Stage
So that's what all the fuss was about! Harlequin has staged its homegrown production of A Rock ‘n' Roll Twelfth Night four times before, but not since 2003, five years before I arrived in Washington. I'd heard glowing reviews of the show and even listened to its entertaining CD, but
Stage
Adjusted for inflation, the epic film Gone with the Wind retains a healthy lead on Avatar and Star Wars as the most lucrative in history. Pop quiz, hotshot: what was author Margaret Mitchell's follow-up to Gone with the Wind? If your brain refuses to kick out a title, that's because
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Theater, no matter how hard we try, is nothing like life. It's amplified, focused, condensed and artificial. That's not to say we who craft it are unobliged to say anything about real life, but we needn't feel we must reproduce it photographically as if there were no
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There are line flubs, sure. I've heard less covering in Beatlemania. The uncertainty lengthens an already-too-long show to 2:30 plus intermission. Still, it's a tribute to OLT's veteran leads that I almost never knew who went up. The actors remain locked into each other, ad-libbing credibly
Stage
Theater, no matter how hard we try, is nothing like life. It's amplified, focused, condensed and artificial. That's not to say we who craft it are unobliged to say anything about real life, but we needn't feel we must reproduce it photographically as if there were no audience members sharing
Stage
A day after opening night of The Cemetery Club at Olympia Little Theatre, my objective and subjective selves are still debating its merits. From a technical standpoint, the show has grievous shortcomings. It's blocked so we spend much of our time gazing at actors' hair instead of their faces. The
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We were two or three scenes into David Mamet's two-hander A Life in the Theatre, the debut production from Tacoma's Working Class Theatre NW, when my wife leaned over and whispered, "People do not talk like this." I knew what she meant. Actors and critics often claim Mamet's truncated
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In 2001, wife-and-husband team Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen conducted interviews with more than 40 exonerated Death Row residents, then condensed some of those interviews into a direct-address theater piece, The Exonerated. Their play won numerous awards and was adapted into a star-studded telefilm that aired,
Stage
We were two or three scenes into David Mamet's two-hander A Life in the Theatre, the debut production from Tacoma's Working Class Theatre NW, when my wife leaned over and whispered, "People do not talk like this." I knew what she meant. Actors and critics often claim Mamet's truncated sentences
Stage
I spent my formative years in an Oklahoma college town, Ada. With 16,000 residents and a median household income of less than $23,000 a year, it might not seem like the kind of place that'd have two books written about it. Robert Mayer's The Dreams of Ada and John Grisham's
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I mean no disparagement whatsoever when I say La Cage aux Folles is a musical populated mostly by drag queens. Its two leads are a gay male couple, Georges and Albin. They run a drag cabaret in Saint-Tropez, France, circa 1983. That was the year Allan Carr, producer
Stage
"queen noun \'kw?"n\ 1a: the wife or widow of a king....3b: a goddess or a thing personified as a female and having supremacy in a specified realm...8 often disparaging: a male homosexual; especially: an effeminate one"-Merriam-Webster.com I mean no disparagement whatsoever when I say La Cage aux Folles is a musical
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March 24, 1958, at the height of his popularity, the greatest rock star in the world - in the history of the world - was inducted into the U.S. Army as a private. His fans called the day Black Monday. The occasion was marked by "one last
Stage
March 24, 1958, at the height of his popularity, the greatest rock star in the world - in the history of the world - was inducted into the U.S. Army as a private. His fans called the day Black Monday. The occasion was marked by "one last kiss" from a
Guides
If I may be so bold as to offer one piece of advice for first-time zip-liners, it would be this: you really do need to thrust your legs straight out in front of you. Pretend you're a kid on a swing set. My wife had trouble with that. It didn't
Guides
I see about 40 plays a year in the South Sound. Some are better than others, and some make more money. At least two will tank despite being quite good indeed. End Days at Harlequin and Next to Normal at Capital Playhouse struggled to find audiences, and those were my
Guides
There has been a great disturbance in the Force. I first profiled Don Sucher and his one-of-a-kind shop in Aberdeen three years ago, when the hottest news in the Star Wars universe was season four of Clone Wars on Cartoon Network. Then came a day that will long be remembered:
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I promise you, no animals were harmed in Olympia Little Theatre's production of playwright Lauren Gunderson's Exit, Pursued by a Bear (other than an antelope set upon by crocs in a nature video, for which life doesn't seem to be going well). The prey in this story is Kyle
Stage
Among the most notorious of all stage directions appears in the middle of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. In Act III, Scene 3, Sicilian lord Antigonus has just delivered a longish soliloquy of 45 lines when - why the hell not, really? - the script directs him to "[Exit, pursued by
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Harlequin's production of Israel Horovitz's Fighting Over Beverley costars one of my favorite local actors, David Wright, in yet another role for which he gets to growl around the stage and show off a convincing accent and physical infirmity. I'm not complaining - far from it! I'd
