Stage
The subtitle "the stage mother of all musicals" only begins to hint at what this campy musical is all about. It is a parody on just about everything, from Gypsy and Mame to The Bad Seed and All About Eve, and most of the female actors belt out their songs
Arts
Olympia's Art House Designs is not your typical art gallery. They seldom have regularly scheduled shows. Rather, it is more like an art fair or a funhouse of contemporary art with prints, paintings, ceramics and sculptures by more than 30 artists, including such popular local artists as Barlow Palminteri, Simon
Arts
"Study of Site and Space" at 950 Gallery is the best theme show around. It is a group exhibition featuring 16 Northwest artists that, according to curator and show participant Allison Hyde, "seeks to address the innate human connection to site and space through 2D, 3D and mixed-media art (representing)
Arts
Christopher Mathie is a frequent exhibiting artist at Childhood's End. It's been long enough since I've seen his work that it's a pleasure to see it again, even if the paintings in his current show are a tad too much like ones I've seen before. Is he recycling previously shown
Stage
South Sound theater lovers love Chris Serface, actor, director and Managing Artistic Director at Tacoma Little Theatre. From Olympia but now living in Tacoma, Serface has been active in theater from childhood. During his educational and professional career, he has traveled throughout the West, working closely with many theaters as
Arts
Feast Arts Center has quickly become Tacoma's most avant garde gallery featuring the most challenging of contemporary visual arts including painting, sculpture, installations, conceptual and performance art -- respecting history and tradition while pushing the envelope. Plus, Feast has classes ranging from live figure drawing sessions to classes in performance
Arts
Nicholas Nyland has been showing art around Tacoma for quite some time, and I thought I was familiar with his work, but the raw stoneware and terracotta earthenware in his show "Reliquary" at Feast Arts Center offers some things I've not seen from him before. His explosions of primary colors
Stage
A new theater company premieres its opening season the weekend of Aug. 16-19 with the popular musical Legally Blonde, to be followed by other hit musicals: The Rocky Horror Show in October, The Wedding Singer in February, Young Frankenstein in March, and Cabaret in May. For the first season, at
Arts
Works by many of the best area artists can be seen at the "Southwest Washington Juried Exhibition" at South Puget Sound Community College. Old friends and familiar names are represented, such as Susan Aurand, Melissa Barnes, Lynette Charters, Doyle Fanning, Lisa Kinoshita, Mary McCann and Jason Sobottka, all-in-all more than
Stage
Animal Fire Theatre's The Winter's Tale is the way Shakespeare in the Park should be done. The outdoor setting is a clearing surrounded by sky-high evergreens, and on the perfect summer's evening when I attended, even the mosquitoes cooperated by going somewhere else. Despite a peculiarity, which I shall mention momentarily, The
Arts
Jacci Lynn Butler's "Holy Trinity and Other Tales in Abstract" at Browsers Book Shop is this artist's first exhibition. When I visited, there were half a dozen small works on a couch waiting to be hung. In the staircase ascending to the upstairs gallery space were five small abstract paintings
Arts
Book artists, meaning artists who create books conceived as works of art, combine many of the most fascinating elements of books - stories told with words and sometimes illustrated with pictures - and elements of visual arts such as drawn, painted and sculpted images. When these elements are skillfully woven
Arts
Pop-up galleries are the latest thing all over the country. Pop-ups feature art exhibitions that are usually of short duration and often in non-commercial venues such as private homes or vacant storefronts. In Olympia, the premiere pop-up gallery is Allsorts in the home of artist Lynette Charters and actor John
Stage
Well over 2,000 years ago, the city of Athens, Greece, was treated to a sexy and hilarious anti-war farce called Lysistrata by the writer Aristophanes. Now it is making its way to Tacoma's Dukesbay Theater in an anonymous adaptation believed to have been by Oscar Wilde, directed by Niclas Olson
Arts
I hardly know where to start. There is so much art crammed into this little space -- basically three shows in one -- that I need at least a thousand words to simply describe it, much less evaluate it. I shall do my best to consolidate it. "The West" is a
Stage
Suite Surrender, written by Michael McKeever and directed by Toni Holm for Olympia Little Theatre, is a period comedy set in the early 1940s. It is filled with outdated and overused comic bits -- and yet it still manages to elicit quite a few chuckles from the audience. Two outlandish, imperious
Arts
Childhood's End Gallery's latest show is clearly different from their usual group show. "Oaxaca to Washington" is an exhibition of more than 30 prints by Mexican artists from the state of Oaxaca. Local artist Mimi Williams became friends with Mexican artist Edgar Martinez (not the baseball player), who now lives
Arts
"The 13th Annual Student Art Exhibition" now fills the gallery at South Puget Sound Community College. My first impression was admiration for the audacity and humor of "Boombox," a gigantic boombox made of cardboard with wood screws that are used both structurally and for aesthetic purposes. Immediately upon seeing it, I
Outdoors
Former Tacoma News Tribune art writer Rosemary Ponnekanti, with the help of curator Lisa Kinoshita, has pulled together an amazing arts festival to take place Sunday, June 10, at the Foss Waterway Seaport. The event called "Tacoma Ocean Fest" will feature photography, eco-sculpture, film, dance, music, an aerial circus, painting,
Stage
Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan's timely political thriller Building the Wall comes to Tacoma Little Theatre for a one-night-only staged reading directed by Randy Clark, founder of Dukesbay Theatre, and starring Scott C. Brown and Iesha McIntyre. Called a "must-see show" by The New York Times, and "a
