It’s 1922 and two British housewives, members of the same ladies’ club, read an ad for Italian villas for rent and, lured by the promise of sun and sea, decide to escape grey London for a while. To save money, they recruit two more women, a dowager and a young socialite.

The four women set out on a vacation that’s meant to be a break from their ordinary lives but once they arrive they find themselves on a journey that will transform them.

Enchanted April opens September 25 at Taproot Theater and runs through October 24, playing Wednesdays and Thursdays at 7:30, Fridays at 8:00 and Saturdays at 2:00 and 8:00.

Artist’s rendition of the Lemieux Library after completion, courtesy Seattle University

On Thursday morning, Seattle University president Stephen Sundborg, SJ, announced the close of SU’s six-year long capital campaign. Over 21,000 donors exceeded the original goal of $150 million, giving the 110 year old academic institution the necessary funds to offer new scholarships to students, academic programs and professorships, a fitness complex, an arts center and more, including the $56 million Lemieux Library and McGoldrick Learning Commons which are scheduled for completion next fall.

The successful campaign was focused on four main areas: scholarships, academic enhancements, facilities, and initiatives centered on the Jesuit university’s Catholic identity. More than 7,500 students are enrolled in Seattle’s largest private university which has eight schools offering graduate and undergraduate programs and was ranked as one of the top ten universities in the West by US News and World Report. (They also have some excellent sports teams.) Of the funds raised, $43 million are allocated to student scholarships and $44 million for academic programs and initiatives.

Since I’m a neighbor of SU, I can always take a short walk down the street to check out the progress on campus, but anyone curious to see how construction is going can check out their Library building webcam, which includes a link to construction bulletins for all the projects on campus. If you’ve never actually visited the university, however, I highly recommend it. It’s a beautiful campus with a lot of interesting architecture and landscape design, and the university hosts many events open to the public from sports to shows like Bloody Henry, a puppet show celebrating the 500th anniversary of “mass-murdering monarch” Henry VIII of England that plays weekends from September 25 through October 24.

It’s been a while since you’ve been on an art walk, hasn’t it, maybe even one whole week or even longer? And now you find yourself thinking, “Wow, I should totally go on an art walk.”

Really, you should.

Tonight you can head up Capitol Hill for Blitz, an artwalk encompassing art of all types in galleries, coffee shops, private studios, street corners, and retail shops. There’s a ton of work to be seen, but you might especially want to keep your eye out for “Glitterporn” at Grey Gallery, a “tongue-in-cheek exploration of censorship, sex, and pornography” and “Whimsy Home Decor”, a mixed media work combining multi-level paintings and three-dimensional murals.

Friday night there’s the Art Up Greenwood Phinney Art Walk which features photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, books, spoken word, performance art, theater and food and drink specials from neighborhood merchants, not to mention the always-charming “living art” of the cats and kittens available for adoption at PAWS Cat City. While you’re there, you should definitely stop in to Taproot Theatre to view Sam Vance’s water lily series, studying the effects of light upon water. As a bonus for stopping in during the art walk, you’ll also get to observe Vance as he sketches a portrait of fellow artist Nikki Visel, a sketch which will then be used on-stage during Taproot’s upcoming presentation of Enchanted April.

In a case of history repeating itself,just as L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was adapted for the stage in a musical that became the toast of Broadway a couple years later, Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked, an imagined history of the land of Oz and its characters inspired by the original, was transformed into a hit Broadway musical a couple years later. Wicked tells the story of what happened in Oz from the time a strangely green-skinned girl is born, the friendship she forms with a beautiful and ambitious young woman she meets and school and the separate paths that lead them to their ultimate destinies. It begins a month long run at the The Paramount on Wednesday, September 2. Tickets have been on sale for a while but there are still seats to be found – The Paramount is offering a nightly lottery for $25 orchestra seats. Present yourself at the box office two and a half hours prior to show time to have your name placed in lottery drum; a half hour later names will be drawn for the opportunity to buy up to two orchestra seats for $25 each, cash only.

Photo by Joan Marcus

I recently spoke with Donna Vivino, starring in the role of Elphaba, the character who becomes by story’s end the famous Wicked Witch of the West about the show. Vivino, who has been a working stage actor since she was just eight years old, says she wanted to play the role of Elphaba as soon as she saw the show for the first time herself, back when it first opened on Broadway and she found herself taken with the role. This November will mark her second anniversary of playing Elphaba so it’s obvious that she’s been enjoying it.

One of the reasons she enjoys working on Wicked so much is that it has a devoted and enthusiastic fan following–”People love the show; it’s got a great following,” she says–but you needn’t already be a fan of the show to enjoy it and you definitely don’t need to have read the novel. Vivino hadn’t read the novel herself the first time she saw Wicked on stage and thinks that it might even be advantageous to see it without already knowing the story so you can go in with fresh expectations. “A lot of people don’t know anything about the show” when they go see it, she says, and still leave happy.

2:00 PM – Donald Margulies: Dinner with Friends
Elliott Bay Book Co.
The Tenth Annual Staged Play Reading Series presents– in conjunction with ReAct Theatre and sponsored by the Mayors Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs– the modern American Pulitzer Prize-winning dramedy, Dinner with Friends.
[LINK]

Tuesday night at Northwest Film Forum join filmmaker Bill Brown and media artist Sabine Gruffat for an evening of video performances, spoken word, scratchy records, and 35 mm slides with their project Time Machine

Gruffat directs you through Real Time Rendering, Quartz and Max patches through digital and analog hyperspace. Brown gives you a guided tour of memory’s roadside attractions from both the past and the future.

