Recent Stories with tag review

Ivan Doig (Photo: A. Wayne Arnst)

The author Ivan Doig lives near Richmond Beach, just north of Seattle, but his heart is always in Montana. [Ed: Doig reads at the University Bookstore tomorrow, July 14, at 7 p.m.]

"Mississippi was William Faulkner's muse," Doig said, when we spoke by phone. "I guess Montana is mine."

Montana, specifically the Butte of 1919, is the setting of Doig's newest novel, Work Song, his tenth work of fiction over twenty years. It's a skittish, fast-moving novel that follows the exploits of Morrie Morgan, a dapper dandy with a bit of the scalawag in him. Morrie narrates the story in the best Dickens style; it's the musings of a rogue, and the reader can delight in Morgan's victories both intimate and large. 

Doig's novels are impeccably researched and filled with intriguing characters. In Work Song, his portrait of a frontier Butte is close to perfection. If the Butte of 1919 wasn't like this, it should have been.

"When researching books," he told us, "I like to go where Google doesn’t go. For Work Song, I went to Butte's old archives and dug through the nooks and crannies."

At the Butte Historical Society, he found an old photograph of the Butte Public Library in the early 1920s. That image, he said, "Went off in my mind like a firecracker." The library is a central location in Work Song, a place where Morrie finds a job and learns the town.

The reader follows Morgan as he weaves his way into the city, charms his landlord, the widowed Grace Faraday, and lands odd jobs here and there. He is a wholly original character, at once a walking encyclopedia and a brass-knuckle-carrying hard case. You can feel Doig's love of the character, who first appeared as a secondary player in Doig's earlier novel, The Whistling Season.

"Readers fell in love with him," Doig said. "When he's around, unexpected things happened. Morrie has flights of inspiration. I thought it would be interesting to see things through his eyes."

Doig is clearly a devoted storyteller. When he talks about the characters in his books, he speaks of them as living and breathing souls. Morrie Morgan is a particular type of early-twentieth-century characters. At times, he's a step or two away from the Harold Hill of The Music Man, but you feel he is also a provocateur who likes to stir the pot, not for personal gain, but simply to see how it'll work out. He's restless, easily bored.... (more)

At a crucial moment in Seattle Opera’s world premiere production of Amelia, (which opened on Saturday night and runs through May 22), a character throws open a curtain in a hospital room. Before him he sees his wife, named Amelia, in a coma, her dead father parading around in his Navy whites, ghostly apparitions of his dead mother-in-law and a Vietnamese family and their dead daughter, a crew of doctors and nurses trying to save a young boy’s life, and The Flier (Amelia Earhart). He yells, "What’s happening here?"

That’s gonna take some explaining.

Amelia is the first new opera commissioned by Seattle Opera’s General Director Speight Jenkins in his distinguished 27-year career. The opera is beautifully composed by Daron Aric Hagen and the music is particularly good in the early scenes where the young Amelia is gazing at the stars, and when the older Amelia is recalling her dead father. In these passages, the music seems to float and soar, helped by a wonderful array of percussion instruments (two percussionists in the orchestra play 14 instruments). The music is only weak in two late scenes where it seems to summon up the ghost of Max Steiner scoring a Bette Davis weeper circa 1937.

Conductor Gerard Schwarz delivers excellent pacing and and deftly moves the 46-piece orchestra through dramatic crescendos with gusto, but also handles the sensitive, quiet scenes between Amelia and her husband with grace. The sets (Thomas Lynch) and lighting (Duane Schuler) are astonishingly beautiful.

The opera is well sung by a large, talented cast that, typical for operas produced in the Jenkins era, is notable for strong voices from top to bottom. Musically, the high point is a scene in Vietnam where we hear beautifully sung phrases in Vietnamese. For the most part, the opera is directed with great skill by director Stephen Wadsworth, but its fractured nature doesn’t allow any of the performers to get the kind of momentum that is needed to really create a fully realized character (though several of the singers really shine).

First and foremost are the magnificent performances of Nathan Gunn as Paul and Kate Lindsey as Amelia. Gunn makes you feel the pain of a man whose marriage is nearly doomed by forces beyond his control and beyond time itself. Lindsey brings intensity to the role of a woman who is frightened about the fate of an unborn child and it builds nicely until a finish that is out of control.... (more)

Anthony Darnell in the Satori Group's "Winky," at 619 Western.

