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...

If you’ve followed this blog from the beginning, you’ll know that Big Fish has not always been at the top of my list.   It took a few tries before it won me over–although I still have a few details I would like to change in the script (wouldn't “I Don’t Need a Roof” make more sense if Sandra were actually at risk of not having a roof??).   But I can appreciate now that this musical has a strong emotional core in the relationship between tall-tale-teller Edward Bloom and his cautious son Will, who’s eager to find out the truth about his father’s life before he himself becomes a father. Good Works Community Theater began rehearsals for Big Fish in 2020 and after multiple rescheduling attempts were finally able to perform this month at Wayzata Community Church.   The show was free to attend, with volunteers accepting donations for the theater group and for the non-profit organization World Central Kitchen.   The performance I attended was the Saturday matinee, which ...

Note: this post contains spoilers. If you want to go in fresh, save this review until after you have seen the show! *** In 1902, a baby in a suitcase was thrown off of a train in Eastern Missouri. He was bruised but not badly hurt, and he was quickly found and adopted - and quickly became famous. He lived a full life with his adopted family, but the mystery of why he was thrown off of the train, and who did it, was never solved.  Bright Star , the musical (loosely) based on this story, imagines a happier resolution than real life. In this version, written by Steve Martin and musician Edie Brickell, the story is set in North Carolina and alternates between the 1920s and the 1940s —t hese changes are presumably made to be a better showcase for Martin and Brickell's bluegrass soundtrack (and they do allow for a little more fun in other production aspects, like the costumes and choreography ). With the two timelines, we meet Alice Murphy quickly as both a young woman stifled by her sma...

The Marvelous Wonderettes is a jukebox musical in which four young women sing pop hits of the fifties and sixties. In the first act, they are performing at their 1958 senior prom, and in the second, they are back to sing at their 10-year reunion. The first act is often silly, as  their teen romances and rivalries sometimes conflict with their desire to put on a polished show. The second act, aided by the more soulful pop music sound of 1968, digs deeper into the characters and how their lives have been complicated since high school. This show reminded me of Nunsense  because of its small cast and interactions with the band and the audience, but the shows also have sequels in common, although The Marvelous Wonderettes only has three to Nunsense 's six. Cross Community Players returned to live theater last summer with a big outdoor production of Mamma Mia , but chose a smaller show for its first COVID-era indoor show, a very reasonable choice after the canceled performances that...

  Welcome to Part 3 of my year-in-review!   Part 1 is here  (link) and Part 2 is here (link) . In Part 2, I told you about Broadway shows that I think should be performed again, by community theater groups.   In this section, I’ll tell you about the shows that I think are worth revisiting just to listen to and appreciate.   Many of them are available to be performed, but for various reasons they didn’t make my previous list.  Again, each musical is listed with the year of its Broadway debut, the organization who holds licensing rights, and information about the musical.  Most of the musicals have recordings on Spotify, and for the others I have provided links to recordings that others in the Broadway 2 A Day community have found.    ***   1. Shinbone Alley 1957, Music Theatre International (under the title archy & mehitabel ) Synopsis: A cockroach writes a newspaper column about his life and about his love, a wayward all...

Welcome to Part 2 of my year-in-review!  Part 1 is here . In this post, I will be telling you about the Broadway shows I came across in 2021 that I think are somewhat or completely unknown but have a lot of potential for the local community theatre stage. Some of the questions that I thought about when selecting shows included: Is the music good?  Does the story still hold up today?  Would audiences want to come see it?  Is it feasible for the limits of community theater?  (For example, Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark  would definitely be a NO on that last question.)  Could I see a local community theater group succeeding at putting on this show? [The fact is, I've seen shows from a lot of local groups in the past several years.  I haven't seen a lot of racial diversity.  The reasons are complex, and I know that some people are actively working on attracting and keeping diverse talent, but in the meantime, I don't know any community theater ...