Celebrity chef Justin Sutherland was arrested in St. Paul on Friday night on suspicion of domestic assault and felony threats of violence, police said.

Shortly after 8 p.m. Friday, officers were called to an address in the 800 block of Front Avenue in St. Paul after receiving reports a man with a gun was outside the address. When officers arrived, they spoke to a man and woman. The man, identified as Sutherland, 39, was arrested and booked at the Ramsey County jail on suspicion of felony domestic assault and felony threats of violence, said Sgt. Mike Ernster, spokesman for the St. Paul Police Department.

“Our investigators will be working to determine the circumstances that led to this arrest being made. When we have those details, we will share them,” he said. Police will present a case to the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office for charging consideration, according to Ernster.

Sutherland remained in jail as of Saturday afternoon.

The St. Paul chef has been featured on “Iron Chef,” “Fast Foodies,” “Top Chef,” “Taste the Culture” and a judge on several other food-focused TV shows and talk shows such as “Good Morning America.” He is a Food Network “Iron Chef” winner and season finalist on “Top Chef.” He also is the author of a cookbook, “Northern Soul,” and won an Emmy for “Taste the Culture.”

He opened his first restaurant, Handsome Hog, in St. Paul’s Lowertown. Sutherland is no longer affiliated with that restaurant but owns Big E, an egg sandwich shop on Grand Avenue.

Earlier this year, he announced he was going to help reopen the beloved Rondo community restaurant Golden Thyme Coffee and Cafe. Sutherland and his dad, Kerry Sutherland, are partnering with the nonprofit Rondo Community Land Trust to open the restaurant.

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Shane Wiskus has been demonstrably excited this week in Minneapolis, not just because he was back in his home state, but also because the former Gophers All-American was at his best in the U.S. men’s gymnastics Olympic trials.

“I had the best two days of competition in my life,” he said.

Wiskus was performing so well that after sticking the landing on his last event, the parallel bars, he let loose with his most emotional celebration of many over the two days of competition, imploring an already loud partisan crowd to make even more noise.

The performance sealed his third-place finish in the all-around competition and, Wiskus thought, his spot on the five-man team that will travel to Paris for the Summer Games next month. Roughly 45 minutes later, the rug was pulled out from under him.

“I feel like I deserved it,” Wiskus said.

Frederick Richard, a sophomore NCAA champion from Michigan, won the all-around competition with a total score of 170.500 and the automatic Olympic qualification that goes with it. Stanford’s Brody Malone finished second with 170.300 points, and Wiskus was next with 169.850. Wiskus was later named an alternate to the team headed to Paris.

Oklahoma’s Paul Juda (168.850) and Stanford’s Asher Hong (167.650) placed fourth and fifth and made the team, as well. The wild card pick was Wiskus’ EVO Gymnastics teammate Stephen Nedoroscik, a pommel horse specialist who had the event’s second-best score on that apparatus, a combined 29.300.

“I always had it in my head that there was a chance, that there was a chance because I can do a really good score for Team USA on an event that maybe they need,” said Nedoroscik, 25. “So, my single score on that one event adds more to a team than perhaps someone who does multiple events.

“It was always in my head, I just knew it was going to be really hard.”

The U.S. men haven’t won an individual Olympic medal since Danell Leyva won silver in the parallel bars and horizontal bars, and Alexander Naddour won bronze in the pommel horse, in Rio De Janeiro in 2016. The men haven’t won a team medal since a bronze at the 2008 Beijing Games.

“You can expect, from me and the team, some medals in Paris,” said Frederick, who became the youngest man to win the U.S. trials since Steve Hug, also 20, in 1972.

Khoi Young, who placed 15th in the all-around this week but was the all-around bronze medalist at the U.S. Championships in May, joins Wiskus as the other alternate.

Wiskus, 25, didn’t make the 2023 U.S. Championships team, and pulled out of the 2023 Pan American Games because of injuries. But he had bounced back, winning silver in the all-around, and bronze in the floor and high bar, at the 2024 Winter Cup.

At Target Center this week, he had the top composite score on the floor exercise (28.95) and was second in the horizontal bar (29.000). Asked how he felt after learning he wasn’t being selected for the team, he said, “Numb.”

