Patrick Reusse has become a ubiquitous presence on KSTP-AM (1500). The crotchety sports pundit pops up hourly on Bob Davis's maniacal morning show, regularly visits with Ron Rosenbaum and Mark O'Connell during the midday hours, and comes back again to chat with his old chum Joe Soucheray during drive time. Then there are the weekends, with Reusse putting in another four hours behind the microphone. Considering that he also pens at least three columns per week for the Star Tribune, it's tough not to wonder about the status of the guy's home life. We're not complaining, though: With his high-pitched rasp of a voice and unhinged cackle, Reusse's a delightful old coot, making everyone around him (even Soucheray) seem more likeable. Reusse's folksy, meandering discourses can range in topic from his own disastrous golf game to the genius of Johan Santana to the bumpkins that land courtside seats at Milwaukee Bucks games. And unlike most of his sports-gab counterparts, he doesn't pretend to be discussing theoretical geometry. Reusse understands his area of expertise: men (and occasionally women) playing with balls.

Her older brothers and sisters can speak of a time in the Twin Cities when another magical media icon Mary (Richards) could turn the world on with her smile. This Mary, heard weekday afternoons on the Current (89.3 FM), may not have earned a statue on Nicollet Mall (yet), but who needs false idols or reruns when you've got the real deal right here, right now? Each weekday, as we while away our boring lives in cubes, Laundromats, home offices, fishing holes, factories, or cars, we crush out on her laugh, her smarts, her self-deprecation, and, yes, her love of music. She looks like Gophers hoopster Kelly Roysland, rocks like Diamond Dogs-era Bowie, and cracks herself up like Ellen DeGeneres's biker-chick cousin. We'd rather listen to her cough or cue up than to any monologue from any of the myriad opinion-mongers or "music lovers" out there.

It should be admitted up front that KFAI's reluctance to program contemporary popular music during daytime weekday hours--and its parallel commitment to news programming--left a gap on the FM dial through which the Current (89.3 FM) has driven a semitruck. But would MPR's new alt-flagship be considered as adventurous were KFAI to switch its a.m. and p.m. schedules--tossing exotic hardcore punk (Radio Riot, Mondays at midnight), dub reggae (The Echo Chamber, Tuesday nights at 2:00 a.m.), and '70s TV theme songs (The Strawberry Pop Show, Thursday nights at 2:00 a.m.) into prime time? As is, KFAI is a tonic at night and on weekends, and a reality check on weekdays at noon (Amy Goodman's indispensable, nationally syndicated political talk show Democracy Now! opens lunch hour to firsthand investigative reporting from around the world). The buffer of roots music in the mornings and afternoons is occasionally as contemporary as it gets, if you consider yourself a citizen of the world--bring on the African hip hop! The nightly jazz shows, meanwhile, are the only place to truly hear the spectrum of America's art form, while the Khmer and Hmong programs leading in are the only place to hear that music at all. (You knew there were Southeast Asian garage bands, right?) Listen to KFAI as fallback, or schedule your life around it, but ignore it at your peril--that's the world on there.

Sure, there are a few local DJs that hew more closely to the sonic boundaries of punk rock, but for our money, no one embodies the spirit of anarchy and irreverence more than Eric of Voice Cried Softly. Where else can you hear the Shaggs on the heels of "Let the Eagle Soar" by John Ashcroft? Faithful listeners of VCS have enjoyed all manner of rock marginalia and disjointed banter for nigh on a decade. In an age when "alternative radio" is often tainted by corporate gloss, it's refreshing to hear a volley of truly spontaneous programming, warts and all. VCS isn't produced so much as it spills awkwardly forth; it's a real-time glimpse into the id of a disaffected twentysomething with his own radio show. Now, how punk is that?

It's Saturday night after closing time, and you want music that you don't have to cue up yourself. Commercial radio feels alive, but commercials kill your mood. KMOJ (89.9 FM) has switched to slow jams, as if the party were already over. The Current (89.3 FM) plays some funky Talking Heads, but ruins it by following up with something slow. You're about to settle for listening to your own screams when you come across the racket on KFAI--a human growl over Mozart guitars and a bass drum that sounds like a jetliner landing with a flat tire. Heavy metal, the phrase lifted by Lester Bangs from William S. Burroughs, need not always describe something heavy. "Yes, that's right," enthuses Earl Root over and over again, his friends cracking up in the background once the music ends. The 18-year host of KFAI's The Root of All Evil also runs an online store and label of the same name, plays guitar in the symphonic metal band Aesma Daeva, and hosts Mötley Tüesdays at the Spring Street Bar in Minneapolis. But this radio show is his pleasure dome and clubhouse, and why he's an object of so many concert tributes. Sticking to the full spectrum of underground metal (don't bother requesting Van Halen, though he loves that, too), Root plays anything fast, nasty, or to his taste, from Mastodon to Sonata Arctica. He's proof that one fan can make a difference, and reassurance that you're not alone in wanting to rock and roll all night.