The trip begins 8 pm Tuesday, August 18th.

Smoke on the Mountain Homecoming cast, photo by Erik Stuhaug

Taproot Theater, which recently put on a lively and entertaining version of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days goes back in time yet again this Friday, July 10, for the regional premiere of Smoke on the Mountain Homecoming.

In a musical conceived by Alan Bailey, written by Connie Ray, directed by Scott Notle and with musical arrangements by Mike Craver, it is 1945, just after the end of WWII, and the Sanders family are ready to welcome Dennis Sanders as the new pastor of Mount Pleasant Baptist with bluegrass, folk and gospel songs. The third and final of musical about the Sanders family, Smoke on the Mountain Homecoming. This final episode of a series that’s now into its second decade of popularity promises lots of fun, lots of laughs, and lots of great old-time toe-tapping and soul-stirring traditional American roots music.

The musical runs through August 8; if you’re chomping at the bit to see it, you can attend the preview performances on Wednesday, July 8 and Thursday, July 9. For tickets and details, see the Taproot Theater home page.
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In other Taproot news, the theater recently announced their winter holiday production: the world premiere of John Longenbaugh’s Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Christmas Carol, running from Thanksgiving through Christmas. Those of you who like to make your holiday plans well in advance (and I know you’re out there) will be able to buy tickets in October. Mark your calendars now.

The eighth longest-running show in Broadway history, Rent has had a devoted following ever since it was first workshopped in New York back in the mid-90s. The final show at the Nederlander Theater on September 7, 2008, was the 5,124th performance, not counting its 16 previews and all the tours across the country and around the world.

Some of those devoted fans were in attendance Tuesday night at the The Paramount for opening night of its six-day stop in Seattle as part of the Broadway Across American tour. An enthusiastic crowd greeted the return of Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp to the lead roles they originated on Broadway and cheered after every number. Much of the excitement focused on Lexi Lawson and Justin Johnston, who played Mimi Marquez and Angel Schunard, two vital characters in this complex musical drama about the interconnected lives of a group of artists, intellectuals, entertainers and entrepeneurs finding love and themselves while living “la vie Boheme” in a worn NYC neighborhood teetering on the edge of gentrification.

Rent continues at the Paramount through Sunday, June 21 with 7:30 pm performances Wednesday and Thursday, 8:00 pm on Friday, a 2:00 pm Saturday matinee, an 8:00 pm Saturday evening performance, and a Sunday matinee at 1:00 pm before the final show 6:30 pm Sunday. In keeping with a tradition that started when the musical first moved to Broadway, seats in the front two rows of the orchestra will be available for $20 for every show. These tickets go on sale at the box office on the day of performance only, two hours before the show, cash only. All other seats can be purchased through the usual outlets; all seats will go fast.

James Moore built the Moore Theater back in 1907, giving the building a simple exterior so he could lavish attention on the ornate interior. The Moore’s lobby was built with mosiac floors, an elaborate ceiling fresco and carved wood, stained glass, marble, onyx and metal. One of the key components of the decorating theme was the carved representation of the Muses designed by architect E.W. Houghton.

If you’ve been to the Moore, you’ve seen the Muses, but did you ever notice that one of them is missing? Greek mythology says their are nine but the Moore only has eight. Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, was omitted from the theater since her area of influence has nothing to do with theater. You’d think they’d have included her for the (admittedly weak) pun of having “stars” appear on stage, but no matter: at long last, the muse is back with her sisters, at least for one night.

Urania Returns is a performance piece by the Seattle School that reunites Urania with her sisters in the Moore lobby. She will work out “elaborate equations using stars, architecture, and portraiture of attending audience members to satisfy calculations that none of us will understand, but all of us will eventually live through.” Per Seattle School, Urania’s a tricky sort of muse so her eight sisters (the muse of comedy and idyllic poetry, the muse of tragedy, the muse of written history, the muse of lyric poetry, the muse of music and dancing, the muse of erotic poetry, the muse of epic poetry and rhetoric, and the muse of sacred hymns and harmony) have been enlisted to help keep her in line.

Urania Returns happens from 6pm to 10pm on Saturday, June 20, and is part of the Free Sheep Foundation and Seattle Theater Group celebration of the Moore, Moore Inside Out. More than thirty artists and groups will be presenting installations and performances throughout the theater to celebrate and reinterpret the theater’s long history.

The NW New Works Festival begins this Friday, June 5 and runs through all of this weekend and the next. Tne NW New Works Festival is an annual festival of world premiere works by Northwest-based artists and ensembles.

Performances vary so much that there’s some thing to appeal to just about any taste. Works this year include an operatic solo performance that relates the story of a restaurant delivery man stuck in an elevator, a dance performance in which the two dancers demonstrate the vulnerability of sharing a home, and a video and audio presentation explores the intersections of sexuality, conflict, and attraction.

As an added bonus, showcases are reasonably priced, offering you a better and better value the more of them you attend. It’s still worth it to attend only one, too. For details and tickets, visit the On the Boards website.