"Sweet Charity" at Artistry

Artistry is beginning their 2025 season in a similar fashion as their fantastic 2024 season: a classic musical staged almost like a concert with a full orchestra on stage, and fabulous dancing in front of it. The 1966 Broadway musical Sweet Charity, adapted into a movie in 1969 starring Shirley MacLaine, is an excellent choice for this type of treatment; it almost feels like a series of vignettes about a NYC dance hall hostess in the '60s, rather than one continuous story with beginning, middle, and end. The strengths of this Bob Fosse show truly are the music and dancing, with a story about a "dance hall girl" looking for love in all the wrong places and continually being rejected that feels a little dated. So why not put the focus on the music, dancing, and performances of this terrific cast? The result is an absolutely smashing production that soars with one big music-and-dance number after another. Sweet Charity continues at the Bloomington Center for the Arts through February 16.

Minnesota Fringe Festival 2024: "Hugo and Maeve Join A Cult!"

Day: 3

Show: 6

Title: Hugo and Maeve Join A Cult!

Category: Comedy / Horror

By: Alex Stokes / Sky Blue Productions

Created by: Brendan Nelson Finn, Abilene Olson, and Alex Stokes

Location: Bryant Lake Bowl

Summary: Twenty-something friends Hugo and Maeve are seduced by chocolate into joining an Oompa Loompa cult in the bowels of the Mall of America.

Highlights: This is just good fringey fun. Liberally sprinkled with Minnesota references, cult references, and Roald Dahl references, it tells the story of these two friends who go to the mall for some Bubba Gump Shrimp and end up in wigs and cloaks, running for their lives. Exhausted from the forced labor of shrimp farming next to the Rainforest Cafe, they find an empty room and livestream their story in the hopes that someone will rescue them. They tell us the bizarre details of their cult, which really are no more bizarre than the real cults they bring to mind (NXIVM, Scientology, Heaven's Gate). Created and directed by Alex Stokes and performed by Abilene Olson and Brendan Nelson Finn (winner of the 2023 TCTB Award for best comedic performance), you're in good hands - these folks know funny. There's a bit of horror, and a fun voiceover cameo, but mostly it's just these two loveable idiots lamenting their fate. It's a short one at about 40 minutes, and I would have happily spent another 10 or 15 minutes with Hugo and Maeve in the basement of the Mall of America.

Read all of my Fringe mini-reviews here.