2023 Seattle Outdoor Theatre Festival
One of Seattle’s best summer entertainments will take place in Volunteer Park July 8th and 9th: The Seattle Outdoor Theatre Festival, which features many the outdoor touring shows in the Puget Sound area, including Shakespeare shows by Wooden “O”/Seattle Shakespeare Company, Greenstage, Mt. Vernon’s Shakespeare Northwest, Last Leaf Productions and CSZ Seattle.
Directed by Teresa Thurman, one of Seattle’s most eminent theatres, Sound Theatre Company, has opened Cost of Living, a play with great relevancy to our current epidemic of isolation and loneliness. Taking place in New York City, the title not only refers to what it costs in dollars and cents to live in Manhattan and its boroughs, but also the emotional costs of simply living. 
A Truly American Opera
Like Lowbrow Opera Collective, Seattle Opera is de-museumifying opera and producing some interesting chamber opera with living, breathing, in the flesh composers and librettists whose subjects are not 18th century Viennese noblemen (much as I like those operas) but about truly American experiences such as immigration. A chamber opera, Bound, which opened this weekend in the intimate space at Tagney-Jones Hall, was just such an opera.
Nothing is more satisfying than stories of revenge!
At 18th and Union, Pacific Play Company will present a playwrights festival as an appetizing selection of hilarious and thought-provoking short plays and monologues based on the sizzling theme of revenge. Eight actors and nine playwrights will offer a fast-paced, suspenseful evening one will not soon forget!
Hope is a Good thing, maybe the Best Thing and No Good Thing ever Dies.
Like the film Schindler’s List, Tacoma Little Theatre’s production of The Shawshank Redemption portrayed humanity at its worst and at its best. Also, I had the same feeling upon leaving TLT, as I did upon viewing Schindler’s List; that I had gone through a profound, emotional and morally uplifting experience. On a less personal level, the production may not have had Steven Spielberg nor Hollywood big-bucks, but its quality was on a par with anything I have ever seen on Broadway or the West End. It was a tribute to director Blake R. York and Tacoma Little Theatre.
Hello Dolly…Hello Laughter!!
Now that the pandemic is over, it most definitely is time to laugh, and the Village Theatre’s excellent production of Hello Dolly, provides just such an opportunity. From start to finish, this production, expertly directed by Timothy McCuen Piggee, was sheer entertainment from opening number to the final curtain call.
More than Friends-A triptych on Queer Love through the Ages. Although I generally like traditional grand operas, as long as
My husband’s addiction drove a freight train through my world.
Is one of the many memorable quotes from Scot Augustson’s Arson of Crows, now playing at 18th and Union, which was undoubtedly THE most moving piece of theatre I have ever seen; also the most profoundly funny and the most comically profound. It illustrated the concept that comedy is tragedy plus time.
Who then,….am I
Is the question which keeps being asked in Screaming Butterflies’ flawless production of Orlando, playwright Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of Virginia Woolfe’s 1928 novel of the same name, which opened this past weekend at the Merlino Arts Center in Tacoma.
“I don’t mean to be insensitive…but”
Last night, Intiman Theatre opened a play by Eleanor Burgess titled The Niceties, which could also have been titled The Cruelties based on the personality of the one of the characters, Janine Bosko, a baby-boomer professor of American History at an elite university in Connecticut. Bosko argued with her young Black millennial student, Zoe Reed about a number of issues: the founding fathers’ sources of wealth, the true nature of the American “Revolution,” and the validity of Zoe’s feelings about being “the other” in American society in general, as well as at an elitist institution cranking out future employees of Wall Street. 
