The Script was against Us
One of the big problems with a lot of modern playwrighting is that it is influenced by screen-writing. As a result, plays are rendered into too many short scenes, taking place in vastly different interior and exterior spaces. The results are virtually un-stageable unless you have the resources of Disney on Broadway. WET’s new production The Things Are Against Us, was one of these scripts.
Radio Theatre Live coming to Seattle’s Town Hall, Monday April 25th.
Sandbox Radio newest live radio show, the Words and the Bees will be performed at Town Hall on First Hill in Seattle, on Monday, April 25th at 8 pm.
Historical Fiction about Great Theatrical Figures
Billed as a “new Steampunk mystery/comedy/thriller, an original script, by Louis Broome and John Longenbaugh, Fatal Footlights opened at Theater Schmeater on Friday. Steampunk, the internet told me, has to do with 19th century historical fiction and technology. Fatal Footlights concerns murder and intrigue in an 1885’s theatre in London. Apparently, two of the characters are members of the Brass family and the play was part of a series about them, so the Artistic Director communicated to me the next day.
O Brave New City that has such talent in’t
One of the occupational hazards of a theatre critic is seeing the same plays over and over again. This is especially true of Shakespeare’s more popular plays, particularly the romances, whose setting are the outdoors and are regularly staged at summer Shakespeare Festivals. Usually, the productions are draped in concepts and gimmicks but rarely do I go to a production, where the language occupies center stage and successfully carries the play. This weekend, New City Theatre, opened The Tempest, which should be the standard by which all other Shakespeare plays should be measured. All the actors were of the highest vocal caliber, and used the text expertly to communicate to the audience.
The Silent Treatment-Noir Style
Drawing on the Silent Movie and Film Noir styles, Irrational Robot Bureau presented the Lasalle Fragments, a live “performance” at the Pocket Theatre in the Greenwood neighborhood. Our seedy detective Casimire LaSalle, played by Robert Reidl, opens the play in silence with the first of many hung-over inner monologues played electronically for the audience to hear. As the evening progresses, he ends up in bars, in a Mercury Sedan, at a train station, in a room and back at his office/humble abode. Throughout the evening various pockets get picked, information gets stolen, he gets tortured and it all ends up back at the bar, where the characters finally speak lines from Bogie’s best detective films.
Conventionally Unconventional
When the Victorian version of “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” is ignored between a mother and daughter, and the wealth, which paid for the daughter’s expensive education, comes from prostitution and pimping, all hell break’s loose in George Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Directed by Victor Pappas, Seattle Shakespeare Company opened this delightful play at Center House in Seattle Center last weekend
Government of the Banks, for the Banks and by the Banks
The above quote appeared in a Wall St. Journal article, during the 1933 United States Senate Banking Committee hearings, which investigated the role that the Wall Street head honchos played in the 1929 stock market crash. The investigation as well as the lead investigator, Ferdinand Pecora, was the subject of a world premier, The Reckoning, Pecora for the Public, at the Alhadeff Studio Theatre at Seattle Center, this weekend. Enthralling was one adjective which sprang to mind, along with extremely topical. When I was not laughing, I felt intense moral outrage, as well as feeling that it was the best one-person show I have ever seen. Possibly it is the best solo play ever written.
Gigabites of Giggles
Seattle’s most beloved comic, Bridget Quigg, opened her new show, Techlandia, a tribute to all that we love and hate about the technological evolution of Seattle , on Friday at Theater Schmeater. For those of us who have been around the tech revolution for more than 25 years and are perhaps married to the first generation of “geeks” it was nothing short of therapeutic laughter.
“I am wedded to Satan”
Drawing on one of the most influential and profound legends in European literature, the legend of Dr. Faust, Akropolis Performance Lab has produced Ecce Faustus, Latin for Behold Faust!!! Directed by Joseph Lavy, and presented at the austere Northminister Presbyterian Church in Ballard, the show opened on Friday.
What Idea? That our Divorce is on the Rocks!!!!
Emotionally one of the most difficult aspects of divorce must be: How does one deal with the fatal long-term illness of one’s ex-spouse? This is one of the themes of the new play, Ruth and the Sea by Morgan Ludlow, produced by Pacific Play Company, now playing at Annex Theatre. One of the other themes is : What do you do in the last weeks of your life? Play the good patient or let loose and live?
