Tag Archives: theatre

Hard Rock and Paper Houses at The Annex: Scissors, Please

March 29, 2012 StefanDW

Perhaps you heard about this production of Paper Houses (at the Annex Theatre March 28-31; tickets: $20) from the promotional spots on KEXP, a reportedly reliable source for taste-making in music. Indeed, the music is great.

Seattle duo Pony Time is playing an awesome evening of hard rock at the Annex Theatre this weekend. There will be dancing. Stacy Peck will loom at you over her drum kit and make sure of it. Also, Luke Beetham’s guitars are things of beauty and deserve concentrated admiration while his fey vocals and agile finger work make for hipster happiness. However their sets are interspersed with theatrical scenes, and the less said about those scenes the better.

It might be preferable just to talk about the actors. Correy Harris stands out from the get-go as a fine actor foundering in text and direction that work to hide his talents. The intimations of character and relationship suggested by Harris’s presence in the role of Nick are also evident in the work of Patricia Bonnell as Iris and Anna Giles, as Abby.

Robert Harkins has perhaps the most challenging work in this play in the role of Stanley, a man suffering from dementia, though he is freed from the need to make sense of his lines. David Cravens-O’Farrell, connects with the audience sporadically in the central role of James. His accent is similarly sporadic but let’s chalk that up to his late addition to the cast.

The only role more thankless than that of Stanley may be this play’s villain, Bartman (Jay Hill), and not only because he shares the name of a dubious novelty dance from the early years of The Simpsons. In lieu of character, Bartman is a collection of negative stereotypes of current American conservatism. Hill appeared to be unsure of his lines, though his were not the only scenes in which vast pauses separated one character’s line from the next.

In the aim of promoting better theatre a few observations of the play are in order: Curtis Lee Fulton has tried to pack way too many themes into this narrative. These themes do not add up to actual content or articulated ideas. There are so many unmoored references that no time remains for establishing relationships through interactions; instead the relationships are simply named.

The most prominent flaw in this play (aside from the implausible situations, characters and relationships—such as they are) is that it is set on the catwalk of a billboard. This places large demands on the set, the actors, and ultimately the audience. The set fails to suggest anything more than a billboard that might as well be at ground level; the actors are inconsistent at best in the ludicrous shimmying that indicates the platform’s height. The audience is left to try to justify all that happens on this strangely deep catwalk–including the arrival of the band set-up on wagons for a rehearsal, and later performances, that ostensibly take place on the catwalk. Possibly the wagons are actually floating several feet in front of the catwalk and at a deadly height off the ground.

That said, Fulton is to be commended for taking some risks and experimenting with the integration of a rock band with a stage play. One hopes he would have learned from more successful forays in this field such as The Dresden Dolls’ production of A Clockwork Orange or The Negro Problem’s Passing Strange.

While Paper Houses is a failed experiment there may be further opportunities for the material. Verisimilitude seems beyond the reach of anything associated with this project but going bigger and more artificial could make for a dynamic performance. Let the angst-laden screeds stand alone, screaming down from a billboard high above a dance floor. Spotlight the senile and the socially diseased, do everything this play does only bigger and stagier. Dispense with narrative and plot, even give us a dunk-tank clown like poor Bartman and, please, have the band play more!

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Le Frenchword Does It For Comedy

March 13, 2012 StefanDW 1 Comment

The audience that attended the performance of Le Frenchword’s Fancy Mudthat I saw was diverse—in age and gender, if not race—and included a number of families with pre-teens

The large percentage of kids in the audience combined with the clarity, simplicity and weak comedy of the opening monologue on astronomy had me cowering in anticipation of an evening of Bill Nye the Science Guy meets The Flying Karamazov Brothers minus the juggling. I felt a nightmare creeping up on me, rife in awkward puns and low-energy silliness wrapped around PBS weekday-afternoon didacticism. Glimmers of hope flashed through the sketch as the silliness slipped into absurdism. Then suddenly, out of a transition so seamless that it was over before I realized it had started, a monologue of strange and unnerving beauty drew together everything that had transpired into an précis of Creation and I was hooked.