Two decades ago, there were one or two radio shows in town that played rap music. Now, hip hop is Top 40, with heavy rotation on commercial stations B96 (96.3 FM) and KDWB (101.3 FM), and also on KMOJ (89.9 FM) community radio every Friday and Saturday evening. Specialty shows on other left-of-the-dial stations abound, from The Session on KFAI (2:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. on early Saturday mornings) to The Beat Box on Radio K (KUOM 770 AM/106.5 FM from noon to 2:00 p.m. on Saturdays). But nobody mixes, informs, or performs quite like KFAI's RSE Radio (formerly 2 the Break-A-Dawn), which has apparently dropped the pretense of being a separate media entity from Rhymesayers Entertainment, the powerhouse local hip-hop label. That bit of business synergy actually benefits listeners: The original radio documentary about Atlanta rapper MF Doom last November helped promote a Rhymesayers show, but it also threw light on a deserving artist who's hardly overexposed. RSE's playlist varies, but it can be counted on to cover the old-school-new-"underground" continuum, with DJ King Otto mixing Boogie Down Production's "Black Cop" into Souls of Mischief's "Tell Me Who Profits" into Mos Def's "Universal Magnetic." Host Siddiq also invites non-Rhymesayers locals to perform live in the studio (Kill the Vultures were particularly spectacular this year). One of the show's DJs, Kevin Beacham (who produced the Doom special) moved on to launch Redefinition Radio on the Current (KCMP 89.3 FM from 11:00 p.m. to midnight on Saturday nights)--notice how the two shows don't overlap. Media monopoly or happy family, these RSE guys are a good influence.

The nighttime is the right time for jazz radio. It has actually been proven in the lab that saxophones, diminished chords, and recitations of album-jacket personnel lists sound 30 percent better after 10:00 p.m. Mindful of this fact, KFAI presents jazz Monday through Thursday from 10:30 p.m. through midnight, round about which anything can happen. Fresh Air has long been about the only place in town that'll touch the outer reaches of jazz, and many of the station's weeknight jazz slots pay special attention to the avant-garde (past or present), but fans of straight-ahead fare are not neglected. Scott Hreha hosts Monday night's One Final Note, which focuses on independent releases and progressive sounds. Recent programs include an in-depth preview of Randy Weston's Dakota show and a birthday tribute to William Parker, arguably jazz's greatest living upright bassist. On Tuesday it's Rhythm and Grooves with longtime Twin Cities music maven Larry Englund, who spins hard bop and soul jazz, and is a reliable judge of all things gutsy, blues, and swinging. Emel Sherzad takes over on Wednesday for International Jazz Conspiracy, a weekly survey of experimental jazz, avant-garde, fusion, world music, and left-of-center rock. Finally, Thursday's Collective Eye, hosted by Janis Lane-Ewart, ranges from bebop to avant-garde and does an excellent job of highlighting women in jazz (instrumentalists and vocalists). KFAI also offers a jazz-dominated pair of shows on Saturday mornings: Dee Henry Williams's A Great Blend Of Watercolors (6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.) and Bill Cottman's Mostly Jazz (9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.).

Every year we struggle with this category. There's just too much inanity that goes with the territory of hosting a sports-talk show. In order to be successful, you've got to spend way too much time pandering to the kind of sub-chimpanzee listeners who believe that the main problem with the Wolves this season was that Wally didn't shoot the ball enough, and that the funniest two words ever uttered over the airwaves are Ndudi Ebi (and not because of his lack of basketball skills). We were all set to hand this award to Paul Allen, co-host of the P.A. & Dubay Show on KFAN (AM 1280). He's obviously the smartest and most talented host in this market (and we love his horse-racing calls out at Canterbury Park). But then we remembered that Allen's also the most annoying host on the dial. His crank-head delivery, banal Stuart Scott-isms, and relentless fellating of the Vikings unfortunately overshadow his other merits. Which leaves us with the anti-P.A.: Dan Barreiro. We were always lukewarm on his Star Tribune column, but now that he's abandoned print completely for the less arduous pastures of talk radio, we've developed a guarded affection for the hairless, joyless old curmudgeon. Barreiro largely avoids the sycophancy of his peers, delivering astute, unvarnished assessments of the local teams. He also doesn't pander to the cretins that generally clog the station's telephone lines, cutting off callers with a dismissive grunt. And listening to Barreiro discuss hip hop--a topic that surfaces with bewildering frequency--is among the funniest things we've ever heard on the radio.