He said performing at home again — he was a three-time NCAA champion at the U — was special. He had cheering sections throughout the arena on Saturday, some holding large cardboard cutouts of his face, some re-enacting a clapping routine for the vault that Wiskus and teammates did during their college days.

“I’ll remember this experience for the rest of my life,” he said. “It’s probably the last gymnastics meet of my life, and what better way to end (than) at home with two of the best competitions of my entire life.”

“I had a lot of family, a lot of friends out there,” he added, “and I just hope my made them proud. It was a hell of a ride.”

Before fame came fun.

Prior to reviving the Disney animated musical franchise with “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast,” composer Alan Menken and librettist Howard Ashman were working with a little lower Manhattan company called the WPA Theatre. It was there that they brainstormed something silly: A musical adaptation of “Little Shop of Horrors,” an extremely low-budget 1960 movie about a carnivorous plant that had become a cult classic via late-night TV and campus midnight movies.

Will Roland (Seymour Krelborn) and China Brickey (Audrey) in the Guthrie Theater’s production of “Little Shop of Horrors,” which runs June 22-Aug. 18, 2024, at the Minneapolis theater. (Dan Norman / Guthrie Theater)

Together, they created something that Ashman called “the dark side of ‘Grease,’” Menken tapping into many a circa-’60 source for inspiration, including doo-wop, rockabilly and vintage R&B. The WPA’s production became the biggest box office hit in off-Broadway history, running for five years.

So what happens if you take a musical that finds charm in its cheapness and place it on the thrust stage of one of America’s most high-budget regional theaters, the Guthrie? Is that too big a venue for something so proudly “little”?

Not if the artists keep the sense of fun that clearly permeated its genesis. And the Guthrie’s summer production of “Little Shop of Horrors” does that. Under the direction of Marcia Milgrom Dodge (who also choreographs), it’s a high-energy dark comedy filled with imaginative staging ideas that still manage to look appropriately cheap. It also unleashes top talent and admirable affection upon Menken’s melodies and Ashman’s relentlessly clever lyrics and script.

Silly as it is, “Little Shop of Horrors” was revolutionary in that no one had ever before brought a monster musical to the stage. The predator in question is Audrey II, a plant discovered at a farmers’ market by Seymour, an employee at a failing Skid Row florist.

It quickly gains notoriety and helps turn things around for the little shop and for sudden celebrity Seymour, but there’s a catch: The secret behind its extraordinary growth is a constant diet of human blood. Seymour only has so much of it, so something has to give. Or someone. Or several someones. You get the idea.

Seymour also has a big-time co-worker crush on Audrey (after whom he names the plant), and their budding romance introduces some surprisingly touching interludes into all this murder and mayhem.

For that, you can thank Ashman and Menken’s way with a ballad – both “Somewhere That’s Green” and “Suddenly Seymour” are beautiful songs – and the tenderness accorded each by China Brickey’s Audrey and Will Roland’s Seymour. Roland gives our conflicted nerd protagonist the right mix of awkwardness and spine, while Brickey is a constant scene stealer, lending captivating layers to a sweet but self-doubting woman stuck in a violent relationship.

They’re complemented well by David Darrow as a collection of characters (including Audrey’s abusive addict of a boyfriend), the soulful voice of T. Mychael Rambo as the blues-belting Audrey II, and the Motown girl group Greek chorus of Erica Durham, Gabrielle Dominique and Vie Boheme.

Lex Liang’s Skid Row set is delightfully detailed, and one of the show’s best elements emerges from the Zig Zag Records shop upstairs. That’s where music director Denise Prosek leads a versatile five-piece band in Menken’s infectiously engaging score, a key ingredient to making this “Little Shop of Horrors” so much fun.

Rob Hubbard can be reached at wordhub@yahoo.com.

“Little Shop of Horrors”

When: Through Aug. 18

Where: Guthrie Theater, 818 Second St. S., Minneapolis

Tickets: $95-$19.50, available at guthrietheater.org

Capsule: The theatrical equivalent of a fun night at a drive-in movie.