It's the most extravagant of all operas. In fact, the spectacle of Aida (that triumphal march! those elephants!) often outshines the music and singing. Not this time. Seattle Opera's current production of Verdi's masterpiece is a finely integrated staging and immensely satisfying night of theater. All three leads sing with impressive musical power. Soprano Lisa Daltirus, who won plaudits here as Tosca earlier this year, returns as the doomed Aida. Tenor Antonello Palombi, who......

Before last night's screening of SIFF's opening film Battle in Seattle, amidst all the self-congratulatory speeches, Mayor Nickels remarked that the 1999 WTO riots are "strongly rooted in the fabric of our city" and that every Seattleite would be well-served to have their feelings of the events "validated by an outside perspective." We'd be apt to agree---if only the outside perspective that followed wasn't such ham-handed dreck. Battle in Seattle isn't as bad as......

If we learned anything at Pacific Northwest Ballet's Laugh Out Loud Spring Festival last night, it was that pointing your fingers while dancing en pointe is hee-larious. Ba-dum-ching. We'll be here all week. The fest, another genre-busting divergence from the norm by director Peter Boal, aims to celebrate all that is wacky and funny about ballet. They mean funny "ha-ha" but there's some funny "strange" thrown in as well. We caught Program A (there's a......

DANCE: George Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream, in a Francia Russell staging, opens tonight at the Pacific Northwest Ballet. Scenery and costumes are by the irrepressible Martin Pakledinaz, evoking a primeval Pacific Northwest. With Shakespeare's play as the basis, Balanchine turned to Felix Mendelssohn's music to dream on the childhood relationship to nature, and the nature of relationships. Here's the video preview. (Photo: Carrie Imler and Timothy Lynch; © Angela Sterling) 8 p.m. //......

ART: We hear Goldmine Shithouse is visiting the Grey Gallery, but you wouldn't know it from either of their sites. The GMSH calendar ends in February, while the Grey Gallery still invites you to their January grand opening. Thank god they have booze to draw you in anyway. Now, about the scruffy guests they're expecting. Goldmine Shithouse is an artist cooperative: They focus primarily on painting, drawing and collage, and have extended into the......

Theatre: We often short West Seattle because...well, we forget why, just like we forget they're over there, doing whatever they do in West Seattle. At the moment, though, they're doing Rebecca Gilman's The Sweetest Swing in Baseball and it's made critic Joe Adcock a believer:As a play crafter, Gilman is a wonder. Every scene, every character -- every speech, practically -- contains a surprise. The surprises build to neatly engineered climaxes and conclusions. But......

None of this stuff about "timeless" settings for Tosca: the story takes place in Rome over a specific, eventful weekend in June, 1800, as Napoleon's troops are invading Piedmont on Italy's northern border. The story, on the other hand, is a potboiler involving a beautiful opera singer, Tosca; a fugitive politician, Angelotti; a famous painter, Cavaradossi; and a villainous police chief, Scarpia. By the end of the opera, the genuine Napoleon has won, and all......

Tonight's show deserves special attention because Reign of Terror is, to our knowledge, the only noir film set during the French revolution. NoirFan62 says: The great Anthony Mann takes a film that would probably play mostly as a colorful, sweeping, epic piece dealing with the French revolution and turns it, with the help of cinematographer John Alton, into a dark, shadowy and claustrophobic film noir/adventure/spy/suspense tale period piece featuring excellent performances from a cast that......

Tonight, Noir City, a seven-day festival of classic film noir, starts at SIFF. The shows are being introduced by "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller. Schedule The Prowler & Gun Crazy, Friday, Feb 15, 7pm [get tix] High Sierra & The Hard Way, Saturday, Feb 16, 1pm, 7pm [get tix] Moonrise & Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Sunday, Feb 17, 1pm, 7pm [get tix] Woman in Hiding & Jeopardy, Monday, Feb 18, 1pm, 6pm [get tix]......

Today SIFF hosts the Seattle opening of the documentary The Rape of Europa, about the efforts to save art stolen and/or desecrated by the Nazis in the runup to and during WWII. The Stranger loves it. The Seattle Times loves it. By all accounts, Seattlest shouldn't be as excited by this movie as we are, but we find something poetic about the preservation of culture in the face of war. For now we'll leave you......