Twice this year, public television found itself at the center of culture-war skirmishes. First, in January, conservatives raised a stink when an episode of Postcards from Buster, a PBS show about a cartoon rabbit, dared to show a same-sex couple. A month later, under threat of FCC fines, PBS was forced to edit swearing in a Frontline documentary about American soldiers serving in Iraq. With public broadcasting thus embattled, it seems like a good time to recognize PBS's quiet excellence--from the indispensable nightly NewsHour with Jim Lehrer to a slate of children's programming that's edifying without being preachy or boring. Our venerable local PBS affiliate does its part, too, with Almanac, a lively weekly program offering virtually the only state political coverage on TV, and locally produced documentaries like this year's North Star, about the contributions of pioneering African American Minnesotans.

Yeah, yeah, we know about her work as a flack for Republican politicos, a pharmaceutical giant, and Big Tobacco. Blurring the lines between PR and journalism has made Brucato the ultimate insider of the local TV dial--and not in a good way. But the sad commentary on the state of the local anchor is this: Cyndy Brucato came back last summer after a nearly 20-year absence and put her competitors to shame. Not that there isn't plenty of reason to bemoan the return of the brusque, clipped delivery that earned her the nickname of Cyndy Staccato in her salad days. Trouble is, her blow-dried, shallow competitors seem more shallow and blow-dried than ever: Don Shelby's sold out beyond recognition, Robyne Robinson's diva act is tiresome, and Julie Nelson's smarts and talent have been wasted since she jumped into the warm, fuzzy arms of the KARE bear. Maybe it's the absence of Paul Magers that leaves us so cold, but it's more likely that we've finally seen the end of the Dave Moore era. Brucato, oddly enough, seems a throwback to that period when anchors thought about what they were reading, eschewed cutesy chitchat, and acted like real people. And she's been seen asking reporters questions that they don't already know the answers to--a refreshing indication that Brucato isn't afraid to go off script. We never thought we'd say this, and it pains us to do so, but: Welcome back.

Only local sportscaster Eric Perkins could do a segment about a family who plays a snowy game of baseball to celebrate opening day of spring training, and allow it to descend into a bizarre, nightmare-fueled short film that features "Perk" as six different but equally whacked-out characters, including an imagined baseball legend called "the Bopper" and a whiny, tobacco-stained bat boy. And only Perk could make this offbeat sports-themed narrative funny (see it for yourself at www.kare11.com/sports/perkplay.aspx). Unlike most sportscasters--who try so hard to be humorous it borders on pathetic--this gangly, unabashed sports geek has a knack for turning snowplow races and gingerbread-house-smashing tournaments into two minutes of enjoyable "news" viewing. Plus, while the crush-worthy Perk knows his stuff, he doesn't have an obnoxious pompous streak. Instead, his style is endearingly awkward and earnest, which is a refreshing change of pace from Mark Rosen's tough-guy brand of sports journalism.

When news anchor Paul Magers left KARE-11 in late 2003 for an unbelievably high-paying gig in Los Angeles, he left behind some pretty big Bruno Magli shoes to fill (and no doubt a large supply of self-tanner). Who would've expected that it'd be meteorologist Ken Barlow, and not Magers's replacement Frank Vascellaro, who would step in to become KARE's perpetually tanned Big Papa? Sure, a little glow doesn't give a weatherperson the power to see into the future. But when it's going to be 20 degrees for five consecutive days in April, it helps to hear it from a guy with an always-smiling bronzed face and a snug-fitting designer trench coat. Plus, Barlow is a science geek to the core, and when he starts spouting off about shifting jet streams and their causes, he does so with an enthusiasm even the best earth-science teachers rarely muster. While he might deliver the bad news with a constant grin, Barlow rarely Minnesota-fies the weather: Unlike most local meteorologists, he understands that "mild" doesn't mean 25 degrees and "warm" doesn't mean 30. And when it comes down to it, trustworthy meteorology around these cold parts is all about smiles and semantics.

Cable access is a medium often associated with Pyrex-clutching church ladies and juvenile pranksters looking for 15 minutes of local quasi-fame. Kinpride, a 30-minute talk show, has shattered the mold on both counts with provocative but evenhanded discussion of issues surrounding the GLBT community. Kinpride first aired in St. Cloud in 1999, ruffling more than a few feathers in the historically Catholic area and spawning an unlikely dialogue. Host and founder Michael Smith, who may have the best moustache on television, persisted in the face of criticism, and the show now airs on cable access channels in Minneapolis, Brainerd, and Duluth, to name just a few. Past shows have focused on groups like PFLAG and Couples Twin Cities, but Smith's not above a little frivolity; a recent episode discussed different methods of massage (and the naughty misconceptions about legitimate massage therapists.) That's edutainment! Catch Kinpride on channel 17 in Minneapolis, with episodes airing at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesdays.

