A Night At the Theater

Last night we went to see Little House on the Prairie at the renowned Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. I had been wanting to see the new Guthrie building, and to take George and the kids to their first Guthrie play for ages. As a birthday present to myself, I chose to purchase tickets to Little House, a world premiere musical based on, of course, Laura Ingalls Wilder's stories.

We had a great time. The musical met my expectations; it was very good but not fabulous I'd say. Since I have the books about memorized, it was a little odd to see how they mixed stories up so much but I got used to it. George thought it was a great first major production to take the kids to. Eli caught all the humor in the music and giggled a lot. Rose was very interested in the story until she got really tired at about 9:00--bedtime.

We all enjoyed a picnic overlooking the Mississippi and the Stone Arch Bridge with its lock and dam.Above is the Mill City Museum, site of a famous flour explosion in 1878 and built on those ruins. (In looking into the history of it just now, I found out that the original mill which had exploded was rebuilt and the current one was destroyed by a fire started by homeless people. I, like many, had misunderstood this.)The new Guthrie is set on the Mississippi River amongst all this Minneapolis flour milling history and beautiful scenery. We enjoyed looking out over the setting from the Guthrie's "Endless Bridge", one of the longest cantilevered bridges in the world.
And below, also visible from the Guthrie's bridge, is the new 35W bridge, rebuilt over the site of the very famous bridge collapse that occurred last August. It's set to open in about a week, just over one year from the accident. Amazing what we can do when we set our minds to it.