MN Shortlist, April 27 – March 5: Winter pushback, origin stories and returns
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Early March brings a familiar Twin Cities tension: winter still digging in, artists pushing back. This week’s lineup leans into revision and return — classic scores revisited, origin myths recast, intimate confessionals shared in big rooms — each offering its own way to reconsider the stories we inherit.
‘Men On Boats’ at Rochester Art Center in Rochester — March 4
Ten Thousand Things brings its touring production of “Men On Boats” to Rochester for one night, reframing a foundational American adventure through pointed, contemporary casting.
At the Rochester Art Center on March 4, Jaclyn Backhaus’ 1869-set dramedy follows a government-sanctioned expedition through the Grand Canyon, interrogating masculinity and Manifest Destiny as actors of color, Native performers, and women, trans men and nonbinary artists step into the roles of the white male explorers.
Directed by Joy Dolo, the production keeps the company’s access-minded ethos intact while pressing on the question beneath the myth: whose stories get elevated, and who gets to do the telling, before the show continues on to Minneapolis and St. Paul later this month.
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‘American Icons’ at Northrop in Minneapolis — March 5
The Joffrey Ballet marks its 70th anniversary with “American Icons,” a tight, clear-eyed tour through 20th-century choreography performed with a live orchestra. At Northrop on March 5, the Chicago-based company takes on four landmark works, including pieces by Martha Graham and co-founder Robert Joffrey, sketching a lineage of American modernism and ballet that continues to shape contemporary stages.
An on-demand preview from artistic director Ashley Wheater, available starting March 2, frames the program as both celebration and corrective: institutions last by returning, again and again, to the artists who first forced them to change.
dodie at First Avenue in Minneapolis — March 5
North London singer-songwriter dodie returns to Minneapolis for the first time since her pre-pandemic “Human” tour stop in 2019, carrying a body of work that has grown quieter and more deliberate in the years since.
At First Avenue on March 5, she brings the soft-spoken intimacy that built her following — spare piano and ukulele arrangements, breath-close vocals, and lyrics that sit with heartbreak, sexuality and depression without sanding down the edges.
Her October 2025 album “Not For Lack of Trying,” released after a long stretch of private development, gathers that introspection into something more assured, less confessional-for-confession’s-sake — the sound of an artist who knows how to hold a room by barely raising her voice.
‘PARADISE’ at Paramount Center for the Arts in St. Cloud — March 5
Hatch Dance takes its performance on the road with “PARADISE,” a 70-minute, all-ages work that treats winter not as something to push through, but as a reason to gather. At the Paramount Center for the Arts on March 5, seven dance-actors move through contemporary dance and physical theater alongside a live original score, building a shared space for warmth and attention when the season feels longest.
Co-created by choreographer Helen Hatch and theater practitioner Jon Ferguson — a central figure in the Twin Cities’ devised theater scene — the piece reads as an early statement from a young company already committed to ambition, collaboration and scale.
‘Mois de la Francophonie’ at Alliance Française de Minneapolis/St. Paul — through March 31
Francophonie Month in the Twin Cities turns its attention to Tunisia this year, following the cultural crosscurrents of language, art and music across the month of March.
At Alliance Française de Minneapolis/St. Paul, programming stretches from Tunisian cooking classes and a book club to film screenings and live music, anchored by the March 5 opening of “Théâtre du Silence,” an exhibition by Franco-Tunisian artist WERIEM featuring her Pierrot painting and drawing series.
A March 6 artist talk on Tunisian art history and March 28 performance of music by Nour Harkati ground the month in both scholarship and sound, a reminder that Francophonie is less a relic of empire than a living, evolving exchange.
‘Guys and Dolls’ at Chanhassen Dinner Theatres in Chanhassen — through Sept. 26
The Broadway warhorse that won the 1951 Tony for best musical arrives in a bright, comic-book Manhattan, all bold lines and primary colors. At Chanhassen Dinner Theatres, director Tamara Kangas Erickson makes her mainstage directorial debut with “Guys and Dolls,” guiding its gamblers and showgirls through love, hustles and hard-won reform with a visual nod to Dick Tracy and a wink toward the swagger of the Marlon Brando–Frank Sinatra screen version.
It also marks a symbolic turning of the page for the company: Kangas Erickson steps into a role long held by the late Michael Brindisi, bringing her choreographic history with the theater into sharper focus as its new artistic leader.
From a one-night canyon expedition in Rochester to a Technicolor Times Square in Chanhassen, the week toggles between reinvention and revival. If nothing else, it’s proof that even in the long tail of winter, there are still new reasons to gather — and new angles on stories we thought we already knew.