For a year now, I've been waiting for the chance to actually see one of the Satori Group's performances. I've caught founding member Adam Standley in other companies' plays, I've done a pair of features on the group, but for one reason or another, I wasn't able to catch either Tragedy: a tragedy last April, or Artifacts of Consequence last fall. But Friday, I finally got my chance with the opening of the company's adaptation of George Saunders' short story "Winky" (through April 5; tickets $15), and for all that build-up, Satori didn't disappoint.

Upon entering the performance space, in an art studio in the 619 Arts Building in Pioneer Square, the audience is seated on folding chairs in what's set up as an intimate conference space. A small stage is situated below a projection screen, where a series of slides introduces us to the self-help philosophy of Tom Rodgers, with everything from celebrity endorsements (a local CEO shows up with the pull quote: "Tom Rodgers changed my life. I changed the world") to a slide inviting the audience to text in questions for Tom (which is real; feel free to text them in to the number provided, and they'll show up in performance).

The play begins as a troupe of actors is trotted out to perform an introduction to the ideas you're going to learn about at the "People of Power: Level 1" seminar, before Rodgers himself (Adam Standley) takes the stage to walk you through the basics. Your soul, he informs us, is like oatmeal—wholesome, nourishing, and pure—but someone is busy crapping in it, and with his help, you can identify who it is and how to cut him or her out of your life (Rodgers' logo is a pair of scissors). From there, he takes text messaged questions until finally, one of the audience members, Neil Yaniky (Anthony Darnell), stands up and introduces himself.... (more)

Christine Nelson and Nick Edwards in "The Jammer" at the Balagan. Photo by Adrea Huysing.

"Frankly, I could just sit around watching Ray Tagavila playing different characters all night," my guest said as we left the theatre, and that pretty much sums up the Balagan's side-splittingly funny production of Rolin Jones' The Jammer (through April 3, tickets $12-$15).

The Balagan has had a extremely odd but undeniably successful season so far, with The Jammer following in the tradition of the inexplicable Zastrozzi: Master of Discipline. On its own, there's not a lot to be said for the script. Set in 1958, the story follows a wide-eyed naif from Brooklyn with a penchant for epistolary eloquence, who abandons his extremely ugly girlfriend to join the roller derby circuit. The humor is fairly toothless, the story cheesy, the drama cliche, and the ending saccharine. But somehow, the Balagan's company of talented actors, under the direction of Terri Weagant, owns all those weaknesses in just the right way, and the result is a perplexingly entertaining 90-minute show.

Jack Lovington (Nick Edwards) is an aw-shucks good Catholic boy from Brooklyn. Raised in an orphanage by Father Kosciusko (Michael D. Blum), he spends his days working at the same cardboard box factory that killed his parents ("brown lung") and his nights driving cabs, trying to save up enough money to marry his hideously ugly girlfriend to whom he's been engaged for two years. Lovington's one outlet is roller derby, and when a sly promoter named Lenny Ringle (Ashley Bagwell) shows up offering him more money than Lovington could dream of to be the star of the New York derby team he's setting up in a new league, Lovington jumps at the chance.... (more)

Ty Alexander Cheng, Joel Myers & Patrick Pulkrabeck in Spectrum Dance's "Farewell" at the Moore Theatre. Photo by Gabriel Bienczycki, Zebra Visual

Watching Spectrum Dance Theatre's Farewell: A Fantastical Contemplation on America's Relationship With China last night at the Moore (through Sat., Feb 20; tickets $25), I was reminded of something I read in college. The theorist and critic Fredric Jameson once argued that everything from conspiracy theories to cyberpunk, with their paranoid insights glimpsing at the hidden order of the world, were all essentially an "attempt...to the think impossible totality of the contemporary world system."

Seeing as how that "impossible totality" is essentially the subject of Farewell, it seems fair to get all lit-crit about it. The concepts in the show could form the basis of several doctoral theses (and, in fact, I'm pretty sure at least one or two were read from during the show). Aesthetically, choreographer Donald Byrd seems to have taken Jameson's idea to heart: his subject is simply too big, too complex to grasp all at once, so instead the audience gets pieces, bits of information, processed and transformed through both memory and media. News photos of Tiananmen Square and Sept. 11 hang at odd angles from the ceiling; a lecturer reads from various texts you only half hear over the din of Byron Au Yong's live drumming and news-report-laden sound collage; the dance is performed in the round, with the audience seated on three sides.

