'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' surprise
Playwright Todd Kreidler's update of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," the 1967 film about interracial romance, had a fraught, unexpected showstopper in April at the Guthrie. The moment came out of the tension between Tillie (Regina Marie Williams), who is overprotective about the white family she works for, and Mary Prentice (Greta Oglesby), mother of the bride-to-be. They had been eyeing each other with suspicion, but when they began to sing, their voices blending gorgeously, all the enmity melted away.
Rohan Preston, theater critic
Five heavenly minutes with Bach
The time is November, the music Bach's "St. John Passion." In a St. Paul Chamber Orchestra performance, English countertenor Tim Mead stood up to sing "Es ist vollbracht," an aria marking the moment of Christ's crucifixion. His mellifluous, compassionate vocalism freeze-framed time, beautifully interlacing with Beiliang Zhu's sinuous viola da gamba solo. The difference between "performing" music and actually living it seemed encapsulated in those five unforgettable minutes.
Terry Blain, classical critic
Rediscovering Aretha Franklin
Even though we knew she was ill, Franklin's death hit me harder than expected. I flashed back on Aretha moments in my life: her canceling a Minneapolis Armory show in 1968 after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. died; all the times I saw her in concert; my 1996 interview with her. Writing two pieces about her the day she died was reassuringly heartwarming and overwhelmingly emotional. Then for weeks I scoured YouTube and listened to SiriusXM's Aretha channel, revisiting the greatest singer of the rock generation.
Jon Bream, music critic
Davu Seru's 'Dead King Mother'
Grabbing a firm hold on two "third rail" issues, race and gun violence, the Twin Cities drummer/composer exhumed a 50-year-old piece of fraught family history. The evening the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Seru's uncle grabbed a pistol, walked out of his home on Minneapolis' North Side and gunned down a white neighbor. At the Feb. 23 premiere, vocalist Sarah Greer wailed in lament over a seven-piece band as relatives of the two men — one life lost, the other altered forever — watched from the front row.
Tim Campbell, senior arts editor
Laughing, crying with 'Nanette'
I laughed. I wept. I cursed at the screen like it was a Vikings-Packers game. Watching Hannah Gadsby's feminist manifesto — err, Netflix comedy special — was emotionally cathartic and intellectually thrilling. The Australian comic serves up art history lessons and wicked burns (I especially loved the one for men who call women "too sensitive"). What makes the show superlative, though, is the finale: a meta take on stand-up and gender that reveals Gadsby's genius as a rhetorician.