We can guarantee that when you think of French New Wave cinema, a sultry feeling of cool washes over you. Suddenly, even if you can't name one French New Wave film, you're driven to wander forlornly down moodily lit city streets wondering where your lover has gone while an ultra-cool soundtrack plays in the background and your lover is trapped, desperately trying to reach you. All of that is thanks to Louis Malle's Elevator to......

Ah, those crazy Frenchies, at it again. This time, they're going to pull off a robbery. The gang that couldn't shoot straight, but with accents, The Band of Outsiders. The cute gal is Anna Karina, her boyfriends are Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey, and the director is the embodiment of French cinema's nouvelle vague, Jean-Luc Godard. Ah, callow youth! Squandering your time in darkened cinemas, what good will ever come of it? Invest that time......

Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Jules Dassin, Federico Fellini -- thanks to distributor Rialto Pictures, their restored films are popping up in theaters around the country, and, happily, here in Seattle. SIFF's classic film series, starting today and running through February 7, commemorates Rialto's 10th year in the movie business. Funny that a classic film company would be just ten years old, but life has a seemingly limitless supply of surprises, doesn't it? Tonight......

Picture a small town in the south (southern Italy in the 1950s, as it happens) where people talk slow and not much happens until the sun goes down and the church bells ring. (Think Faulkner, Song of the South, Porgy and Bess.) Then a travelling circus comes to town, a whole troupe of clowns (those irrespressible pagliacci), squeezed into a real clown car, a tiny black Fiat 500. You can guess what happens next: sex,......

When we're not blogging about food, wine and opera, Seattlest works as the sommelier at Sorrentino atop Queen Anne. (Keeps us out of the bars, don't you know.) So last night, who comes in but a devoted Seattle Opera volunteer shepherding soprano Nuccia Focile and tenor Antonello Palombi (with wife & adorable kids). Since they weren't drinking anything alcoholic other than a glass of Prosecco, we didn't spend much time at their table. Took a......

Time magazine claims, "You can't swing a dead cat this time of year without hitting a Top 10 List." Never one to waste a perfectly good dead cat, we decided to take a swing and create a Top Random-Number Shows Seattlest Saw This Year. And now, without any further ado, here's how your favorite bloggers broke down the year: According to Dante, everything else pared in comparison to Daft Punk at WaMu Theater 7/29/07. OMFG!!!!!!!!!!!!!......

This morning we were glancing through the Going Out section of the Seattle P-I when we ran across these two questionable entries:"War and Peace": 1 p.m. Sergei Bondarchuk's adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's novel (part one screens today) is widely considered to be one of Russia's greatest achievements. Right up there with Ivan Drago and those wooden dolls that open up to reveal a bunch of smaller wooden dolls. SIFF Cinema, Nesholm Family Lecture Hall, McCaw......

The 1968 film version War and Peace, directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, with the participation of over 100,000 Red Army soldiers, is in a class by itself, not least because it runs 411 minutes and is being presented in Russian with subtitles. We're not sure how to recommend a 7-hour movie, except to agree with Roger Ebert that it does "take the enormous bulk of Leo Tolstoy's novel and somehow transform it into this great......

Until the day after Thanksgiving, Seattlest hadn't seen The Nutcracker -- probably the world's most famous ballet -- in years. But we had a solid image in our head of what it looked like because when Seattlest was a little kid, our mom made an annual birthday tradition to see it every year on opening night. For much of our childhood, this meant getting all spiffed up and walking a few blocks to Lincoln......

One of the great things about Seattle Opera's Young Artists fall show is that while it's staged and costumed, that's about all you get. The set is "suggested," the lighting minimal, the props bare essentials. So what's on display are the singers' voices and any dramatic talent -- plus, CHAC, compared to McCaw Hall, feels pretty much like your living room. But we don't have to tell you how cool that can be; both Friday......

