Twin Cities Community Theater Beat

This past weekend, theater groups across the world held performances of a special, limited-time event: Musical Theatre International's All Together Now!: A Global Event Celebrating Local Theatre . MTI is a licensing company that holds the rights to many popular musicals (and plenty of unpopular musicals), which means that usually theater companies pay MTI for the right to perform their shows, and for the rental of scripts and music. All Together Now! is a revue that MTI offered for free, with the goal of supporting small theater groups that may have struggled under the pandemic.  Multiple groups in the Twin Cities participated in this event, including Cross Community Players. CCP used All Together Now! as their fall fundraiser, but did not charge admission; I appreciate that this event was more accessible for that reason, but it does seem unusual for a fundraiser! In addition to collecting cash donations for their own organization, CCP encouraged audience members to bring dona...

Little Shop of Horrors is the story of Seymour, a working-class guy with nothing to his name but a dead-end job in a failing flower shop. He finds an unusual plant that quickly changes his life, but the plant can only thrive when fed human blood. It seems like everything is within Seymour's reach — money, fame, a family, and even love ⁠— so long as he's willing to pay a price that gets steeper and steeper. This has always been one of my favorite shows because of the way it blends humor and horror. The story is dark enough that test audiences for the film adaptation got very upset ⁠— leading to an ending that is much more cheerful than the stage play's. But overall Little Shop has such a delightful camp energy, and such amazing music, that you might even find yourself rooting for the murderous plant. In 4 Community Theatre's recent production, Director Sharayah Bunce made some clever creative choices in the blocking, for example, playing some sequences in silhouette. She...