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.