It's not that development in itself sucks; it's that our county and city government doesn't believe in development for art's sake, despite all those studies about the half billion the arts return to the community. When we look around, we don't see a lot of public investment in the single most expensive thing that artists and smaller arts organizations have to face: a place to work, rehearse, show, perform. We did see this notice that......

Bumbershoot 2005 hosted the inaugural People Talking and Singing show, where 2,800 festival attendees packed McCaw Hall to see Dave Eggers, Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket), Mike Doughty, Sarah Vowell, and Death Cab for Cutie, all the while raising $18K for 826 Seattle, the youth writing center in Greenwood. Last year's event, also at Bumbershoot, was hosted by Daily Show Resident Expert™ John Hodgman and singer Jonathan Coulton. Eggers, Handler, Gibbard, and Vowell were back......

Gluck's operatic masterpiece, the much-neglected Iphigenia In Tauris, premiered this weekend at Seattle Opera. Inexplicably, it's only been staged once at the New York Met, and that was some 90 years ago. In Seattle, never. But it's suddenly hot: San Francisco and Chicago did a co-production with Covent Garden last year, and the Met, looking to spread the cost and risk of staging new productions, asked Seattle to co-sponsor a new Iphigenia, enlisting the......

On a weekend when Blue Angels were literally drenching Seattle skies with violent peals of thunder, Seattle Opera's new production of Flying Dutchman saturated McCaw Hall with vibrant voices and reverberant horns. Dutchman is Wagner's first major work, with roots squarely in the tradition of German romanticism (Beethoven musically, Heine philosophically). He was still years away from composing his interminable, mystical Ring (which, like Seafair, has become a touchstone of Seattle's civic religion). In......

Guns, booze, dames, and private eyes: The SIFF Cinema Summer Series (say that five times fast) kicks off tonight with their first annual Seattle Noir City Festival. Noir City's been taking place in San Francisco for five years now, and this is the first time it's made its way to the seamy underbelly of the Northwest. The festival is co-presented with and will benefit the Film Noir Foundation whose mission is to spread the......

Considering this is Pride Weekend, you've got a bevy of options for live music in between bouts of sodomy, muff-diving, tina-using, and/or trips to Home Depot. -Seattle Men's Chorus explores the complex love-hate relationship between God and the gays in Scared Faithless at McCaw Hall. Friday-Saturday // 8pm // 321 Mercer St // $15-$57 -The Wildrose (and dragtastic Ursula Android and Jackie Hell) hosts their annual all-weekend party, with approximately nine million performances by......

A new musical genre: not heavy metal, but fiberglass. First, Seattle Opera got in on the frenzy of Pigs on Parade, whipping up an Opera Pig named Rusty. Then the scenic studios manager, Michael Moore, composed a 20-second "aria" for the pig to sing, and persuaded baritone John Boehr to lend it his voice. A bit of electronic wizardry in Rusty's snout senses when people come snooping around the plaza in front of McCaw......

Stravinsky125 @ PNB Through June 10 // McCaw Hall // Tickets $18-$145 The big thing on PNB's Stravinsky-celebrating program is State of Darkness, a 34-minute solo choreographed by Molissa Fenley. We saw Jonathan Porretta, but the casts change. The music is Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and in contrast to the "pagan sacrifice" orchestral theatrics, Fenley emphasizes solitary ritual and the limits of human endurance. A movement sequence (nothing showy, nothing too aerial) is presented, the......

1) How did you get the picture of Segway mom? Spare us no detail! I had arrived at work (at the Pacific Northwest Ballet) at about 10am. At about 10:30, my co-workers started yelling, “Jen, Jen, you have to come see this!!!” Generally when this is called out, by the time you get there, whatever the spectacle was has since ended. This time, this was not the case. When I first saw Segway Mom she......

BALLET: The opening night of PNB's tribute to music man Igor Stravinsky, STRAVINSKY 125, brings the PNB premiere of Jerome Robbins’ Circus Polka, set to Stravinsky’s Circus Polka for Wind Symphony, and the return of two works by Balanchine -- Rubies, set to Capriccio for piano and orchestra, and his Symphony in Three Movements. Plus, there's the PNB premiere of Molissa Fenley’s solo work, State of Darkness, set to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It's......