Article: Cornball wizard; To Michael Brindisi, artistic director of Chanhassen Dinner Theatres, the dramatic contents of classic Broadway musicals like `State Fair' remain big and relevant. He believes in them totally - and he's convincing even the skeptics.(VARIETY)

Will Pa's prize pig win a blue ribbon? Will Grandma's brandy-laced mincemeat sway the strait-laced judges? Will the rosy-cheeked farm kids find romance on the midway, in 1946, at the Iowa State Fair? Is this enough dramatic conflict to engage an audience 51 years later?

It doesn't get much more homespun than Rodgers and Hammerstein's "State Fair." Yet to Chanhassen Dinner Theatres' managing artistic director, Michael Brindisi, those issues are as big, as relevant, as contemporary as anything on any theater stage, bigger than Samuel Beckett.

By the time the show opens Friday, "he'll have everyone believing in it," said Joe Chvala, head of the hot dance ...

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