Author name: Alan Sydney

Past

Come From Away Soars at the Rep

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The Seattle Rep’s premiere of Come From Away could not have been timelier. The tragic events on the streets of Paris occurred only days earlier. The moment seemed to echo another era when western Europe grappled with darkness, of which Dickens noted “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” The play explores how immense tragedy somehow, someway brings out the best in humanity. To say that Come From Away is inspirational is greatly underselling the show. The work provides one of the most uplifting theatrical experiences imaginable.

Past

Quirky Buyer & Cellar at the Rep

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Playwright Jonathan Tolins has created a whopper of a high concept play; a description of the premise tells us just about all we need to know about the work. The setup is an enticing mixture of truth and fiction. The truth: Barbara Streisand really has written a book entitled My Passion for Design in which she describes an underground shopping mall that really exists below her Malibu mansion. The truth: Tolins once met Barbara and she offered him a Kit Kat Bar, which he declined. The fiction: the mall has a special caretaker, the struggling West L.A. actor Alex More. The one-man show imagines what it must be like to have a full time job down there in Barbara’s wacky personal playground.

Past

SPT at the Bathhouse’s “Bad Jews”

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SPT’s production of “Bad Jews” delivers a mixed bag of entertainment. The one-act play by young Julliard graduate student Joshua Harmon features a solid premise and potentially fascinating characters, but fails to earn some of the intense conflicts it throws at us. It does present what must be one of the most dynamic performances this season from SPT rookie, Anna Kasabyan. Her monologues recall the breath taking bitter humor of the iconic Lenny Bruce. Her riveting, laser-focused performance is worth a trip to Green Lake to see.

Past

Book-It Presents 4 Stories by Raymond Carver

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Book-It’s Repertory Theatre’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is a collection of stories that Raymond Carver wrote in different periods of his life encompassing the years 1964 to 1986. Adapter and director Jane Jones knows this material well, for she has worked with Carver’s stories before for this troupe. Book-It’s unique style of emphasizing the text’s language enables it to deliver a great deal of dramatic life into these dark tales.

Past

Seattle Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors

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The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare’s earliest and silliest plays. Slapstick and mistaken identities rule the day, as the Bard seems to just be starting to find his voice. There are flashes of his startling imagery entwined within the convoluted plot line and tortured puns. Seattle Shakespeare goes all out for the laughs here, filling their new venue at Seattle Repertory Theatre’s Leo K. Theatre with a robust energy.

Past

Bloomsday-An ACT World Premiere

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Playwright Steven Dietz enjoys a fruitful relationship with the ACT. Bloomsday is his 11th play to be taken on by the Seattle troupe and its world premiere is a gem. The premise is simple: a middle aged man experiences some “time slippage” enabling him to return to his past and encourage his younger self not to let that special girl get away. The setting is Dublin, the girl is a tour guide and the time is 35 years ago. A fun idea for sure, but what enables this work to soar is the exquisite language (a bit of it borrowed from James Joyce) employed by Dietz.

Past

GreenStage Brings Much Ado to the Parks

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On yet another very warm Seattle summer evening, GreenStage brought its high energy Much Ado about Nothing to the Dottie Harper Park in Burien. The troop chose to go big and broad here, and while some of the nuance of Shakespeare’s comedic chops may have been lost, the play clicked wonderfully for the picnicking audience.

Past

GreenStage Presents a Rarity: The Two Noble Kinsmen

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When a theater troop is focused on working with Shakespeare’s entire canon, it inevitably must dust off such oddities as the little known The Two Noble Kinsmen. Scholars credit the writing of this piece to the team of John Fletcher and Shakespeare and file the work under tragicomedy. The play, based on Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, involves two Theban cousins falling in love with the same Athenian woman. It is a positive commentary on Seattle and the GreenStage Shakespeare in the Park program that the presentation drew such a good crowd on a sun baked afternoon in Volunteer Park. All were rewarded with a solid, entertaining production that made the most out of its somewhat clunky script.

Past

Wooden O’s : Henry IV Part I

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Seattle Shakespeare’s Wooden O Productions is featuring a delightful Henry IV Part I in their outdoor series this year. On a shirtsleeve July evening in a park in Issaquah, the talented troop laid out one of the Bard’s most cherished history plays with a remarkable degree of skill and focus, never thrown off by the passing skateboarders or blasting car radios.

Past

Slaughterhouse Five at Book-It Repertory Theatre

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Kurt Vonnegut’s classic Slaughterhouse-Five has to be one of the more unwieldy narratives ever to be brought to the stage. The tale involves multiple points of view, time and space travel and a long piece covering the devastating and controversial bombing of Dresden. It became a forgettable motion picture back in 1972, but now has reemerged as a compelling theater piece adapted and directed by Josh Aaseng for Book-It Repertory. This production’s success largely rests on the astounding effectiveness of Vonnegut’s language. For through all the story’s explosions, horrors and confusion, it is Vonnegut’s unique voice that drives the play to some breath-taking heights.

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