Monthly Archives: July 2012

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

There is No Escape from Infinity Box

Photo courtesy Infinity Box

If you get angry at people who own and watch televisions, then Ladies and Gentlemen, This is Your Crisis! may well be for you—or would be with better acting, directing and writing.

Kate Wilhelm is a highly regarded writer best known for her science fiction and fantasy work including The Infinity Box, a 1971 short story included in a 1975 collection of the same name. That name is shared by a Seattle theatre project devoted to combining performance and discussion relating to the sorts of ideas with which these genres wrestle.

While the company purports to ask questions about the relationship between humans and technology, the Infinity Box Theatre Project’s production of Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis! ($15 through July 8 at the Ethnic Cultural Center) is more interested in passing judgment than asking questions or providing any sort of entertainment.

The kitchen-sink set is perfectly simple, relying entirely on a few pieces of shoddy furniture and appliances. The snatches of dialogue in the play suggest that the rummage-sale furnishings of Dan Schuy’s set are consistent with the play’s working-class characters. The class aspect of the story remains discomfiting throughout as the empty beer cans and violent sniping between the onstage couple increases. This is Your Crisis sometimes feels like a sermon from the privileged, educated classes against the bear-baiting pleasures of the NASCAR set.

The characters at the center of this production are Lottie and Butcher who race home to spend a weekend parked in front of a TV watching a reality show called This Is Your Crisis. The show is a sort of survivalist race, therapy-as-competition for financial gain and fame. It’s The Biggest Loser meets Man vs. Wild meets The Amazing Race with a touch of The Hunger Games. While there is a nubbin of interest in the indication that Lottie and Butcher harbor thoughts of doing something terrible to one another in order to qualify to be on the show that tension is not dramatically developed.

Lottie and Butcher (Gini Hawkins and David Alan Morrison) have purchased a wall-size television designed to allow them to spend the entirety of every weekend watching the show in brutal detail. They’re also able to select the views they want to watch—a kind of internet-enabled interactivity that is one of a few impressively prescient details from a story written some forty years ago. Unfortunately that prescience muddies the play making it seem less science fiction than quirky-contemporary and thus diminishing the impact.

Catherine Kettrick’s adaptation does not serve Wilhelm’s story well. The dialogue feels blunt, but at least the sense of time is fairly clear with an elegant tendency to show the passage of time by adding mess to the set during commercial breaks. Those commercial breaks also serve as pseudo-black-outs that elide chunks of time so a 36-hour marathon show takes barely an hour of stage traffic.

Kettrick also misses an opportunity as a director by allowing the acting to be overly broad. The TV show’s sound design by Dustin Morache is impressive, if only for its scale. However the offstage sounds such as buzzing oven timers and flushing toilets are poorly placed.

A twist ending is as much a relief for its comic surprise and social commentary as it is for its quick arrival, but this is not the end of the evening. While most theatres hold their post-show discussions after a short break to allow the audience to leave, if they so choose, there is no such opportunity after Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis! Infinity Box launches directly into post-show discussion and the Beckettian intimations of the company name and the two characters nearly immobilized before their giant screen TV suddenly become evident.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

What We’re Hearing This Month: Classical Music Picks for July

Summer’s here, and most orchestras and classical musical groups are taking a break before the concert season begins again in the fall. Pickings may be a bit slimmer for classical music during the summer, but the Seattle scene features some sizzling events this month. Here’s what’s on our radar for July:

The Planets: See ’em and hear ’em this month at Benaroya Hall. (Photo: NASA)

July 2 – 29 — Now in its thirtieth year, the Seattle Chamber Music Society‘s Summer Festival has rightfully earned its place as the classical music event of the season.  The festival brings together world-class musicians and gems of the chamber repertoire for a month of spectacular concerts. This year, the festival returns to Benaroya Hall’s Nordstrom Recital Hall.

