Lisa Confehr and Kaitie Warren are the co-directors of Balagan Theatre's Romeo & Juliet, and they deserve co-praise for the hectic, breathless pace of this 16-actor-strong production. (Now through March 22nd, Thurs-Sat 8pm, Sun 2pm. Tickets: $15 advance, $20 at the door.) We don't need to recap the story of Romeo and Juliet, right? The direction of the Capulet party and the fight scenes is superb, edge-of-your-seat stuff, and we're not just saying that......

We've been meaning to catch these guys for a while. (Full disclosure: we took a yoga class with one of them once.) Judging from the cuts on their MySpace page, their music is a weird combination of Vaudeville, Love Boat, and Portishead, with lyrics about balls and whatnot. Tonight, they'll be doing a tribute of sorts to Lawrence Welk, with some burlesque performers. Their MySpace quote is "Serving Camel Toes since 1977." We really......

Tuesday night University of Washington biology professor Roger del Moral spoke at an uncrowded Town Hall about his findings in natural disaster-ology, covered in his new book (with co-author Lawrence Walker), Environmental Disasters, Natural Recovery and Human Responses. (On the plus side, we got in two questions during the Q&A, a first for us.) This will no doubt turn out to be the easiest Science Lecture to get a seat at: next week brings Harvard......

This Tuesday, at 7:30pm, UW professor Roger del Moral visits Town Hall to discuss his findings in natural disasterology. Tickets are $5 at the door, and if we know Seattle, people will gladly pay that much for an evening of science and, hopefully, slides of volcano eruptions or or hurricanes or whatnot. The thesis of his talk, as we understand it, is that thanks to the ever-greater numbers of people around, natural disasters kill more......

Seattlest had high hopes for Dayton Contemporary Dance Company's interpretation of Jacob Lawrence's paintings, presented last night as a part of the UW World Series. Our expectations were met halfway.The evening was bookended beautifully, beginning with an iconic, stunning piece by local choreographer Donald Byrd and concluding with an energetic, celebratory hip-hop/modern dance mashup by Rennie Harris. You absolutely should go if only to see those two, both of which left us inspired and reinvigorated......

If you missed Reggie Wilson's group at On the Boards a few weeks ago, you have the chance to not only make up for it, but to add three other stellar choreographers and one of Seattlest's favorite dance companies to the bill. Opening this evening at Meany Hall as a part of UW's World Series, the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company performs the Seattle premiere of colôr-ógrăphy, n. the dances of Jacob Lawrence. There have been......

Kids have been getting shafted by disputes between their parents since the first caveman hired an attorney to protect his rock collection after breaking it off with the cavewoman. Or at least since the 70s--same difference. But there's a kid down in Oly who's about to suffer above and beyond what most casualties of divorce go through. His father has converted to Judaism (we're picturing Goodman in The Big Lebowski) and wants his son to......

It's like a painting, see? From far away, it's OK, but up close, it's a big old mess. That's kind of what Lawrence Cheek says in the PI today, where he dares to say what a lot of Seattleites are thinking: our new central library building isn't all that. This library, incredibly, is an uncomfortable place to read. The third-level "Living Room," which has the feel of a vast indoor park, is not conducive to......

It’s been over a week since the Viaduct vote, and we’ll admit it, we have no idea what the new plan is. There was some sort of announcement right after the vote that the state will spend some $950 million to spruce it up over the next few years. So, is that it? After years and years of debate, plans, and drawings of ethnically diverse group of people enjoying a better waterfront, was the solution......

A good rule of thumb for playing trivia: When in doubt, go with your first answer. It saves arguing and cuts right through potentially endless cycles of self-doubt. Unfortunately, Tuesday night at the Hopvine, that rule of thumb failed us. Twice. And left our team, I Am Anna Nicole's Babydaddy, in second place. "What philosopher is associated with deconstructionism?" Our gut answered quickly: Baudrillard. Wait a second, said our brain, I think it's Derrida. Our......

It's the end of an era. Check out the standings list below and you'll see "Hüsker Don't," as you might expect -- but you'll see them in third place. Ever-renamed team State of the Onion played Nancy Zerg to HD's Ken Jennings, as did comeback kids Thaiku Hookers, who took second place. Of course, Tiger Woods doesn't win every golf tournament; just because Hüsker Don't is mortal doesn't mean they're pushovers. It was a raucous......

