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MN Shortlist is your weekly curated roundup of recommended events from MPR News, highlighting standout performances, exhibits and gatherings around the region.

‘Bard African Night: A Showcase of Works Exploring the Queer African Mind’

— Organizer and local playwright Ibimina Dominique Thompson 

brings to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis

 an evening of theater and film to spotlight Black queer narratives. 

The evening features a live excerpt from the play “Bad Africans” by Thompson, the story of a young African influencer and their struggle to return home. This will be followed by a screening of Thompson’s short film “Love is Like.” 

The event will also include an artist talkback with co-collaborators Ashe Jaafaru and Mariah Hanson. 

 a free museum inside the Landmark Center in St. Paul, has unveiled new spring exhibits. A delightful, bijou space filled with historic keyboards and interactive, hands-on displays provides a uniquely physical sense of the history — and exquisite craftsmanship — of music history. 

A kids’ storytelling event takes place Saturday

 — admission is free, but registration is required on the Schubert Club website. 

Minnesota poet Jim Moore will be at the Loft Literary Center

 to read from his new collection, “Enter,” in an evening of poetry and conversation. 

Moore’s work is powerful, compact and intimate, drawing in equal measure from extraordinary tragedy (he was present for an airport bombing at La Guardia) and meditative stillness (he is a scholar of Asian poetry). His work is still vital and contemporary — one of the poems in this collection is called “How to Come out of Lockdown” and tells us “we are sane, but sanity alone is not enough.” 

Girlhood (It's complicated) Book Club: ‘The Girl in Building C’

The History Center is hosting a book club to accompany the traveling exhibit “Girlhood (It's Complicated).”

 The club will discuss their next book, "The Girl in Building C" by Mary Krugerud. Set in 1943, it’s about a young woman who received news that her supposed pneumonia is tuberculosis. She is sent to a sanatorium in Walker, Minn., for a stay that lasts months and sees her symptoms worsen significantly, leading to a brush with death. 

Krugerud, a freelance historian based in Minnesota, weaves nonfiction archival material with excerpts of letters from sanatorium patients to highlight the experience of the young woman’s stay. The book club is for adults. 

 — From Nova Scotia, sister duo Cassie and Maggie 

make three stops in Minnesota this weekend

 to share their lively, graceful folk numbers, including International Falls, New Port and St. Paul. Influenced by their Celtic heritage, their sound blends an innovative musical approach with centuries-old melodies. 

The duo’s music incorporates Gaelic and English with exquisite harmonies. They also showcase an affinity for string instruments. The sisters are descendants of a rich history of musical talent. And they have quite their future to continue to write. 

University of Northwestern brings to its stage a marvelously broad 18th-century comedy, “The Critic.”

 Originally authored by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, this version was revisited by local playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, who has a world-renowned talent for finding new life in old stories. 

Full of backstage drama, oversized egos and characters with names like Dangle and Sneer, it’s immediately obvious that “The Critic” leans into burlesque. It’s very funny. 

 during which millions of Ukrainians died. Many scholars and the Ukrainian government consider it a deliberate act by the Soviet regime, which imposed grain requisitions and restricted food access in Ukraine. Millions of Ukrainians died. 

“Sickle,” a play written by the Chicago-based playwright Abbey Fenbert and produced by Theatre Novi Most 

of Minneapolis. The story is told through four women — Halka, Anna, Iryna and Yasia — who attempt to survive the famine in their village.

“These women are forging this kind of community together because all the men have been deported to the gulags and killed,” says director Lisa Channer. “It’s an unusual play because it's a cast of all women who do things that usually men do in plays, like there's a combat and there's really deep, gritty acting needed and visceral emotional arcs that feel Shakespearean or Greek. We were commenting yesterday — you don't very often see that with a cast that's written for just women.”

The play, which includes Ukrainian supertitle captioning and live Ukrainian folk music, opens May 2 at the Mix Blood Theatre Company in Minneapolis. (Preview May 1.) 

