Rohan Preston

Minneapolis, Saint Paul

Lead Theater Critic at The Minnesota Star Tribune

Writer and critic, photographer and gardener, husband and dad.

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Articles

Former Medtronic CEO and his wife, who have donated over $250 million, honored at Guthrie gala

3 days ago | startribune.com | Rohan Preston

Minnesota humanitarians Bill and Penny George received the distinguished arts philanthropist award Friday from the Guthrie Theater at its annual gala. Through their foundation and directly, the couple have donated over a quarter of a billion dollars to health and well-being, authentic leadership, community and the arts. At the gala, the Georges called out other Minnesota philanthropic champions in their acceptance speech, including former Carlson Cos.
$25,000 awards promise big impact for playwrights, theater artists

3 days ago | startribune.com | Rohan Preston

When playwright Gemma Irish got a call that she had won the McKnight fellowship for playwrights, she was ecstatic. She had applied six or seven times for the $25,000 prize, hoping that it will help lift her career and also buy time to make work.
'Between Riverside and Crazy' punches for the gut

1 week ago | startribune.com | Rohan Preston

After a heart attack has him knocking on death's door, retired New York police officer Walter "Pops" Washington decides to give the son with whom he's had a fraught relationship some advice. Be sure to get your fiber and potassium, he tells Junior. And while tap water doesn't have the cache of designer drinks, it's perfectly fine. OK, what Walter has to offer may not seem all that profound as end-of-life wisdom goes.
Guthrie stages a dramatic financial comeback

1 week ago | startribune.com | Rohan Preston

After a fiscal year in which the Guthrie Theater reported a record $3.8 million shortfall on a $32 million budget, Minnesota's flagship performing arts company reports a dramatic turnaround. The theater still posts a shortfall, but it is a relatively tiny $85,578 on a $29.6 million budget for fiscal year 2024, which ended Aug. 31, 2024.
After believing that she's ugly, 'Violet' finds her voice and inner beauty

1 week ago | startribune.com | Rohan Preston

She has almost all the things she seeks - including grace and healing - inside her. It's just that she hasn't had the right mirror to reflect her innate beauty. Violet, the title character of Jeanine Tesori's musical about a scarred young woman who thinks that she's too ugly to be loved, is getting a splendid embodiment by Annika Isbell for Ten Thousand Things Theater.
19th-century baddie is slick on the stage and slippery with the law in 'Whoa, Nellie!'

1 week ago | startribune.com | Rohan Preston

It's all shapeshifting fun and games for 19th-century Minnesota outlaw Nellie King until she runs headlong into a fateful dilemma. Fired from a vaudeville show and with the authorities closing in on her for financial fraud - she and partner Edward Loudon look to The Child, an orphan teen who has recently come into their care, for a possible solution. The adults in the makeshift family have a choice between suffering together or trafficking the adolescent to a whorehouse madam.
Gut-busting Pulitzer-winning cop drama 'Between Riverside and Crazy' to bow at Park Square Theatre

3 weeks ago | startribune.com | Rohan Preston

Talk about a passion project. Director Stephen DiMenna first saw Stephen Adly Guirgis' Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Between Riverside and Crazy" in 2014 in New York and was so taken with its poetry and pathos that he sought to bring it to Pillsbury House Theatre in Minneapolis, where he was a company member. But the set requirements, including a three-room apartment, proved too much for the space. DiMenna shopped the play around.
5 ways 'Whoa, Nellie' salutes cross-dressing outlaw queen who scandalized 19th-century Minnesota

3 weeks ago | startribune.com | Rohan Preston

She was a cross-dressing "cowboy detective" who got breathless newspaper coverage for her exploits. Nellie King stole horses, ran scams and changed husbands and outfits often in Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Dakotas in the 1880s and 1890s. She may not be as well-known as frontier legends such as Calamity Jane and Annie Oakley. But a new crackerjack musical hopes to change that. "Whoa, Nellie! The Outlaw King of the Wild Middle West" premieres Saturday at St. Paul's History Theatre.
Broadway's '& Juliet' blasts onstage with stirring mashup of pop songs and Shakespeare

3 weeks ago | startribune.com | Rohan Preston

While pop star Katy Perry was late getting onstage at the Target Center in Minneapolis Tuesday, only blocks away, theatergoers at the more intimate Orpheum Theatre got to hear her pop hit "Roar" well before the concert fans. The number in "& Juliet" was served up gorgeously by soulful and precise performer Rachel Simone Webb as an anthem of female liberation in a grand, brash Broadway musical that reimagines literary history.
'Sickle' is severe and brutal, but it's a must-see

4 weeks ago | startribune.com | Rohan Preston

For some arachnids such as spiders and scorpions, it's normal for the offspring to consume their mom to live. But it's a sign of supreme desperation when a human mother tells her starving children that they should eat her body for sustenance when she dies. That heartbreaking story is related in "Sickle," Abbey Fenbert's one-act drama that's up at Mixed Blood Theatre through this weekend.