Latest news with #OrpheumTheater
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'The Passion and the Cross' set for Orpheum Theater
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — A local production group is set to bring an Easter musical back to downtown Sioux Falls. The pieces are in place at the Orpheum Theater, now it's all about the final details as 'The Passion and the Cross' returns for a fifth consecutive spring. Documents shed light on pair of shootings & wounded Police officer 'It's an encounter with the witnesses who were there with Jesus, the men, women, children, the religious, the non-religious, people of all walks of life,' show creator Brent Grosvenor said. 'The Passion and the Cross' features an all-local cast of about 140 adults and children. He says the recipe for success is staying organized. 'Musical theater lives and dies by the ensemble. The energy, the vocals, the quality of those large scenes, so we iron all that out first and work hard, hard, hard through those and then work out all the details beyond that with our smaller scenes with either three or five or twelve people in it,' Grosvenor said. 'It's a large group, but everyone's so supportive of each other and get along really well. It's a great group,' actor Mark Ditmarson said. Ditmarson will be playing the role of Simon Peter for the third consecutive year. 'He's very bold, he kind of thinks he's a leader and he does a lot of good things, but sometimes puts his foot in his mouth,' Ditmarson said. After taking a 20-year break from acting, Ditmarson has been part of all five productions of The Passion and the Cross. 'It's impacted my life personally a ton over the past five years, as well as my daughter who's been involved with most of the productions as well,' Ditmarson said. And whether it's your first time or fifth time seeing the show, Grosvenor says it's always a learning experience. 'I think people need to come because they'll get a good broad, as well as a detailed understanding of who Jesus is as the Messiah, as the Redeemer, as the Savior of the world, the hope of the world,' Grosvenor said. And opening night is only 48 hours away. 'We're going to be ready. Two more dress rehearsals though to polish is up and fine tune everything,' Grosvenor said. The 'Passion and the Cross' opens Friday night at the Orpheum Theater and runs through Saturday, April 19. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Premiere Playhouse set to tackle Shakespeare
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — A play that dates back to the 16th century is about to hit the stage at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Sioux Falls. The stage is set for William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Orpheum Theater. 'It's one of Shakespeare's best, it's one of his most accessible, and it's one of his funniest, so we decided to do this show because we thought everyone could use a laugh,' The Premiere Playhouse Managing Artistic Director Oliver Mayes said. Mayes thought tackling Shakespeare during season 22 was worth the risk. Calls for help to Senator Rounds triple as DOGE cuts hit South Dakotans 'Shakespeare is the great of the greats. He wrote so many things that we kind of live by and we don't even realize that, so to kind of un-crack those scripts and unlock all the beautiful metaphors, similes, and illustrations within them is fun for our actors,' Mayes said. 'There's a lot of research that you have to do that kind of goes into understanding the words that you're speaking since it's from a different time period, the words are maybe a bit more flowery and poetic, so there's a lot of subtext that you kind of have to comb through,' Sioux Falls actor Alex Newcomb Weiland said. Newcomb Weiland is playing the role of Hermia and says A Midsummer Night's Dream is her favorite Shakespeare show. 'I love the contrast in the show, I love the humor in the show, I think the humor is timeless and very fun to play regardless of what era you're setting it in,' Newcomb Weiland said. The comedic masterpiece is more than 400 years old but will feature some original aspects, including a more contemporary setting. 'We have set it in the late 1920s of Athens, Georgia, it's usually in Athens, Greece, so you're maybe going to see some flapper-wear and things of that sort, get kind of a jazz ambiance to it,' Mayes said. And the all-local cast is ready for opening night. 'Now that we have our costumes and the set, we were in rehearsals for so long and now we've been transported into the Orpheum, I think we've all even stepped up our game more so an audience will just kind of seal it for us, and so we're really excited to share it with the rest of the community,' Newcomb Weiland said. A Midsummer Night's Dream opens Thursday night at the Orpheum Theater and runs through Sunday, March 30th. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
New York Times
22-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Finding a Common Thread in Jonathan Larson's Unheard Music