From any one point, you can't see the whole—the images tilt away from you, dancers block your sight-lines of other dancers. But the effect works. During one segment, with most of the company seated directly in front of where I sat in the front row of the bleachers off stage right, I watched as a lyrical duet unfolded as nothing more than a series of arms and legs extending beyond what was blocking my view. So there is, the work suggests, some order in all that chaos.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. In Farewell, Byrd plays with a number of concepts and themes that he tries to make add up to a big whole: the titular "contemplation" on US-China relations. One of the core influences, and the most remarked upon before the show, is Ma Jian's novel Beijing Coma, about a man wounded in the Tiananmen Square protests who spends 12 years in a waking coma. Structurally, Farewell duplicates that narrative by proposing a subsequent coma victim as a result of Sept. 11. The relationship between 1989 and 2001 is painfully high-concept—namely, the idea is that in both cases, a state of emergency threatened the stability of the neoliberal world order, and in the name of preserving that stability, human and civil rights were curtailed.... (more)

Bruno Beltrao and Grupo de Rua's "H3". Photo by Anns V. Koiij.

The first thing my guest asked me upon leaving On the Boards last Thursday, after seeing Brazilian choreographer Bruno Beltrão's company Grupo de Rua, who are their first US tour with H3, was, "Did you respond to that more because you're a man?"

It's a fine question to ask. Not that women in the audience weren't responding—you could almost hear the panting at the end, as eight physically ripped, sweating (and most shirtless to boot) Brazilian dancers took their bow—but Beltrão's H3 is an almost Mametian (in terms of its masculinity, rather than its misogyny) exploration of men interacting with men, from the opening moments, where a pair of dancers stare down the audience, to the closing moments of chaos, the dancers each taking more and more expressive and athletic poses on an increasingly darkened stage. In between, H3 offers a detailed examination of the way men establish themselves among their peers, compete with one another, and ultimately turn to machismo as a means to exist in the world.

H3 unfolds in three distinct sections. The first is essentially narrative, centering on one dancer's character. As the show opens, he stands next to a far more self-assured counterpart, trying to follow his lead in staring down the audience. Then the weaker of the two begins to move, only to be shown up by his more assured and accomplished counterpart. Then, one by one, the other dancers move onto the stage, each in turn seeking to establish his own skills and ability. Ultimately, the original dancer finds a partner whose moves he carefully follows and thus is able to establish himself within the group.... (more)

Kirkus Reviews calls Matthew Flaming's debut novel, The Kingdom of Ohio, "impossible to resist," praising its "marrying poetic prose with hints of steampunk aesthetics." Closer to home, the Stranger's Paul Constant labels it "just deadly dull," adding that "There's nothing in the central mystery to entice the reader on."

So clearly it sparks differences of opinion. For me, this Booklicious review nails down the general outlines, and discontinuities, of the work: "Part historical fiction, part alternate reality, and wholly romantic, Flaming’s novel is a conglomerate of popular publishing trends and timeless storytelling elements."

The daily life of a turn-of-the-century New York subway construction worker is vividly evoked; the Kingdom of Toledo's founding by French pilgrims is carefully footnoted; the unlikely romance between young engineer Peter Force and math genius Cheri-Anne Toledo springs up amid their opposition to a powerful cabal starring J.P. Morgan and Thomas Edison.

All is recounted by a peculiar old historian, closing up shop in Los Angeles, who is less convincingly elderly than reminiscent of that stodgy younger man you know who annoyingly litters his speech with literary archaisms. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, young men fond of archaisms, it's just not as significant of advanced age as it is of advanced bookwormery.)

There's an ambition to this agglomeration that isn't actually to write the ultra-selling novel, but to powerfully reimagine a splintering world as worlds of possibility colliding--this, sadly, is a task that exceeds Flaming's abilities, as yet, as a novelist. Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride.... (more)

Erin Stewart as Diwata in "Speech & Debate" at Seattle Rep. Photo by Kathryn Barnard.

You don't mean to spark an argument by asking where the Franklin High School main office is, but since you've addressed the question to a couple of high school boys, you recognize the possibility.

"Go up those stairs and take a right," a pudgy kid in a striped shirt tells you.

"No it's left, you idiot," says his skinnier friend. "The main office. You're thinking of something else."

"Oh."

You thank them, feeling bad for the pudgy kid and vaguely annoyed at the skinny one. Kids can be cruel, which, if not the message of the high school comedy Speech & Debate, running through February 21 at the Seattle Rep (tickets $12/$30-$52), is certainly a key principle. You're here to meet Erin Stewart, who plays proud teenage dork Diwata in the play.

Stewart does not need directions to the office, because she—like smooth sax superstar Kenny G, current U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, and reigning NBA 6th Man of the Year Jason Terry—is a graduate of Franklin High. Stewart, Class of 1999, arrives wearing a long black sweater and tells you that she hasn't been back to these halls since she graduated. "Like nine years," she says. "No wait. Ten. No eleven, I guess." A pause. "Wow."