July 12 – 14 — The Seattle Symphony performs Holst’s beloved classic The Planets, accompanied by high-definition images of the solar system. Hear the dramatic work that inspired so many modern film scores, including the popular themes from Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Also on the program is Strauss’ ubiquitous Thus Spake Zarathustra and Ligeti’s Atmosphères.

July 28 — Seattle composer Nat Evans presents Blue Hour, a site-specific musical event set to coincide with sunset at Greenlake. To participate, download a pre-recorded piece onto a portable music-playing device of your choice. Then, meet with Evans and other audience members at Greenlake Park to collectively experience the music at sunset.

July 29 — Opera on Tap strikes again! This fun-loving, talented group of singers is gaining quite a reputation for bringing opera to bars around the city. This month, they’re taking over Columbia City Theater for an evening of “Pop Up Opera”.

Arts & Entertainment, Music, Theatre

In Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe, a Preposterous Clash of Fairies and Noblemen

One of Gilbert & Sullivan’s comic masterpieces, Iolanthe, returns this July to the Bagley Wright Theatre (July 13 through 28; tickets), and to the repertoire of Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society for the first time since 1997. This absurd and delightful show comes close in audience affection after the three most popular of the canon, H.M. S. Pinafore, The Mikado, and The Pirates of Penzance, and gives plenty of room for the presenters to allow their imaginations to bloom.

The music is entrancing, the political satire delicious and always with topical allusions. (I can’t imagine there won’t be a reference to the health care law this time).

In it, the British peers insult the Fairy Queen and her band. In revenge the fairies cast a spell which requires the Lords to think for themselves and not vote along party lines. (It may have been written in 1882, but part of G&S’s charm is that it is is always politically pertinent!)

Iolanthe of course contains all the G&S stock characters including the gentleman who sings pattersongs. Seattle G&S is fortunate to have two singers who are as good at this as any I have heard in many decades of G&S attendance: Dave Ross and John Brookes have that essential dry baritone and ability to get tongue-twisting words out clearly.

This is an entirely new production. The company has no room to keep all its sets so builds most things fresh every time. Like so many small businesses based in South Lake Union, Seattle G&S had to move from its long-time quarters but had the luck to find more spacious digs with a long lease at the old Crown Hill Elementary School. There a swan, a huge Japanese urn, and some ominous-looking wheels from the Tower of London share a roomy, lightfilled space with a half-painted bridge, a bunch of railings with an emblem denoting the British House of Lords, a piano, racks of costumes topped with a row of cannon, stacks of paint pots, plus much else.

Officially, this is an amateur group, but any organization which has been running for 58years has found a modus vivendi that works for it, and its methods and decisions are exceedingly democratic.

As set designer Nathan Rodda says, “There are always boundaries. We step over them all the time, but so long as we understand where the boundaries are, I think the best ideas come when people do cross boundaries. I don’t care where an idea comes from.”

Next year’s opera gets decided on about a year ahead, says producer Mike Storie. The board has informal meetings in the fall and winter. They acquire videos of professional and amateur productions from around the world, check them out to see what they think worked and what didn’t, and gradually the bones of the production jell.

Once general outlines are decided, Rodda makes sketches of his set ideas and brings them to Storie and stage director Christine Goff. If they approve he goes straight to working drawings.

In professional companies, it is quite common “for the designer to do very elaborate drawings, and perhaps a model, and then go away,” says Rodda, “and it’s up to the painters and carpenters to generate the working drawings and complete it. Normally all the scenic artists own are their brush strokes.”

Rodda, however, doesn’t disappear and because he’s building it, he doesn’t need to do all that. He’s there, hands on, throughout the process. “Because I’m going to execute it, I design to my strengths,” he says. He began painting scenery in high school, and became a free-lance architectural and theater designer. He’s been with Seattle G&S since 1989, first as a tenor, and after 1997, as scene designer though he did some scene painting before that.

