Among the spectacles at the Minnesota State Fair: Giant hogs, giant pumpkins, giant people, you can now add Cluckeoke, karoake with clucking instead of singing. On Friday at 1 p.m. you can watch the finals at Gold’n Plump’s booth on Cooper Street, on the east side of the food building. Expect arm flapping, butt-shaking, farm implements as instruments, and plenty of yuks, er, clucks.
On Saturday, the Soap Factory continues its recent streak of intriguing events with the opening reception for The Austerity Cookbook, an exhibition indeed inspired by a vintage cookbook full of recipes for hard times. The art ranges from an apocalyptic landscape to dust-streaked wallpaper to miniature barricades–visions of the current crisis.
Also on Saturday, Theatre Mu opens a new season at Mixed Blood Theatre with rising Guthrie Theater star Randy Reyes in the lead role of The Romance of Magno Rubio, the story of Filipino farm workers in the 1930s.
Sunday marks the start of the last five add-on performances of Ella at the Guthrie. The show, essentially a musical revue of Ella Fitzgerald hits, suffers a bit from pedestrian plotting and the sense that jazz music shouldn’t be scripted (you just want the performers to bust out and jam, but that wouldn’t fit the format). Yet the show is marvel to hear and look at, as the set draws the audience into a vintage club atmosphere–complete with disco ball, at one point–and the musicians are top-notch, even if you have to wait until the encore to really hear them cut loose.
