Minnesota Fringe Festival 2022: "Cowboy Cat: the musical!"

Day: 7

Show: 22

Title: Cowboy Cat: the musical!

Category: COMEDY / MUSICAL THEATER / HISTORICAL CONTENT / KID FRIENDLY

By: Foxhill Studios

Created by: JL Charrier

Location: Mixed Blood Theatre

Summary: A musical western set in a cat-loving town in a land known as Wyomesota.

Highlights: This was actually my least favorite show in the festival (something has to be!). A clever concept (a cat ranch in the old west) and a valiant effort, but it didn't quite come together. There were too many plot threads dropped - the show opens with a cat burglary and the audience finds out who the cat burglar is (which doesn't really make sense) but the characters don't nor do they seem to care, someone possibly killed their first husband but it's never resolved, and something about a long lost child that came out of nowhere. They tried to shove too many things into the show - cat puns, Minnesota and pop culture references, anachronisms - and it felt a little unfocused. But the cast (JL Charrier, Tabitha Kerr, Christopher J. Devaan, Bob Alberti, and Mikayla Bode) is game for the ride and fun to watch; the songs are also fun, with new lyrics set to the tune of old timey country western songs and accompanied by a live guitar player dressed in black (Andrew Christophe); and who doesn't love a catty singalong.

Read all of my Fringe mini-reviews here.

"Wait Until Dark" at Theatre in the Round

I first saw Frederick Knott's 1966 classic thriller Wait Until Dark, adapted by local playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, at Lyric Arts two years ago. The second time around, at Theatre in the Round aka the Twin Cities' oldest theater, may have been a bit less suspenseful since I knew what was coming, but it's still a thrilling story of a blind woman who outsmarts the criminals trying to do her in and uses her sightlessness to her advantage.

"A Laura Ingalls Wilder Christmas" at Lyric Arts

I'm a little bit obsessed with all things Little House on the Prairie, and I'm not ashamed to admit it! The TV show started the year after I was born, and I don't remember a time when I didn't watch it and love it. When I was old enough to read, the Little House books were a favorite, although I soon discovered just how different the TV and book worlds are. I've re-read them as an adult, along with several other books about Laura Ingalls Wilder, most recently the excellent Prairie Girl: An Annotated Autobiography. And when I took a road trip across South Dakota a few years ago, I made sure to stop in De Smet, and Walnut Grove on the way back into Minnesota. On the live performance front, I loved the Guthrie's 2008 musical adaptation of Little House on the Prairie (starring Melissa Gilbert!), and I even saw Alison Arngrim's comedy performance of her funny and touching memoir Confessions of a Prairie Bitch. So it's obvious I will consume Laura Ingalls Wilders' writings in any form I can, and I couldn't resist Lyric Arts' "Mainly for Kids" production of A Laura Ingalls Wilder Christmas. Playwright Laurie Brooks has turned a few pages in Laura's original memoir that never made it into her children's series, about their time spent in Burr Oak, Iowa, into a sweet little 65-minute play in keeping with the Little House theme of family and frontier life.