THE GUTHRIE THEATER’S KUSHNER CELEBRATION DECLARED A SUCCESS!
(Minneapolis/St. Paul) From April 18 through June 28, Tony Kushner reigned in Minneapolis and today the Guthrie Theater released information on the stunning success of the Kushner Celebration. In the mainstream media, blogs and social networking sites like Twitter; in coffee shops, restaurants and gatherings throughout the Twin Cities; and in the Guthrie’s lobbies, bars and box office lines, everyone was talking Kushner!
- Ticket buyers from all 50 states, as well as Canada, Europe and Japan, traveled to the Guthrie to participate in this unprecedented theatrical event!
- More than 90,000 people from around the world attended the plays, classes, seminars, workshops and other events of the Kushner Celebration!
- All three productions of the Kushner Celebration – Caroline, or Change; Tiny Kushner and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures exceeded their box office goals!
Here’s what the media was saying…
…about the Kushner Celebration:
“…one of the most ambitious (and quite possibly subversive) theater events ever to happen in this country.”
Mpls.St.Paul Magazine (Tad Simons)
“… a coup for the Guthrie.”
Associated Press (Patrick Condon)
“… a supersized endeavor in a nonprofit legit landscape disposed to downsizing… the latest step by the Guthrie to take a more prominent role on the national stage.”
Variety (Gordon Cox)
“As part of the festival, Mr. Kushner received an honorary doctorate on May 21 at the University of Minnesota, and there are rosters of speakers, symposiums and classes on the Kushner cosmos. The festival also took over the nine-story, midnight-blue new Guthrie Theater, perched above the Mississippi River. The three year-old $125 million complex by the French architect Jean Nouvel is a mash-up of the silolike grain mill form — old mills are visible in several directions — and the emphatic power of transport: a dramatic boxcar shape juts from the building like a bolt from Zeus, aiming toward the river. Inside, Mr. Kushner reigns: from the gift shop on the ground floor, with its mugs, T-shirts (“The Intelligent Homosexual,” one says), books and posters; to the revival of “Caroline, or Change,” staged by the Guthrie’s director of movement, Marcela Lorca, in the Wurtele Thrust Stage; to “Tiny Kushner,” an evening of one-acts in the small Dowling Studio at the top of the building, directed by Tony Taccone, the artistic director of the Berkeley Rep in California.”
The New York Times (Andrea Stevens)
… about The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures:
The new play commissioned of Tony Kushner by the Guthrie Theater… is the clear successor to Kushner’s masterpiece, Angels in America, picking up many of the same arguments about love, sexuality, and politics while adding many more–and brilliantly…. The thrill of Kushner’s probing is delightfully dizzying, like having a conversation with the smartest person you know.
Minnesota Monthly
A success – sprawling, yearning, at times emotionally violent, it is also packed with a level of complexity, sophistication and understanding that distinguishes it as a potentially important new American work.
Variety
Sixteen years after “Angels” established him as a major force in the theater, Mr. Kushner continues his surgery on the American body politic in his new play, uncovering with a prophet’s zeal the myths that no longer sustain and the corruption at their heart. Perhaps alone among American playwrights of his generation he uses history as a character, letting its power fall on his protagonists as they stumble through their own and others’ lives. And like a prophet, he wants his listeners to think hard about the world and their place in it.
The New York Times
…about Tiny Kushner:
Kushner here is at his most unfettered, his humor and intelligence freed from loyalty to his longer work or the grand, earnest themes that underpin it. It’s by no means light, this Tiny collection, but there’s a welcome warmth and sense of play that makes one game for the most far-flung scenarios.
City Pages
Part of the Guthrie Theater’s season dedicated to the playwright, “Tiny Kushner” is a slam-bang series of five plays providing kaleidoscopic windows into the recesses of the artist’s fertile mind.
Variety
…about Caroline, or Change:
An engrossing, must-see event! Oglesby delivers the best performance on a Twin Cities stage this year.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
As marvelous, enchanting, and soul-stirring a show as you’re ever going to see, and if you choose to forego the chance to experience the Guthrie’s absolutely spectacular production of it, you will be missing the opportunity of a lifetime….There’s no way for mere words to do this production justice. You have to see it to appreciate it. This is a show everyone ought to see.
Mpls.St.Paul Magazine
The Guthrie
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