Local girl Laura Osnes is the toast of Broadway

The Eagan High School graduate gets much praise for playing Bonnie in "Bonnie & Clyde"

By Ro Preston

December 2, 2011 at 2:20PM
(The Minnesota Star Tribune)
(The Minnesota Star Tribune)

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."

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Ro Preston