Monthly Archives: October 2010

Theatre

Weekend Performing Arts: Pink Door Dance, Northside Chop Shop, and Sexy Halloween

Seattle Shakes’ “Hamlet.” Photo by John Ulman.

This weekend when it comes to theatre, the big news is the opening of Seattle Shakes‘ stunningly cast Hamlet (tickets $22-$38). Directed by John Langs, Seattle Shakes tackles the play that’s just too big to ever be fully performed with a cast of amazing Seattle actors, including Adam Standley (in several roles, including Fortinbras), Charles Leggett (as the ghost of Hamlet’s father), Shawn Law (Laertes), Brenda Joyner (Ophelia), and the incredible David Pichette as Polonius. With a set design by Jen Zeyl and sound by Rob Witmer, this is about as fantastic a group as you could bring together in Seattle, and I’d be more than willingly bury my longstanding dislike of seeing Shakespeare performed to head over for it.

Of course, the Rep’s production of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women is pretty stacked, too (tickets $30-$52). Directed by Alison Narver, the show stars Megan Cole, Alexandra Tavares, and Suzanne Bouchard in the titular roles. And yes, I dig Tavares, but Bouchard has been one of my favorite Seattle actors for quite some time–since at least ACT’s The Women a few years ago. Last weekend, I also missed calling out the opening of Adam Rapp’s Red Light Winter (tickets $15). Produced by small and new-ish Seattle theatre company Azeotrope at Theatre off Jackson, Rapp is a playwright whose star’s been rising in NYC for quite a while, since he clambered out from under the shadow of his older brother Anthony (of Adventures in Babysitting and Rent fame), and the show features Richard Nguyen Sloniker (Azeotrope’s founder, who I don’t think I’ve ever seen), and Tim Gouran (who’s a strong actor).

In terms of dance, this weekend is the inaugural edition of Chop Shop Northside (tickets $14/$20). Founded a couple years ago in Bellevue by longtime Seattle dance stalwart Eva Stone, Chop Shop is the east side’s biggest dance festival, and sells out Meydenbauer for two days every February. Now it expands north to Edmonds Community College, where among others you can catch Jim Kent performing a solo choreographed by the incredible Mark Haim.

Also, this Friday is the latest iteration of lovely Seattle-by-way-of-Perugia dancer and choreographer Alice Gosti’s Modern Dance Behind the Pink Door, at the Pink Door (10 p.m., free with purchase of food and/or drinks). The line-up features the likes of Maya Soto, Mimi Allin, and Ms. Gosti herself. And then Sunday and Monday, over at On the Boards, you have the latest iteration of their longest running performance series 12 Minutes Max (tickets $8 at the door, and don’t forget it’s early at 7 p.m.), featuring performers like Markeith Wiley and Lavinia Vago, as well as “Awesome”‘s John Ackerman performing selections from his ’09 song-of-the-day project and more.

Otherwise, you’ve got a trio of fun at Eclectic Theatre, with 3 Geeks 1 Mic (tonight 9:30), Human Prop’s improv comedy (Friday), and Blood Squad‘s Halloween-y Hell Squad (Saturday). There’s other stuff playing (check our Theatre and Dance sections), but frankly, Halloween festivities are probably first on everyone’s mind, so I need to call out BUMP this Friday down at the Showbox (tickets $35-$125). An annual fundraiser for Gay City, BUMP is a crazy-ass costume party with live entertainment, including Waxie Moon (for whom my straight heart nevertheless yearns), Inga Ingenue (for whom my straight heart yearns slightly less in jest), and Liza Rose (come on! Aerialists!) and more. It’s got a $1,000 costume prize and after-party at the Baltic Room. And it’s all for a good cause.

Travel

The Reluctant Parisienne Survives Strikes, Wrath of Penguins

Mindy Jones is a Seattleite living in Paris for two years with her husband and two kids. Her daily life does not include romantic walks along the Seine, champagne picnics on the Pont des Arts, or five-star gourmet dinners. For a realistic take on life in a fantasy place, visit her blog, An American Mom in Paris.

France is mad as hell and blah blah blah something about not putting up with this crap anymore. The country known for its strike culture is knocking itself out with daily manifestations and ongoing disruptions in metro/bus/plane/boat/hot-air-balloon/bobsled service. Walking service will be reduced next; two out of three people will have to slither around on their bellies.

