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It began as a 1988 John Waters film in which Ricki Lake (yes, that Ricki Lake) played Tracy Turnblad, a girl of size in 1962 Baltimore who wants nothing more than to dance on The Corny Collins Show. Drag queen Divine costarred as Tracy's mother. That film was adapted into
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The current record for Largest Food Drive Ever netted half a million pounds of food. Now Emergency Food Network, Northwest Harvest, Tacoma Public Schools and the Stadium Centennial Foundation hope to celebrate the Stadium Bowl's 100th anniversary by doubling that record from Friday to Saturday. Fill
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Gig Harbor is a quiet suburban community, known largely for a kickass shopping mall with a Blazing Onion Burger Company and that movie theater with the seats that shake you around. But did you also know it's fairly swimming with talented artists in a wide variety of media? Of course
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Elizabeth Lord is many things: bartender, storyteller, gifted actor - and, once a year, Lord Franzannian, the gruff but lovable drag host of Oly's premier vaudeville revue. We don't know what the good Lord's lineup will be this year, but odds are there'll be music, juggling and lovely ladies of
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Run frantically, hop in your car and navigate the urban jungle to the Tacoma Art Museum to enjoy the soothing tranquility of nature. Vashon Island landscape painter Victoria Adams, known for such pastorals as River's Edge and Morning Shimmer, creates broad panoramas of the American countryside devoid of humans. She
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The Dixie Swim Club might be the perfect community theater script. It's gossipy without undue saltiness. It offers laughs - not just chuckles but laughs - several times a minute. It gives female actors a chance to shine in an ensemble, when the byword of community
Stage
One of the common complaints about art critics is that we're nitpicky, as if assessing the finer details of a show weren't our job in the first place. When I watch a play, I notice the broad strokes, but I also inspect the minutiae that can, though barely perceptibly, cumulatively
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Tacoma artist Shaun Peterson, who also took on the native Puyallup name Qwalsius in 2005, created a 22-foot-tall carved figure for Tollefson Plaza. The figure is a woman in a white dress with a Thunderbird design and woven cedar hat, and she welcomes visitors of all cultures to what was
Features
"Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act," M. F. K. Fisher opined, "that should not be indulged in lightly." If he's right, then the intimacy quotient in downtown Olympia is about to get downright freaky. On Saturday, Sept. 11, the Olympia Action Network and the Volunteer Center of
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21. OLEANNA >>> SUMMER 2011 David Mamet's Oleanna is one of those plays people holler about decades after it was written. It's a two-hander about a college professor, John, and his ongoing feud with Carol, a female student. Is John guilty of sexual harassment, or is Carol just wielding political correctness
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Somewhere out on the vast prairie, two strangers ride into a frontier boomtown. One spits a thick stream of tobacco juice into the sagebrush. "For the great desire I had to see fair Padua," he drawls, "I am arrived for fruitful Lombardy, the pleasant garden of great Italy." Hey,
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Three years ago, my beloved girlfriend, then completely unknown to me, was at the Capital Playhouse's Live Theatre Week performance of Sweeney Todd I attended. Small world, right? A romantic "meet cute?" Nope, we didn't talk that night and wouldn't for several months, but Capital Playhouse has decided to
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In Jeffrey Hatcher's 2008 adaptation Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Hyde is represented by four actors, one of them female, but Jekyll's a different actor altogether. It's a challenging idea, which Harlequin Production's director Scot Whitney does a fine job of communicating quickly. Of Harlequin's four Hydes, I found Mike
Stage
In October 1977, a man whose birth certificate read William Stanley Milligan was arrested for the rape of three women on the Ohio State campus. Milligan claimed insanity; his psychologists claimed he suffered from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), then called "split personality." The rapes were allegedly committed against Milligan's
Stage
Having previously addressed the upcoming theater season in Tacoma, let's take a look at the year in Olympia. Harlequin is first off the blocks with its production of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde as adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher, premiering Aug. 26. The public read-through made it clear Hatcher's eloquent voice is
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Three unknown assailants blindfold me and slide me into the back of my car in broad daylight. Two are in camos. It's a little after 4 p.m. in one of the most liberal strongholds in America, and nobody watching gives a damn. My abductors drive me to a secret lair,
Stage
Let's face it; we have to admire the self-confidence of any group willing to call its production BOMB, even if it is a clever acronym (Best of Modern Broadway). Such faith in a production directed, choreographed, and performed by kids-including the band!-borders on foolhardy. I've stated my reluctance to dump
Stage
Grit City's upcoming theater season is cram-packed with interesting shows, so with no further - (See what I did there?) Tacoma Little Theatre opens the year Aug. 27 with Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth, an ingenious two-hand thriller in which an aging mystery writer and an ambitious Casanova match murderous wits. Tacoma playwright
Stage
"I was typecast as a lion," Bert Lahr once said of his post-Wizard of Oz career, "and there just weren't many parts for lions." If actors have one universal gripe, it's typecasting, the process by which actors are limited to a single kind of role. Actors with limited range sometimes
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Here's the setup: A dozen members of New York's Tectonic Theater Project traveled to Laramie, Wyoming at the turn of the millennium to research the murder of Matthew Shepard in October 1998. Shepard, openly gay, had been robbed, beaten into a coma, tied to a fence and