Minneapolis/St. Paul Spotlight: March 2010

In March, the national tour of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winner for drama, August: Osage County, stops at the Ordway Center for one week only (March 16 – 21). Academy Award-winner Estelle Parsons leads the cast in this sprawling tour-de-force about the breakdown of an Oklahoma family. The Minnesota Opera’s production of La Boheme also appears at the Ordway this month (March 6 – 14). Puccini’s classic about romance and art is one of the opera world’s favorites.

Bridge Productions hosts Now Hear This!, their second annual festival of one-act plays (Lowry Lab Theater, March 12 – 21), which will feature three new works by Raymond Luczak, a local playwright and author of the recently-published novel Men With Their Hands, a pseudo-autobiographical account of growing up deaf and gay in America. Other participants include Stanley Toledo and Fringe Favorite Mahmoud Hakima, back to perform his solo show Two Bowls of Cereal & Some Bacon.

The national tour of the Broadway musical Mamma Mia! stops in town (Orpheum Theatre, March 9 – 14). Including “Dancing Queen,” “Take a Chance on Me,” and “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man after Midnight)” the popular tuner will leave you dancing in the aisles to the timeless classics of ABBA. Later in the month, a new staging of The Wizard of Oz moves into the Orpheum (March 26 – 28). Based on the Royal Shakespeare Company’s celebration of the 1939 MGM film starring Judy Garland, The Wizard of Oz features all of Harold Arlen’s classic songs, including “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead,” “If I Only Had a Brain,” and, of course, “Over the Rainbow.”

Theatre in the Round presents Matthew Barber’s Enchanted April (March 19 – April 11). Based on the best-selling novel about frustrated London housewives who rediscover themselves on holiday in Italy, Enchanted April is the winner of the 2003 Outer Critics Circle Playwriting Award. At the very end of the month, the Guthrie briefly hosts a musical revue of some of Noel Coward’s best-known songs called Coward’s Women (March 30 – April 3).

Be sure not to miss Buffy Sedlecek’s Jack and Rochelle at the Sabes JCC (March 12 – 28), based on the true-life 60-year love affair between local holocaust survivors Jack and Rochelle Sutin. Over in White Bear Lake, the Lakeshore Players present Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman’s hilarious comedy, The Royal Family (March 5 – 28). A thinly-veiled send-up of America’s acting dynasty, the Barrymores, the play was recently revived on Broadway.

The Children’s Theatre Company presents Iron Ring (March 9 – April 10), a thrilling Indian epic told through dance, and created in collaboration with Minneapolis’ own Ragamala Music and Dance Theater. Always ready with exciting new children’s theater, SteppingStone Theatre offers the world premiere of My Grandmother’s Tsotchkes: Tales of a Gambling Grandma, in which a young girl learns about her Russian Jewish grandmother’s flight from Russia to America through the series of trinkets grandma has collected.