Theater Articles and Reviews

"Ten Thousand Things speaks to nontraditional audiences, and they speak back."
Laura Butchy, American Theater
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"Performing for prisoners and other unlikely audiences, Michelle Hensley's Ten Thousand Things Theater Company revives the classless spirit of classical theater."
Tim Gihring, Minnesota Monthly

"Ten Thousand Things theater knows a thing or two about captive audiences"
David Hawley, MinnPost
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"The powerful myth shines through in this joyous telling of a sweet love story."
Graydon Royce, Star Tribune
"All I really want to say about Ten Thousand Things' production of "Once On This Island" is that I loved it. It was cool. I laughed. I would have cried if people weren't looking at me. I was totally into it."
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"Once On This Island It's well worth lingering on this musical's shores."
Dominic Papatola, Pioneer Press
"This is a mightily sung, heartfully acted, sure-footed staging that pulls you into its world and makes you linger there, even after the last notes have faded."
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"I've seen few pieces of recent theater so pleasurable to watch and to admire."
Quinton Skinner, City Pages
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"There are scenes in this play of great beauty – virtually all of it provided through strong performances. Sonja Parks is somehow both ethereal and sparky as Eurydice and Marc Halsey is engagingly sweet as her adoring, though self-absorbed, Orpheus. Steve Hendrickson's portrayal of paternal tenderness breaks the heart, even as he slowly constructs a room for his daughter out of string in a wonderful scene."

"The production, directed flowingly by Larissa Kokernot, floats on a sound design by Peter Vitale that uses a huge array of imaginative devices, instruments and electronic effects. In the end, it becomes something lingering for the heart and the soul."
David Hawley, St. Paul Pioneer Press

"It's phenomenally moving stuff."
Quinton Skinner, City Pages
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"This Richard III restores faith in the Bard."
Graydon Royce, Star Tribune
"Intimate, articulate, so emotionally honest that we wait achingly for each line, the staging affirms another personal opinion: Ten Thousand Things produces this community's best Shakespeare."
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"Raw and powerful, distilled to the simplest essence of presentation but complex and nuanced where it counts, in the performance of the uniformly excellent cast and Michelle Hensley's penetrating and fluid direction . . . The actors get right to the guts of the story, elevating it from dusty, who-cares English history to whatever modern relevance one chooses to find, whether its Washington politics or local gangs."
Carla Waldemer, The Onion

"A Closer Look at Evil."
Quinton Skinner, City Pages
"In this production's intimate setting, Davis is a blast to watch."
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"Ten Thousand Things theater company finds the rich human subtlety in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice."
Graydon Royce, Star Tribune

"In a Garden made the abstruse, idiosyncratic, repetitive world of Stein a near-perfect analogy for childhood."
Dominic Papatola's 2006 Top Ten, Pioneer Press