Le Frenchword is a talented trio of performers who excel in all they do (outside their opening scene) and they do a lot. This production, directed by George Lewis and created by Sachie Mikawa, Carter Rodriguez, Lewis and John Leith features clown, dance, singing, quirky instruments, puppetry, and physical theatre, and some of the most finely executed stage combat I’ve seen. Mikawa does Hello-Kitty kawaii and plays melodica and toy piano. Rodriguez is the big man of fragile dignity playing guitar and teaching a master class in the power of pre-emptive sympathy. Ben Burris is an excellent physical comedian and a excellent singer who plays glockenspiel and finger-cymbals. They are so much fun I just want to run away from my life to go play with them.

The unfortunate astronomy lecture diffuses into something of a wallpaper theme that runs throughout the performance but never aspires to profundity or education even while it suggests universal truths. This is rough theatre that sometimes approaches the holy. It shows its work, but seeing the structure does nothing to diminish its efficacy. The lame three-legged cow is funnier because we can see that it has three legs so the actor’s other hand can make the udder. The work is so fresh and in the moment that it’s often unclear whether it’s being improvised on the spot or has just maintained the vibrancy of creative gestation.

There are puns, but not too many and some are downright clever. There is silliness but it is either completely absurd or totally integrated into the rest of the performance. There is a cappella, but it’s often quite good and ranges from Night on Bald Mountain to outlandish and hilarious word music.

This show has its version of a gun hanging over the fireplace and that gun gets talked about a lot but it never goes off. Yet, contrary to Chekhov’s dictum, this is part of the show’s charm—along with the house lights that never dim more than halfway. After all, plot is not the point here. Not much is explained in Fancy Mud but everything gains context. A large part of the fun comes in following the actors on wild tangents only to discover that each tangent returns to the same basic themes, rearranged to change our perception of them. The closest Le Frenchword comes to explaining Fancy Mud is when one of the actors asks, “Why are we doing this?” Their answer: “We do it for comedy,” and in the name of comedy no opportunity for ribaldry or vulgarity escapes Le Frenchword.

So what happened with that opening scene? Was it poor timing that made the lecturer seem over-indulgent with his colleagues and his outbursts unjustified or was it poor writing? Or could it be that some of us are too serious and too narrow-minded to enter easily into the world of Le Frenchword? Whatever the reason the first five minutes pass quickly and the rest of the show is as pleasing a trip into the mythology of the cosmos as you’re likely to find—or at least one with great music.

The Seattle run of Fancy Mud has come and gone so to catch the next performance you’ll have to make for the border. Le Frenchword plans to perform at the fringe festivals in Winnipeg (July 18-29), Calgary (August 3-11), and Edmonton (August 16-26). Help them show los Canucks what Seattle theatre can be through LF’s soon to be launched Kickstarter campaign or by checks made out to Sachie Abrego C/O Le Frenchword, 1122 East Pike St. #929 Seattle, WA 98122.

Arts & Entertainment, Music, Theatre

12 Minutes Max: The Test Results Are In

February 22, 2012 StefanDW

A house of fans, friends, family, and the merely curious filled On The Boards’ Studio Theatre Monday night for the 2011-2012 season’s fourth and penultimate edition of 12 Minutes Max. This OtB institution offers twelve regional artists a twelve-minute slot of lab time for testing new material on audiences, and “testing” is no euphemism. While the crowd was enthusiastic there were no obligatory standing-O’s at this show; the performers earned the responses they received, and more often than not those responses were positive.

The evening was heavy on dance, light on theatre and music, and featured a pair of performance pieces incorporating movement and declamation. Sarah Burgess provided the musical act playing low-key pop piano under a smoky Norah Jones knock-off vocal. She’s a pleasant and comfortable performer who, one hopes, may aspire to greater achievements in her future lyrics.