The main issue sparking the unrest is the upping of the retirement age from 60 to 62. It’s pissed off a whole bunch of people (who may or may not understand math) and they are expressing their discontent by refusing to do many things. There are gas shortages because no one’s working the refineries and rumored food shortages in the near future.

Just work your extra two years, dammit, French people. I need my corn flakes.

Strikes are a regular part of life here and we’ve gotten used to disrupted transportation service and canceled school days. Last year, however, going on strike surfaced in the most unlikely of places.

We’d been in Paris about six months when we went to our son’s end-of-year preschool play. For the record, watching three-year-olds mill around onstage is as awkwardly entertaining here as it is anywhere. The confused wandering, the blank stares, the teachers whispering loudly and gesturing madly from the wings–the cluelessness of the three-year old is the same despite all our cultural differences.

The theme of the show was “The Sea.” Our son was dressed as a windmill and helped demonstrate why the ocean is salty. I think it was something about a magic, salty windmill. Those precocious kids were speaking French so the subtleties, or even the generalities, of the tale were lost on me.

The show continued with the older kids pleading for environmental awareness. Great idea, but, man, do those kids know how to kill a festive mood. First up were a group of penguins whom I thought were chatting happily until I realized they were saying their families were dead because of pollution. All their friends were dead, too. What a bunch of downer penguins.

As French penguins do, they then went on strike, holding signs in their flipperish hands and chanting things like, “Down with humans! Penguins against the humans!” I felt conflicted who to cheer for as I believe I’m a human and not a penguin, but humans seem like real polluting jerks.

Then came the sea urchins discussing how everyone they loved was dead. And the coral, they had also lost all those near and dear to them. Same with the dolphins, then the whales. At this point, a fellow American mama sitting behind us leaned forward and whispered, “Jesus, this is worse than Hamlet.”

One by one, all the depressed creatures of the sea agreed on a solution. No, they didn’t form committees and go pick up garbage on beaches; they organized and the whole ocean went on strike. The grand finale involved more sign waving, chanting and stomping of small feet sticking out from large sea creature costumes. I laughed so hard, silently and hiccupy, that tears streamed down my face. I like to think if anyone saw me, they just thought I was sad everything in the ocean was dead.

It did make me wonder: If the starfish and coral went on strike, how would we know? I hope someone’s keeping an eye on things down there. I also hope someone’s got some plans in case we are attacked by wrathful penguins staging manifestations.

Reduced metro service doesn’t seem like such a big deal, come to think of it. Carry on, French people.

Politics

Gov. Gregoire to Whitney: We’re Already in Crisis Mode

Governor Gregoire

CNBC asked Governor Gregoire to respond to analyst Meredith Whitney’s comparison of states to banks, pre-financial crisis. Here’s what Whitney said in late September:

The similarities between the states and the banks are extreme to the extent that states have been spending dramatically and are leveraged dramatically. Municipal debt has doubled since 2000, spending has grown way faster than revenues.

Whitney said what reminded her most strongly of the banks’ situation was the absence of “reliable data on state spending and debt.”

Governor Gregoire chose to play off the phrasing, saying that, “We’re in crisis mode. We the states are not in pre-crisis at all.” That’s no doubt true, but it evades Whitney’s point that state spending and debt now represent a separate economic danger from the banks’ credit meltdown, and that transparency is hard to come by. In fairness, Washington’s credit rating is quite good, but with the caveats that a) if credit ratings were infallible, we wouldn’t be in the crisis we’re in, and b) things can change very quickly.

Gregoire noted that Washington has trade to rely on; unusually, we don’t have a trade deficit with China. And state economists see mainly good news in that relationship for the future. Yet the state has to figure out how to avoid a $3 billion deficit over the next two years, and cuts have approached the bone. CNBC says:

In August, Gregoire announced plans for four- to- seven percent budget cuts across the board, as well as a phase-in of $51 million in cuts to state welfare aid. The cuts will disqualify nearly 2,500 families from child-care subsidies in October, and an additional 5,500 families from cash welfare benefits in February.

In a related article on Huffington Post, CNBC’s Nicole Lapin adds a little more to the story, saying economist Nouriel Roubini shared with her his unease about the prospect of municipal debt default, estimating that municipal debt is about 20 percent of GDP. “He added that unfunded liabilities of state and local public employee pension funds are as high as $3 trillion–or another 20 percent of GDP.”

