The news cycle for the 2016 presidential race has been full of stories questioning candidates’ personal and political integrity. In the midst of this contentious political climate, Taproot Theatre presents Suzanne Bradbeer’s The God Game. This nuanced, compelling drama explores a politician’s struggle to balance his career, religious views, integrity, and family.
More Fun than Trick or Treating in the Rain
Sandbox Radio, Seattle’s competitor with Minneapolis’s Prairie Home Companion will present a special Halloween episode, from the locally grown radio variety show that combines killer music, sound effects, engaging storytelling, the city’s best performers and an ultra cool sparkly host… all recorded live for podcast in front of you, their “studio” audience.
In their first production, the Red Rover Theatre Company presents “Red Rover” written by John C. Davenport, the story of four 30-year-old men in 1983 reminiscing about their old day’s in high school, most doing so unwillingly with the exception of Dennis.
Played by Tedd Saint-James, Dennis drags his three old high school buddies in his rusty red convertible through their dilapidated town in a tour of weather-beaten places they used to visit as kids. Although the four never formed a group and only hung around Dennis individually, Dennis figures they can put any old animosities behind them and just enjoy the night.
But their evening is far from perfect.
This Seattle Repertory Theatre production of A Raisin in the Sun impacts the audience with a potent, Brechtian blend of
The Pocket Theater’s Two Man Tempest, though ambitious, fails to take the viewer by storm.
Two Man Tempest parodies Shakespeare’s classic story of magic, romance, and revenge. The 45-minute show, performed by Kendall Uyeji, Danny Lacker, and audience volunteers, is clearly the result of a lot of hard work. It features several rapid costume changes, puppetry, rap, and water guns, and leaves the actors visibly drenched in sweat before the end of Act 2. Despite the effort, these technical elements do little to make the show enjoyable. The script doesn’t pick up the slack. The jokes are weak, and they aren’t helped by the actors’ delivery or inability to stay in character.
In theater and movies fevers, like dreams, play a special role. In North American culture, they cue us to thinking what is expressed is coming from the deepest and unfiltered parts of our unconscious minds. So from the title alone we are to understand this is a stream-of-(un)consciousness work, and Wallace (Wally) Shawn holds tight to this trope to present his audience with the uncomfortable realities of being white and of the privilege classes in America.
Shawn wrote this in 1990. He could have written this for 1940 or 2040. It’s the nature of the luck of being born privileged
Jazz DJ spins plates and jangles the marrow in your bones. The Holler Sessions was flawless: a mind-bending, soul-stretching deep-dive
Hearing performances of the Messiah has long been a major musical highlight for me during the holiday season. Last year I even joined the sing-along Messiah they put together in Wedgewood and had a ball! I had no idea that the story of Handel’s composing of the work and its first performances in London had such dramatic intrigue behind it. Taproot Theatre’s season closer, Joyful Noise, brings alive the story of the birth of this classic piece.
“We don’t have the right to expect happiness.” Nor should you, if you’re going to see Richard Eyre’s adaptation of
A Book for the Time Being is a 422 page novel by Ruth Ozeki published in 2013. In the 2 hours and 40 minutes runtime of this play, Book-It packs in a lot in on topics such as: online and physical bullying, loneliness, depression, suicide across generations, Buddhism, dementia, environmental pollution, animal familiars, and (in passing) quantum physics! It was indeed a Herculean task to bring this unwieldy novel to the stage. Chiang and Ferri pull it off with aplomb.
Director Desdemona Chiang is a genius.