Nick Coleman is old-school. He grew up in blue-collar St. Paul. When he needs material for his thrice-weekly Star Tribune column or wants to check his gut against the word on the street, he heads for a barbershop. He favors blunt, declarative sentences, with an occasional sprinkling of gee-whizzery. But while Coleman has enough blue-collar cred to be welcome in Archie Bunker's house, one can't help but wonder whether he might have succeeded in bringing the old bigoted softie around to his own old-style progressive politics, the kind that favor giving the little guy a chance in life and watching out for each other. That's because Coleman brings a dose of red-state values to his blue-state politics--a welcome read this past election season, his tiresome kerfuffle with the Powerline bloggers notwithstanding.

Thanks to a recent 260,000-square-foot expansion (designed by award-winning Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron), Minneapolis can proudly claim it has a museum equal to Paris's famed Pompidou Center. It's true--there's a world-class art museum right in the center of America! Even the New York Times claimed the Walker was one of the best contemporary art exhibition facilities in the world, and this was before the $92-million expansion. Now, the cube includes a 385-seat theater, a garden lounge, and a café that offers a 180-degree view of the Sculpture Garden and the city, which guests can enjoy while dining on artfully presented entrées by celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck. (The Pompidou Center has, what, some cruddy sandwiches?) Of course the Walker is offering even more of the classes, festivals, films, and lectures that have made it such an important and famous piece of Minnesota culture. But nothing can overshadow the Walker's exhibits and collections, which currently include Quartet, featuring installations by Jasper Johns and Robert Motherwell, among others, and Elemental, which includes pieces by Minimalist artists Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra, and more.

Science geeks and kindergarteners unite in the giddy pleasure of seeing the largest traveling exhibition of Chinese fossils ever to tour North America. The six-year-olds growl carnally at the velociraptor and rattle off facts to accompanying adults about the diet composition and prey-accusation methods of the small dinosaur. The older paleontological admirers check the placement of the oversized toe claw used by the velociraptor to slash prey, which was unfortunately misplaced in the Chinosaurs exhibit. This wasn't the only mounting error; the archaeoceratops's hips were also mounted backward. These gaffes aside, the collection is impressive; the species present are diverse, as are the fossilized eggs and footprints. The young and the young at heart can also go on their own dig at the small excavation pit.

Over the past year, this little gallery in northeast Minneapolis (run by artists Karl Raschke and Dave Salmela) has housed some of the most buzzed-about exhibits in town. From a show by local comic-book artists the International Cartoonist Conspiracy (which featured work by acclaimed comic-book creators King Mini and Sam Hiti, among others) to an exhibit by the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists (who later got a front-page write-up in the New York Times' art section), Creative Electric is nothing short of eclectic. In addition to functioning as a unique gallery, over the holidays the space becomes a storefront filled with one-of-a-kind items created by local artists. Here, you can pick up Raschke's assortment of buttons dedicated to shoes or soldiers (among many other things) and find a sparkly beaded necklace to accompany them. Most recently the gallery has been used to shoot a music video for Low and as a music studio to record a CD sampler for the gallery itself. But best of all, this totally pretense-free gallery has become a springboard for the local arts community, and Raschke and Salmela are as passionate about the artwork as are the artists themselves.

The corner of Franklin and Fifth Avenues, where many cars turn to catch the freeway, has long been a homely vista, especially when compared with the corner across the bridge where the Electric Fetus sits. A Dairy Queen stood empty on Franklin and Fifth for years, known as the "Crack Dairy Queen" until it was finally torn down. These days, the corner actually shimmers as the sun hits a mirror-and-tile mosaic on the side of Peace House, a place that offers lunch and shelter to the homeless on weekdays from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. The mosaic project began after demolition of the DQ exposed Peace House's west wall, which was covered with unflattering graffiti. "It was a fantastic eyesore that needed to be tiled," says Angela Carlson, an artist in the neighborhood. She approached Peace House with an offer to create a mosaic mural for them, and did so with volunteers and some $2,500 in donations from family and friends. With a name like Peace House, it's not surprising to find a flower-child aesthetic in the glittering mural, which is dominated by daisies and the words, "A Place to Belong." Come closer to see more poignant details, such as the memorial to Sister Rose Tillemans, who founded Peace House in the mid-'80s and died in 2002. Or the tiles recognizing volunteers and clients of Peace House, people whose names are rarely known, much less any contributions they've made to the community.

This exhibit had two tales to tell: one of the mid-20th-century American painter Beauford Delaney, whose modern art style changed dramatically when he moved from New York to Paris, and the other of Sue Canterbury, assistant curator of painting and modern sculpture at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, who spent five years searching through private collections to find forgotten works by this underappreciated artist. A master of color, Delaney painted in New York during the '40s and '50s, and counted Georgia O'Keeffe and Henry Miller among his friends. During that time, his urban streetscapes and portraits favored a moody, painterly, post-Impressionist style. When he relocated to Paris, his work became less centered on objects and eventually became abstract expressionism. This exhibit could have also been called "The Hunt for the Cut-Up Raincoat," because the work that bridged Delaney's styles, according to Canterbury, was rumored to have been painted on a cut-up raincoat. Canterbury eventually tracked it down, along with other works from both sides of the Atlantic. The exhibit, now gone from the MIA, is on tour to select galleries in the States throughout this year.

