Garrison Keillor Returning to The Fargo Theatre for Live Show in March

Minnesota storyteller Garrison Keillor will return to The Fargo Theatre for Garrison Keillor at 80 with Heather Masse and Richard Dworsky on March 2, 2023. Tickets go on sale Friday, February 3rd.

Garrison Keillor at 80 is a show of music, stories, and stand-up on the theme of cheerfulness — happiness depends on circumstance but cheerfulness is a choice. The show includes Keillor’s sung sonnets (“Prayer,” “Longevity,” “Love Song”) and duets with Heather Masse on songs by Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Tom Waits, Greg Brown, Mark Knopfler, and Ann Reed, plus an extended medley of sung classic poems and jokes.

Keillor also does the News from Lake Wobegon, reflecting on his generation, the one that knew about outhouses, slaughtered chickens, hitchhiked, drove a straight-stick transmission, skated on outdoor rinks and told jokes. The program concludes with the audience singing a cappella an impromptu medley of familiar songs — “America,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Oh Susannah,” “In My Life,” “Going to the Chapel” etc.

“We are the last generation who knows all the words,” Keillor said. “When we’re gone, they’ll disappear.”

Garrison Keillor did “A Prairie Home Companion” for forty years, wrote fiction and comedy, invented a town called Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average, even though he himself grew up evangelical in a small separatist flock where all the children expected the imminent end of the world. He’s busy in retirement, having written a memoir and a book of limericks and is at work on a musical and a Lake Wobegon screenplay, and he continues to do “The Writers Almanac” sent out daily to Internet subscribers (free).

He and his wife Jenny Lind Nilsson live in Minneapolis, not far from the YMCA where he was sent for swimming lessons at age 12 after his cousin drowned, and he skipped the lessons and went to the public library instead and to a radio studio to watch a noontime show with singers and a band.