Real Shakespeare Housewives, New Savage Umbrealla work, Choo Choo Bob and more!

Hiya Theater Chums- -------- Dancer, choreographer Deborah Jinza Thayer hit by car MPR’s State of the Arts blog reports that Deborah Jinza was run over by a car on June 3rd resulting in several broken vertabrae and cracked ribs. Little information is currently known but it’s certain she won’t be performing in Red Eye Theater’s new work series starting on June 14th and she may need financial and other support in the coming weeks and months. Keep an eye out -------- A video called The Real Housewives of Shakespeare, produced by the Great River Shakespeare festival, has been making the rounds. It features some of Shakespeare’s leading ladies arguing over who is “Best in the Canon.” Fun if you’ve got five minutes. -------- The Savage Umbrella folks opened a new play last week called Care Enough. Written by Carl Atiya Swanson, the show features a man taken hostage and a series of lovers. Not sure what that exactly means but it’s intriguing. And this company seems really dedicated to making new work in the Twin Cities. I will confess that the show title’s coming from a famous Buster Keaton quote is what first made me give it a second look. But I’ll try not to expect any broad physical comedy or deadpan in this production. -------- Twin Cities local television saw a new debut this past Saturday in the Choo Choo Bob Show. This new weekly children’s show features a host of local actors including Sam Heyn, Rich Kronfeld, Charles Hubbell, and David Tufford. If the show builds an audience it could certain provide more opportunities for local performers and writers and possibly encourage more locally produced television. Or, at the very least, we’ll have some fun Saturday morning TV full of people we can also go see in live stage shows. -------- Art maker and art consumer Andy Sturdevant collaborated on a project ranking 150 art cities. He’s recently released the results of this process on his Southtwelfth tumblr. Here’s how Andy described the project: “2012 U.S. CITIES CONTEMPORARY ART RANKINGS: A NEW HIERARCHICAL APPROACH, a project I did in October of last year. The idea was to gather a group of artists in a room with a list of the 150 largest cities in America, and over the course of a few hours, determine a criteria for establishing a tiered system (based on the presence of renowned spaces, MFA programs, contemporary art museums, curators, critics, collectors, etc., etc.), and then divvying up the cities into one of the five categories (or none of them, if the city was collectively decided to not fit the minimum criteria). About forty people showed up, and over the course of several hours, we arrived at the conclusions below. (It’s on my website, too.)” -------- The McKnight Artist Fellowships for Dancers and Choreographers for 2012 have been announced. The fellowships for choreographers went to Ananya Chatterjea, Carl Flink, and Aparna Ramaswamy & Ranee Ramaswamy. The fellowships for dancers went to Taryn Griggs, Ashwini Ramaswamy and Stephen Schroeder. From what I know about the people on the above list these fellowships are well deserved. Kudos to the Minnesota dance community for have so much quality from which to draw. -------- I don’t do it here much but I’ve got a self-promotion item so feel free to skip this part if you like. My theater company, Comedy Suitcase, just launched a new podcast project called Pratfalls of Parenting. It’s a weekly audio program that features conversations with parents who are artists and creative types of all kinds about the relationship between being an artist and being a parent. So far we’ve got two episodes up and I’d love it if you gave them a listen and shared them with anyone who may be interested. -------- Have a week full of simulated drama and real comedy thanks -Levi