Item World: Singing her heart out

The Minnesota Opera’s excellent “Roberto Devereux” provided a lot of intense moments Tuesday — and not just during the show. When soprano Brenda Harris, who played Queen Elizabeth I, came out for a well-deserved bow, she appeared thoroughly wrung out from Elizabeth’s bitter closing lament over royal responsibilities and the death of crush Devereux, played by handsome tenor Bruno Ribeiro. I.W. was relieved that Harris had perked up by the standing ovation’s end.

MARCI SCHMITT

Mason Jennings earned the Twin Cities version of a papal blessing by having Prince show up during Jennings’ set at the Current’s fifth anniversary party — his first appearance at the club since his 7/7/07 gig there. He hung out in the owner’s box/DJ booth long enough to play a little (acoustic) air-guitar along to Jennings, and to usher in Current program director Jim McGuinn for a chat. “Half my brain was having a semi-normal conversation at a rock show with another music fan, while the other half of my brain was going, ‘Oh, man, I’m chatting with Prince!’” said McGuinn. None of the bands pulled out a Prince tune, but many other cover songs filled up the sets: Jennings sang one apiece by the Boss (“Atlantic City”) and Satchmo (“A Kiss to Build a Dream On”), and Solid Gold tried out three: The Stone Roses’ “I Wanna Be Adored,” Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” (featured on their new EP) and the Dandy Warhols’ “Minnesoter.” Kinda reads like a Mary Lucia playlist.

CHRIS RIEMENSCHNEIDER

He hasn’t lived here for 20 years, but Tom Arnold loves talking about the Twin Cities. In a phone interview from his Beverly Hills home last week, the comedian talked for an hour about partying hard and working odd jobs during the 1980s (hard to imagine, but he said he was “a bartender/bouncer/whatever” at William’s Uptown Pub). He also doled out such nuggets of wisdom as: “If you have five or six good friends in life that will bail you out of jail naked, you’re doing pretty good.” Read the rest of the interview in Sunday’s A&E section, which will preview his Feb. 12-13 shows at the Comedy Gallery in St. Paul.

TOM HORGEN

Back from his new home in Mexico to play a few solo acoustic concerts, Martin Zellar got gabby. At the Maplewood Community Center, he told about an unexpected encounter at Rosedale with Smokey, the driver immortalized by Zellar in the Gear Daddies' “Zamboni.” The singer/songwriter explained that he was apprehensive about what Smokey, a trailer-park-type character in Austin, Minn., might do to him. But the Zamboni man blurted: “Zellar, you don’t know how many times that song got me laid.”

The sharp divide between fans of Son Volt and Death Cab for Cutie was underlined right away during Sunday’s Varsity Theater gig by the bands’ singers, Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard. One young woman yelled out, “We love you, Ben!” A few men in the crowd gruffly yelled back, “We love you, Jay!” While the two (lovable) frontmen spent the night singing about the Big Sur and San Francisco area, they did not forget their immediate surroundings on the last night of their tour behind the Jack Kerouac-derived album, “One Fast Move or I’m Gone.” Farrar, with a rare hint of glee, said: “We finally made it to Dinkytown. Bob Dylan was probably sitting around some frat house here, reading Kerouac." The duo and their band later encored with Dylan’s “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” a perfect postscript to an absolutely sweet performance.

CHRIS RIEMENSCHNEIDER

“A New Literary History of America,” edited by rock critic Greil Marcus and German scholar Werner Sollors, is as heavy as two Bibles, and almost as intimidating. With its “All Things Connected” scope, the anthology maps history through essays by the likes of novelists Walter Mosley and Mary Gaitskill and poet Paul Muldoon, taking on everyone from conquistadors to hermit geniuses. Whichever cultural artifact makes you tick will likely be illuminated somewhere in the tome’s 1,104 pages. Marcus will speak about the book at the Weisman Art Museum at 6:30 p.m. Monday in a dialogue with U of M profs (and “NLHA” contributors) David Treuer, Paula Rabinowitz and Michael Gaudio. The event is free, but the book sells for $49.95.