In his Tony-winning musical, 'Rent,' Jonathan Larson asked: 'How do you measure a year in the life?' The question took on an even heavier weight, with striking resonance, after Larson died unexpectedly at the age of 35 in 1996, hours before the show's first preview. In the years after, dozens of his unheard songs were discovered, revealing the inner workings of a prolific artist looking for his big break. Now, a new musical, 'The Jonathan Larson Project,' celebrates those songs and raises a new question: How do you thread together snippets of Jonathan Larson's creative output into a musical? 'It was like an expedition,' the show's creator, Jennifer Ashley Tepper, said of what it was like to pore over the archive of Larson's work at the Library of Congress. 'Like a musical theater historian expedition, because you would go and you would find one lyric that sort of matched up with one demo that sort of matched up with an idea of another notebook.' The show is a collage of Larson's life as told through his unproduced music, some of it written when he was as young as 22, including compositions for downtown revues and cabarets, music from Larson's futuristic dystopian musical 'Superbia' and songs cut from 'Rent' and 'Tick, Tick … Boom!' The new show, which is in previews and opens March 10 at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village, has been years in the making. It evolved from a 2018 song cycle that Tepper staged at 54 Below, a basement cabaret club where she is the creative and programming director. Partly a tribute to Larson, the musical is also its own universal story of the artist's struggle: surviving in an unforgiving city, plumbing the depths of lived experience to create something authentic, weathering rejection after rejection. On a recent afternoon at one of Larson's old haunts, the Ear Inn on Spring Street, another question hung in the air: Who is Laurie? A former lover? A fictitious archetype? She's just one of the many mysteries in the hundreds of cassette tapes, scripts and music demos the writer left behind. Over turkey burgers and beer, Tepper, the director John Simpkins, the music supervisor Charlie Rosen and the actors Adam Chanler-Berat and Taylor Iman Jones discussed what it took to produce a cohesive musical out of disparate songs and material, and what it means to keep Larson's legacy alive. There's something of a mystique to Larson. ('Kind of a weird juju about it,' as Jones put it. 'That's positive. Things just keep falling in place.') So it was fitting that we met at the Ear Inn and, later, visited Larson's old apartment (thanks to a generous current tenant), where he lived for 12 years, and died. Larson, who brought humanity to myriad social issues like addiction and homophobia, never shied away from politics. In songs like 'White Male World,' written in 1991, and 'The Truth Is a Lie,' written in 1990, Larson's lyrics feel eerily familiar in today's culture. 'What emerged immediately was this connection between the time in which he was writing and right now,' Simpkins said. 'And so to us, we became immediately interested in the dialogue that we could have between Jonathan, the time in which Jonathan was writing, and the time in which we find ourselves right now.' In one tongue-in-cheek political campaign scene, Larson lists 'Trump Industries' as a corporate Republican sponsor. 'We haven't changed a word,' Tepper said. 'The idea is not to fix something he wrote or to make it relevant, it's to do what he wrote and to honor it.' In 'Likability/La Di Da,' a song about political candidates bending to the whims of voters and so-called experts, Larson uses the phrase 'Make America great.' He wrote it in 1989, perhaps as a nod to Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign slogan. If the Larson mystique wasn't already present, there were coincidences that, despite Tepper's avoidance of what she called 'woo woo' tendencies, did seem auspicious. Shortly after rehearsals started, one of the actors, Lauren Marcus, returned home to find that of the dozens of posters on her wall, one was missing. Her 'Rent' poster had slipped to the ground. Not long after, Tepper's 'Jonathan Larson Project' poster, which she'd had on her wall since 2018, fell to the ground in an impossible-to-reach spot behind a bookshelf (where it remains). Later, they realized that the show's load-in day at the Orpheum took place on what would have been Larson's 65th birthday. 'The Jonathan Larson Project' — called a 'project' for its range of genres and story lines — supplements its minimalist set with video footage of SoHo to ground the show in today's Manhattan. But it's also awash in nostalgia. 'You can lean into the homage, right?' Jones said. 'Like, I don't necessarily need to play Mimi in a song,' she said, referring to a 'Rent' character she has played before in community productions, 'but I don't need to shy away from Mimi-isms or 'Rent'-isms. It's hard to describe, but I definitely feel there's like a 'Rent' method of acting. It's really fun to lean into that.' After years of delays — because of the pandemic shutdown and the time it took to book the right theater — getting the musical to the Orpheum stage happened at lighting speed. The venue was confirmed in late November, then rehearsals began in January, and previews started this month. It was fueled by fandom and discovery from the start. Back in 2014, Tepper chose five songs, largely unheard by the public, for a concert in the New York City Center lobby ahead of an Encores! performance of 'Tick, Tick … Boom!' The response was so enthusiastic, from 'Rentheads' and new fans alike, that she began dreaming of expanding the concert into an evening-length work. She checked in with Larson's family, who gave her the green light. 