"Cabaret" at the Guthrie Theater

"What good is sitting alone in your room? Come hear the music play. Life is a cabaret, old chum, come to the cabaret!" Truer words have never been sung, and they have never been more true than now. With our world getting weirder and scarier every day, who doesn't need to "leave their troubles outside" every now and then? But Kander and Ebb's brilliant musical Cabaret is a subversive little thing. It lures you in with fun and sexy songs and dances, and then slowly, ever so slowly, it reminds you that it's not so easy to forget your troubles. They're still there, even when we're not thinking about them, and maybe they've even gotten worse when we weren't looking, when we were dancing. This musical cautionary tale about the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany, which the Guthrie had originally scheduled for the summer of 2020 before a global pandemic shuttered all theaters, has never felt more relevant than it does right now in the summer of 2025. The Guthrie's stunning new production of Cabaret is perfectly marvelous and utterly devastating, and it's the #TCTheater event of the summer. Do not miss it! The Kit Kat Klub remains open for business (until it tragically shuts its doors every night) through August 24.

"Les Miserables" Broadway Tour at the Orpheum Theatre

Fresh off of a successful Broadway revival, the music-theater phenomenon known as Les Miserables is on tour, stopping at Minneapolis' Orpheum Theatre for the final two weeks of the year. I'm not one of those Les Miz fanatics (like my friend Laura at Twin Cities Stages), I save the fanaticism for RENT. I saw the tour 18 years ago, but it was the #TCTheater production at Artistry (formerly known as Bloomington Civic Theatre) five years ago that production that really won me over to the beauty of the story, writing, "Les Miserables is such an inspiring story. Through a moment of kindness, a man's life is changed and he goes on to affect others' lives by passing on that kindness. But through it all he's still just a man, with doubts and regrets and struggles. In short, it's the human experience." So I was ready for this large-scale Broadway production, re-invented from the original. And I loved every minute of it (approximately 180 of them).