A bold organizational move that gave the musicians of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra responsibility for their own affairs--and their subsequent decision to have a series of "artistic partners," rather than one music director--has generated interest both locally and nationally. One of these artistic partners (the excellent Scottish conductor Douglas Boyd) led the SPCO concert on February 26, but the real star of the evening was the SPCO itself. The full ensemble of 30-some musicians started the evening with a smile--namely, one of the wittiest of Haydn's 104 symphonies--but the following 1921 chamber orchestra arrangement of Mahler's Symphony No. 4 showed how mesmerizing the group can be. Just 13 players performed music normally tackled by an orchestra of almost 100. Rather than coming off as Mahler-lite, the reduced forces brought the music into intense focus, highlighting each and every player. It was a musical high-wire act that lasted for 50 minutes; the slightest slip in ensemble or intonation from any of the 13 musicians would have instantly broken the symphony's spell. In the final movement of Mahler's Fourth, soprano Heidi Grant Murphy sang of heavenly bliss, but in the preceding three movements, SPCO's players had already sounded positively angelic.

Even though it got blasted by critics for lacking any discernable plot, Maria de Buenos Aires was the sexiest, most arresting opera production to come along since, well, Jeune Lune's production of Carmen last year. With a seven-piece tango orchestra, gorgeous singing (and singers), and visual trickery, Maria packed an exotic and visceral punch. Even though the music was bare-bones alongside the more athletic singing of Minnesota Opera's Maria Padilla or, for that matter, Theatre Latté Da's production of La Bohème, Jeune Lune served up this hooky pop-opera with just the right amount of spitfire and spice. Its regular pack of vocalists, an all-star bunch that includes Christina Baldwin, Jennifer Baldwin Peden, and Bradley Greenwald, fronted a low-tech spectacle of red-hot costumes and vivid mosaics. As high-heeled señoritas cavorted with their lovers, a ragtag ensemble of street instruments--accordion, guitar, upright base, and the like--pulsed and stomped to the beat of an Argentine marketplace. Meanwhile, the gorgeous-but-gloomy Maria eluded the grasp of our understanding. In their tag-team roles as Maria, the Baldwin sisters shimmied, stretched, and whirled until Maria swelled larger than an individual woman. While the imagistic, poetic libretto of Maria didn't always make sense to our narrative-thirsty heads, Jeune Lune's realization was nothing short of a sensory feast.

A silent apparition, a punk rock goddess, a complex character from Shakespeare: Judith Howard summoned all of these presences in "Ophelia," a solo that fearlessly celebrated all aspects of the feminine psyche--and the unique ability to gracefully doff many, many petticoats in a postmodern nod to Salome. In "Suite Goodbye," Howard played the vamp. Clad in black lingerie and brandishing a remote control, she engaged in a little dirty dancing with a toy car before clearing the stage for a maelstrom of roiling, grappling female bodies. Eventually, the dancers found their footing and cut loose for some laid-back line dancing set to Lucinda Williams's sensual growl. With these two brief but memory-searing works, Howard proved that even though she was the recipient of the "Stickin' With It" award at the 2005 Best Feet Forward Festival for her role as a veteran choreographer, her ideas remain fresh, unpretentious, and a little bit rude. Her unflappable sensibility seems more confident and mature than ever. The dance world needs rebels like Howard to remind us that a body and mind in harmony can inspire a beautiful sort of performance anarchy.

10foot5 is more than one dancer, but when hoofers like these unite in a groove so deep that pieces of the stage floor start flying around, such details hardly matter. 10foot5 is the creation of Minneapolis brothers Andy and Rick Ausland, two lanky, tap-dancing, peace-loving guys who enthusiastically celebrate the funk in our beloved Funkytown. Their performance Buckets and Tap Shoes was the runaway hit of last summer's Minnesota Fringe Festival, thanks largely to the boundless positive energy of the Auslands and their pals, all of whom are fluent in the nuances of rapid-fire percussive movement. Occasionally, members of the group banged on buckets or jammed with the live band, but mostly they gave up the spotlight to their phenomenal feet by daring one another to come up with a new mad skill or a far-out twist on an old favorite. Whenever it seemed like these folks should be getting tired, they just kept going faster: shuffling up and down the stairs in the darkness of the theater, pumping their fists, spinning on the tips of their toes, and literally bouncing off the walls. Everyone was sweating profusely by the encore--including the audience, who were shouting for more.

