Leon Russell is usually not talkative in concert but on Tuesday at the Dakota he was downright loquacious. He talked about Minnesota's biggest musical heroes -- Prince ("one of the greatest performers of a generation") and Bob Dylan. The story the piano man had heard about Prince was that he had 20 tailors on staff. "That guy's serious about show business," Russell said. "I have a roadie and a bus driver." The story Russell had heard about Dylan was how during the "Nashville Skyline" sessions, the bard wrote songs while listening to the playback of the previous song. So Russell asked Dylan to show him how to write like that. "He was walking around with an envelope and wrote 'Watching the River Flow' and "When I Paint My Masterpiece.'" Russell recalled of that day in L.A. "He wasn't much for spilling the beans. But he told me everything I wanted to know about show business, life and all that stuff." -JON BREAM
'Hype' going national
Dominic Taylor is going where August Wilson, Wendy Wasserstein and a host of great playwrights have gone before. Taylor's new play, "Hype Hero (King Patch)," has been selected for the 2012 National Playwriting Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., in July. A satire, "Hype Hero" is set in a fictional American city that looks like Newark. In this milieu, there are only three types of people: debtors who wear patches, indicating the corporations that have bought their debts and thus own them; people who wear badges and are employed; and celebrities, who do not need to wear any identification. Taylor wrote "Hype Hero" in 1997, and put it away in a drawer. "Out of habit, I submit a play to the O'Neill and Sundance every year, not really expecting anything," said Taylor, an associate artistic director at Penumbra Theatre. "You never know what a committee is looking for." -ROHAN PRESTON
A real-life Cinderella
The Twin Cities are starting to look like fairytale heaven. Producers of the first-ever Broadway production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Cinderella" cast Eagan High School graduate Laura Osnes and Santino Fontana, a graduate of the University of Minnesota/Guthrie Theater BFA program, as the Cinderella and her Prince, according to Playbill and the New York Times. Osnes has headlined "Bonnie & Clyde" and "South Pacific" on Broadway. Fontana's Broadway credits include "Billy Elliot" and "The Importance of Being Earnest." The musical, a re-imagining of the 1957 TV version, is to be staged sometime in the 2012-2013 season by veteran director Mark Brokaw ("Cry-Baby") with a new book by Douglas Carter Beane. -ROHAN PRESTON
Lost in translation
Our modern techno-abbreviations are efficient and all, but sometimes they can leave a person in suspense. Mara Hvistendahl, author of "Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men," lives in Shanghai, from where she covers science news and features across Asia for Science magazine. The native of Northfield turned on her cellphone Monday to find a message congratulating her on being a finalist "for the P." "I went and made coffee, the whole time thinking, surely not that 'P,'" she told I.W. via e-mail. "Then my mom called. I figured, OK it's that P" -- as in Pulitzer Prize, in the nonfiction category. Hvistendahl's book explores the disturbing numbers of parents in China, India, parts of Eastern Europe and elsewhere who are self-selecting only boy children, and the eventual results (a shortage of potential brides is already a reality in some countries). -LAURIE HERTZEL
A fun. time for dads
