Results tagged “chrisbennion”

It's not often that we can tell just from glancing at the stage that we'll like a play, but with the Seattle Rep's The Imaginary Invalid, we felt like great things were in store the moment we caught sight of the silly, sumptuous velvet hatbox of a set. (Runs through March 22; tickets $15-$59, $10 for 25-and-under.)

If you go, go for Suzanne Bouchard's outstanding performance as a feral alcoholic widow. You won't see better acting in Seattle. (Also, thanks to design team Michael Ganio, Frances Kenny, York Kennedy, and Christopher Walker, the sights and sounds of a Texas summer day have never seemed so real to us.)

Four Dickens Carolers are singing in lovely harmony. Children toddle by, then look back at the carolers, their eyes wide with wonder. Garland and lights are everywhere.

A friend of ours -- and Into the Woods connoisseur -- says this is the best of the non-Broadway productions he's seen. We had never seen it before -- we like musicals fine, but for some reason we associate liking Sondheim with, you know, the fun of terrible key parties like in The Ice Storm -- and had only the faintest notion about its fractured fairytale plot: there's a Baker and his Wife who want to have kids but have been cursed by the Witch next door, Jack and mom and his magic beans, a more indecisive Cinderella than you'd expect, and a shiv-wielding Little Red Riding Hood. Having kids can be the moment you finally let go of your toys and stop looking upward for advice -- in a story like this, that means dad and mom have gotta go. In the first act, dads get left behind like nobody's business, in the second act, moms get clubbed to death.

Seattle Rep's The Murderers is three monologues, one after the other, that thankfully get more entertaining as the show goes along. Each monologue deals with a murder (or murders) committed at the Florida retirement community, and sends up a different view of senior citizens -- as old moneybags who keep their heirs on tenterhooks, as randy old goats, as cash cows for the unscrupulous. It's a mildly dark series of "I-dun-its" for Matlock's urban audiences and their graying kids. Any younger, and you're there just for Sarah Rudinoff, which is right and good.

It's not often that a play comes along that unites both senior citizens and the people who want to kill them. If your parents are elderly, this may strike you as "fair and balanced" theatre.

As if Bart Sher weren't enough artistic ordnance, Intiman is also packing Craig Lucas in its Associate Artistic Director holster. (That's Craig Lucas, author of the book for The Light in the Piazza, author of the plays Prelude to a Kiss, The Dying Gaul, and The Singing Forest, and author of the screenplays for Longtime Companion and The Secret Lives of Dentists.)

If kaboom-style fireworks aren't the bang you're looking for, stop in at ACT for the theatrical fireworks of David Hare's Stuff Happens, reviewed here. It's the play about Iraq and the rockets' red glare, the difference between the spark of liberty and the blinding torch of neocon ideology. (The title refers to Donald Rumsfeld's disingenuous retort to questions about U.S. forces' disregard of post-"liberation" lawlessness.) By all accounts, it's a thought-provoking (almost 3-hour) imagining of what it was like being "in the room" as the decisions were being made, and confronts us with the outcome of those decisions, ready or not.

You've heard this: Pizza is like sex: even when it's bad, it's still pretty good. Same with West Side Story. When the music's by Bernstein and the story's by Shakespeare, you could cast Tone Loc and Rhea Perlman in the leads and still have something great.

Tues - Sun, through June 10, Tickets $10-$54 ($10 students, 25-and-under)

Writing on The New Republic Online in November, 2006, James Kirchick snarkily commented, "Of all the subjects for a 90-minute, one-woman show, Rachel Corrie ought to have been at the bottom of the list." Rachel Corrie was an Olympia native and Evergreen State College student who, in March 2003, while working with the International Solidarity Movement, was killed by an Israeli bulldozer destroying Palestinian homes. And frankly, before seeing Seattle Rep's production of My Name is Rachel Corrie, we tended to agree with Kirchick, albeit for completely different reasons.

Blue Door is part confessional crisis, part historical saga -- or part Philip Roth's The Human Stain and part Alex Haley's Roots. It's showing in the smaller Leo K Theatre at the Rep, which features continental seating (no center aisle) and jumpy Rep subscribers. We sat down 10 minutes early and stood up 8 times to let people in and out. Holy crap. Don't let anyone tell you older people are all ruled by the pull of gravity.

It's a sad thing, but even narcissists die. They don't like to admit it, but they do. When other people die on them, it's almost worse, losing their attention.

No matter what Dane Cook's myspace page says, the Reverend Dr. Samuel McKinney, narrator of the gospel musical Black Nativity, is the only person you'll see on a Seattle stage this month who went to school with Martin Luther King, Jr. Our favorite part of this consistently entertaining show was watching 80-year-old McKinney--who also once met Langston Hughes, its author--tap his toes, silently sing along, and break into a smile during the solos by the Total Experience Gospel Choir.