Recent Stories with tag balagan theatre

From left, Dr. Horrible (Eric Ankrim), Captain Hammer (Jake Groshong), and Penny (Annie Jantzer) in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog at Balagan Theatre (Photo: M. Elizabeth Eller)

There's a lot of backstory to Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, but I am going to dispense with it on the assumption that if you haven't heard about it by now, it can't possibly be your thing. (That doesn't mean you won't enjoy seeing the show--just go in blindly and let it wash over you.)

A "musical tragicomedy" web series created by the Whedon boys and Maurissa Tancharoen during the writers' strike of 2007-08, it starred Neil "How I Met Your Mother" Patrick Harris and Nathan "Castle" Fillion, as Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer, respectively. (Oh look! A fansite.)

It also clocked in at just 42 minutes, so the Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog that Balagan Theatre is presenting (through September 4) has material that will be new to Dr. Horrible fans, but is delightfully faithful in tone and spirit. My only reservation was that Balagan isn't by trade a musical theatre, so could they come up with the goods? Hell yes. It's wonderfully sung, and leads Eric Ankrim (Dr. Horrible) and Jake Groshong (Captain Hammer) do much more than sub in for NPH and NF.... (more)

Ryan Higgins, Angela DiMarco, and Sarah Budge in Balagan Theatre's production of Trout Stanley

Set in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Trout Stanley (Thurs-Sun at the Balagan Theatre through March 6; tickets: $12-$15) opens with Sugar DuCharme (Angela DiMarco) dancing to Heart's "Magic Man," which ought to please any Seattleite worth their bacon. She's in a knick-knack-filled shack (Maridee Slater has fully transformed the bare concrete of the Balagan basement) that she's stayed inside of for ten years, kept company only by her twin sister Grace (Sarah Budge), who works at the town dump, where the dead bodies of young women their age turn up annually.

At this point, you should have some sense as to why the New York Times said the play "could give wacky talkiness a good name." And if wacky talkiness appeals, by god, you can do no better currently for the price.

I had an idea that Trout Stanley the work of a young playwright (seems true) who had just discovered the joys of getting staggering word-drunk, but it turns out that Claudia Dey writes like this all the time. The Toronto playwright says she drew upon her experiences cooking in bush camps for Trout Stanley, and she has penned a far-North flood of monologue that, in this context, has just one subtext--gnawing loneliness.... (more)

David Mamet's "Edmond" at the Balagan Theatre, directed by Paul Budraitis. Photo by Andrea Huysing.

"I wound up in Seattle because I was going to Indiana University, and I was about to graduate so I was looking into my options," Paul Budraitis said. "I was pretty much set on going to Chicago, and then a few things happened that kind of made me reconsider. And I wound up talking to somebody that was heading to Seattle, a grad student, and she sort of sold me on the place, saying at least it was worth checking out."

About a week before the opening of David Mamet's Edmond at the Balagan (through Feb. 6, tickets $12-$15), which Budraitis directed, he and I met up at Caffe Vita to chat about his history and work. Tall and solidly built, Budraitis has a calm voice but gives off a vibe of quiet intensity that was only heightened by his deferral to wait in line to get a coffee for himself, mysteriously offering only that it did "something" to him and it was probably better that he didn't have any before heading to rehearsal. This all left me imagining him a pent-up ball of over-caffeinated aggression, à la Henry Rollins, though that owes as much to a video I once saw of his solo performance as anything to do with the man himself.

Budraitis, whose family emigrated from Lithuania, moved to Seattle in 1995 and spent the next five years working in fringe theatre. His time at Annex Theatre was particularly formative, because it was where he first learned Vsevolod Meyehold's biomechanics method, which continues to inform his theatrical approach. But in 2000, he left to go to grad school in Lithuania, where he trained under the legendary director Jonas Vaitkus, who, along with Oskaras Koršunovas and Eimuntas Nekrošius, helped put Lithuania on the global theatrical map with a radical aesthetic approach developed in the crucible of Cold War repression.... (more)

Ali el-Gasseir, Sam Hagen, and Ryan Fields in Balagan Theatre's production of David Mamet's Edmond (Photo: Andrea Huysing)

"An everyman descends into the maelstrom of big city degradation," says one synopsis of David Mamet's 1982 play Edmond, later turned into a 2006 movie starring William Macy.

The director of Balagan Theatre's production (Thursday-Saturdays, through February 6; tickets: $12-$15), Paul Budraitis, downplays the element of biography--it was Mamet's first big play after moving to New York from Chicago, which was apparently an unpleasant shock: "It's a society that's lost its flywheel, and it's spinning itself apart," Mamet said in a 1982 interview. "That's my vision of New York. It's a kind of vision of hell."

Instead, Budraitis focuses on how the pressures of change can separate us from each other. "Edmond walks his lonely path so we don't have to," he writes in his director's notes. Mamet himself called Edmond, "a myth about modern life," "a play about an unintegrated personality," and "a play about someone searching for the truth, for God, for release."

