Peter Shaffer’s 1965 Black Comedy, preceded by David Ives ten-minute “curtain-warmer Sure Thing, opened at Strawberry Workshop at the Erickson Theatre Off Broadway on Thursday night. Although the curtain warmer was funnier than the main attraction, they were both hilarious.
Local Jewell Productions’ take on Other Desert Cities by Jon Robin Raitz at the Eclectic Theater on Capital Hill probably will get better with time. This is a family drama set at the desert home of the connected, Jewish, Republican, Wyeth family. Themes of loyalty, honor, love, justified violence, and creative freedom clash over two days around Christmas in 2004. I think Raitz wants us to feel a strong desire
“If you’re going to be born gay, don’t be born Mormon”
“I love being Mormon” was the opening line of Questions of the Heart, spoken by what looked like a quintessential whitebread American, as he listened to some beautiful liturgical music sung by the Mormon tabernacle choir
Noah Duffy’s original one-man show “Caught One-Handed” offers a joyful and irreverent portrait of what happens when a gay child
Beckett en français était formidable
The Seattle Beckett Festival opened this week at West of Lenin with Life=Play an Evening of Short Works and Rarities by Samuel Beckett. Of the four plays presented, two were absolute duds, one was reasonably entertaining and the fourth, La dernière bande ( Krappe’s Last Tape), presented in French, reached into the stratosphere of delight.
Urinetown has to be one of the quirkiest musicals ever to grace Broadway theatre. It debuted in 1999 at the New York International Fringe Festival, but by 2001 it had flowed (sorry that will be my only bathroom pun, promise) right up to Broadway. It is a wacky potpourri, throwing together political and social commentary, environmentalism, love stories and Broadway musical parodies. Director Jake Groshong somehow is able to have his troops pull the whole thing off in a spirited combined effort from Balagan and Seattle Musical Theatre.
Hold these Truths by Jeanne Sakata, directed by Lisa Rothe and featuring Joel de La Fuente in a stellar one-man performance, shows up the unique strengths of theater. This play’s mix of fact and fiction depicts Gordon Hirabayashi’s principled stand against racist WW II policies that led to the internment of Japanese-Americans.
Three unique American voices are featured in ACT’s evening of one-acts. To be sure Steve Martin, Woody Allen and Sam Shepard are as different from one another as can be; however, this seemingly random sampling of modern theater smoothly flows together, providing a lively summer night.
Marianne Savell excels as the sole performer in The Amish Project about the shooting of school girls at the West Nickels Mines School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on October 2, 2006. Robert Quinlan directs this powerful fictionalized account by Jessica Dickey in the small and intimate Isaac Studio at Taproot Theatre. Isaac Studio is the right space for this, it seats 120 and with a bare set by Mark Lund of a hanging window and a simple wooden chair, it suggest the aggressive “simplicity” of the Amish as understood in our popular imagination.
The facts this play is based on read like yet another tragic school massacre:
The Snoqualmie Falls Forest Theater, nestled in a canyon in a lovely wooded area about thirty-five minutes from Seattle, makes for a wonderful summer destination for theatergoers. While the show’s vibrant chorus numbers were sung effectively, the troop had some minor problems pulling off an entirely successful Fiddler on the Roof.