"Where should we go," you ask her. "Is there any part of the school that means something to you?"

Erin suggests The Little Theater, where all the drama kids hung out. Classes have just ended, so she leads you through the mass of students hurtling through the halls, down the main stairs and along a long hallway. Midway you stop near a metal door. It's closed, but with classes out you take the risk and open it. Inside, kids scurry about, while in the center of the room a stylish woman with bright red lipstick barks the occasional order. This is Mary Smith, Stewart's old drama teacher.... (more)

Zaki Abdelhamid and Daniel Christensen in "Jihad Jones." Photo by Regan MacStravic.

"I find the genre...reductive. Insulting," says the film director Julius Steele (James Weidman), describing his opinion of satire. Steele's a Soderbergh-esque auteur casting a mainstream picture, and he's explaining this to a young Arab-American actor, Ashraf (Zaki Abdelhamid), who's convinced himself—with some help from his sleazy agent—that the script must in fact be a satire. Because why else would a noted activist director be making a movie in which a bunch of sex-crazed, America-hating Arab terrorists burst into an average middle-class home on Thanksgiving to defile the flag, the daughter, and the apple pie, before being slaughtered in righteous cold blood at the end?

Local playwright Yussef El Guindi's Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes, which opened last weekend at Theater Schmeater (tickets $15-$18), is in many ways a classic riff on Hollywood: the idealistic but ambitious young artist is forced to choose between his values and money in a town where high-minded ideals are a thin gauze covering a great, gaping wound of greed.

Ashraf, according to his agent, is on his last legs—he's got a reputation for being hard to work with after turning his nose up at another screenplay (the titular Jihad Jones), and the agency wants to dump him. But the hot director Steele saw Ashraf in a production of Hamlet and wants him for his new picture, playing opposite the hot starlet Ashraf has been ogling in the latest issue of Playboy. Oh, and it's a six-, maybe even seven-figure deal. Just so long as he can swallow his pride and end every grotesquely stereotypical line with "praise Allah!"

Theater Schmeater's casting for the show is one of the production's greatest assets. Abdelhamid looks damn near perfect for the role, a handsome, all-American leading man in every way except skin-tone, which is just enough to leave him type-cast in a role as hideous monster. (Excerpts of dialogue constantly reference the Arabs' bad looks, smell, and even their "greasy, dirty hands.") The stereotypes in the script stand in brilliant contrast to the charming and earnest character Abdelhamid brings to life.... (more)

Every so often--with some regularity in fact--someone decides that the myth of Orpheus should be updated by turning the lyre-strumming poet into a brooding rock star, which, in terms of back strokes in shallow-end artistic genius, is right up there with envisioning Atlas as a bodybuilder, or Hades as an undertaker.

Brett Dennen headlined The Mountain's "Winter Warmth" concert at the Moore Theatre last Sunday, striding onstage barefoot through billowing clouds from joss sticks. He's a tall, skinny man with heron-like legs and oddly buttery-jointed dance moves, and his shaggy red hair caps his head, giving the impression of a super-sized warbler. He's not overwhelmingly sexy, is my point.

But the hippie shamanism that Dennen practices has its own appeal, and for a few hours the frozen world outdoors was forgotten, the aisles gradually filling with tanned, hair-color-streaked, leather-jacketed, radio-industry people dancing like it was a spring night at WWU.

Musically his songs veer from Van Morrison stylings to R&B and funk to reggae, and his band on this tour is tight, especially bass player Ron Johnson and guitarist Ryan Jalbert, who each unleashed solo turns that had people turning to each other wide-eyed.

I say shamanism partly because in "Darlin', Do Not Fear," Dennen recounts how "I was hunted by the wolves and I was heckled by the crows," and his heart was "scattered in a thousand little pieces on the ground."

But also because the trick to much of poetry--as opposed to relationship pop, which Dennen does, too--is counter-narrative, flipping a familiar social topic onto its side. If the story of Orpheus is about a poet who has trouble letting go, the twist is when Eurydice must let him go, instead.

When Dennen sings in "Make You Crazy" that "they will lock you up in prison / but they won't call it slavery," he's not just making a point about institutionalized racism, but the fact that, if we can't talk about it honestly, no one can get out.... (more)

There goes the neighborhood.

There is over-the-top, and then there is Roland Emmerich. The German action director has spent most of his career making disaster porn (The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day, Godzilla), and his new movie, 2012 (in theaters today), is his magnum opus. Because this time, he's made apocalypse porn.

