On a typical day at the office, Managing Director Josef Gross (played with appropriate increasing bafflement by Galen Joseph Osier), arrives at his desk, opens his Apple MacBook and begins to sift through his inbox. He comes across a memo in a new language, prints it, reads it out loud, has a WTF reaction, and proceeds to search around his offices to find out what it is written in and to get it translated. The language is Ptydepe. …
Arthur Miller’s direct language in A View from the Bridge is bracing to ears tuned to Seattle Nice. Directed by Braden Abraham and styled as a tragedy, the first act is quite funny. It’s the shorter second act which makes it tragic.
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.
Theater-off-Jackson hosted an evening dedicated to early Jazz musicians; some local to Seattle, and some making history in New Orleans. The first show, upstairs in an art gallery/cabaret was a “Live Installation”, Unsung Heroes of Seattle Jazz, produced by Freehold Theatre in partnership with the Central District Forum for Arts and Ideas and the Mahgany Project, the second was Emboldened, the Rise and Fall of King Bolden the First, an original script by one of Seattle’s most distinguished actors, Reginald André Jackson. King Bolden was actually Charles Buddy Bolden, a Cornetist, often credited with improvising Ragtime to create what came to be known as Jazz in New Orleans.
Cheap Tricks
Fantastic Z Theatre Company, a self-described artist-run LBGTQ theatre, opened Sidewinders, the Northwest premiere of an “existential transgender wild western” by award winning playwright Basil Kreimendahl at Richard Hugo House on Thursday, July 16.
Hans’ Fans The 14/18 project presented several Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales linked together by incorporating The Journey of the
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.
Teenagers playing Teenagers in Romeo and Juliet
Seattle’s Young Shakespeare Workshop presented Romeo and Juliet at the Seattle Outdoor Theatre Festival in Volunteer Park at something called the Conservatory Lawn, but is really a natural stage made by the low-lying branches of a Cedar tree. The length of the play illustrated an important principle about outdoor theatre: Never go over two hours and preferably get it down to 60 minutes.
The World’s Most Famous Tragedy with Plenty of Comic Relief ?
Last Leaf Productions opened their summer Shakespeare in the Park season, at the amphitheater in Volunteer Park with perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous play, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark; it is certainly the play with the most famous quotes. One of LLP’s strong points is that they always get their shows down to one hour, which makes it perfect for outdoor productions.
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.
