"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.

"Beautiful: The Carole King Musical" at Chanhassen Dinner Theatres

For their third regional premiere in a row, Chanhassen Dinner Theatres (CDT) is presenting Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. It's interesting that it follows on the heels of their regional premiere of Jersey Boys, because that 2006 Tony-winning bio-musical about Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons set the standard for the bio-musical and spawned a bunch more of the like, of which Beautiful (premiering in 2014), is one of the better ones. You can definitely see some similarity in structure between the two shows, both feature recognizable hits from the mid 20th Century, and both are really more like plays with music than musicals (most of songs are sung in context - in a studio or at a concert). As Artistic Director Michael Brindisi says, they went from the Jersey boys to the Brooklyn girl. And this first #TCTheater production is big, bold, and yes - beautiful. With an outrageously talented ensemble, super smooth transitions between the many mini scenes and songs, and unstoppable momentum that makes each act of this 2.5-hour-long musical feel like 20 minutes, Beautiful is not to be missed. It's playing through the end of September so you have plenty of time to get out to the Western metro for this celebration of one of the most prolific songwriters of 20th Century American popular music.