Month: May 2004

Not many Americans remember that we were once at war with Finland, and unlike the Vietnamese, Finns have not tended to migrate here and open restaurants that might remind us of this history. Lori Luchsinger and Karen Salmey, therefore, have been left pretty much on their own when it comes to satisfying the metro’s pent-up…

If Richard Pryor were thirty years younger and tapping the same inspirational vein as the South Park guys, he might be very like Dave Chappelle: smart, scatological, splenetic, and not interested in slaughtering sacred cows so much as stampeding the whole herd off a cliff, or maybe through Dick Cheney’s front yard. His sketch series,…

Now here’s a worthy import. The Guthrie Lab closes its 2003-2004 season with a play the London Guardian called “the year’s funniest and most important.” Winning the “triple crown” of British theater awards, Blue/Orange depicts a struggle between two psychiatrists over the care of a soon-to-be-released Afro-Caribbean patient. Christopher suffers from multiple personality disorder, but…

If classic whodunits really float your boat, you’re in luck. It’s reasonable to deduce that you’ll leave the Showboat with suitable closure on Agatha Christie’s crime classic The Mousetrap. It’s an archetypal Christie setup: Snowed in at an ancient manor, guests find themselves embroiled in a murder mystery when one of them turns up brutally…

A humble fugitive trying to lead a life on the straight-and-narrow. A self-righteous inspector chasing the past. An orphan child in love with a man at war. The Victor Hugo classic, on a return trip to the Ordway for three weeks, has more characters than the Michael Jackson trial, but entertains with much more dignity.…

Guyton and Walker are two up-and-comers whose work was most recently seen, respectively, at the Whitney Biennial and at the legendary Paula Cooper gallery in New York. For this show, the pair engaged in some pretty heady collaborative hijinks. They subjected a limited selection of imagery—including a designer couch, a knife blade, a private jet,…