"Lend Me a Tenor" at Old Log Theatre

Now playing at the oldest continuously operating theater west of the Mississippi: the madcap comedy Lend Me a Tenor. Although written in 1989 by playwright Ken Ludwig (see also the madcap Sherlock Holmes comedy Baskerville), the play is set in 1934 and harkens back to the days of classic film comedies like It Happened One Night. Old Log Theatre has taken that cue beautifully, and created a piece of theater that feels like one of those old movie comedies come to life, except in three dimensions and full color! With a sparkling eight-person cast, sharp design, and impeccable timing on this complicated farce, Lend Me a Tenor makes for a fun night at the theater. Combine it with an afternoon or evening spent shopping and/or eating in the almost too charming lake town of Excelsior (which, when I visited, featured a horse drawn buggy and softly falling snow on the beautifully lit main street), and you have a wonderful day in the western suburbs of Minneapolis. Lend Me a Tenor continues through February 16, the snow will probably continue much longer.

"A Gone Fishin' Christmas" at Yellow Tree Theatre

The #TCTheater holiday* season is not complete without a visit to charming downtown Osseo, adorned with red, green, blue, and white lights on all the trees lining the main street of this small town in the suburbs. Just a few blocks away, tucked in a nondescript strip mall, is the warm and welcoming Yellow Tree Theatre space, where for the 10th year in a row you can experience an original Minnesota holiday play, a silly comedy mixed with local references, and a heartfelt message of home and community underneath it all. YTT co-founder Jessica Lind Peterson has written four such plays - two installments of Miracle on Christmas Lake,** A Hunting Shack Christmas, and this year's selection, a reprise of last year's smash hit A Gone Fishin' Christmas. They've brought back most of the original cast, plus a few fun additions, and if possible it's even better than it was last year. It's a really fun feel-good show, with outrageous hilarity mixed with tender moments, plus an original song by Blake Thomas! The Wednesday performance I attended was not sold out, but tickets will get harder to come by, especially weekends, as the season continues, so make your plans now to visit the ice house before it's too late (more info here).

"The Red Shoes" at Open Eye Figure Theatre

You may be familiar with the Hans Christian Andersen story The Red Shoes, in which a vain little girl with pretty red shoes is cursed so that her shoes will never stop dancing. But you may not recognize what the ingenious minds of Joel Sass and Kimberly Richardson have turned it into. Yes there are a few (hilarious) runaway dancing scenes, but their 80-minute show at Open Eye Figure Theatre is more 20 Century creepy noir thriller than 19th Century fairy tale. I'll let director Joel Sass describe it to you: "Equally humorous and hair-raising, our adaptation of The Red Shoes draws inspiration and influences from the vintage detective novels of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, case studies of amnesia and multiple personality, and black and white film noir movies of the 1940s. Like that cinematic genre, The Red Shoes evokes a highly stylized landscape of convoluted mystery, subconscious manacle, fever dreams, and existential crisis." My immediate thought at the end of the show was, "how do people think of such things?" The Red Shoes is something so curious and unique, odd and chilling, inventive and charming, it's thoroughly captivating from start to finish.

"A Gone Fishin' Christmas" at Yellow Tree Theatre

Original Christmas plays at Yellow Tree Theatre have become a beloved tradition in the last 9 years. Due to a happy accident, Yellow Tree was forced to produce their own play (written by co-founder Jessica Lind Peterson) when they lost the rights to the play they were intending to do their first season. This was the basis of the plot of that first play, Miracle on Christmas Lake, which after three successful runs inspired a sequel Miracle of Christmas Lake II that also ran for a couple years. Then came A Hunting Shack Christmas, and now this year we head to the icehouse for A Gone Fishin' Christmas. All of these plays follow a similar blueprint - a small Minnesota town with adorably quirky characters, the "citiots" who return to the small town they grew up in and make some sort of a life change. It's not the most original of plots, but it works, and provides a framework for Minnesota humor, outrageous antics, and lovely quiet moments of family and connection. There's a reason that Yellow Tree's original Christmas plays are so popular and sell out virtually every performance - they are a perfect mix of heart and humor wrapped up in local jokes that we love so well, with a talented cast that makes these characters and the sweet and silly story sing (literally and figuratively). And Gone Fishin' may be the best of the bunch. A few tickets remain (with best availability at weekday matinees) so get your tickets now to experience this hilarious and heart-warming tale.