birthday celebrations, music, comedy... If you can't find something in here to tickle your fancy, well all I can say is, you're missing out.
Enjoy a good crime novel? Want to meet an author? How about fifty of them? Once Upon A Crime Books presents its annual Write of Spring on Saturday afternoon, featuring a dozen or so different crime writers every hour for four hours. Sounds like the perfect setting for a murder mystery to me...
Katha Dance Theatre presents Soul to Sole, a blend of gospel music and North Indian Kathak dance, tonight through Saturday at the Ritz Theater in Minneapolis.
Just because a storyteller dies doesn't mean the story has to. Walker Art Center presents Spalding Gray: Stories left to tell, in which a group of actors perform selections of his manic monologues, as well as excerpts from his journals. Get this: each night features a different local personality performing one of the pieces. Tonight: Louie Anderson, Friday: MPR's own Kerri Miller and Saturday: Kevin Kling.
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Open Eye Figure Theater presents two new works by emerging artists with Seeds. Kyle Loven performs his one-man trptych, "my dear Lewis," combining puppets, objects, video, and original music by George Maurer. "O the Sky!" by Eric Van Wyk employs shadow puppetry, objects and figures to tell the story of a man who leaves a big city in the east to travel west.
Four Humors Theater takes a critical look at modern life in
Welcome to Dystopia, on stage this weekend and next at Bedlam Theater.
They say classical music is written by dead white men, but that doesn't mean they can't still be the life of the party. Celebrate Bach's 325th Birthday at the Dakota. There will be music from the Bach Society of Minnesota, local cello and percussion ensemble Jelloslave, and classical music pioneer and cellist Matt Haimovitz.
What the "Vagina Monologues" is to women, "The Naked I: Beyond the Binary" is to transgender, gender-queer, and intersex individuals. 20% Theatre Company presents this exploration of sex and sexuality that moves beyond the traditional categories of male and female.
The Ordway Center for Performing Arts in St. Paul presents steppenwolf's August: Osage County, a stinging yet comic look at a dysfunctional family and all of its dirty little secrets.
Mike Doughty plays at the Dakota both Friday and Saturday night, performing music from his new cd "Sad Man Happy Man." He's touring as an acoustic duo with long-time bassist Andrew Livingston on cello.
Stepping Stone Theatre and Stuart Pimsler Dance and Theater join forces to present My Grandmother's Tsotchkes: Tales of A Gambling Grandma. A young girl learns about her Russian Jewish grandmother through the trinkets she collected. Each "tsotchke" - a bag of pennies, a box of chess pieces, an old black shoe, and a glass ring - transport the girl into adventurous stories of her grandma's flight from Russia to America.
Theatre Pro Rata presents The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. The play, written ten years before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, bears quite a few striking similarities, including a quest for revenge, ghosts, a play within a play, and more. But here the main character is a father mourning the loss of his son. Performances run through March 28 at Gremlin Theatre in St. Paul.
And last, but not least, The Cody Rivers Show descends on the Walker Community United Methodist Church for two nights (tonight and Friday) of intense physical humor and sketch comedy with Right Back Where We Finished.
Phew! I'm tired just writing about all this stuff.