In past Christmas seasons, we've seen Stephanie Fellner command the stage with a mixture of Mick Jagger swagger and Cruella de Ville mischief as the Rat Queen in the Ballet of the Dolls' production of the Nutcracker?! (Not So) Suite. This year she took on the considerably sweeter role of Cinderella, and transformed the typically bland, Disneyfied character into a plucky and wise heroine. Starring in the Dolls' Cinderella and the Glass Slipper at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, the petite Fellner--who always seems to move with the sort of buoyant delicacy reserved for feathers tossed by the breeze--danced with beautiful abandon. It's not the first time we've seen Fellner sparkle onstage: A longtime Doll, she's tackled many meaty roles (including the doomed diva of The Red Shoes) and was a memorable presence in works by choreographers Penelope Freeh and Uri Sands, among others. No matter what the assignment, Fellner always gives everything to her dancing, sharing the spotlight when necessary, but also knowing when to embrace her star turn with a flash of grace and an all-too-rare sense of humility and honor.

The mark of a great actress is her ability to inhabit her role convincingly in any part or production, and Parks possesses this ephemeral quality. The last year has seen her in two Children's Theatre shows: the Somali/African American collision Snapshot Silhouette and the eco-warning Splash Hatch on the E Going Down. She played characters younger than herself in both productions, but Parks manages to combine youthfulness with bite--she never plays a character as a type, and she brings a sparkling authenticity to the tumult of adolescence. In the same span of time, she played a mother in Pillsbury House's Bel Canto and took on the role of Roxanne in Ten Thousand Things' Cyrano, two of the more well-received shows in the Twin Cities in 2004. She was a standout in both, though her performance as single mom Bessie in Bel Canto was especially memorable. In a show that gave her every opportunity to overemote, Parks gave a powerfully bittersweet performance opposite co-star Will Sturdivant, evoking the national hangover of the '70s while imparting a sense of a life gone in directions unforeseen. Whether onstage for children (as in the stripped-down Ten Thousand Things) or in more conventional productions, Parks combines craft with evident depth of heart.

After the dust settled from Fringe 2004, SRO Productions picked two of the year's most popular productions for a best-of at the Loring Playhouse. Kicking off the evening was Theatre Latté Da's Knock!, which dove headlong into the world of a 12-year-old boy named Toehead (ostensibly a younger surrogate for show creator and star Jim Lichtscheidl). The production was airtight technically, with choreography, pantomime, and actors interacting with projected images. But what made the show distinctive was the way it ceaselessly poked fun at everything: itself, you, childhood, Minnesota, and the absurdities and cruelties of family life. Ken Rosen played Toehead's big sister with icy and unrelenting sadism, and when a video montage showed him repeatedly dashing board games to the ground in fits of pique, younger siblings throughout the audience laughed knowingly. Lichtscheidl put together a piece of lightweight fluff that found a perfect tone; like all talented humorists, he seems to understand that nearly everything is funny when it's looked at the right way.

Frank Theatre treated this local unveiling of Suzan-Lori Parks's play like the lopsided treasure it was, staging it on the floor of an empty machine shop and applying layers of dread, panic, and tempered affection to a prickly and unforgiving storyline. Shá Cage was both appealing and frightening as Hester, an abortionist living in a backwoods dystopia and dreaming of freeing her son from prison one day. The imagery came in streams, with a crooked mayor, corrupt vigilantes, and bursts of Brechtian song creating a knife's edge amid the waters of surrealism. Along the way, Gregory Stewart Smith's Butcher provided a crucial innocence that kept things from turning too harsh. This was a perfect wedding between Parks's wild and daring play, Cage's depth and energy, and director Wendy Knox's go-for-it style. Nathaniel Hawthorne had no fucking idea what he was getting himself into.

As an artistic director at Theatre de la Jeune Lune, as well as in outside projects, Serrand weds a unique and almost contrarian aesthetic to a propensity for producing tons of work. In recent months he's co-directed a new staging of Carmina Burana, a run of The Miser at Jeune Lune, and an energy-packed Maria de Buenos Aires in the same space. Like all the best directors, Serrand is an idea man. His miser Harpagon, portrayed with acid restraint by Stephen Epp, is all about money and meanness rather than the humorous figure traditionally portrayed. And in his tango opera, Serrand evoked the sensuality and abandon one would expect, but threw in a strong dose of the dread and death that underpins high romance. Serrand routinely embraces invention and left-field choices that provide ample ground for thought and insight even in shows that strain the viewer's endurance. He's diving back into a partnership with Cambridge's American Repertory Theatre (from which The Miser also sprang), this time for a staging of Kafka's novel Amerika. He is, it seems, constitutionally incapable of doing boring work.

