Welcome To Braggsville Poses Big Questions at Book-It
Book-it wraps up their current season with a knockout punch of a production: Welcome to Braggsville. Josh Aaseng and Daemond […]
June 2017
Threatre22 Aces World Premiere of Downstairs by Theresa Rebeck
Seattle Claims World Premiere of New Theresa Rebeck Play by a Week
Director Julie Beckman has drawn vivid performances from the three actors in this show. Beckman culled Downstairs from the four scripts read in last year’s Construction Zone series for this full production. Good choice.
Somewhere I heard a quip that family are those people who feel obliged to take you in when nobody else will. In this case, Irene has taken in her brother Teddy (Christine Marie Brown and Brandon Ryan). Ryan opened the first act with about 45 seconds of acting without words that let’s us know he’s quirky. Irene enters the basement to strongly encourage her brother to find other lodgings. It doesn’t go smoothly.
(IM)Pulse—Spectrum Dance Theater Disrupts Complacency
Spectrum’s Dance Company’s “Theater of Disruption” lives up to that handle with dual World Premieres
Cruel, life-changing, and—too often—deadly violence suffered by LGBTQ people formed the basis for this 90 minute dance/dramatic performance by the Spectrum Dance Company + Donald Byrd. Though the press release mentions the killing of 49 people and injuring of 58 others in the machine gun attack by Omar Mateen a year ago at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Byrd drew upon the sadder and much older outlaw “tradition” of anti-gay violence. Evoking the artistic monologuist styles that emerged in the 1990s during the peak of the AIDS Plague, Byrd continued his exploration of a “theater of disruption.” This style of theater uses all the tools available for performance on stage to, in Byrd’s words, “engage audiences in issues that are difficult and intractable, and importantly to move closer to disrupting the artificial and often arbitrary boundaries between dance and theater.”
PREVIEW Schlong Song-Sexual Bildungsroman
Too True Tales of Woody Shticks
“It’s the second cumming of Woody Shitcks solo sextravaganza! Stand-up storytelling, hip hop heroics, and emotionalnuddity collide in this smash-hit smackdown of sexual misadventure. Woody will take you on the scenic route to the bone zone-from his days inside a Puritan cult to his nights inside consenting adults-in this honest onslaught of hanky-panky hijinks!”
Although to some, this blurb might indicate that the show is ever so slightly over-the-top, I can truthfully say that yes it was, but at the same time, it was also endearing, universal and highly entertaining. Read the review of the show I saw in February:
The Truth Be Told
18th and Union, operating out of the New City space in the Central District, this past year has produced and hosted some incredible shows of the small cast variety, which have been a continuing source of creativity and joy. However, the latest show at 18th and Union, produced by the Training Grenades, however well-executed, was not exactly joyful.
Truth Be Told was four unnamed solo pieces, only one of which I would call a ten-minute play, the other three were solo monologues. Although the subject matter of three of the pieces were not quite my cup of tea, the actors, who all emanated from the graduate M.F.A. program at the UW, certainly demonstrated incredible talent and fine training.
18th and Union Brings Comedy to Summer School
Maddie Downes, a Seattle-based actor and writer, is the principal of her latest comedic endeavor, “The Summer School Comedy Show:
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) by The Fern Shakespeare Company
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) expertly parodies the Bard’s work with puppets, rap, Freudian analysis, and more. In this encore production at the Slate Theatre, the Fern Shakespeare Company caricatures some classics with mixed results.
The Complete Works was first performed by its writers, Adam Long, Daniel Singer, and Jess Winfield, of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1987. Since then, this three-actor play has been performed by theater troupes all over the world. The show presents all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays in abridged, parodied, and/or combined form. With room for improvisation, audience participation, and other deviations from the script, it’s easy to see the appeal for both actors and audiences.
PREVIEW -Soirée Café-Théâtre
Join in the fun with the nut-cases
La Cage aux Folles etc. in French
Les Seagulls, Seattle newest French language theatre troupe will be performing improv and sketch comedy on Friday June 16, at Kirkland’s Northlake Unitarian Universalist Church. Highlights will be a scene from La Cage aux Folles, the 1973 play by Jean Poiret, in which a middle-age drag queen tries to appear “matcho” when meeting his step-son’s ultra conservative anti-gay prospective in-laws. In addition there will be a parody of a TV quiz show, as well as solo monologues performed by Sébastien Plisson, Artistic Director of Les Seagulls.
Accompanying Sébatian will be: the three J’s: Jerome (Vasseur) Julien ( Bouétard) and Jessica ( Meer) as well as Nastia Kunderova.
The performance will be in French
Soirée Café-Théâtre Les Seagulls. 308-4th Ave S Kirkland, WA 98033. 7:30 Friday June 16 7:30 Suggested donation $5.00. Free for children under 12 Info:https://ufeseattle.wordpress.com/viepratique/seagulls/
Strawberry Theatre Workshop’s “Lydia” at 12th Avenue Arts
Strawberry Theatre Workshop brings Octavio Solis’s award-winning Mexican-American family drama to 12th Avenue Arts.
Lydia, first performed in 2008, tells a twisted story of family, sex, sexuality, and immigration, set in 1970s Texas. In the aftermath of a debilitating car accident that leaves the youngest child in a semi-vegetative state, the Flores family hires Lydia, a recent immigrant from Mexico, as a maid. Sexual, socio-political, and supernatural tensions soon hurtle the family towards the play’s dark conclusion.
The Wild Hearted (A Parley Workshop Production)
The Wild Hearted, Parley’s 33rd workshop since 2014, played before a capacity audience 0f about 90 people at West of Lenin Monday evening. Four millenials plan a party to celebrate history in the making on Election Night, 2016. Spoiler alert: the history they witnessed unfolding was not the one they had gathered to celebrate. The roller-coaster electoral college results of this election night rip and tear at the thin affections these acquaintances hold for one another. The lines are funny and consistently land. With just 5 weeks of walk-throughs and scripts in hand, minimal props and a few deft sound cues, the play came fully to life. All the actors put emotion and movement into their performances.