9 Hot Picks: 5/6
You think you’re pretty special. After all, you’re one of the world’s finest violinists, a guy living in a tuxedo and bedding beautiful, smart socialites—a sort of musical James Bond. And you’re about to play the biggest gig of your life—the White House—when bam! The gossamer threads that held your string quartet together come undone, and now you need a new member, stat. You need Grace, in so many words: a gifted but inexperienced violist who threatens your sense of superiority but can play the heck out of Beethoven’s Opus 131—you hope. That’s where the story begins, anyway, in Opus at Park Square Theatre, a play by violinist-turned-writer Michael Hollinger. Starring Emily Gunyou Halaas as the girl who has to play with the big boys, it’s only marginally about music and mostly about the way we work—or don’t work—together. parksquaretheatre.org
| 5/1 | Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story—part biography, part rock concert—is back by popular demand at the History Theatre. historytheatre.com |
| 5/4 | Chamber-pop thrush Shara Worden joins the classically trained yMusic ensemble for new song cycles about love, war, and faith. southerntheater.org |
| 5/10 | From the director of Rent comes Next to Normal, another hit rock musical with similarly smart writing, to the Ordway Theater. ordway.org |
| 5/12 | Pillsbury House Theatre presents In the Red and Brown Water, about a young woman forced to choose between family and a better future, at the Guthrie’s Dowling Studio. guthrietheater.org |
| 5/12 | Steve Epp and Dominique Serrand return with The Flood, a new physical theatre piece. southerntheater.org |
| 5/20 | Hundreds of artists open their studios for the Art-A-Whirl art crawl in the Northeast Arts District of Minneapolis. nemaa.org |
| 5/20 | The Bad Plus premiere their latest, most ambitious interpretation: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for jazz trio. loringtheater.com |
| 5/23 | Bruce Cockburn, joined by hip violinist Jenny Scheinman, brings his musical activism to the Cedar Cultural Center. thecedar.com |
Candid Camera
Without photography, there would be no Brangelina. Norma Jean Mortenson might never have become Marilyn Monroe. And People might actually be a magazine about, well, people, not celebrities. Celebrity thrives on voyeurism, riding the line between private and public, and no one was going to drag an easel to the beach in the hopes of capturing an actress in a sexy bathing costume. In the Walker Art Center’s Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870, opening May 21, some 200 photographs by Man Ray, Helmut Newton, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, and other famous shooters demonstrate the ease with which photography has allowed us to infiltrate the forbidden, from secret lives to secret wars. walkerart.org