He values his stint as a singer, and sometimes now he is a supernumary. “It’s useful to get some stage experience if you want to be an effective designer,” he says. “You have to understand the issue actors have, see things from the perspective of the director, and be mindful of their turf as director.”

Rodda is a painter first and foremost, but he has a skillful team with which to work. Master carpenter Gary Webberley has been with the company since 1966, and according to Rodda, understands “just how strong a bridge must be to hold 1,600 pounds of beef running across while singing.”

Michael Crow is his assistant, while Mike Andrew carves, and props master Marv Brown creates such items as fairy wings and wands that light up, as well as special wands for three fairy klutzes—watch out for them! All have also ended up on stage as singers or actors in some role or other. This year, Rodda has an intern, Erin Yoshida, a theater major between her sophomore and junior year at UW. “It’s nice to have a young assistant,” says Rodda. “Her brain works faster than mine, and her minor in Math is useful, too.”

Research is essential, even for a comic opera. Seattle G&S has a stored Big Ben (the clock in the tower which is now to be called the Elizabeth Tower) Rodda would like to use with his House of Lords, but to work for the actors it would have to be on the wrong end of the Houses of Parliament, which would make the action take place in the midst of the river Thames. He knows he would hear about it. So, no Big Ben. “I’ve had amazing letters […] someone wrote to say the signal flags in H.M. S. Pinafore said something incorrectly!”

There’s a device on the gates to the House of Lords, and that has to be accurate also. It’s a portcullis with a crown on top, so that’s what will be there on stage.

An enormous amount of time gets devoted to each annual production, but everyone associated with Seattle G&S has got hooked. Some, like Webberley and Storie have been there for years wearing different hats. Quite a few are well into retirement years, though newcomers are joining in all the time. No one gets paid a living wage (though the office manager gets a half-time salary), and regular hours are a joke. “We get what we call ‘insults,’” says Storie. “I make about 80 cents an hour. Mike Andrews is a janitor. He works until midnight, then comes in to carve, and we frequently find him asleep in the morning. Now he even has a bed!”

Last Friday, no one was going to bed. It was load-in night, when scenery, props and all were loaded into trucks for schlepping to the Bagley Wright Theatre, where they were unloaded Saturday, to sort out all the hitches and glitches of scene changes, pit-building, lighting, sound details and rehearsal, and be in readiness for their opening night performance on Friday, July 13. Given their experience, despite the date, it should go like clockwork.

News, Weather

July 4th is Transition Day!

Climate Prediction Center’s 6-10 day outlook

Okay, July Fourth is also Independence Day, on which we make the British look sheepish about their imperialist history and then blow our fingers off with fireworks. But for Northwesterners, as Cliff Mass reminds us, July Fourth is also the day that summer begins. (Right, sometimes it’s July Fifth.)

This year, says Mass, we can expect the Fourth to be “the transition day, but one that should be dry–particularly around fireworks time”–so be ready to fire up the grill. The big local event is the Family 4th at Lake Union, presented by Starbucks. Though the fireworks have to wait for dark, there’s fun planned for the whole day, beginning at 10 a.m. in Lake Union Park and noon at Gas Works:

One Reel, the non-profit producer of the Family 4th, has collaborated with The Center for Wooden Boats and future South Lake Union resident Museum Of History & Industry (MOHAI) to link their event with another favorite summer tradition, the Lake Union Wooden Boat Festival.

With the Fourth behind us, “we transition to meteorological nirvana, as the persistent trough over the NW moves offshore and ridging develops over western North America,” adds Mass, in what certainly looks like English.

It’s that trough that brings in cool, cloudy air from the Pacific, so with it gone, things brighten up appreciably. The Climate Prediction Center provides the map above, in which oranges and reds indicate the probability of above-average temperatures. For most of the year, the Northwest has been on the bluer end of that scale, but finally we will have a chance to swelter a little, and make sotto voce disparagements of people who wear flip flops at inappropriate venues. Enjoy.