— Based on the 2007 indie film, “Waitress” is a musical with songs by Sara Bareilles and a book by Jessie Nelson

. Produced by Artistry Theater in Bloomington,

 the show follows Jenna, a server and expert pie maker, as she navigates an unplanned pregnancy, an abusive marriage and a complicated romance with the town doctor. 

Though it premiered on Broadway in 2016 under the shadow of “Hamilton,” “Waitress” has since become a regional favorite. Its intimate story and blend of folksy love songs and heartfelt ballads remain as satisfying as the pies featured on stage 

— The George Morrison Center for Indigenous Arts, which 

, presents a solo exhibition on Jonathan Thunder, a Duluth-based artist known for paintings that mix the surreal with mythology and pop culture. 

“Jonathan Thunder: The Artist as Storyteller” 

is on view through May 17 at the Regis Center for Art at the University of Minnesota. The show features 15 large-scale artworks, including a new painting commission titled “Out to Sea: The Dreamer.”

“I grew up reading ‘Mad Magazine,’ Robert Crumb, collecting Garbage Pail Kids, riding skateboards with elaborate, odd designs on the deck, listening to Public Enemy, Rage Against Machine, Tom Waits and watching MTV," Thunder says of his influences. 

“I’m also a life student of Ojibwe culture and storytelling. The Twin Cities is where I was raised, and I was born on the Red Lake Indian Reservation. These two worlds are integrated to me, yet far apart. Both worlds inform my perspective. I’m also attracted to urban minutiae, bad graffiti, tattoos, tribal symbolism, children’s tales and dreams. I feel these symbols help place my work in our time and connect it to where we are today.” 

 — Murder mysteries are seeing a pop-culture resurgence of sorts. Well, actually, they never really fell out of favor since the genre was canonized by authors like Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 

 one of Christie’s most famous works is closer than ever. The “Mousetrap,” which started as a radio play nearly 80 years ago, delivers all the delicious perks of the genre like endearingly innocent and annoyingly out-of-touch character tropes, interconnected plot lines and one unsurpassable storm — both figuratively and literally. 

This production, directed by Guthrie senior artistic producer Tracy Brigden, follows a recent history of dramatic mysteries after she also directed "Dial M for Murder" by Frederick Knott during the 2023-24 season. 

 — “The Barber of Seville” is one of the best-known operas in the English-speaking world. Even if you're unfamiliar with the plot of the 19th-century opera, its famous aria “Largo al factotum” has appeared in films like “Mrs. Doubtfire” and Pixar’s “Luca.”

The Barber of Seville is a comic opera about a young Italian woman trying to escape an arranged marriage in pursuit of freedom and true love. To do so, she enlists the help of the clever barber Figaro. 

The production closes the Minnesota Opera’s current season

 and will be performed in Italian, with English captions. 

Preserving Our Stories: A Practical Guide to Family Archiving

 For KaoLee Vang, stories, objects and memories taught her everything she knows about her family. So when her father died, she faced the question: what should we keep and who decides? How are stories remembered when they are never written down? 

This exhibit shares artifacts and items from her dad’s life that also make up who she is, she says. The exhibit will inspire you to ponder what the act of remembering means and what remembering can offer as we work to understand ourselves. 

The exhibit runs through May 27 at the XIA Gallery & Cafe in St. Paul.

 Vang is a Hmong American daughter of refugees from Laos and currently resides between Minnesota and Colorado. 

Jacob Aloi

Author

Anika Besst

Alex V. Cipolle

Max Sparber

MN Shortlist is your weekly curated roundup of recommended events from MPR News, including a poetic evening with Jim Moore, a heartfelt musical about resilience and pie and a powerful new play centered on the Ukrainian famine.

Three people stand on a stage dressed as farmhands.

Courtesy of Theatre Novi Most

Courtesy Walker Art Center

MPR photo/Euan Kerr

A painting of a person with tree-like horns in a robe standing near a doorway.

MN Shortlist: May 1-7

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