"Mistletoe & Mayhem" by Just Us Theater at the Phoenix Theater

I caught Just Us Theater's new Hallmark holiday movie spoof Mistletoe & Mayhem on their final weekend. I wasn't sure I could fit it in during this busy #TCTheater holiday* season, but my fellow Twin Cities Theater Blogger The Stages of MN assured me it was worth it. So I drove to the Phoenix Theater in snowy Uptown, got a decaf mocha from their extensive concessions counter, and settled into the theater for some festive comedy. I found it to be charmingly goofy and delightfully spoofy, poking fun at all of those holiday romance tropes, and even includes an original song! Mistletoe & Mayhem would be a great 70-minute-no-intermission show, if not for the unnecessary intermission, with only a couple shows left before it closes on Sunday.

Minnesota Fringe Festival 2025: "Our Zombie Town"

Day: 6

Show: 21

Title: Our Zombie Town

Category: Comedy / Horror / Literary adaptation / Political content / Shakespearian elements

By: Pat O'Brien

Created by: Richard Chin, Pat O'Brien, Larry Ripp and cast

Location: Mixed Blood Theatre

Summary: One of the most classic works of the American stage, Thornton Wilder's Our Town, but with zombies (also an American classic).

Highlights: The show is very cleverly written (by Richard Chin) in the familiar conversational fourth-wall breaking style of Our Town, with Kurt Schulz as our narrator in a Fringe artist lanyard. The story begins with the surviving citizens of Grover's Corners (including the Webb and Gibbs families) living in an abandoned Walmart, fending off zombies (a familiar situation to fans of The Walking Dead). The daily sweet mundane daily life continues, including the Emily/George romance, as more and more people become (still semi conscious) zombies (an unfamiliar situation to TWD fans). When a cure becomes available, Emily has to make a decision to go back to the old busy life where everyone is preoccupied on their phones, or spend one last day with her love in a world that's all about eating brains together. Our Zombie Town is a mashup of a theater classic and a horror B-movie, complete with some fun cheesy effects and an impressive wood chipper, a clever idea well-executed by the team.

Read all of my Fringe mini-reviews here. 

"Measure for Measure" by The Birth Play Project at A-Mill Artist Lofts

My favorite new theater company of 2022, The Birth Play Project, is back, this time with a new twist on a classic. Their new play with music Mary’s Wondrous Body, based on a so-bizarre-it-must-be-true story of a woman who claimed to give birth to rabbits, was indeed wondrous. Now this company whose mission is "to place birth in public memory by developing representational practices for staging reproductive stories" is presenting Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. If you're wondering, "what does this play have to do with birth?," you're not alone. I've seen this play a few times before, and it's always been Isabella's story, a soon-to-be nun who is offered a chance to save her brother Claudio from death, if she sleeps with his accuser Angelo. But so far in the background that I even forgot she was there, is Juliet, Claudio's not-quite-wife, who is pregnant with his child (the crime with which they're both charged). This adaptation by Madeline Wall and William Edson, who also direct the piece, puts the focus on this forgotten woman who is quietly (or not so quietly) giving birth while the other actions of the play swirl around her. It's an engaging and entertaining take on this classic that explores a hidden side of it, and makes one wonder what other birth stories are hiding in the background, waiting to be told. Click here to find out more about The Birth Play Project and to purchase tickets to one of their two remaining performances at Saint John the Evangelist Episcopal Church and Elision Playhouse.

Minnesota Fringe Festival 2024: "Pants on Fire"

Day: 7

Show: 23

Title: Pants on Fire

Category: Improv

By: The Project Factory

Created by: Sarah Broude

Location: HUGE Theater

Summary: A game show in which two teams try to guess if the story someone is telling is a weird truth, or an elaborate lie.

Highlights: What a great idea for a show. If you've heard of "two truths and a lie," it's like that, but each participant only has one chance at a story, with the opposing team guessing if it's true or a lie. It's a nuanced game, in which the storyteller not only has to tell the (possibly made-up story), but make the others believe it's true when it's a lie, or vice versa. And the even trickier thing is that sometimes part of the story is true, but not all of it. The evening is hosted by Sarah Broude, with help from Music Director Chris Perricelli and a delightfully bored assistant (whose name I didn't catch), throwing snacks at the guests, changing outfits frequently, and giving occasional side eye. Each performance has different guests, all pulled from our talented comedy/improv scene. I went (not coincidentally) to the show that featured the Four Humors: Ryan Lear, Brant Miller, Matt Spring, and newest Humor Allison Vincent. This group never fails to crack me up, and this was no exception; in fact I think it's the hardest I've laughed at Fringe this year. They were split into teams with captains Dale Peterson and Katie Kaufmann (who I gather are at every show), and each one got to tell a story, from getting kicked out of a Bozo the Clown show, to being part of a pregnancy reveal gone wrong, to childhood pranks. Watching these six weave a tale on the fly, and the others respond to it and ask questions, is sheer joy and hilarity. Highlights of the evening include watching Matt mime milking a cow, Brant reenact a Santa Experience, and hearing Ryan recite all the books of the Bible, after making us think he couldn't (but of course he can). The point system is a bit suspect, with math and word problems thrown in arbitrarily, but it's all in good fun. Great fun actually.