Another in a string of online sex stings recently caught ex King County Prosecutor's Office employee Lawrence Corrigan trying to meet up with a 13-year-old for sex. You asshole, Lawrence. Undercover detectives targeted Lawrence after learning that he was communicating with young girls online. A detective contacted him and Lawrence emailed a bunch of porn and set up a meeting outside of a Capitol Hill video store and when he showed for that meeting he......

Town Hall kicked off its Science Lecture Series last night with a talk by particle physicist Lawrence Krauss on Einstein's "biggest blunder." Krauss is famous (in some circles) for three things, which we'll list in descending order of fame: 1) for being the Star Trek physics guy (he's in town for the Trek-inanigans at the Sci-Fi Museum this weekend), 2) for allegedly calling string theory a "colossal failure," and 3) for his work on......

If you laughed milk through your nose at Lawrence and Gerald, then you owe choreographer Busby Berkeley a great big thank-you. Synchronized swimming was nowheresville until he turned his birds-eye-view camera on the glamor of dancing in and around pools. There's probably no better way to express your gratitude than by attending Chris Jeffries' Kaleidoscope Eyes: Songs for Busby Berkeley. That's at the Northwest Film Forum, July 20-23, 27-30, at 8pm. Tickets are $15......

We love this town. But we'd love it ever-so-much more if it had these things in it. (Budding entrepreneurs, take note.) 1) Soft-serve frozen custard, preferably attached to a good burger joint and with rotating flavors of the day. We've mentioned this before. 2) Thunderstorms. There's nothing like being able to see lightning strikes when you're a mile away. 3) Street food! Carts pushed by immigrants offering a variety of culinary delights. We long......

Protector of all things free in the Interwebs, Pied Piper of copyright freedom, Underdog of the digital era--Lawrence Lessig has a new love, and it is...Microsoft? Lessig recently wrote a short post for Wired, in which he lauds the new Borg technology in Vista called InfoCard. His assessment is that InfoCard gives you much more control over what information you share, and with whom. Lessig makes it sound like a custom personal profile, which you......

Oh performance art, you're so absurd. Seattlest got a taste of that absurdity first hand at last night's opening of Computer by Seattle-based collective High Kindergarten Performance Group. We weren't quite sure what to expect going into the show---we had read that it would involve an office workday and Lawrence Welk---but we didn't realize that 90 minutes later, there would be stuff everywhere: fake blood, shaving cream, Mountain Dew, and a lotta candy. Nor did......

Collective highlights from Seattlest's year in reading: James: Legs McNeil's The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Industry demonstrated yet again that reading about porn is far more interesting than actually watching it. Cintra Wilson, in Colors Insulting to Nature, balances savage and hilarious mockery of her main character with deep sympathy, without forcing either element. Wilson saves her true venom for celebrity and its acolytes. I finished this early last January,......

Once upon a 1998 the Real World was filmed in Seattle and the cast lived on one of the piers down by Myrtle Edwards. They were probably going for a houseboat feel but couldn't find or build anything large enough to contain the cast along with the cameras and equipment it takes to make the World Real. It probably worked in favor of the show because whenever you're trying to brainwash someone it's best to......

Three Washington natives were picked in the first round of yesterday's NBA draft, an all-time record. So the Seattle Times asked the question: when did Seattle get to be such a hotbed of basketball talent? More summer camps, the emergence of Gonzaga's basketball program, and a growing population are writer Bob Condotta's reasons, but he misses the obvious one: the diminshing percentage of Scandinavians in the state. Scandinavians can't play basketball. We know, we......

If you are at all interested in digital music, ownership of content and copyrights, then you should check out this presentation by famed digital legal scholar, Lawrence Lessig and Jeff Tweedy of Wilco given at the New York Public Library. They discuss the rights and ownership of music in an age where more music than can be listened to in a lifetime can be acquired for no cost in a matter of seconds. If you......

If you’re a radio fan who craves the offbeat and simply weird, there’s no better place to tune in on a Friday night than KBCS, 91.3 FM. From 11 pm until 1 am, the esteemed Reverend Bubba Levi Greenacres spins a strange audio web from a techno remix of Lawrence Welk to the Muppets to Shooby Taylor to Leonard Nimoy to Shonen Knife to the Latin Hebrew Hip-Hop of the Hip Hop Hoodios. The......