When most of us think of international theater, what comes to mind is the Walker Art Center's programming of avant-garde, experimental, and often nonsensical productions. In that grand shadow, the Guthrie Theater and its World Stage Series director James Morrison slowly grew a divergent international program, one that just wrapped up a breakthrough season and is poised to explode once the Guthrie moves to its new home. Morrison, who long split his World Stage responsibilities with a position as Guthrie communications director before a promotion last month, differs from the Walker's performing arts curator Philip Bither with an affinity for text-based, usually narrative-driven work. A penchant for contemporary retellings of legends and old stories was reflected in Morrison's 2004-05 season picks: the eerie 4.48 Psychosis, playwright Sarah Kane's pre-suicide manifesto performed by London's Royal Court Theatre, and The Notebook and The Proof, two distinct WWII-inspired "mind fucks" (Morrison's words) by Flemish company De Onderneming. Next season, World Stage presents, among other things, a new production of Macbeth that's reset in a war-torn African nation (nameless, but closely resembling postcolonial Uganda). The production features an all-black cast with one exception: a real-life white aid worker who married an African warlord inspires Lady Macbeth. The three witches take after cross-dressing Liberian combatants, those guerilla grandstanders who baffle their enemies with pink wigs and frilly dresses. "The piece is so immediate, and so shocking," said a lovesick Morrison, who fell headlong when he saw the show in Britain last fall.

While last year's Guthrie Mainstage shows were of the sort that one admired rather than loved, the action taking place in the Guthrie Lab possessed a consistently high level of quality and adventurism that made it the closest thing to a sure bet. Lady with a Lapdog was Chekhov on truth serum, full of manic highs and dreamy lows. Blue/Orange paired Peter Macon and Stephen Yoakam as a mental patient and psychiatrist in a mental duel that later spilled over to the Guthrie's excellent staging of Oedipus. Earlier this year cockeyed genius Joel Sass staged Pericles, maybe the oddest of Shakespeare's plays, as a warped phantasm. And before that, the Royal Court Theatre popped into town to present the late Sarah Kane's suicidal meltdown 4:48 Psychosis, which converted a corner of the Lab into a desperately harrowing space. Intimate and comfortable, the Guthrie Lab provides high-level regional theater with considerably more risk than the usual Mainstage offerings--which, in 2004, tended to be safe choices rendered with a somewhat antiseptic polish.

A month before last fall's presidential election, Mixed Blood Theatre rushed Jane Martin's Iraq War play, originally intended for the Guthrie, to the stage. It featured Chris Mulkey as Eddie, a gutbucket patriot proud that his son is off killing the enemy--until that son is killed, and Eddie goes into a spiral of questioning every value about America that he once held dear. Mulkey nailed the role, as did his real-life wife Karen Landry as his spouse. The play was delivered as a Greek drama, complete with a chorus, and Eddie's downfall ostensibly mirrored the imperial hubris that got his son killed in the first place. Looking back, the play itself was probably a little thin, a little preachy, and a little didactic. That being said, it was also a work that moved its audience to tears. It felt as though we were experiencing a crucial moment up here in the frozen north, and that somehow the power of this drama was going to be the beating butterfly wings that would somehow stop the madness. It wasn't true, of course; it almost never is. But this was a pivotal stage work in 2004 because it jammed a wire right into the light socket where art and politics intersect, and showed how the power of public performance can lay bare the anguish behind our collective hopes.

Theatergoers in the Twin Cities are often blissfully unaware of the embarrassment of independent riches in this town. In most other American cities of this size, there are but a handful of theatrical options on any given weekend. Here, a couple of dozen offerings are on the plate at any given time. Earlier this year the tiny CalibanCo served up a quintessential small-theater experience: Neil LaBute on an empty stage in a church basement. Artistic director Jeremy Cottrell assembled a sharp cast for Bash, a series of monologues dealing unflinchingly with death and horrible misdeeds. The small audience (some seated on sofas, for crying out loud!) was treated to an intelligent and emotionally complicated performance that could have translated to almost any stage. Cottrell told the audience beforehand that CalibanCo will be looking for new digs in the future. Let's hope it's a bigger but similarly intimate venue, and that the company can build on its momentum.

A little production company called Grinding Into Emptiness, composed of local artist Kristi Ternes and sometime Twin Cities resident Roger Peet, assembled last December at Bedlam Studio to put on a multimedia show rife with happy darkness. Autotomy combined shadow puppets, live music, and conventional puppetry to tell a story of allegory and paranoia in a police state that raised wacky echoes of Kafka at his bleakest. (Are we alone in thinking that, on some level, that was when Franz was having the most fun?) It was a story of spies, betrayal, and the impossibility of purpose when all has become oppression and suspicion. For all its lively, brainy storytelling, it kept coming back to humor--at one point, paint and projected light yielded results that would have made prime-period Syd Barrett a proud man indeed. Honorable mention in this category goes to Michael Sommers for his psychedelic moving comic book Over, Under, On, part of an Open Eye Figure Theatre show the month before. Both of these outings presented psychotic alienation with a goofy grin.