Dances included a solo, a duet, a trio, and a quintet. Kaitlin McCarthy and Kiplinn Sagmiller danced McCarthy’s choreography using a precise vocabulary of movements to create a narrative of tenderness and aggression that escalated steadily with acts of kindness subverted to violent ends, resulting in the total division of roles between the empowered and the subjugated.

Shellie Gravitt gave the audience a go-go dance by way of Beckett (perhaps that’s go-go of Godot’s Didi and Gogo). The clown act consistently resolved into a vainglorious reassertion of dignity, enacted in the astonishing beauty of the dancer’s torso slowly rising up over squatting thighs, perched on massive high-heeled shoes only to launch once more into the impossible and ludicrous contortions of the act. After an unperformed transition, masked only by the proscenium wall, but revealed in shadows and the unmuffled sounds of costume and prop transitions, Gravitt reemerged, freed of footwear and with a therapeutic rocks glass at hand. This dance was free and easy, instead of striving to achieve an impossible task.

The other dances included one of transitions between mechanized and organic qualities in a nuanced dynamic of encounters received and compelled within Vancouver’s three-woman ensemble Triadic Dances Works. The other involved Geoffrey Johnson’s ensemble of five performers in athletic and grounded movement, often arranged around a still center with a motif of hand flutters punctuating the sequences. The costuming was remarkable for including a variety of faded t-shirts printed with lettering and images, which helped place the experience of the dance in a very accessible and informal world.

William D. Brattain, or TIT: The Irrealist Theatre, gave the audience a strong performance piece spiraling off from the Fibonacci sequence and conceptions of gender and language that was supported in the physical work with well-integrated form and content and enough authentic personality to win the audience’s sympathy. Meanwhile, Joyce Liao’s Llevame Contigo was a more obtuse piece involving childlike play and ruminations on horses, intermixed with prerecorded voiceovers and followed by primitive and simple dances.

This sort of an evening can be a technical nightmare and the transitions between scenes deadly. I’ve long been of the opinion that scene changes must be totally fascinating or completely invisible. Given the large percentage of dance pieces in the evening, the transitions were relatively smooth and quick, but the slow transition into The Town Theater’s Missed Connections was slow and fascinating, a dance piece unto itself. Unfortunately, the rest of this piece didn’t compare as favorably. The set consisted of a pair of triangles in blue painters’ tape laid out on the floor in a formal choreography seemingly borrowed from the preceding dance.

Nick Hara and Ciera Iveson performed their composition derived from Seattle Missed Connections postings, a forum with which other groups, such as NYC’s Royanth Productions and Ars Nova, have had success. The performance of the text was often engaging. Iveson and Hara committed to their characters, calling out into the theatre for affection and connection, though never so much to suggest that they expected a response. This was all very nice, but the actors were locked onto those triangles. What might have happened had they broken free and had an interaction with one another?

At the end of intermission, The SunBreak’s Arts Intern Emeritus Leah Vendl’s name was chosen out of a glass vase full of entries, which won her the responsibility of guest-curating the next edition of 12 Minutes Max (April 8-9, auditions March 11). If it’s anything like this latest edition, there will be plenty to like—and anything you don’t like will be over soon enough. That and the $8 admission are a small price to pay for the chance to contribute to local performance development and possibly to be the first to see the next big thing.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

Seattle’s Film Lovers Returning to the Uptown

November 28, 2011 Michael van Baker

We have been documenting the Uptown’s revival as a SIFF property for some time (before, before, and after), but this weekend I had the chance to visit not for any special event, but because I wanted to see a movie or two, and they happened to be showing at the Uptown.

In the lobby a group of a half-dozen 50-somethings had just met en route between theatres (the Uptown has three salles), and were comparing notes. It seemed half had come from Elite Squad 2 and were headed into London Boulevard, and half were headed the other way. “Have you seen Le Havre?” someone asked, and there was a discreet pause. It developed that some people had loved it, but not the speaker.

