It may be Bastille Day, but there's plenty of things to do besides eating brie and baguettes and wearing a beret. Like seeing the conclusion to the Harry Potter series, of course.
Can't Miss It: Thursday
Wow, We Just Saw A Blue-Ribbon Elephant Man
Strawberry Theatre Workshop is building a repertoire of person-in-society plays that, recently, have included an intriguing look at filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl; a laugh-out-loud, musical take on the life of Johannes Gutenberg; and now a captivating portrait of Joseph (aka John) Merrick, the Elephant Man. It's like having a live Biography Channel with really eclectic tastes.
Finally, a Side-Splittingly Funny Musical about Gutenberg
Gutenberg! The Musical! runs through September 27 at the Erickson Theatre Off Broadway, and you should "run" to get tickets ($25/$10 students/seniors). Ha ha! No, but seriously. We laughed like a booze-addled hyena for much of the night, with some startled expletives thrown in when things got...strange (we can't remember the precise lyric, but it had something to do with wanting to feel Satan's horns deep inside). After, we traded memorable quotes ("dirty thatch"!) with our companion all the way home.
Finally, A Good Play About Leni the Maybe-Nazi
There was a woman, born in Germany, who thought Hitler was about the best thing to happen to Germany since, well, ever. Though she never joined the Nazi party, she became a "close personal friend" of Hitler. He supported her work: the documentaries Triumph of the Will (about the 1934 Nazi rallies at Nuremberg) and Olympia (about the 1936 Oympics). She shot a lot of film during the war. Sometimes the extras were trucked in from a concentration camp. When she got married in 1944, she introduced her husband to Adolf. She was a woman who both didn't know about the camps, and only cooperated with the Nazis because she didn't want to be sent to one.

