Results tagged “acttheatre”

HOLD ONTO YOUR DOUGH: Seems the folks at Southern Comfort finally want to make up for all of those awful hangovers with a free rock show. Deal. Tonight those sweet whiskey people present The Hold Steady at The Crocodile. Jump through a couple little hoops (register for a ticket), and you’re in.

RECOMMENDED Pretty Girls @ Seattle Center House/TPS Theatre 4. Despite its low budget and all the attendant challenges faced by small fringe theatres, Marked Women Productions have pulled off a winning show with Pretty Girls. Inspired by the work of Naomi Wolf, the company has produced an ambitious and challenging original script that comes to life onstage on the strength of the company's innovating approach to staging. It features several strong performances, as well, particularly Opal Peachey and local teenage up-and-comer Megan Schutzer. (Fri., Sun. & Mon., 8 p.m. Seattle Center House, Fourth Floor; tix $8-$10.)

'CAUSE HATE IS JUST UGLY: The California Supreme Court announced last Friday that they would be handing down their decision today on the constitutionality of the infamous Prop 8. The court upheld the same-sex marriage ban, but allowed the existing 18,000 unions to stand. Since the news is mixed, it's fitting that there's a rally and/or protest taking place at Westlake Center Park tonight. Get out and show your support either way.

We have to start here by jumping in and saying that this is easily one of the most exciting weekends of theatre we've seen in town in months--two festivals running, genre-breaking opera, ballet crossing over into Broadway show tune territory, two shows that have had their runs extended (, you've lost your bloody mind. It doesn't get better than this!

Seattlest is a Patsy Cline fan. The woman had range. And not just that, but husk. No matter what note she was unleashing, she never dropped the soul of the song for a second. Sure, if you watch video of her singing through "Walkin' After Midnight," you may see a smile on her face for the camera. But there's something behind that, something in her eyes and the tone of her voice as she delivers lines like "I'm always walking after midnight searching for you." You can hear the lonely despite the smile. Singing like that is harder than smiling through the pain. We can't explain why, it just is. But Patsy could do it, and she made it look effortless. It was her appeal, was what made her such an icon in her so-short-it-was-almost-non-existent career (she was killed in a plane crash at 30 years old).

   

OPENINGS: Athol Fugard's at Stone Soup (Fri. & Sat. 7:30 p.m., tix $15/$10) is a rock n' roll adaptation of a classic.

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First, the idea is totally insane and gave us anxiety just thinking about it. Fourteen plays, written, directed and performed in front of a live audience in 48 hours. If you're an actor, writer, performer, or have ever been on a stage, you'd certainly understand. Deep breaths. What is certainly a weekend of chaos for all parties involved in the production of the world's quickest theater festival however, composed itself into a relatively well oiled machine come the 8 p.m. curtain.

Everyone knew it was going to be harsh. For weeks, arts orgs around Seattle have been struggling with the fallout of the recession and its impact on their projected budgets for 2009. Now hard figures are coming out, and they're not pretty. Over on the Slog, Brendan Kiley has a report on the budget cuts at some of Seattle's largest theatres. ACT Theatre, following the wildly successful run of their annual Christmas show, , is in better shape than some others: It only had to chop 20% out of its budget. The Rep, by contrast, may be looking at up to a 40% cut to make ends meet, though there's no hard numbers yet. No information was available from the Intiman.

ACT kicked off their annual production of playing up at Annex Theatre.

At lunch we were down the block from ACT theatre, and kept hearing this youthful cheering. We didn't remember a stadium being built at 7th and Union, so we walked up the street to see where it was coming from. A few hundred school kids were standing on the sidewalk outside ACT, making "honk your horn" gestures at trucks--and cars and any other horned conveyance--passing by. Whenever someone tootled at them in return, a roar went up from the kids. They were still at it as we headed in to lunch. We wonder if they were heading to something at ACT, and, if so, if the performers realized they had to out-do the thrill of people willing to honk for kids on a sidewalk.

. Rice's script is a near-forgotten masterpiece of early-20th century American theatre: a long (at seven acts), brutal play exploring racism, anomie, and alienation in the character of Mr. Zero, a dull accountant who, after years of dedication to a soul-crushing job, finds himself about to be downsized, replaced by an adding machine, and responds in a murderous rage.

, in the second week of its run at ACT Theatre (tickets $10-$55; through Nov. 16) may be a winning, even heart-warming, comedy, but it feels about a year too late. The story of a middle-aged, middle-class wife who's bored with her marriage to an easy-going husband and paranoid about her economic future, only to find herself swept up into a dazzling affair with a comfortable rich man feels like a cautionary tale of late 2006.

We were really looking forward to seeing Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice (at ACT through October 5, tickets $10-$55). Ruhl's a Pulitzer prize finalist and a MacArthur "genius" grant winner, and we've long been fascinated by the Greek tale of not counting your dead chicks before they're hatched. Maybe we'd love it; maybe we'd hate it. We didn't expect boredom. But that's what we got.

, right?

There's something amazing on stage this month at ACT Theatre that everyone should see: black people, on the stage, in a play, that a tepid exploration of race in America. It's a holy frickin' miracle!

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Since the first previews of .

Seeing it is oddly like watching a engrossing foreign movie--and not just because of the supratitles above the stage. A score by Aziza Sadykova, voice-over narration, and live sound effects (echoes heighten outcries) add to the immersion you get from high production value. And though the story about a boy growing up gay in a sexually repressive society isn't all that unfamiliar a scenario, the familial haggling over bride-price and discussions of the finer points of Sharia law are.

Monday the 10th, at 7pm, the Paramount Theatre presents Charlie Chaplin's 51st, 52nd, and 53rd films, all from 1916: The Floorwalker, The Fireman, and The Vagabond. They're all half-hour or so shorts from early on in his Mutual Films era, and feature Chaplin's genius for environmental comedy, with mishaps with escalators and fire poles.

CALL 911! CALL 911!: Political and economic commentator and White House strategist during the Nixon administration, Kevin Phillips talks about his book, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. Phillips traces the set of related causes that caused the downfall of historical world powers. That same combination of ills he says -- global over-reach, militant religion, resource problems, and ballooning debt -- is at work in the U.S. today.

This year, Moisture Festival, everyone's favorite local showcase of variety performers and circus freaks, is growing up. This Friday and Saturday, Moisture Fest is hosting four very special "late night" burlesque shows at ACT Theatre. The shows (at 7:30 and 10:30) feature clowns, can-can dancers, vaudeville and, of course, burlesque.

Act Theatre's latest offering, Miss Witherspoon by Christopher Durang, is the perfect balance to their previous effort, The Pillowman. Both plays feature crucifixion talk and an impending sense of doom, but Witherspoon contains an unlikely amount of hope to counterbalance Pillowman's bleak outlook.

This week's weather was beautiful, enough to justify Seattlest's first bbq of the year. But it's going to be a wet weekend, according to KOMO-TV's Scott Sistek. How will Seattlest keep dry? Read on...

ACT Theatre certainly knows how to get a rise out of us. First came the ominous news in January of 2003 that they needed a million dollars or they were going to close their doors for good. Now they're flat out just trying to freak us out with their current staging of The Woman in Black. The folks at ACT are playing it a little safe, given that this adaptation of Susan Hill's book of the same name has been keeping people looking over their shoulders in London for years.