We may be at the “bottom,” as Governor Gregoire’s advisers say, but it’s not at all clear that it’s a sustainable bottom–that is, if tax revenues have reset and incremental growth is the best we have to look forward to, debt could still drag city, county, and state governments down. (In related news, Fitch just downgraded a number of Tacoma bonds because they were backed by “volatile revenue sources” like sales taxes and parking fees.)

In Washington, the unemployment rate refuses to budge from nine percent for the past four months; and ten of our 39 counties are in double digits, topping out at 12.2 percent in Clark County. Last month alone we lost 3,200 jobs, and this is noteworthy because while the private sector added 1,000 jobs, government lost 4,200.

Budget austerity was behind the July 2008 to September 2009 decline of 2,769 employees on the state’s payroll, to a total of 65,290. And layoffs have continued since then. With government accounting for about 18.5 percent (2008) of non-farm employment in the state, it’s clear that continuing budget cuts will have an outsized effect on state unemployment. Year-over-year, it’s the third hardest-hit sector, after construction and finance.

Seattle is currently making headlines because of a “foreclosure epidemic.” Realty Trac’s heat map shows Skagit, Snohomish, King, and Pierce counties especially hard hit. KING 5 explains that, “Analysts point to the unemployment rate as a big reason for all the foreclosure activity.” This begets a vicious circle, in that unemployment leads to foreclosures, which depress home values and thus property tax revenues, which leads to more budget cuts and unemployment.

As NPR reports, falling property tax revenues also put cities in default on debt payments, which leads to what Meredith Whitney is trying to call attention to, a tragedy of the municipal debt commons. All of this makes election day–as the state’s voters weigh a high-earner’s income tax or tax increase only by super-majority–more high stakes than usual.

News

From HS Star to Face in the Crowd: A UW Walk-On Fights for Respect

Ever thought yourself really good at something, and then, all of a sudden, get put in a group of people far more talented than you? Jarring, isn’t it? For me it happened in high school calculus. I’d always been the person people called for help about math, and cheated off of on test day. But in calculus, suddenly I was the one needing help. Bradley Nelson, you have my eternal thanks.

Antoine Hosley

University of Washington freshman Antoine Hosley is going through that right now. A star basketball player in high school, he’s a “walk-on” with the Huskies (meaning that he’s not on scholarship). He talked about how that feels in very honest and thoughtful way for someone his age with the Seattle Times‘ Percy Allen. Here’s Hosley:

I’m just not used to this. A walk-on guy, he has to earn his keep. He doesn’t necessarily have the respect of the other players, the scholarship players. So it is humbling. I was thinking about that a lot today actually. And I’ve always been one of the star players on my team every since I was young so it is humbling, but it makes me want to work even harder to get just to get back to what has been normal for me from what I’ve experienced in basketball…

I feel like I have to prove myself everyday…. So say if I messed up, it was like okay, he has the ability, he just messed up. I feel like everyday I’m earning the respect of these cats and trying to get to the point to where I can make a mistake…. So I just got to keep working.

Everyone reaches their highest level of achievement at some point: scholastically, athletically, professionally. Hosley’s Husky teammates will perhaps reach theirs at the next level. For now, though, we’re rooting for you, Antoine!

Note: The Seattle Times‘ Percy Allen is absolutely killing it with Husky coverage. If you like Husky hoops, or want to give following the team a shot this year (they are going to be real good), make Allen’s blog daily reading.

UPDATE: The Huskies were picked today in a media poll as the preseason favorites to win the Pac-10. Of the 35 voters, 33 picked the Huskies first. It’s the first time in school history Washington has been picked to win the conference.

News

Belltown Rats Have Got a New Sheriff

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Our pet & wildlife and real estate correspondent, Lyle George, provides this picture he snapped while heading to Gary Fukushima‘s show at Tula’s in Belltown last night. The SunBreak has a long history of Seattle rat coverage, but this is the first time I’ve seen a solution that literally takes a bite out of the rat population downtown. Rats of 2nd and Bell–you’re on notice.

UPDATE: A helpful commenter gives you…the rest of the story. “The dog’s name is Ozzie and rat hunting is his favorite hobby. He is a Dachshund, not a beagle, and he is 11 years old. He can be seen most days around Belltown. His owner has plenty of other pictures of him catching rats (some bigger than that one) and then there’s the two Seattle officers that provided the spotlights one night so that the crowd of people that gathered to see Ozzie with one of his prizes could take pictures. He had on his cowboy hat that night.”