Whether you consider yourself an opera purist or know the form only from Bugs Bunny cartoons, Salome, running now through April 24 at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, may be the opera for you. “Obsession, served on a silver platter,” is how the Minnesota Opera is slyly marketing Strauss’s scandalous adaptation of the scandalous Bible story, in which John the Baptist, having refused the beautiful Salome’s advances, pays with his head.
It’s a swift running time of under two hours, filled with sweepingly melodic music as only Strauss could conjure, and full of, well, beautiful people lusting after each other. If you’re too old for a nightclub, this is as good a place as any to get a similar sensual buzz.
Mixed Blood Theatre wraps up its stellar season with a wrestling play—a ring literally forms the stage. “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Diety,” opening this weekend, takes the wrestling metaphor to comic heights in its look at racial struggles through the bloody eyes of a Puerto Rican “professional loser” in the ring. Ansa Akyea, City Pages’ best actor in 2007, plays the titular Chad Diety, an African-American champion.
Chris Koza’s new band, Rogue Valley, debuts the first of four seasonal albums it expects to put out this year in a big gig at the Fitzgerald Theatre on Saturday. Fans of Coach Said Not To and, more obscurely but delightfully Nate on Drums, will be pleased to know that cutie-pie bassist and singer Linnea Mohn has joined the band.
