Star-crossed lovers and singing monsters: The Twin Cities' winter theater season

Winter is all about piling on the layers, and the winter lineup for the Twin Cities theater scene is little different. From January through March, there are many multiples, parallel themes, and canonical playwrights getting double bills.

The Bard is always the safest bet for theaters to fall back on, and the Guthrie is presenting two of Shakespeare's safest bets. Up first is Romeo And Juliet on the McGuire Proscenium stage, a co-production of the Guthrie and New York troupe The Acting Company, who presented a critically acclaimed Henry V at the Dowling Studio a year ago. Henry V was marked by the youth of the actors, many of them graduates of the Guthrie and University Of Minnesota B.F.A. actor training program—and a number of them are returning here, which should give the well-trod love story some dynamism. Like Henry, R&J is slated to tour nationally after starting off at the Guthrie for a Jan. 9-31 run. On Jan. 30, Guthrie chief Joe Dowling returns to helm Big Blue's other Shakespeare production this winter, the bloody murder tale Macbeth. As with previous Dowling Shakespeare efforts, look for all the stops to be pulled out as far as costumes and sets, although for the bleakness of the Scottish moors, Dowling could just as easily turn to Minnesota's January landscape. Macbeth runs through April 3.

You'd better not be afraid of Noel Coward's satirical wit, since he's the other quintessentially English playwright getting a double look this season. On Feb. 11, Britain’s Kneehigh Theater will take up residency at the Guthrie with its adaptation of Brief Encounter, a mix of the 1946 film version and Coward's original stage script, Still Life. Using a blend of song, live theater, and film to explore the love lives of three couples, the show has won critical and audience rave reviews in Europe and New York. The show runs here through April 3. On Feb. 12, Blithe Spirit, perhaps Coward’s best-known play, kicks off Jungle Theater’s 20th-anniversary season. Spirit's comic love triangle centers on a husband and wife who attend a séance, only to have the ghost of the man's first wife conjured up, sparking a jealous rivalry between the living and the dead. Look for Jungle favorite and longtime Twin Cities actress Wendy Lehr to steal the show as the batty psychic Madame Arcati. Spirit runs through March 28.

Two more heavy-hitting scribes get area premières of recent work as well. Feb. 12 to March 7, Theater In The Round gives a local debut to Nobel winner Seamus Heaney's adaptation of the Greek tragedy Antigone, The Burial At Thebes, which has been lauded elsewhere for Heaney's poetic but modernized update of Sophocles. And Park Square brings the latest by Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead's Tom Stoppard to town. Rock 'N' Roll, running Jan. 15-Feb. 7, juxtaposes the differing climates of Stoppard's birthplace and adopted homeland, looking at rock music and the rise of democracy in Czechoslovakia, and the death of Communist idealism in England.

Smaller companies are often known for taking greater risks and staging edgier work that takes aim at contemporary political issues, and there's no shortage of that this season. The 20% Theater Company, which is dedicated to increasing the visibility of female and transgendered playwrights, presents a slate of five world-première one-act plays under the umbrella title The Fresh Five. Representing three local and two national writers, and directed by five different women, the evening should range from subtly provocative to comic to outright politicized, including a play about a New York school teacher who accidentally kills a student she doesn’t recognize because he never comes to class. The series runs Jan. 8-23. The trials and tribulations of life in a New York public-school classroom—taken from the real life of writer Nilaja Sun—are also the focus of No Child… at the Pillsbury House Theater, returning for a Feb. 20-March 22 staging after also opening Pillsbury's 2009 season. Actress Sonja Parks starred in the one-woman show last year, garnering positive reviews and a 2009 Ivey award for her impressive tackling of 16 different characters. Seeing as how we haven’t fixed our public education system yet, the play is still timely, and the remount is a great chance to see a tour de force performance.

Music hath charms to sooth the savage beast, and Minnesota winter is about as savage a beast as they come—luckily, there are several musical extravaganzas to whisk you away. As part of its 2010 Broadway season, the Orpheum is importing The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein—seriously, that’s the full billing. With the same production team as The Producers (although universally acknowledged not to be as good as that show), Young Frankenstein packs songs and silliness into this send-up of the monster-movie genre, and should be a fun, lowbrow night whether you're a fan of the movie or just there for the naughty bits. It runs Feb. 9-14. For something a bit classier on the culture scale, the Minnesota Opera’s production of La Boheme at the Ordway fits the bill. The classic Puccini opera is one of the most-produced in the country, and MNOp is bringing back rising stars James Valenti and Ellie Dehn, who sizzled in last year’s Romeo And Juliet, to play ill-fated lovers Mimi and Rodolfo. Performed in Italian with English supertitles, the warmth and spontaneity of the music, not to mention the attractive cast, should be plenty to keep an audience engaged. It runs March 6-14.