Twin Cities Community Theater Beat

The children’s book The Little Prince , or Le Petit Prince , was first published in 1943, and has captivated audiences ever since. It is one of the most widely translated books in the world and has been adapted for theater, radio, television, and film. And yet somehow I managed to avoid ever reading or seeing it, until now. I imagine that the experience of seeing The Little Prince on stage is a little different for someone with a connection to the story from childhood; still, I came in with no nostalgia and found the story to be charming and to offer some profound messages about what it means to be an adult and to make connections with other people. The Little Prince takes place in the Sahara desert, where an aviator has crashed with only a limited supply of water.   While he attempts to fix his airplane, he is visited repeatedly by a little prince, who traveled to Earth from a little planet where he lived alone except for a rose. In his journeys, the prince met a numbe...

Steel Magnolias has always been a popular play, especially for community theaters. There’s the name recognition, assisted by the star-studded film adaptation of 1989. There’s the all-female cast, a blessing in any theater community. But most of all, Steel Magnolias is memorable because of the compelling emotional story and the fully realized characters who live it. The play drops in on the lives of six Louisiana women as they gather over and over again in a beauty salon. Each time, their lives are changed in big and small ways, but their bonds with each other give them strength to get through any difficulty. North Starz Center for the Performing Arts, as I understand, has previously focused on youth shows, and is now starting to branch out.   They picked a great show to start with not just because the play itself is good but also because it worked very nicely in this space.   Steel Magnolias was performed in a fairly small black box theater, and s...