Ballard’s Ghost Light Originals offers up a provocative night of entertainment with its revision of Calderon de la Barca’s Life is a Dream, written during Spain’s Golden Age of Theatre in 1635. The play provides a multi-faceted story that explores the tensions between love and duty, the burdens of meeting one’s fate and the mystery of mankind’s perceptions of reality.
Peter Brook’s The Suit provides Seattle with a powerful example of this theatre master’s stage magic. The 75 minute one-act makes its West Coast premiere in a co-production between The Seattle Rep and the Seattle Theatre Group.
The 5th Avenue Theatre and The ACT’s goal is to “blow audiences away” with their collaborative production of the quirky and absolutely entertaining Little Shop of Horrors. They can check that job off of their “To-Do List” right now!
Rookie director Peggy Gannon has staged a wonderfully acted Third for West Seattle’s ArtsWest Theatre. She has elicited heartfelt and thoughtful work from her entire cast and the play looks top dollar from the first scene. Third was Wasserstein’s final play; she died just months after its off-Broadway premiere. It is not her finest work, and while there are some very moving and thought-provoking scenes, the play finally remains somewhat thin and underdeveloped. However, this talented cast is ready and able to make the most of what they’ve been give
When in high school, playwright and composer Nathaniel Porter loved the way a punk cover could “take the original, crank up the distortion, pump up the tempo and add in some brattitude.” Black Vengeance is his punk cover of Shakespeare’s Othello. A thoroughly altered script, new songs and a three-piece punk band add up to a hit and miss evening on many counts, but the work is never dull and has a kettle full of clever riffs on the Elizabethan classic.
Mr. Pim Passes By, A.A. Milne’s drawing room comedy written in 1919, is wonderful fun from Pim’s opening entrance right up to the romantic dénouement. This is exactly the kind of show, Taproot does so well, and they are running on all cylinders here!
For their mid-winter show, The Seattle Public Theater brings Lisa Dillman’s quirky 2013 comedy, American Wee-Pie to the Bathhouse on Green Lake. The piece exudes a quiet charm, featuring a batch of determined, thoughtful characters slipping and falling in the socially and economically tough days of twenty-first century America. How they dust themselves off, stand again and proceed to find that “beautiful, tiny good thing in life” forms the major spine of the production.
Richard III and his monstrous machinations usually over shadow Richard II, Shakespeare’s only play written entirely in verse (even the gardener speaks in rhythm and rhyme.) A pendulum may be swinging, for the Royal Shakespeare Company recently staged a very strong version of Richard II that it sent out to movie houses around the world and now Seattle’s Shakespeare Company has put together a stellar production that does everything right.
Patrick Lennon returns for his fourth go round as the star of David Sadaris’ The Santaland Diaries. At this stage, he is wearing the role as comfortably as an old fuzzy Christmas sweater. A pleasant evening is in store for all.
Seattle playwrights and actors Candace and Sam Vance have created a new production for the holiday season. Le Club Noel takes place in a 1930’s Parisian cabaret surrounded by the incipient stages of World War II. The Nazis are knocking on Paris’s door and it will take a great inner strength of the play’s characters to soldier on and find some genuine Christmas warmth and joy amidst the looming darkness.