Kilbourne has earned a lot of notice on Twin Cities stages in recent years, most prominently in Hapgood at the Jungle in 2002 and The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer with Frank Theatre in 2003. It was in playing Langley Collyer in Richard Greenberg's The Dazzle, though, that he delivered a haunting performance that set him apart from the pack in 2004. This Jungle production was a portrait of a downward spiral that generated all kinds of weird psychic electricity, and Kilbourne was the conduit for a uniquely disturbing vision of the senses gone haywire. He played Langley, a talented pianist with no skill for living in the world, as a wide-eyed aesthete so in love with everything that he could contemplate a piece of garbage for hours on end. Abetted by Stephen D'Ambrose as brother Stephen, and Bain Boehlke's set, which comprised a mountain of found objects, Kilbourne gave us a man so adoring of reality-- and so out of touch with it--that, at the end of the work, he carefully arranges the position of his brother's dead body. Charismatic, creepy, off-putting, and enthralling, his work in The Dazzle shone with a bizarre light that left no one without illumination.

Well-known as the hardest-working filmmaker in the cities, documentarian extraordinaire Matt Ehling (Urban Warrior) has, since 9/11, been crafting the sort of PBS-worthy docs that PBS doesn't dare to broadcast anymore. His latest is, you could say, a noble effort to inform us of what we might at this point be too terrified to want to study on our own. Interviewing a cavalcade of government, university, and interest-group heavyweights (including former CIA director Stansfield Turner and local FBI heroine Colleen Rowley), Ehling delves deep into the controversies surrounding the Patriot Act and the introduction of military elements into the realm of domestic policing. Yet for all the unease that these topics bring to any inquisitive American, Ehling's thesis seems to be that the Bush years actually don't represent the first time in U.S. history that constitutional rights have been suspended--that in each preceding case (e.g., WWII-era Japanese internment camps), public reaction and the strength of our government's foundation have won out. Whether that comforting message will be galvanizing or placating is up to us. How's that for democracy?

To celebrate its 10th anniversary, our local museum of the moving image is reeling in the years, spending three weeks on a dozen and a half of its best-attended, best-loved repertory titles: Hitchcock's Vertigo (May 11-12), Kurosawa's Yojimbo (May 9-10), Godard's Breathless (April 29 through May 1), and the Maysles brothers' Grey Gardens (May 11-12). It's a reminder not only of the theater's history (or the cinema's), but of the unique virtues of film projection in the DVD era--including the company of strangers. We love Oak Street's new habit of stretching director retrospectives (e.g., Renoir and Ozu) across two months with screenings on Sunday mornings and afternoons. (Better to take one's time pondering the masters than to cram half an entire oeuvre into a busy week of binge auteurism.) Recent weeklong runs of new material have included a few soon-to-be-classics: the Senegalese Moolaadé, The Lizard from Iran, Infernal Affairs from Hong Kong. The pair of series devoted to noir and screwball comedies were way too canonical for our taste, but not so the monthlong "Gotta Dance!" wherein Purple Rain and Moulin Rouge shared the floor with Top Hat and Silk Stockings. Would the Oak Street promise to make the "Jewish Holiday Chinese Buffet Extravaganza!"--Broadway Danny Rose with sweet and sour in the lobby--an annual event?

It's not just for the neighbors anymore. The only Minneapolis movie house of any kind within miles of its far-east locale attracts filmgoers from all over because, for one thing, it's an awfully nice room: both wide and long, with unusually comfy seats, a huge screen, and state-of-the-art sound. For another, you feel immediately welcome when you walk in. The lobby isn't '50s-style; it's nearly as it would have been in '49 when the place was built. (Love that old TV, that copper water fountain, the vintage ads displayed under glass, the issues of Variety on the swanky couches.) The programming is handled "split-screen," as they say in the biz: two or three different films on weeknights, as many as five on weekends, scheduled with the audience's needs in mind (kids' movies in the morning, grown-up dramas in the evening, Rocky Horror and Donnie Darko, etc., at midnight). For a while near the end of last year, the Riverview was the only theater in the five-state region screening the best movie of 2004: I (Heart) Huckabees. Local indies (e.g., Justice), international film-fest fare, Gophers games(!), even the TPT premiere of that "controversial" Sugartime episode have found a home here, too. And then there's the cover charge: unbelievably generous at $2 before 6:00 p.m., $3 after 6:00. Could this increasingly rare and vital independent showplace get any better?

If the best movie theater is the one that has the best new movies, then this 10-year-old multiplex offshoot of the Uptown--run by the muscular Landmark Theatres--is clearly the best. In the past year, owing to the bargaining power of its parent company, the Lagoon has played exclusive host to no small number of "specialty film" essentials (like 'em or not): I (Heart) Huckabees, Bad Education, Before Sunset, Vera Drake, Tarnation, Control Room, Dogville, The Brown Bunny, and Primer, to name a handful. Sometimes, inevitably, the corporation wins--particularly if it screens The Corporation.