Global Search

entertainment

Welcome to Artcetera. Arts-and-entertainment writers and critics post movie news, concert updates, people items, video, photos and more. Share your views. Check it daily. Remain in the know. Contributors: Mary Abbe, Jon Bream, Tim Campbell, Colin Covert, Laurie Hertzel, Tom Horgen, Neal Justin, Claude Peck, Rohan Preston, Chris Riemenschneider, Graydon Royce, Randy Salas and Kristin Tillotson.

Posts about Red hot

William Shatner coming to the Orpheum

Posted by: Rohan Preston Updated: January 25, 2012 - 2:50 PM

  • share

    email

 

 

As soon as he closes the three-week Broadway run of "Shatner's World: We Just Live in It," screen star William Shatner will bring his one-man stage show to the Twin Cities. 

The two-hour show is a stage autobiography of a Shakespearean actor known mostly for playing Captain Kirk on "Star Trek" and, later, being a spokesman for Priceline.com. His TV credits also include "Boston Legal" and "T.J. Hooker." Shatner, 80, has been in show business for more than half-a-century.

"Shatner's World" plays the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis on March 15.

Tickets, which range from $59-$79, go on sale Feb. 3. 1-800-982-2787.

Local girl Laura Osnes is the toast of Broadway

Posted by: Rohan Preston Updated: December 2, 2011 - 8:20 AM

  • share

    email

 


 

Laura Osnes and co-star Jeremy Jordan in "Bonnie & Clyde." Photo by Nathan Johnson.

 

 

Eagan High School graduate Laura Osnes has her name in Broadway's big lights again.

The Children's Theatre alumna is starring in "Bonnie & Clyde," which opened Thursday in New York. The response to her title performance as Bonnie has been mostly enthusiastic, even if this new musical by composer Frank Wildhorn and lyricist Don Black is almost universally disliked.

The critic for the New York Post  panned the show but praised Osnes, "who makes this dime store poetry sound like a million bucks."

The Associated Press called her "a stone-cold fox cradling a shotgun."

The New York Daily News calls Osnes "criminally talented."

She gets a cooler reception in the New York Times, which thinks that she is miscast: "Ms. Osnes is a lovely young woman of fashion-model proportions and an instinctive, accessible elegance that reads Ingénue...I don’t think ingénue was what Bonnie Parker was about. Ms. Osnes brings to mind a Bennington girl slumming with rough trade on her semester off."

 

 

Penumbra extends "Love"

Posted by: Rohan Preston Updated: November 22, 2011 - 1:22 PM

  • share

    email

 


 

Photo by Michal Daniel.

 

Apparently, audiences cannot get enough of Dennis Spears as Nat King Cole in "I Wish You Love."

The tuner by Dominic Taylor about Cole, the pioneering singer and TV host, has been extended at Penumbra Theatre in St Paul, where its revival opened over the weekend. The show has added 14 performances and will now close Dec. 18.

Directed smoothly by Penumbra founder Lou Bellamy, "Love" stars Dennis Spears in a portrayal of cool totality. The show played Penumbra earlier this spring but was unable to extend to meet demand because of scheduled engagements at Washington's Kennedy Center and at the Hartford (Conn.) Stage.

It was hurried added to the schedule and has since been revised, with two songs cut and the lead character filled out a little more.

The cast also includes Michael Tezla as a news anchor and network TV official and Kevin D. West as a smooth bass-player.

"Young Adult" is "Juno's" wicked step sister.

Posted by: Colin Covert Updated: November 4, 2011 - 5:46 PM

  • share

    email

On Oct. 19, the Landmark Edina Cinema was the site  of the first U.S. audience screening of  "Young Adult," the new collaboration from the "Juno" team of director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody. The much-anticipated new film (which is set in Minnesota, like its rpedecessor, and shot a few scenes here) shares some stylistic notes with their earlier effort. It features a pop-saturated soundtrack, a woman-child stuck between adolescence and adulthood, and a droll appreciation of daily life in suburbia. Yet it's a step in a new direction, both for the creative team and for movies, a mature and humane comedy centered on a misanthropic female antihero.

Think of it as "Juno's" wicked step sister.

Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gary, a divorced writer (or as she prefers it, "author") of "Sweet Valley High"-style teen novels. Though she's in her thirties, Mavis never really graduated high school. Her Mineapolis high rise apartment has the depressing, slumlike impermanence of a crash pad. Her social life consists of one-night hookups and lunches spent belittling former acquaintances with a catty former classmate who fled Mercury, Minn. for the big city. At once haughty and insecure, Mavis is a textbook case of arrested development. To top it off, she's still obsessed with her former high school sweetheart, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson). Her fixation flares when Buddy's wife emails her an announcement welcoming their newborn child.

Mavis launches a mission to rescue Buddy from the bondage of family life, heedless of the fact that he's utterly content as a new dad. Equipped with an armory of makeup brushes, falsies and lethal little black dresses, she travels back to her hometown to reclaim her man. The comedy of awkwardness is honed to a knife edge as two-faced Mavis seductively wheedles Buddy at a plaid shirt sports bar. In her slinky cocktail attire she's as out of place as a black widow on a slice of apple pie.

Looking on mockingly is Matt (Patton Oswalt), a wisecracking former classmate of Mavis and Buddy's. Though he's physically disabled from a brutal high school bullying attack, he's better adjusted than Mavis. As she pursues her romantic delusion to its bleak conclusion, the two misfits strike up an unlikely friendship. In Matt, Mavis discovers the one confidant who might have saved her from terminal self-absorbtion when she was still young enough to change.

Edgy, subversive and hilariously embarrassing, "Young Adult" undercuts the conventions of female-centered comedies at each turn. It manages to keep us invested in the story despite focusing almost every scene on a thoroughly unpleasant protagonist. The supporting characters provide the homespun humanity Mavis lacks, especially Wilson as the bland new papa and Elizabeth Reaser as his funloving wife.

Theron delivers a brave, darkly amusing performance as a one-time alpha female realizing that life is passing her by. In her scenes with Oswalt, Theron drops her character's mask of mean girl poise, revealing the fear, loneliness and confusion beneath. "Young Adult's" skepticism that Mavis can fan these flickers of self-awareness into a flame of understanding is a guage of its sophistication. Cody and Reitman would rather close their film on a lifelike, unresolved note than force its characters into a contrived happy ending. Audiences may not embrace Mavis immediately -- she's too spiky for that. But there's little doubt that in time she'll join Marge Gunderson and Juno McGuff as one of Minnesota's enduring and iconic film characters.

"Young Adult" opens Dec. 9.

'Cavalia' run extended

Posted by: Rohan Preston Updated: September 25, 2011 - 1:05 PM

  • share

    email

 


 Star Tribune photo by Tom Wallace.

"Cavalia," the mythic equestrian and human extravaganza that opened last week west of Minneapolis, has extended its run.

The show of iconic, dreamlike vignettes, stately dressage and daring acrobatics has added another week of performances under the big tent near the Shops at the West End at highways 394 and 100 in Saint Louis Park.

"Cavalia" will now close Oct. 16.

Created by Cirque du Soleil co-founder Normand Latourelle, the production has been a hot seller since opening last week in the Twin Cities. Scalpers have been charging several times the face value of tickets, which range from $64.50-$189.50 plus fees.

"Cavalia" will travel to China.

For more info, visit the Montreal-based troupe's web site, or call 1-866-999-8111.

 

inside the StarTribune