Recent Stories with tag the paramount

The winter holidays quite often mark the beginning of a long season of depression for some folk. If it's not seeing your family that depresses you, the weather in these parts might do the trick. Never fear! Someone from England feels your pain and already wrote every song you need to sing until Spring cycles around again. In the 80's, he was doing exactly the same thing as the frontman for The Smiths. Now, he's living the solo project dream as the enigmatic Morrissey.

Morrissey will be in town Sunday promoting his new B-sides collection, Swords. He'll be moping about on stage and collecting bouquets of roses from enthusiastic fans. His entire band will have the same signature Morrissey pompadour. He'll be filling The Paramount with his melancholy, breathy voice and somehow making us feel better about our lives. Perhaps it is true that misery loves company, because Morrissey has been publicly miserable since 1982. And it seems like he loves it.

 

• Morrissey begins the festivities at The Paramount on November 29th at 7:30 PM. Tickets range from $52 to $72, plus fees.

Hey, it's the digital leaked music age! Latest evidence: One week ahead of Them Crooked Vultures' (Dave Grohl, John Paul Jones, Josh Homme) eponymous debut release, the whole thing is available (and legally so) on YouTube.

 

Of course you can "preorder the future," too; the iTunes version includes two bonus live tracks. Which of these dirty, huge-riff tracks will we hear at the Paramount November 21? All of them, I expect. And perhaps some Foo Fighters, QOTSA, and Zeppelin covers? Hope so.

What the hell, people? Tickets are still available.

Hubbard Street Dance performing Nacho Duato's "Gnawa." Photo by Todd Rosenberg

Friday night, Chicago's well-respected Hubbard Street Dance stopped through town for one-night-only engagement at the Paramount, presenting four works. Three of them were re-stagings of HSDC's work from the last decade, sandwiching the night's main-event: Finnish choreographer Jorma Elo's Bitter Suite, which debuted earlier this month in Chicago (Seattle was the second city to get to see it).

The bill seemed designed to keep the audience happy with the Elo piece. Alejandro Cerrudo's Lickety-Split, set to music by Devendra Banhart, was an occasionally touching, generally charming piece about relationship tensions. Music with lyrics is frequently distracting when used to score a dance, and that was true here, but there was some impressive dance, particularly the male solo (performed, if I'm correct, by Justin Hortin), the only movement of the night that remotely hearkened back to the company's jazz roots.

Elo's piece was third, sandwiched between Lucas Crandall's comic love-triangle The Set (funny, but almost too audience-pleasing) and Nacho Duato's exuberant Gnawa. Jorma Elo is extremely in-demand these days (his work has been presented this month in Portland and Boston as well), but for all the hype, his piece didn't seem to go anywhere....

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Alejandro Cerruto's "Lickety Split," performed by Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. Photo by Todd Rosenberg

"Last year we performed down in Oregon, in Medford or someplace down there. And this last year we also went up to Vancouver and Victoria and performed, which is great. But it's really great to be back in the Northwest, in Seattle." Jason Hortin, with whom I was having a last-minute phone call this afternoon, paused. "I walked down to the Market this morning, met up with friends, it's really great: The first time professionally I'll have performed in Seattle."

This Friday, October 23, is a sort of homecoming for Hortin, a native of Olympia: After four years of work in Chicago, he's returning as a full company member of Chicago's celebrated Hubbard Street Dance, who are performing a one-night-only engagement at the Paramount Theatre (8 p.m., tickets $25-$42).

Founded by in 1977 by Lou Conte with a focus on jazz dance, Hubbard Street steadily grew and expanded its artistic repertoire (and moved substantially away from its classic jazz roots) through work with a variety of choreographers—everyone from Twyla Tharp to Nacho Duato—and becoming one of the premier contemporary dance companies in the U.S.

"There's definitely been a shift throughout, from the beginning of Hubbard Street," Hortin told me. "It was started out performing for senior citizens, when Lou was director it was very much jazz based. I think throughout that the evolution of the company, of dance in general, it's more of a melding of styles."

Today, Hubbard Street boasts of having some of the most versatile and virtuosic dancers working in the U.S., supporting its ambitious new works programs. HSDC has debuted at least 25 new works of choreography over the past eight years. All of which says something about the region's ability to produce world-class dance talent.

"I started dancing when I was 10, or 11 maybe, at Debbie's Dance in Olympia, Washington," Hortin told me. "Tap, jazz, pop, just standard studio fare. Then I went up to Westlake Dance Center for about a year, that was in high school. Then I burned out on dance when I was a senior in high school. I just completely stopped dancing. And then I went to community college in Olympia, and then went to UNLV as a computer science major, and stated popping in, taking dance classes again, kind of fell back in love with it."

After graduating with a BFA, Hortin moved to Chicago to take a position with River North Chicago Dance Company, which he knew had fed dancers into Hubbard Street in the past. In 2007, he received an apprenticeship from the company, and last year became a full company member.

Hortin will be dancing in three of the four works on the program this Friday, the one exception being HSDC associate artistic director Lucan Crandall's comic romp The Set (2008). HSDC resident choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo's Lickety-Split (2006), a work for three couples, explores the twists and turns of romance, set to music by Devendra Banhart. The company is also re-staging noted Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato's Gnawa (2005), which mixes traditional Spanish and Moroccan movement, set against a percussive score of North African music.

But the most exciting opportunity for Seattle audiences is to be the second city in the country to see Bitter Suite, a new work commissioned by HSDC from Jorma Elo, an increasingly in-demand Finnish choreographer. Described by The Chicago Tribune as "a reawakening for a group of people who have devolved into a tragically detached new species and are learning how to be human again," it's a quasi-sci-fi exploration of humanity set to music by Mendelssohn and Monteverdi.

"If you've never seen Jorma's work, it's very quirky," Hortin said. "It's definitely more out there, much more abstract. He described the piece as entries in journal, but perhaps they're not in order. Non-linear, almost random, but some sense of order in there. But I think it's a very beautiful piece, various human experiences of highs and lows, and beauty and sadness."

Shannon Cochran, Jeff Still and Estelle Parsons. Photo by Robert J. Saferstein.

Want to win tickets to Tracy Letts' Pulitzer prize-winning excavation of familial misery in the back country of Oklahoma, August: Osage County (which hits The Paramount for a highly anticipated one-week run starting October 27)?

Well, STG Presents is giving you the chance every week through the end of the month. Starting today, each Tuesday at 2 p.m. a "Twitter Trailer" of a scene from the play will be tweeted live to followers of @BroadwaySeattle. Afterward, you'll be asked to retweet a phrase from the scene to be entered for the chance to win a pair of tickets. Winners are announced by 3 p.m.

Couldn't be simpler, but if you'd like to buy a pair of tickets, they're $23.50 to $63.50, and will no doubt go fast. Hey, the play's starring Estelle Parsons, who people of a certain age recall fondly as Roseanne's insufferable mom on Roseanne. How's that for a ringing endorsement?