Read all of my Fringe mini-reviews here. 

"Mary's Wondrous Body" by The Birth Play Project at Elision Playhouse

One of my favorite things about being a Twin Cities Theater Blogger is checking out a new theater company and immediately finding a new favorite (e.g. Transatlantic Love Affair, The Winding Sheet Outfit). That's what happened last night when I went to see the new original "dark comedy with music" Mary's Wondrous Body by The Birth Play Project. Led by 2020 U of M grad Madeline Wall, the company focuses on telling birth stories, which is definitely an untapped niche in theater, although something we have started to see more of lately (see Penumbra's recent play Weathering, and the MN Fringe hit Endometriosis the Musical, which wasn't about birth specifically but the larger topic of women's reproductive health). In addition to being a unique and necessary topic, their work, at least based on this one play, is thoughtful, innovative, and bold. A woman belting out songs about the joy and pain of childbirth and everything surrounding it on stage in front of an audience - yes, we need that. I've never given birth (thankfully so after seeing shows like this), but for those who have, I imagine it feels quite validating to see the experience depicted on stage with respect and raw honesty. The birthing process is a fundamental part of the human experience from the beginning of human history, so (like House of the Dragon's theme of "the childbed is our battlefield") let's get into it. (Click here for info about and to purchase tickets for Mary's Wondrous Body, continuing through December 18.)

"Top Girls" by Theatre Pro Rata at the Crane Theater

Everyone loves the '80s, right? Maybe not so much after seeing Theatre Pro Rata's production of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, which takes an unflinching look at what the '80s were really like, particularly in the lives of working women who seemed on the surface to "have it all." It's dark, weird, and a little fantastical, like all of Churchill's work, but it's also smart, thought-provoking, grounded in humanity, and relevant to our world 40 years later, with a different sort of gender politics happening in the work place.

"The Bungalow Loft" by Fearless Comedy Productions at the Historic Mounds Theatre

Fearless Comedy Productions returns with a brand new comedy play by #TCTheater favorite Shanan Custer! Although maybe it's more of a dramedy, as it features two sisters discovering some secrets about their recently deceased mother and deals with themes of grief, loss, regret, memories, mental illness, and challenging family relationships. Presented in an intimate in-the-round (or square) space on the floor of the Historic Mounds Theatre, The Bungalow Loft is funny and real and brought to us by an all-female cast and creative team. 

"Silent Sky" by Theatre Pro Rata at the Bell Museum

'Tis the season for Lauren Gunderson's smart, funny, modern, and inspiring plays about female scientists in history, and I am here for it (keep 'em coming, #TCTheater). A week after seeing DalekoArts' lovely production of Ada and the Engine (about mathematician and computer programmer Ada Lovelace), I saw Theatre Pro Rata's production of Silent Sky (about astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, which I had seen at Lyric Arts a few years ago). It's a great play, but what makes this production truly special is that it is staged in the planetarium at the Bell Museum on the University of Minnesota's St. Paul campus. Despite the fact that I got my graduate degree (in statistics, you can see why I'm so drawn to women in science plays) at the U of M, I didn't even know this museum existed (in my defense, the gorgeous new building just opened a year and a half ago). I hope to return to tour the museum sometime, but my first experience to it (through theater, natch) was a wonderful one. Being able to look up at the stars as Henrietta talked about them made the story feel so real. A truly inspired pairing of play and location by Theatre Pro Rata.

"The River Becomes Sea" by nimbus theatre at the Crane Theater

In nimbus theatre's latest original work, The River Becomes Sea, they explore the world of post-Civil War New Orleans through the complicated lives of one family. New Orleans is always a fascinating place, with its diverse peoples, cultures, and art, and its complicated relationship with water (see also the excellent HBO series Treme). But as playwright Josh Cragun notes in the playbill, the post-Civil War era is particularly fascinating; a time when there is new freedom for African Americans, and a backlash of fear from those who backed the failed Confederacy. Add to this the arrival of a long-lost sister, banished after a scandal, and an impending flood, and you have more than enough drama to fill 85 minutes. nimbus does that, but in an unhurried, lyrical, Southern sort of pace.

Fringe Festival 2016: "The Real World Fringe Festival"

Day: 4

Show: 15

Title: The Real World Fringe Festival

Category: Comedy

By: Trusty Paper Ship

Written by: Annie Scott Riley

Location: Mixed Blood Theatre

Summary: Like an episode of MTV's Real World franchise, except it's onstage instead of on TV, and it's at the Fringe Festival.

Highlights: Confession: I was a loyal viewer of The Real World back in the early days, before there even was such a thing as social media. But in this Real World, the housemates spend most of their time on their phones, worrying about their social media presence. This allows the creators to skewer not just reality TV, but also our larger obsession with social media. We meet the seven housemates (a disappointingly less diverse cast than the real Real World casts) in a series of vignettes, complete with "testimonials" Real World style. The cast (David Beukema, Sarah Broude, Stephen Frethem, Rachel (Finch) Postle, Marcia Svaleson, Rob Ward, and Katie Willer) is great and fully commits to their larger-than-life stereotypical characters. There are some amusing observations about the social media world and some clever fourth-wall-breaking and acknowledgement of being on a stage. I wasn't wowed by the show, but it was kinda fun.