"Ordinary Days" at St. Croix Festival Theatre

St. Croix Festival Theatre in St. Croix Falls Wisconsin is making it really hard for me not to cross state lines to see theater. Earlier this year I saw my first show there, the Kate Hamill-penned Ms. Holmes and Ms. Watson, Apt. 2B, a modern, funny, and feminist adaptation of the classic detective stories. This weekend they're closing their three-week run of the rarely done musical Ordinary Days, which unfortunately opened during the Minnesota Fringe Festival so I was not able to see until the end of the run. It's a gorgeous gem of a musical, and they do a really lovely job with it. I saw Nautilus Music-Theater's Ivey Award-winning production of the show in 2013, just four years after its Off-Broadway premiere, and loved it, but to my knowledge no #TCTheater company has done it since. I will never understand why certain musicals are done over and over again but gems like this one are not done, even though this 90-minute musical with four performers and a keyboard is relatively easy to stage. So it was absolutely worth a short road trip to Wisconsin. But if you missed this show, their excellent season continues with An Iliad (a co-production with #TCTheater company Combustible Company, which will also be performed at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis), my favorite living playwright Lauren Gunderson's I and You (a play we haven't seen in #TCTheater yet, other than a virtual version during the pandemic), and concludes with Frosty: A Musical Adventure as their unique choice for the holidays. If St. Croix Festival Theatre continues to program plays and musicals I can't see in the Twin Cities, I'm going to keep making that beautiful drive across the river.

"The Imaginary Invalid" by Combustible Company at Gremlin Theatre

Their opening night was cancelled in the Great April Blizzard of '18, but a little (or a lot) of snow didn't stop Combustible Company from delivering a funny, clever, relevant, and really well-done version of Moliere's The Imaginary Invalid. When I finally made it to Gremlin Theatre two days later than planned, I found myself thoroughly entertained for two and a half hours by this delightfully odd mixture of humor, music, social commentary, bright costumes, and pharmaceutical ads. The play may be over 300 years old, but this clever new adaptation (by Oded Gross and Tracy Young) brings out all the relevance to 2018 in this story of a hypochondriac struggling with health care issues, as so many are today. The modern references make the play feel fresh and current, while still keeping a tie to the original, and the consistently fantastic cast plays up the comedy to a hilt, without losing sight of the humanity of the characters. (Playing through April 28, click here for info and tickets.)

"Philemon and Baucis: Planet in Peril" by Mixed Precipitation at Dodge Nature Center

One of my favorite summer #TCTheater traditions is Mixed Precipitation's annual picnic operetta, in which one can enjoy classic opera, pop songs, the great outdoors, and delicious food. For their ninth summer operetta (the fourth I've attended), Mixed Precipitation has chosen Austrian composer Joseph Haydn's Philemon and Baucis, a piece so rare it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. Written and directed by Scotty Reynolds, this timely treatise on a Planet in Peril is a delightful mash-up of beautiful German-language opera and the songs of Queen, with five delicious courses of small bites passed throughout the 70-minute show. Playing at parks and gardens throughout the Twin Cities and beyond, it's a unique opportunity to enjoy all that late summer in Minnesota has to offer (click here to find a location near you).