"Man of La Mancha" by Mounds View Community Theatre at Chippewa Middle School

This is my annual PSA to support your local community theater! Especially if one of your favorite #TCTheater director/choreographers is involved. I'm lucky enough that Joe Chvala (founder of the dance company Flying Foot Forum) is directing and choreographing a production for Mounds View Community Theatre for the second time (after helming a delightful H.M.S. Pinnafore two years ago). This Man of La Mancha, playing at a middle school a mile from my house, is as good as what I see on professional stages around town. Of course there's fantastic dancing in Joe's trademark rhythmic percussive style, but he's also assembled a really talented cast, most of them unknown to me, with impressive set design, all of which combines for an all around funny, engaging, and inspiring show. This story of the idealistic noble knight fighting injustice in the world is one that we always need to hear.

"Man of La Mancha" by Theater Latte Da at the Ritz Theater

Theater Latte Da (which I would say were my favorite theater company, if I as an impartial theater blogger had favorites) is opening their 20th season of doing theater musically with Man of La Mancha, a 400-year-old story beloved in musical and many other forms. At its core this is a story about optimism and hope, about seeing the good in people and the world, even when everything you see and everyone you meet tells you otherwise. It's about clinging to and fighting for ideals of chivalry, decency, and honor in the face of evil and corruption. In other words, it may be exactly the story that this world, and this country in particular, needs right now. As usual, Theater Latte Da puts its own unique re-imagined spin on the 1964 classic that heightens the relevance of the piece. An incredibly talented and beautifully diverse cast about half the usual size for this musical, a small but powerful four-piece orchestra, and a modern twist to the play-within-a-play structure make this Man of La Mancha an inspiring, moving, and engaging piece of theater musically, just as I have come to expect from Theater Latte Da.

My Favorite Shows of the First Half of 2011

I’ve seen more than 30 local theater productions by almost 20 different theater companies so far in 2011. Now that the year is half over, I thought I’d reminisce about a few of my favorites.

[title of show], Yellow Tree Theatre
My favorite little theater in the ‘burbs produced this hilarious four-person musical about musicals, which was the perfect fit for their small intimate space (“four chairs and a keyboard”). This piece is like a love letter to musical theater, and the soundtrack is so much fun to listen to. The fantastic cast was obviously having just as good a time as the audience was. I also have to thank Yellow Tree for introducing me to the music of Blake Thomas in their production of Our Town. Check him out if you like real, original, authentic country music.

Cabaret, Frank Theatre
I love Cabaret; it can simultaneously make you laugh and break your heart. Starring Bradley Greenwald as the emcee and original Broadway cast member Melissa Hart as Fraulein Schneider, as well as a talented and diverse ensemble, this production by previously unknown-to-me Frank Theatre did just that. And it also introduced me to the perfectly lovely little theater on the Minnesota Centennial Showboat.

Heaven, Flying Foot Forum
This show gives me hope for the future of musical theater. In a time when it seems like just about every “new” musical on Broadway is a jukebox musical or tired adaptation, Joe Chvala and the Flying Foot Forum created an original piece that’s moving and entertaining, and everything musical theater should be. Tackling a subject one wouldn’t normally think of for a musical (although I believe no topic is off limits for musical theater), Heaven tells the story about an American war photographer in Bosnia.  Repeating what I said in my original post, “Original musical theater that uses music and movement to tell an interesting, relevant, meaningful, entertaining story, and to help us make sense of the world we live in. That's what musical theater can, and should, do. And when that happens, there's nothing better.”

Man of La Mancha, Ten Thousand Things
I’m pretty sure that Ten Thousand Things will always have a place on any “best of” list I write because of their sparse, intense, stripped-to-the-bone productions with nothing getting in the way of the pure talent of the performers. They produced two amazing shows this year but I decided on Man of La Mancha for this list (even though Doubt, A Parable, featuring Sally Wingert and Kris Nelson and directed by Peter Rothstein, was also brilliant). Silly, profound, inspirational, and featuring an amazing cast led by the crazy brilliant Steven Epp as Don Quixote, the man with an impossible dream, I hope that it meant as much to the “non-traditional” audiences that were privileged to experience it as it did to me.

I was originally planning to list my six favorites of the last six months, but after the above four I couldn’t decide among the many other shows I loved. So I’ll just briefly list a few more:

• Mixed Blood Theatre’s production of another one of my faves, Avenue Q, was joyous and perfectly cast.

• Mu Performing Arts brought fresh life to Little Shop of Horrors, and not because it featured an all Asian American cast. The plant was a slinky, sultry woman!

• I saw my first August Wilson play this year, Penumbra’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom at the Guthrie, and I can’t wait to see more of his ten-play cycle on African American life in the last century.

• Peter Rothstein and Dan Chouinard’s original theater/concert piece Steerage Song featured a super talented cast of singers, musicians, and actors, and reminded us all of our immigrant past.

• 7-Shot Symphony, an delightfully original piece of “physical theater” by Live Action Set, was a combination of a Western and classical myths, and also featured a yodeling love song!

