You’ve seen the banner [mb], now see the play: Avenue Q, the Tony-winning play about a bright-eyed college grad who heads to NYC with big dreams and a tiny bank balance is coming to Seattle.

If you’ve not heard about the play your first reaction to that description might be something along the lines of “Eh, sounds like a zillion other plays out there” so let me clue you in with two very important words: naughty puppets.

That’s right–the story of young Princeton and his adventures in the low-rent district of NYC is performed on stage by puppets operated onstage by actors. The puppets are in homage to Sesame Street but the show “has not been authorized or approved by The Jim Henson Company or Sesame Workshop, which have no responsibility for its content,” a phrase you will see quite often when it comes to this play. Although some of the specific characters are obvious satires of existing Sesame Street characters, the problems they face are a lot more advanced than eating too many cookies or looking for their rubber ducky. The puppet characters address issues like racism, pornography and homosexuality, and “full-puppet nudity”.

Avenue Q plays the Paramount June 10th through 15th.

Seattle Theatre Group unveiled the (apparently) most controversial banner to date on Monday (May 19th) at 1:00PM on the east facing exterior of The Paramount Theatre. The banner features Lucy, star of Broadway’s Avenue Q, in all her provocative glory.
“This is the first billboard that’s made me blush,” says STG Executive Director Josh LaBelle.

AVENUE Q is Broadway’s smash-hit 2004 Tony Award® winner for Best Musical, Best Score and Best Book. A hilarious show full of heart and hummable tunes, AVENUE Q is about trying to make it in NYC with big dreams and a tiny bank account. Called “one of the funniest shows you’re ever likely to see” by Entertainment Weekly, AVENUE Q features a cast of people and puppets who tell the story in a smart, risqué and downright entertaining way. AVENUE Q has not been authorized or approved by The Jim Henson Company or Sesame Workshop, which have no responsibility for its content.

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During the intermission of tonight’s opening night performance of My Fair Lady at the Paramount, I ran into a friend who described the show as “beautiful”.  It’s a fitting word–the production is rather lovely, with such exquisite attention paid to detail that it was easy to imagine having been transported to a glamourized version of Edwardian England.  It takes more than well-crafted sets and pretty costumes to make a good show, however, and it’s in the most important parts of a musical that the play truly shines.

The story of the often artificial separation between the social classes, the struggles faced when attempting to rise above one’s station and the dangers of middle class morality remains as provocative and entertaining as ever.   The show’s many famous songs were sung rather well and the dances delight.  It was the acting of the principal cast that made it most rewarding.  Christopher Cazenove fully mastered the delicate balance of keeping Professor Henry Higgins as insufferable and arrogant as he needs to be while remaining just enough shy of being an ogre to add believability to the warm feelings so many of the characters have for him despite his purely academic interest in the social graces.  Dana DeLisa was completely credible as both Eliza Doolittle the “guttersnipe” flower seller on the dirty streets of London and Eliza Doolittle the fine lady at the Embassy Ball.  DeLisa infuses Eliza with such charm that I found myself worried for her welfare even though I know how the story ends. 

Walter Charles as Colonel Pickering, Professor Higgins’ partner in scheming, is a likeable chap and serves his role of being Eliza’s buffer against the worst of Higgins’ rages well.  It’s a shame that the part of Henry’s mother, Mrs. Higgins, is so small because Marni Nixon (who provided the singing voice for Audrey Hepburn’s turn as Eliza in the famed film version of the story) was most appealing.  The stand out performance of the show for me was another minor, but important character.  Tim Jerome as Eliza’s rapscallion father, “England’s most original moralist” Alfred P. Doolittle, nearly steals the show every time he takes the stage in a charismatic performance that displays his impeccable comic timing.  His cheerful, shameless amoralism when we first meet him, followed by his later complaints of being “ruined” by respectability neatly satirizes the hidden hypocracy of the “good manners” practiced by the less directly spoken members of the social classes higher than his.  

The only performance in the play that I found a bit lacking was Justin Bohon’s portrayal of Freddy Eynsford-Hill, the idle son of an upper crust family who falls for Eliza.  To be fair, the role is underwritten:  the sole purpose for Freddy’s existence is so that Eliza can ponder marrying him but it was a bit of a stretch to imagine Eliza caring enough for this bland boy that she’d give him any sort of serious consideration.   This is my only complaint and it’s not a very serious one.  Overall, this is a show worth seeing, one that truly lives up to its billing as the revival against which all revivals will be measured. 

