she opens soon!

It hit me today that I hadn’t really um described Beaverdance. Briefly, it’s a Marxist analysis of the fur trade in Central Minnesota featuring disco dancing beavers, a love story that almost ends tragically featuring a rapacious capitalist named Mr. Blaine and a city boy named Loring Park, a manly voyageur named Jacques Brainerd and his beautiful Ojibway love interest, Bemidji. That’s all clear, right? It opens tomorrow. The cast is looking and sounding great.

Got a little writeup in the Onion AV Club this week, in TC Daily Planet, and in  Minnesota Monthly, and MPR will air a drivetime spot Tuesday. For some reason in all these writeups you have to scroll to the bottom to find my show. I wonder why that is…

I’ll be in DC on BD’s opening weekend, performing Fidgety Fairy Tales with a group of six young actors and Matt for a national convention.

One Baudelaire song written, and two more in the works. I actually made myself cry improvising some ideas for one on piano. Now we shall see how it turns out. What I have discovered about setting Baudelaire is that I have to cut, cut, cut. The language is too thick in all the translations I have. Too many adjectives.  The song cycle will be performed in February and I hope to have all the writing done by the end of December. The first song I wrote I junked. The second I’m not so sure about but I sent it off anyway.

Charles Baudelaire, 1885, photo by Felix Nadar

In any case, it is very promising, and I will have more to say about this project in the coming month. For now, I will only say that Baudelaire is much deeper and cooler than the popular ideas about him.

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