• The Moving Company’s Come Hell and High Water (featuring Steven Epp again), was inventive, surprising, moving, and all wet. 

• My two favorite Guthrie shows so far this year are the darkly hilarious God of Carnage and the extravagant musical H.M.S. Pinafore (which I get to see again later this month!).

Those are some of the highlights among the amazing local theater productions I've seen in 2011 so far.  My two favorites among the touring productions were both shows I had seen twice on Broadway, and both tours featured members of the original Broadway casts: the American tribal love-rock musical HAIR, and the brilliant Next to Normal.

Here's hoping the second half of 2011 is even better!

"Man of La Mancha" by Ten Thousand Things at Minnesota Opera Center

I failed in my quest today - my quest to find a pair of yellow shoes.  But if I learned anything from Don Quixote, it's that it doesn't matter if you fail in your quest, it only matters that you have a quest and continue to strive for it no matter what obstacles you encounter.  There's nobility and grace in that.  So even though I may never find the perfect pair of yellow pumps, I'll continue to search for them.

That's kind of a silly analogy, but Ten Thousand Things' Man of La Mancha is kind of silly.  And I mean that as the highest compliment.  It's playful and profound at the same time.  The play-within-a-play set in a prison seems like a perfect choice for Ten Thousand Things, considering a large part of their work is performing in prisons.  I imagine it has a different sort of poignancy in those locations than it did in the spacious room at the Minnesota Opera Center where I saw it.

Man of La Mancha is a musical based on Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes's seventeenth century novel Don Quixote.  Cervantes is the main character in the piece, a poet who, after being thrown in prison, pleads his case to the other prisoners by telling the story of a crazy old man who thinks he's a knight named Don Quixote.  Cervantes and his servant act out the story, and the other prisoners also play roles, at first reluctantly, and then enthusiastically.  Steven Epp (whom I last saw in The Homecoming in Baltimore) is crazy brilliant as the mild-mannered poet who transforms into the charmingly insane knight.  His version of the signature song, "To Dream the Impossible Dream," is different than you've ever heard it.  It starts off as a vulnerable, unsure, almost whispered idea of a dream, and grows into the strong confident voice of a man fighting against all odds.  It brought tears to my eyes.

Cervantes' servant and Quixote's squire Sancho Panza (whom Quixote calls Tonto, Santa, and various other names in a running gag throughout the show) is played by Luverne Siefert.  I've seen Luverne in a few different productions over the last year, and I've come to believe he's a true clown, in the best sense of the word.  He can take a simple throwaway line and turn it into the funniest joke, just through his line delivery or the expression on his face or way he moves across the stage (or in this case, floor).  He's truly a delight to watch.  Regina Marie Williams (who was also in TTT's recent production of Doubt) plays the prostitute Aldonza whom Don Quixote sees as the beautiful lady Dulcinea.  This is a woman who lives a hard life with no beauty in it, and because of the way this man speaks to her and treats her, she begins to believe in herself and the world again.  Rounding out the cast and playing multiple roles are Tracey Maloney, Matt Guidry, and T. Mychael Rambo (who lets his amazing voice ring out a few times during the show).  It's so much fun to watch this cast work together and with the audience.  Since the show is performed in the same style as it is on location, the lights are up, so the actors frequently look at the audience and make side comments.  At one point Quixote grabbed someone's program to make a dagger to fight with, and Steven handed part of it back saying, "my bio's in there."  I was sitting in the front row very close to the action; I was afraid someone was going to end up in my lap!  One of the beautiful things about watching a Ten Thousand Things production is that it's so intimate and immediate, you really feel like a part of the show.  It's almost like watching the neighborhood kids put on a show in the basement, if only your neighborhood were populated with the most talented actors, directors, and musicians in the Twin Cities.

In typical Ten Thousand Things style, the music is less of a focus than in the typical production of a musical, focusing instead on the story, in which conversations morph into songs and back into speaking.  That's not to say that the music and sounds (by Music Director Peter Vitale and Michael Pearce Donley) are not lovely, but it's not the lush musical sound you might expect from a musical.  The props all come out of Cervantes' box and include a muffin tin for armor, brooms for horses and/or lances, and a metal bowl as a helmet.  It's sort of a double suspension of disbelief, as the prisoners make do with what they have to tell the story, and we as an audience go right there with them.  It's a truly magical transformation.

Don Quixote is only defeated when forced to look into a mirror and face reality.  All of his noble dreams fall away and he's just a simple, sick, old man again.  But that spark is still in there, as at the end of his life he remembers.  Don Quixote sees life as it could be, not as it is.  Because sometimes "too much sanity is madness," which I think was never more true than it is today.  I rarely watch the news because it's overwhelming and depressing to focus on all that is wrong with the world.  The world of Don Quixote is a much nicer place to be, at least for 90 minutes on a Sunday afternoon.  The show is playing for two more weekends, check it out if you want to escape from reality for a little while and be taken on a wonderful journey.