From MPR News, Art Hounds are members of the Minnesota arts community who look beyond their own work to highlight what’s exciting in local art. Their recommendations are lightly edited from the audio heard in the player above. 

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Brecht meets the gangster underworld in Frank Theatre’s Halloween opening

Peter Rachleff is a retired labor historian from Macalester College, and he recommends Frank Theatre’s staging of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,” a satirical play about authoritarianism and corruption.

The play’s title character, Arturo Ui, is an imagined cross between Adolf Hitler — whose rise Brecht fled Germany to escape — and Al Capone, and it’s set in the 1930s gangster underworld of Chicago.

Frank Theatre is known for mounting plays that challenge the status quo and spark conversation.

The play opens on Halloween and runs through Nov. 23 at the Ivy Building for the Arts in Minneapolis.

Rachleff, who has seen Frank’s previous productions of the show in past years, calls the play "very relevant to the moment in which we are living."

Peter says: We are living in a moment where not only is authoritarianism a concern, but so is corruption; and so whether it's pardoning this cryptocurrency guy or demanding that the Department of Justice reimburse the president $230 million, we seem to be experiencing the kind of synthesis that Bertolt Brecht imagined when he wrote “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.”

I think that Brecht's aesthetics of tearing down the fourth wall between the audience and the performers on stage is an aesthetic that Frank Theatre has engaged and deployed consistently and in challenging ways over the last 36 years. I've lived here about 45 years, and I'm very fortunate not only that we have a fabulous theater community, but that Wendy Knox and Frank Theatre are in the middle of it.

— Peter Rachleff

‘Phantom’ returns to the screen — with a 60-piece live orchestra

Tristan Crawford is a writer, director and animator in Minneapolis, and his plans for Halloween evening involve a new musical take on a famous phantom. Before Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote music for the haunted Paris Opera House, Gaston Leroux’s gothic horror novel was imagined as a silent film.

On Halloween night, the 1925 film “The Phantom of the Opera” will screen at Ted Mann Concert Hall on the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis, accompanied by an original score by Twin Cities composer Philip Shorey. He will conduct the 60-piece Curse of the Vampire Orchestra as the film plays.

Tristan says: It's like the combination of going to the movies, but then also going to your favorite concert. They have flashing lights, they have fog, they have the screen playing the film. But then you also get to see the orchestra just play right in front of you.

Philip always dresses to the 10s, too. And you're just sucked into this amazing experience. I don't know what else you would want to be doing this Halloween.

— Tristan Crawford

A musical ‘Terminator’ brings joy and absurdity to Morris

Syd Bauer of Morris loves the joy and fun going into the production of “Terminator: The Musical” on the University of Minnesota-Morris campus, starting tonight.

Shows run Thursday and Nov. 1 (skipping Halloween), and Nov. 6–8 at 7:30 p.m., with a 2 p.m. matinee on Nov. 8 at the George C. Fosgate Black Box Theatre.

Syd says: I'm excited about “Terminator: The Musical” for lots of reasons, but for the main reason being that the folks putting it on are thrilled to be experiencing joy and silliness through their art.

I've gotten to talk to a lot of the folks doing tech for the show, and they're pumped about the comedy within it. They're pumped about the silliness in the props.

One of them is a bike helmet with a little toy helicopter attached to the top for the chase scenes. They're excited about what it means to be thinking about AI and technology as we're coming up on 2029, the year that the Terminator is from, to go back to the 80s.

— Syd Bauer