The show continues through May 4.

Who says you have to wait for the weekend to go out?

 Tonight make your way down to the Rendezvous Jewel Box Theater for Strikethrough by the fine folks from the Seattle School , this month featuring C. Davida Ingram performing “What a Body Can Do”.  Doors at 8 pm.

Tuesday is opening night of My Fair Lady at the Paramount.   If you’ve somehow gone your whole life without seeing this play (or the excellent Audrey Hepburn-starring, Marnie Nixon-singing film version), this clever musical adaptation of a George Bernard Shaw play updating the Pygmalion legend by having an arrogant professor of linguistics, Henry Higgins, boast to his pal Colonel Pickering that he can train any woman to speak so well that she can easily pass as nobility.  Challenge arrives in the form of Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle and her ne’er do well father.  This revival of the play celebrates its 50th anniversary and is well worth seeing to hear the many classic songs the musical has contributed to the showtune lexicon alone.

Tuesday night from 7 - 8:30 pm at the Central branch of the Seattle Public Library, novelist Alice Hoffman reads from her new work The Third Angel.  On Wednesday night at the North East branch, Theodore Duncan, representing the Seattle Opera Guild, presents a preview of I Puritani by Vincenzo Bellini.

Based primarily on traditional Irish music and dancing with modern and cross-cultural influences blended in to the mix, Riverdance features a five piece band playing both contemporary instruments and old Irish instruments like the Uilleann pipes and the bodhran and a full troupe of Irish dancers joined by the Moscow Folk Ballet Company, two tap dancers and a flamenco soloist. The show is very loosely arranged as a sort of artistic interpretation of Irish history from ancient times to the modern era via segments that include a five piece band, singers and dancers performing sometimes together and sometimes separately, linked together by offstage narration and onstage screened projections. While the narration was sometimes useful for providing a sort of context to the onstage action, it wasn’t strictly necessary. The show would have been equally as enjoyable and easy to watch without it. The projections, however, actually detract from the show, displaying art that is probably meant to appear primitive but seemed rather amateurish instead. It also didn’t help that the stage set was unattractive, with unappealing full-length panels that seemed to serve no other purpose than unnecessarily drawing the eye from the onstage action.. The show definitely would have been better served by a simpler set that keeps the focus where it should be, on the perfomers.

These minor irritations aside, Riverdance remains a compelling show. Irish dancing can appear simple on a superficial glance, but the intricate footwork of the dancers is astonishing, even when you’ve seen it before. Try to mimic the straight upper bodies with arms held at sides while you tap, twirl and kick and you might be surprised at just how challenging it really is. While all of the dancing is quite spectacular, I found that I enjoyed it best stripped down to its essentials. The first act’s “Thunderstorm” in which the Male Irish Dance Troupe storm over the stage with no other musical accompaniment than their own tapping feet is breathaking. Then again, any time a large group of the dancers take the stage, the sheer force of their presence is dazzling.

The dancing is the deserved primary focus of the show but music gets its chance to shine, too. The luster dims a bit for the vocal performances–I wasn’t horrified by the singing but I wasn’t impressed by it either, and wouldn’t have missed it had it been left out–but any time the band became the center of attention was a good time. Of particular note is fiddler Pat Mangan who is so clearly having a good time that if you somehow managed to dislike his excellent playing ability you’d still have to appreciate his pleasure.

Overall, Riverdance was an enjoyable show, accessible to a wide audience. You don’t have to like or know anything about Irish culture to enjoy the show but if you do want to see it–and I heartily recommend it–you’ll want to get your tickets right away–it’s only at the Paramount until February 3rd before moving on to the next stop on its farewell tour.

Back in the 1980s an American dancer named Michael Flatley got his big break when he joined a tour with Irish rock band The Chieftans. Flatley and another dancer, Jean Butler, made Riverdance’s first mark on the world at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest and then developed a full-length show which made its debut in Dublin in November 1994. Much has happened to the show since then–creative changes, cast changes, world domination–but even though its star shines a little less brightly than it did when the show at the height of its fame, Riverdance continues to draw audiences all over the world drawn to its interpretation of traditional Irish music and dance.