On the box office window, a paper sign with showtimes was taped up that listed a Le Harve, and I felt keenly the lack of a French version of Harvey. Next door at the Uptown Espresso, a trio were catching up before their film started. The Uptown Espresso is home of the Velvet Foam, which they will scoop onto your hot chocolate without asking, even if you think that overly steamed milk has little to recommend it over whipped cream.

The threesome were going to see Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, two assuring the third that you didn’t need to have see the first installment–chronicling Captain Roberto Nascimento’s mounting pressures in an elite Brazilian anti-drug unit, and his rookie protegé André Matias’s struggle to remain a law-abiding officer in the face of his unit’s torture and killing of drug suspects. (Here I refer you to the BOPE Tumblr.)

The second Elite Squad, like the first, makes a point of emphasizing that any similarity to reality is purely coincidental. (In the first, Nascimento is clearing favelas in preparation for a papal visit; these days, Rio is gearing up for the Olympics.)

It plays a bit like a Brazilian take on The Wire: After a prison riot debacle, Nascimento is demoted upward, to running surveillance, and begins to understand that there are political realities behind the directives he used to execute in BOPE. A cabal of corrupt militia, a Rush Limbaugh-esque TV politico, a law-and-order candidate, and a governor who never stops campaigning for reelection conspire to complicate Nascimento’s life yet again.

With Nascimento, director José Padilha pursues an only-Nixon-could-go-to-China strategy, in that the captain is the kind of guy who believes wholeheartedly in torturing scumbags if that’s what’s needed, but grudgingly comes around to see that unchecked police power brings its own drawbacks. But where Elite Squad 1 was a blow-the-covers off, first-person exposé, trading on cops-and-robbers charisma, The Enemy Within feels like any number of movies about upright men discovering there are crooked pols, and lacks some of the lived-in authenticity of the first.

It’s still a better film in its way than London Boulevard, an idiosyncratic mash-up of Sunset Boulevard and one of those ultraviolent-Cockney movies from Guy Ritchie. Colin Farrell is Harry Mitchel, a “made man” of sorts just released from prison, who stumbles into a Someone to Watch Over Me gig with a model-actress-painter who’s been hounded to housebound-ism by paparazzi. Farrell is engaging enough–he gives good rageaholic–but the film becomes such a stringing together of unlikely events that by the time Keira Knightley falls for Farrell, you realize you’ve missed it, and have had to have it mentioned to you via exposition. Ray Winstone and David Thewlis deliver fine performances, but screenwriter-turned-director William Monahan’s overstuffed neo-noir gradually flies off in all directions.

This is the kind of thing you talk about later, in the lobby, as if it were old times in the Uptown, only everything now is sparkling, and the films look great on screen (SIFF insists on creating trailer collages that almost never display at the right resolution, all jaggy and pixellated, but the films themselves show well.) It’s early, but the move to the Uptown seems likely to pay off in attracting the social film-goer, the kind of people who go to films because it’s fun for them, and who have made SIFF-the-Festival such an attendance colossus.

The antisocial film-goer can be found, apparently, at the Majestic Bay, but I’ll leave it to you to decide if that’s the choker or choked.

That leaves just one problem, as I mentioned in an earlier post, which is parking in the area:

While SIFF‘s new digs at the Uptown Theater offer tons of seats inside, they didn’t come with any on-street spots. Parking in Lower Queen Anne is a bear even when the weather’s nice–just assume that you’re going to pay for parking in a lot (here are Seattle Center-run locations), or take public transit (the Monorail is nice this time of year).

I’ve been nosing around looking for parking spots of note, and so far the best I can come up with is the parking garage at the Market at 1st and Mercer. If you buy something–Raisinets? Licorice?–at the Market, you can get two hours’ parking for free, and it’s open until midnight seven days a week.

Arts & Entertainment, Music, Theatre

Fremont’s Genius Loci Brings You “West of Lenin”

July 5, 2011 Michael van Baker

It’s West of Lenin‘s A.J. Epstein who puts his finger on it. We’re standing in a hallway as the acts rehearse for West of Lenin’s grand opening, and Epstein’s concentration keeps wavering back to the black box theater; he delightedly catches himself wearing both the hats of both producer and fan.