It's also simply flawed, a stressed-out explosion of misanthropy and rage that a youthful Mamet tried to repackage in context of life's bigger questions. It's grotesque, violent, and profane...and, at Balagan, purely theatrical. It's a beautifully formal achievement, an intricate villanelle on bigotry, lust, and madness.

There, that description should help you decide if Edmond is in your future.
... (more)

K. Brian Neel in "Vaud Rats" at the Balagan Theatre. Photo by Jennifer Marie.

"King's Elephant, the improvisational company, disbanded, we closed up shop, and I had put a lot of focus and energy into that company. But I was just starting to reach the point of making a go at making a living in the theatre," said K. Brian Neel the other evening, by way of explanation of how he became a solo performer, as we sat chatting over coffee at Caffè Vita, just up the street from the Balagan Theatre, where Neel's one-man ukulele operetta Vaud Rats is playing through Jan. 16 (tickets $12-$16).

"And after six months of so of asking, 'What am I going to do? Should I audition, should I learn monologues?', I just had this moment of, 'I know how to create shows! I've been creating original shows for nine years. I know how to develop original work.'"

Neel has been something of a fixture in Seattle experimental and fringe theatre for twenty years now. A native of Albuquerque, New Mexico, he relocated to Seattle in the late 1980s with King's Elephant Theatre, an improv troupe, just in time for the heyday of the Nineties fringe theatre. Following their disbandment around 1994/5, Neel began pursuing a career as a solo performer with a sci-fi trilogy called The 42nd Floor in 1995. From there on, Neel began splitting his time between work with the Seattle Mime Theatre and solo work touring the summer festival circuit.

By 2003, he was well-established enough to be commissioned by the Seattle Fringe Festival to produce Omon Ra, an adaptation of the novel by Russian postmodernist Viktor Pelevin. In later years, he's continued working both as a solo performer as well as a regular collaborator with Helsinki Syndrome, as well as various acting and directing projects. In November, he directed the well-received production of Tim Crouch's An Oak Tree at Theatre Schmeater (a two-person play in which only one actor knows the script; the second actor changes each night), and in February, he will be appearing in the adaptation of David James Duncan's The River Why at Book-It.

Vaud Rats is the show that Neel's been with longest. Originally developed in 2004 out of Neel's growing interest in both the ukulele and vaudeville, it's been developed in a series of forward lurches ever since.

"When I first crafted it and did a workshop performance of it at Union Garage, I didn't do anything with it," he explained. "I was directing at the time and doing other shows, and moving in other directions. So after the workshop, I just sat on it for a few years, and then when I re-entered three years ago, and took it on tour, I took another break, mid-tour. I felt I'd just started to get it on its feet, and take it out into the world, and then I stopped to build a house. I took a good year-and-a-half off."... (more)

Aimee Bruneau and Ray Tagavilla in "Zastrozzi: The Master of Discipline" at the Balagan Theatre.

The Balagan Theatre's thoroughly entertaining but utterly perplexing Zastrozzi: The Master of Discipline (1117 E. Pike St., tickets $12-$15), is like a cautionary tale for radical artists. Beware all you who seek to make a point by offending the mores of your society—eventually, time will mellow your artful outrages into mere schlock and awe. George F. Walker's 1977 adaptation is fairly faithful to its source, Percy Shelley's 1810 novel, but all the perversity that Shelley (and maybe Walker, for all I know) thought would make a point about the moral vacuity of modern society has long since become standard entertainment fare.

Zastrozzi, the maniacal master criminal of Europe, is seeking revenge against the man, now mad and convinced he's a messenger of God, who brutally killed his mother. Zastrozzi leaves a trail of rape and murder in his wake, and between tedious philosophical discussions, the play supplies superfluous sex and violence with relish, including numerous sword fights, BDSM kink, a number of onstage murders, and—my personal favorite—actual bodice ripping. But when all's said and done, Zastrozzi is basically a cackling cartoon villain, the ideas in the play so ridiculously collegiate (is there morality without God? Must a secular society invent its own Hell?), that it's impossible to tell how seriously it should be taken. And to be fair, I don't think the producers could decide, either, so they settled for just doing it: Neither a stirring drama nor a comic send-up, Zastrozzi just sort of is, in a gleefully violent and funny sort of way.

The play's success lies mostly in the casting. Cartoonish villains may not be particularly deep, but actors love to play them, and the Balagan has had the good sense to hand the role of Zastrozzi over to the increasingly well respected Ray Tagavilla. Over the past few years, he has been racking up great reviews, and Zastrozzi won't change that. Tagavilla tackles the character with aplomb: his Zastrozzi switches at the drop of a hat between self-righteous autodidact, cackling madman, and brutally violent killer. Tagavilla's choices aren't necessarily original—he adopts the clenched Etonian accent and casual approach to violence that's been the hallmark of villains at least since Dr. Moriarty—but he pulls them off by being so damn compelling. And one or two technical mess ups, ably played through by Tagavilla, attest to his consistency and competence as an actor.... (more)