Riverdance has been seen by more than 21 million people over the years, became the largest Western musical to play China, and set a world record when a line of 100 Irish dancers performed at the 2004 Special Olympics in Dublin. The show is energetic, sensual, engaging and exciting, a true spectacular. Traditional Irish music and dance are presented in new and innovative ways in a grand theatrical setting. The show is great fund and definitely worth seeing. It’s also coming to a close: its run from Tuesday, January 29 through Sunday, February 3, at the Paramount Theater is part of the show’s goodbye tour of America as after all these years and all these performances, Riverdance is coming to an end so if you want to see it, get your tickets right away.

image, via The Rep

As I left The Rep last week after a showing of The Breach, I wondered if it would even be possible to write a subtle play about Hurricane Katrina.

The Breach tells three stories, all tied up together–the story of a family trapped on a roof as the waters rise, the story of an old wheelchair-bound man trying not to drown, and the story of a young reporter from New York attempting to find out the truth about what happened to the levees. At times, each of the stories manages to be effective. The grandfather and his grandson bicker and pick at each other on the roof while trying to stay on it at the same time. The old man, rescued, develops a terror of water while in the hospital and refuses to drink. And the young reporter picks and picks at the people he is attempting to interview until the resident he is harassing breaks down and screams at him.

But more frequently, things break down. The reporter’s story takes too long to go anywhere, and his frustrated arguing is much too literal a translation of the divide between the poor black locals and the white liberal media, and as such it becomes boring. And the grandfather and his grandson finally fall off the roof not because of the weight of their broken family or even during the rooftop baptism of the boy, but because he starts to confess that he is gay, which undermines the already realistically flawed family dynamic that they had spent the whole time fleshing out.

The set design is just plain nifty, with a lot of raining and swimming onstage. The transitions between the three stories are smoothly done and Water, a character in the old man’s story, shimmers around the stage with a voice that manages to echo. Still, I left the theatre feeling vaguely dissatisfied, like what I had been shown hadn’t quite lived up to what I had been promised.

Which might, in the end, have been a better comment on how Hurricane Katrina affected everything than the play itself was.

One of the all-time greatest “so bad it’s good” movies is Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, the creepy thriller starring arch-rivals Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Two local actors with an appreciation for the flick, Lisa Sanphillippo and Imogen Love, have adapted the classic Davis-Crawford film for the stage, creating “What’ve We Done to Baby Jane?”

The show runs every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night at Re-bar . Tickets are $15 in advance thru Brown Paper Tickets or $18 at the door.

Photo by atonall via [Flickr]

As I write this, we have exactly 13 days, 11 hours, 12 minutes and 43 seconds until Halloween–the most spooktacular holiday of the year! Personally, I can’t get enough of Halloween whether it’s decorating my apartment with cheesy fake spider webs, eating fun-sized candy bars by the fistfuls, researching my costume all day at work, renting all the horror movies I love or planning when and where I’m going to celebrate (with at least three days in costume).

So, countdown in anticipation with me here at Seattle Metblogs because I’ve gathered something you can eat, drink and do for the remaining 14 days leading to All Hallows’ Eve…

DAYS UNTIL HALLOWEEN:

14

DRINK:

Smashing Pumpkin Martini

2 1/2 oz of Stoli Cinammon Vodka
1/2 oz. of Bols Pumpkin Smash Liquor
1 oz. Amaretto
Toasted pumpkin seeds for garnish

Combine ingredients in a shaker with ice. Stir gently and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

EAT:

Pumpkin and Coconut Cream Soup

Finish off your pumpkin martini with a side of pumpkin soup. This vegetarian Thai dish combines pumpkin, coconut cream, lemongrass, lemons and limes for a hearty fall soup with a hint of citrus. For an added touch, ladle it into mini hollowed-out pumpkin bowls!

GO:

Murder! Mayhem! and Horror! are presented in three one-act plays called Mystery Madness: A Trilogy of Terror at Stone Soup Theatre, 8 p.m. This small theater on the border of Wallingford and Fremont claims the three twists of mystery and terror– Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, Sorry, Wrong Number and Trifles–and will “keep you on the edge of your seat.” The play opens tonight with a preview and will continue every Thursday, Friday and Saturday from now until November 10th. stonesouptheatre.com

Seattle is not quite a theater town in the way that New York City is, but we do have a host of talented local performers and theater groups and a number of excellent spaces in which to see both local and touring shows live on stage. To celebrate, Seattle Performs is celebrating Live Theater Weekby calendaring all the great events going on in the area today through the 21st.

Highlights include Twelfth Night at the Rep, To Kill a Mockingbird at the Intiman, Target Family day and Free Night of Theater. To get more information, visit the Seattle Performs website.