Why Fremont, I ask, and Epstein says at first that Fremont happened to be where he had the building. (You’ll find it at 203 N. 36th Street, directly across the street from the George & Dragon Pub.)

But then he rattles off the appearances of Circus Contraption at Theo Chocolate, around the corner; the Moisture Festival at Hale Palladium down the street, and one more intersection of art and commerce seems almost predestined by Fremont’s promiscuous genius loci.

The way West of Lenin is supposed to work, after all, is as a tag-along in a larger building devoted to commercial office rental. If Epstein has calculated correctly, with his building full of tenants, the black box theater rides free. (So far, his tenants are himself and Ecco architectural design, who reworked the space for him. )

That takes the pressure off West of Lenin to somehow be money-maker enough to pay rent, with maximum audiences of around 100. (A size that, crucially, allows smaller shows to sell out and create buzz.) It’s a slightly bigger step, true, creating a resident space, but it also says something about the spirit of place.

Having artists on commercial premises is all well and good until one of them says (or performs) something a customer doesn’t agree with. Fremont businesses have been willing to take that chance, and audiences have been happy to show up and reward them. That’s not as true elsewhere in Seattle. Business owners are either a little less inclined to share their real estate, or audiences have other arts-specific venues to attend.

It’s true that West of Lenin exists because Epstein wants it to. He had the chance to reconfigure the space in his building, and, at least for the short-term, curate for the “friends and family” he’s acquired through Ethereal Mutt, Limited, productions. After that, the 88-seat black box theater will rent in “multiple configurations”–Epstein says he’s got several layouts drawn up, using his risers and chairs.

Emily Reitman (206-352-1777 or emily@emutt.com) handles the bookings. Epstein is happy simply to rent the space, or, in the case where he’s interested, co-produce. The main thing, he says, especially early on, is to book shows that have existing audiences.

So far, the lineup at West of Lenin has raised eyebrows appreciatively:

Seattle comedian and cabaret crooner Mark Siano will workshop a new piece in the Fall 2011.
Brooklyn-based rock band Sky White Tiger (www.skywhitetiger.com) premieres a new immersive live show October 5, 2011.
Sandbox Radio LIVE, produced by Sandbox Artists Collective (www.thesandboxac.org) and the first production ever at West of Lenin, returns Oct 10, 2011.
Matt Richter/XOM (www.xomonline.com) will inaugurate a new, semiannual, late night cabaret beginning Winter 2011.
Playwright/actor/director Paul Budraitis will workshop a new physical theatre piece Fall 2011
Emerald Reels Super 8 Lounge, a series of film/DJ amalgamations that last played the Re-Bar in 2004, will present at West of Lenin Fall 2011.
Kevin Joyce, co-founder of UMO Ensemble, former host of Big Night Out on Seattle TV, and former principal performer and Director at Teatro Zinzanni revisits his award-winning solo show, A Pale and Lovely Place, in December 2011.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

Inside the SIFF Film Center at Seattle Center [Slideshow]

July 1, 2011 Michael van Baker

The front desk at the new SIFF Film Center

SIFF Film Center

Upstairs in the SIFF Film Center

The jewelbox cinema space at the new SIFF Film Center

New SIFF Film Center layout

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SIFF has officially moved their offices into the new SIFF Film Center at Seattle Center. They’re taking up residence in what was formerly known as the Alki Room in the Northwest rooms. There they will offer exhibits, presentations, and film programming, as well as educational programs.

The heart of the new Film Center is a jewelbox cinema seating about 100–they’ll continue showing film at SIFF Cinema in McCaw Hall, but this smaller space will be a better fit for niche interest screenings. If you like the Northwest Film Forum, you’ll be right at home in this space,

SIFF phone, fax, and emails all stay the same, but the new mailing address is: SIFF / 305 Harrison Street / Seattle, WA 98109. Phone: (206) 464-5830 / Fax: (206) 264-7919).

Curious Georges in a conversation with Seattle