'They said, like, go for it, kid,' Tepper said. She deepened her research and in 2016 started taking the train to Washington to dig through Larson's collection at the Library of Congress, where she would spend the entire day completely immersed in his journals and music demos. When she found the song 'Greene Street,' she was so overcome that she left the library, sat outside and cried, in awe that it had gone virtually unheard. 'It was like the wildest, wildest dream of being a fan,' she said. In 2018, a show was born. Tepper staged a 12-performance run of 'The Jonathan Larson Project,' a longer song cycle version of the City Center event, at 54 Below. The show featured five actors and a band — as does 'The Jonathan Larson Project' today — who recorded the songs as an album the following year. 'It's a little bit of, like, a seance when the composer is no longer with you,' said Rosen, the musical supervisor. 'You don't want it to be a pastiche,' he added. Tasked with orchestrating and co-arranging, Rosen looked to Larson's musical influences, the time period and the many genres in his work to piece things together — and make it relevant. Thankfully, the quality of Larson's demos helped. 'The fact that he even had the ability to record a piano and then go back and record his voice over the already recorded piano,' Rosen said, 'most people didn't have access to that then.' Larson, Tepper said, felt his work was incomplete without instrumentation beyond piano. Arranging his songs with a full band is a way of finishing what he started, a production quality Larson simply couldn't afford. 'When I listen to this music, I hear it as a survival guide for getting through hard times,' said Chanler-Berat, who plays a version of Larson's characters and himself. 'And I mean that as an artist, but I also mean that as a citizen.' The artist's life that Larson lived in the '80s and '90s looks a little different today. There's a Sweetgreen around the corner from his apartment on Greenwich Street. The view he once had of the Hudson River has been replaced with a towering glass building. There is no trace of the phone booth that once sat across the street, where, in the absence of a functional buzzer, Larson's visitors would call to have him throw down a key to the building. But at its core, as his music transmits, the trials artists face is the same: finding the time to create; mustering the resolve to flout traditional expectations of success; staying financially afloat and cutting through the dull rhythm of manual labor or the fog of corporate malaise to excavate what alights the soul. 'Oh piano,' Larson croons in an unfinished song, 'you saved my soul again. Oh piano, you saved my soul, amen.'
Yahoo
04-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Bob Dylan adds more Midwest dates to tour, joins Willie Nelson's Outlaw Music Festival
Bob Dylan announced last week that he'll head to Mankato in April with his "Rough and Rowdy" tour, but that's not the only stop he's making in the Upper Midwest. Though it remains the only one announced in his native Minnesota, Dylan revealed Tuesday he will also bring the tour to Eau Claire, Wis., which is about the same distance from the Twin Cities as Mankato. He'll play the recently opened Sonnentag Center in Eau Claire on April 5, the night after playing in Minnesota. Dylan, who has been in the news frequently following the release of the Oscar-nominated film A Complete Unknown, will also make stops in Omaha and two cities in Iowa in addition to a previously announced pitstop in Green Bay. Here's a glance at the Upper Midwest dates for Dylan's tour. April 1: Orpheum Theater in Omaha, Neb. April 2: Orpheum Theatre in Sioux City, Iowa April 4: Mayo Clinic Health System Event Center in Mankato, Minn. April 5: The Sonnentag Center in Eau Claire, Wis. April 6: The Weidner-Cofrin Family Hall in Green Bay, Wis. April 8: Adler Theatre in Davenport, Iowa April 9: Prairie Home Alliance Theater in Peoria, Ill. Tickets for the shows in Mankato and Green Bay are already on sale. The newly announced shows will go on sale on Feb. Dylan will again take part in Willie Nelson's annual Outlaw Music Festival Tour starting on May 13 in Phoenix. The festival will wrap up on Sept. 19 when it comes to Alpine Valley in East Troy, Wis., which is the closest that tour will get to Minnesota. Nelson, 91, and Dylan, 83, teamed up for a show in Somerset, Wis. last year, accompanied by John Mellencamp. Despite their age, neither icon seems to be slowing their touring schedule significantly. Dylan took the stage more than 75 times in 2024. This year, he's got 20 headlining dates announced so far. He's also on board for all 34 dates of the Outlaw Music Festival, which also has Billy Strings, Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Swets, The Avett Brothers, Wilco, Lake Street Dive, Lucinda Williams, Bruce Hornsby & the Noisemakers, and Trampled By Turtles, among others, listed for dates during its 2025 run. The East Troy show will include Sheryl Crow, Waxahatchee, and Madeline Edwards. Tickets for the Outlaw Music Festival Tour go on sale Friday at 10 a.m.
