A conversation with Seattle
As a Seattleite, I’ve found it all but impossible to avoid the force of nature we know as Jinkx Monsoon. … Continue reading TSB interview: Jinkx Monsoon talks to us about The Vaudevillians, The Inevitable Album, and what’s next
Were Martha a real person and alive today she’d be 103 and George would still be six years her junior. … Continue reading Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf: Still Blowing Us Away After All These Years
Where in American Utopias he seemed egged on by that self-same utopian urge, an impatient, footsore migrant of the ideal, on opening night he often spoke directly to the audience, sprinkled with reviewers, about the role of cultural arbiters, and how Ayn Rand initially slipped past those latter-day gatekeepers. Continue reading Mike Daisey: Are You Trying to Seduce Me, Ayn Rand?
Minute-for-minute, the show contains a greater torrent of convulsive laughter and insight than anything I think I’ve seen from Daisey before. The utopias encountered are Burning Man (one thing we all know with certainty, deep in our souls, says Daisey, is whether we need to go to Burning Man, or not), Disney World and his sister’s New Jersey annexation of its aesthetic, and the occupation of Zuccotti Park. Continue reading Mike Daisey Unmasks Our “American Utopias” at Seattle Rep
Or, takes so many risks, it’s hard to believe they all work. It defies convention by refusing to define the time period with costumes and dialogue, instead choosing the ambiguity of mixing Restoration costumes with late ’60s glam rock, and mixing colloquial phrases with rhyming couplets. The ambiguity continues as each of the characters describe their amorous interests as based solely in pleasure and happiness as opposed to gender, or obligation. Continue reading Have You Ridden Seattle Rep’s Or, Yet?
John Logan’s play RED (at Seattle Rep through March 24), about the painter Mark Rothko, won the 2010 Tony, Drama Desk, Drama League, and Outer Critics Circle awards. (You may also remember Logan from his screenplays for such movies as Hugo, The Aviator, and Gladiator.) Here in Seattle, the Rep has already extended its run.
It’s a talky two-hander, starring Denis Arndt as Rothko and Connor Toms as his atelier assistant Ken…and Kent Dorsey’s moveable feast of a set. Continue reading In Seattle Rep’s Rothko Play, RED Is Better Than Dead
At a hundred and forty minutes, with one intermission, I Am My Own Wife is lengthy by solo-actor standards, and is essentially about a number of conversations held with a 65-year-old, self-styled museum curator, so you have to make allowances, and sit back and relax as Charlotte tells her story in her own time, complete with digressions and evasions, instructing you in the history of the Edison Gramophone and the antique furniture in her Gründerzeit Museum. Continue reading Charlotte Keeps You Guessing in Rep’s I Am My Own Wife