theater

wall bricks

Rock Ballet

Yesterday we went to see Pink Floyd The Wall: A Rock Ballet presented by the Twin Cities Ballet Company. I am kind of a ballet snob so my expectations were not super high but I thought it might be interesting. The last time they performed this ballet they got some good reviews. The music was performed live by a local band as well (Momentary Lapse of Floyd).

The Fitzgerald Theater is a fairly small theater built in 1910 originally called  the Sam S. Shubert Theater. It has gone through several iterations and was renamed in 1994, after native son F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

The story of The Wall is kind of a sad one. The boy named Pink loses his father at a very young age and his mother becomes over protective, symbolized by bricks in a wall used to shelter him from the world. School is a bad experience with abusive teachers and it pushes him to drugs and it is down hill from there. 

The musicians were on a raised platform at the back of the stage and the dancers performed between them and the audience. The only ‘set’ were a bunch of large styrofoam painted ‘bricks’ that the dancers carried around with them and built walls.

I would say overall it was interesting and there were some good dance moves. I noticed early on that the whole dance troupe was white and mostly tall blond white. Yes, we are in Minnesota, Dorothy. The band was way too loud for the venue and made it uncomfortable. I wished I had earplugs. Maybe I’m just old but I sat with my fingers over my ears most of the time. And we left at intermission.

We went home and put The Wall on YouTube and Don performed interpretive dance around the living room. Very entertaining.

Then we drove to Como Lake and took some pictures.

It is snowing again, of course. have a good week!

Theater in the Twin Cities

The Orpheum Theater opened in downtown Minneapolis in 1921. It was designed after the Beaux Arts style and seats about 2,500 people. The first performers included the Marx Brothers, Jack Benny and Fanny Brice. In the 1940’s it became a major cinema theater. Over the next thirty years it showed movies and touring productions such as My Fair Lady and Fiddler on the Roof. It became run down and eventually closed.

Bob Dylan and his brother David purchased it as an investment in 1979. They gave it a light facelift and then brought A Chorus Line to be the opening show. In 1988 they sold it to the Minneapolis Community Development Agency who spent $10 million to restore the theater. It re-opened in 1993 and in 2005 it was transferred to the Hennepin Theatre Trust.

During the renovation they found some gems including six Pompeiian friezes that had been hidden under fake window grids and a false wall. The chandelier that dominates the main auditorium is 15 feet high and weighs 2,000 pounds. Today the Orpheum shows theater productions and concerts.

IMG_4079-300x300[1]The hallway ceiling at the Orpheum We went to the Orpheum recently to see the Book of Mormon, a funny musical written by Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park fame. It irreverently pokes fun at the young Mormons who are sent out into the world to proselytize without really knowing anything about the places they are being sent to. This particular group ends up in Africa and is faced with war lords, aids and female circumcision.

It has some dark moments as most satire does but everything turns out okay in the end and lessons are learned. During one scene a missionary has a dream about Hell and my favorite part are the two dancing Starbucks coffee cups.

The following week we saw something very different.

Continue reading here

Alien Citizen – An Earth Odyssey
alienheader

Re-posting from Eclectic Global Nomad – read about Lisa’s one woman show….

By the time I was 18, I had only lived in the United States for a total of three years. When I started college in California, I experienced severe “reverse” culture shock.  At the time I had no way of understanding it or preparing for it.  Because I had grown up overseas, I had a completely different experience than American kids my age.

When I arrived for my freshman year in college, I talked about traveling around Europe, hiking up Swiss mountains, and living in Africa. My college peers talked about football games, high school proms and television shows I had never heard of.  I could not relate to them at all and they thought I was bragging about all the places I had been.  It never occurred to me they would think that; to me my life was ordinary.  To them I was like an alien landing in their dorm room and talking about visiting the rings of Saturn.

It wasn’t until I was in my 40’s, married, and living with my son and husband in Moscow, that I discovered a group called Global Nomads. Global Nomads are also called Third Culture Kids (TCK’s). The definition of a TCK is someone who grew up in countries other than their passport-country due to their parents’ jobs. I spent my whole life thinking there was something wrong with me and the founder of the group, Norma McCaig, described me in a detail nobody could have known.  McCaig felt everything I felt.  She had the same experiences I had.  I didn’t think there was another person on earth who understood how I felt.  It was truly my “ah ha” moment.

Years later I returned to the US and met Norma McCaig. Through her I learned about an organization that was just getting started called Families in Global Transition (FIGT). This organization, now 15 years old,  “promotes the positive value of the international experience, and empowers the family unit and those who serve it before, during and after international transitions.
 FIGT believes in the capacity of the expatriate and repatriate family to transition successfully, and to leverage the international experience for all of its human and global potential.” (www.figt.org)

– Continue reading at: Eclectic Global Nomad

 

NOTE:  the MIT venue has changed to a classroom: #6-120, and it’s at 7pm.