Recent Stories with tag mccaw hall

Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter at McCaw Hall

There were a couple things I knew going in to the Conan O'Brien show Sunday night. It was at McCaw Hall, Conan would be there, and...that's about it. (Sunday also just happened to be Conan's birthday!) Not a lot was said about the show, and no one knew who the guests would be. Would he set it up like a talk show? Would he ride a unicycle for 90 minutes?

It turned out to be an interesting mix, more like a variety act than a comedy tour. There's been some positive and negative talk about the tour, but if you're a huge fan of his talk show, then you probably would have had a fantastic time. The show's opening act, Reggie Watts (formerly of Seattle and currently of Maktub), did a great job of working up the crowd and getting them ready for 90 minutes of hot Coco action. He brought on a lot of laughs with his great mix of electronic music, dirty jokes, and wacky lyrics. The Seattle-specific call-outs really perked up the audience as well as his dazzling voice. 

And then on came Conan with a bang, kicking off with a two-minute standing ovation by the awaiting audience. He started with a pretty typical introduction, talking about the tour and its purpose, with quite a bit of the complaints that we've gotten used to hearing from the ex-NBC host over the last three months. The Seattle crowd ate it up, and it must have felt good to have that many people behind him. Guests that joined the comedian onstage included his sidekick Andy Richter, one of his writers, Deon Cole, who did a short stand-up routine, La Bamba and his "Big Band," and that night's special music guest Dave Matthews....

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Looks like Conan O'Brien has found something to do with his free time, as today he announced a thirty-city live performance tour.  Dubbed "The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour," his live show promises "a night of music, comedy, hugging, and the occasional awkward silence."  That sounds like the Conan we all know and love.

Kicking off in Eugene, Oregon on April 12th, the tour will take place over two months, making stops in twenty states and three Canadian provinces, as well as a special appearance at Bonnaroo.  Locally, Conan will perform at McCaw Hall on April 18th and April 19th--looks like this second show was just added!  Prices start at $39.50 (but this is Ticketmaster, so let's just say $50) all the way up to $695 for the drool-worthy special VIP meet-and-greet package. 

Full list of tour dates as of right now--ticket sales are strong, so second shows keep getting added--after the jump....

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So the latest hullabaloo is over the Wright family proposal to build a Chihuly glass house where the Fun Forest once misspent idle youth--the news made the USA Today, for heaven's sake. The lesson seems to be that if you say you'll pay for construction, you can build whatever you like at Seattle Center.

A glorified Chihuly gift shop/restaurant was on no one's top ten list for the Center--well, except for Dale Chihuly and the Wrights, apparently, where it was number one with a putti.

Mossback crawled out from beneath a seed log to make the point that the Center has never been all that high-toned--that was in defense of Chihuly, by the way. On the City Council, Sally Bagshaw said, What about our Central Park plan? Mayor McGinn said, It makes money? And Council President Richard Conlin plumped squarely for a Central-Parkesque open space with a glass house in it.

Here and there, Seattle Center is sporting more and more the handiwork of Owen Richards Architects. A principal with LMN on the McCaw Hall renovation, Owen Richards has since come back twice to make improvements on the Hall's cafe and to create SIFF Cinema. It's also the firm chosen for the SIFF Group Film Center on Center campus.

Now the firm has been tapped for the glass house project. I'd rather see someone tackle the real white elephant on Center grounds, the hulking ex-armory Center House, which has the effect of making any cultural celebration held there feel vaguely Stalinesque. It's the heart of the campus, and what everything else relates to. It seems odd simply to plunk things down around it, in the hope that when something is finally done with it, it will "work" with everything else.

Classical ballet doesn't get more classical than The Sleeping Beauty, this production especially, which, as PNB's Doug Fullington explains it, has a lineage that extends right back to its original choreographer, Marius Petipa. When Kaori Nakamura, as Princess Aurora, balancing en pointe on a single foot, has each of her suitors turn her, hold, then release, four successive times, it's such an apotheosis of style that it's hard to believe a human ankle is involved. (PNB's production, running through February 14 at McCaw Hall, employs rotating casts, so your Princess Aurora may vary. Tickets are $25-$160.)

One of the humanizing qualities of such an idealized art form is that, even with notation, there's no better way to be sure of a choreographer's intent than seeing his work yourself. Ronald Hynd's wonderful version is just two choreographic generations from a 1921 Diaghilev production that toured to London, which gets you right back to St. Petersburg and Petipa.

Yet you don't think of The Sleeping Beauty as, narrative aside, slumbering unchanged for a hundred years. It exists, in Mircea Eliade's formulation, in illo tempore, in a once upon a time adjacent to the present. (On the other hand, this is a three-hour ballet with substantial action in pantomime, not a sing-along fairy tale, so while I can vouch for its immediacy, I can also vouch for the adorable little moppet behind me talking throughout, kicking seat backs, doing an impromptu dance break, beating time on an arm rest, and guzzling her way through a juice box.)

The Prologue presents the baby's christening, in a kingdom with access to yards of gold lamé--Peter Docherty's costumes start out storybook and trend towards Bedazzler--with seven fairies bearing gifts of beauty, temperament, beauty, and so on, each having a little solo. Sadly, Carabosse the wicked fairy was left off the invitations, and shows up enraged, promising deadly spindles on sixteenth birthdays, before the Lilac Fairy of Wisdom (Carla Körbes, last night) steps in to water down a death sentence into a coma....

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SIFF's New Italian Film Festival kicked off Tuesday night with director Marco Risi's latest film Fortapàsc (a Neapolitan pronunciation of the film title Fort Apache). As Risi gently explained to the opening night audience, he's not really all that new--this is his 13th film. But kudos to the New Italian Cinema people for including him, because he was new to me and his film is a wonderful piece of craftsmanship.

If you can't afford that trip to Italy, this might be the next best thing. The festival includes two Mafia-related movies (Fortapàsc, The Sicilian Girl), two gay/lesbian stories (Different From Whom?, Sea Purple), two relationship dramas (Ex, The House in the Clouds), and two that just happen to come from Italian directors (Lecture 21, Pa-ra-da).

Fortapàsc tells the true story of the last four months of a young journalist's life; Giancarlo Siani was assassinated by the Naples criminal syndicate Camorra. (Risi was caught in one of those awkward "Oh, you've made a Camorra movie, too?...

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