The two-and-a-half hour flick (ugh) kicks off with nearly an hour of backstory (double ugh). That is not what the audience is here for. We do not care about John Cusack or Amanda Peet or Chiwetel Ejiofor or Oliver Platt. We do not care about Thandie Newton being pretty or Woody Harrelson being crazy (neither of which requires acting ability). And we certainly do not care about Danny Glover starring as pseudo-Barack Obama, the first and last black President of the United States, even if he does get to say things like, "You don't know what it's like to be the last President, son." 

We are here to see THINGS BLOW UP. And truthfully, the moment that shit finally starts to go down (the beginning of the apocalypse, as it were) is the most fun part of the entire movie. But after the fourth time you watch people outrun waves of disaster--on foot, in a limo, by plane, in a camper--it all gets a little ridiculous. 

Emmerich has previously destroyed the White House, but he gets to do so again, as well as taking out the Washington Monument, the Sistine Chapel, Yellowstone National Park, Rio de Janeiro, and all of Las Vegas. C'est la vie. He gives you CGI up the wazoo (some of which is quite impressive), but the action gets bogged down with way too much time spent on character development. Look, I know you have kids and need to talk about the issues in your relationship, but seriously, the apocalypse is no time to work on a failed marriage. Thankfully, there isn't a long, drawn-out explanation of why exactly the world is coming to an end, besides neutrinos from the sun make the Earth's core GO CRAZY.

Obviously, there's very little in the film to take seriously, though of course, people have to be told: No, this isn't a documentary. Case in point, everything on the internets. I didn't stick around after the screening for the post-film Q&A with a representative from Pacific Science Center. No doubt she had to spend most of her time explaining that come 12/21/12, we are all gonna be just fine, relatively speaking.

Lord knows that when the apocalypse does happen (after the machines rise up), it will assuredly take less than 158 minutes and cost way less than $200 million.  But here's the real doomsday scenario: Emmerich is talking about a television spinoff of the movie, taking place in 2013. Really, Roland, after you've leveled the entire planet, what exactly is left to destroy?

(2012 is currently playing at Landmark Metro Cinemas, AMC Pacific Place 11, AMC Loews Uptown 3, and Regal Cinemas Thornton Place Stadium.)

The roar of cheers and applause that went up as Regina Spektor reappeared for her encore at the Paramount on Tuesday night was louder than anything else that night. All night, between songs, it had been "Regina, I love you!", "Regina, I love you more than that first girl!", and a baritone howl of "Regina, I want to have your babies!" Spektor, in contrast, traveled imperturbably from song to song, though the "babies" brought her up short. "All tour," she said, "it's been babies. I guess...thanks?"

If you were listening to her albums--Far is her latest--and debating about whether a live show was worth braving wind and cold, I can tell you it was. (Though if I had it all to do over again, I would have worn a scarf.) Spektor's ferocious talent puts her live show into life-flashing-before-your-eyes highlight-reel contention.

When she appears onstage, ducking and grinning shyly at the wave of applause headed her direction, you might not think "ferocious" is all that accurate or even appropriate. But when she's there alone on the stage singing "Silly Eye-Color Generalizations" a capella, full-throated, tenderly, mockingly, piercingly--over two thousand people are barely breathing.

Lyrically, she has a predator's ability to confound her prey so that you--little bunny rabbit, come for carrots--freeze right there, marveling at the silky verbal tricks. Vocally, she has very sharp teeth. One moment, she's a little breathy girl's bleat but with bounce, "It was so easy and the words so sweet", and then the mouth opens very wide and the voice gets very big and you would probably take a few steps back if your chair would let you. Still, even if she has you in tears or gibbering foolishly, she looks like she'd apologize profusely for having eaten the whole theater and gone to sleep.

Yes, she is acclimated, but she is a Russian bear. Do not forget this.... (more)

A still from "Confessions of a Ex-Doofus-Itchyfooted Mutha"

Melvin Van Peebles makes movies his own damned way, thanks. So it’s no surprise that in his latest directorial effort, Confessions of a Ex-Doofus-Itchy-Footed Mutha (now that's a title), he wears his heart on his ragged sleeve. That distinctive passion and drive make Van Peebles’ new movie well worth checking out. (It screens at the Northwest Film Forum September 8 through the 14th.)

Confessions serves as sort of a kinder, gentler companion piece to his breakthrough guerilla mission statement, 1971’s Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song. As in Sweetback, Van Peebles plays a character on a journey of flight and self-discovery.  This time, however, his protagonist finds escape from neighborhood bullies in the pages of travel books and gives in to a wanderlust that takes him through childhood in Chicago, young manhood in New York, drama on the high seas as a merchant marine, and danger at the epicenter of a militant... (more)