The Seattle Outdoor Theatre Festival is over, but that just means that more plays are coming to a park near you, instead of congregating all up in the Volunteer Park area--except for two kid-friendly productions, that is: Theater Schmeater's Wind in the Willows (Bravo, Mr. Toad!) and Open Circle Theatre's Alice in Wonderland, both of which play at Volunteer Park Saturdays and Sundays through August 10. We saw Wooden O's very likable, well cast A......

That's really all we wanted to tell you. You got your Shakespeare, your Alice in Wonderland, your Wind in the Willows. It's all free, up in your Volunteer Park. We posted about it all here. The weather is supposed to great, so remember to pack lots of water, slather on the SPF, and maybe even wear a hat if you're catching an afternoon show. Two or three hours sitting still in the sun can really......

If you've been alarmed by the groups of people shouting at each other in Volunteer Park recently, it's for a good cause: those are actors rehearsing and, believe us, it's better if they rehearse. The free-to-the-public Seattle Outdoor Theatre Festival, presented by Greenstage, unites a number of companies (Theater Schmeater, SSC/Wooden O, Open Circle, and more) willing to brave the elements and the flight path to SeaTac. (Greenstage is not just in Volunteer Park, by......

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......

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......

Is live theater still relevant in a society where computer users can create high-quality video and distribute it almost instantly via the web? That's been the subject of an ongoing, rancorous debate between two Seattlest contributors, Jeremy and Charles, both former theater artists. Jeremy maintains the theater can yet be a powerful art form -- Charles feels it's a dying, irrelevant medium (most likely wounded by its own hand). To stir them up appropriately, the......

Patrick Page's Swansong is the bread-and-butter of institutional theatres: an audience-pleasing show about the theatre (subject: William Shakespeare) that offers an emotional drama (Ben Jonson's love-hate relationship with Shakespeare) that's a tad bit intellectual and really dramatic and emotional. Imagine Amadeus, but with (slightly) less murder. We have little to fault with the production itself--for $20 it's a good price and tolerable time. It feels like watching a romantic comedy, and would probably make a......

That's David Quicksall as Brutus and Hana Lass as Cassius, above, in director Gregg Loughridge's quirky, stripped-down take on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. It "doesn't always work," says the P-I, "but the actors stand out." Which sounds like code for "enh." We thought it was anything but "enh," and not just because an actor told us we looked thinner in front of the whole audience. (The show features a lot of interactions with the audience,......

Updates of Shakespeare tend to make us yawn at best, or at worst, make someone douse the theater with an accelerant and post a "Smoking Area" sign on the way out. But Seattle Shakespeare Company's martial-arts cult take on Julius Caesar (as detailed in the P-I) may just find that rare middle ground where it doesn't blow or suck. We're turning the concept over in our heads, and it seem like it could work. Director......

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......

Seattle Shakespeare Company's Pericles is awash in contradiction. It's the rarely performed Shakespeare play that Shakespeare may not have written. It's a comedy about a singularly painful life. It's fueled by strong performances -- Reginald André Jackson's Pericles is every minute compelling -- but marred by a directorial misstep that plagues the whole production. We don't recommend it as anyone's first Shakespeare play, but if you have never seen Pericles before, this production is a......

It's Seattle Shakespeare Company's version of the wandering prince Pericles on Friday night for MvB, followed Saturday night by Britain's accordion-driven, Brechtian street opera trio with neo-castrati Martyn Jacques, the Tiger Lilies at the Moore, ladies and gentlemen. Having been invited down to San Francisco for a friend’s bachelorette bacchanalia with only one directive ("Bring a wig"), Courtney is hoping she doesn’t end up in the clink this weekend. While laughing at Charles for attending......

Last night, in the face of too-cold-too-soon autumn weather, we corralled our friend (and friend of the Slog) Carollani into her badass newish car and headed over to the 5th Avenue Theater for the official opening night of Lone Star Love--a Broadway-bound musical playing now through Sept. 30. We'll just cut to the chase. Lone Star Love has everything it needs to be a huge, raucous Broadway hit. There's the ballsy black woman, the......

If there's anything we learned studying literature in college, it's that everything either comes from Shakespeare, Greek mythology or the Bible. Seattlest used to entertain herself by playing "From Whence Did That Allusion Come?" Yeah, we only had two friends in college. The result of our education is an absolute delight for anything that successfully adapts some brilliant Shakespearean masterpiece into a slightly more ribald, contemporary spectacle. And so it is that we perked up......

The Central Library played host last night to a host of concerned citizens and Thomas E. Ricks, author of the best-selling Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. They put Ricks in the big auditorium for good reason. Fiasco was a #1 New York Times best-seller, finalist for the Pulitzer, winner of the Gelber Prize, etc., etc. Plus it plays to the liberal instincts of Seattle's finest. The room was crammed full of business suits......

It's Shakespeare, so you can't complain. That's just "Shakespearean language." Here it is, Act III, Scene 1 from The Merchant of Venice:If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? Anyway, in Seattle we've got outdoor theatre options, and most of them are in Volunteer Park this weekend, July 14 & 15, for the Seattle Outdoor Theatre Festival. There are......

The School for Scandal @ Seattle Shakespeare Company Through July 1 // Seattle Center House // Tickets $28 adults/$22 seniors/$18 students The Seattle Shakespeare Company is breaking out and kicking it up a notch with Sheridan's School for Scandal. It's not Shakespeare but it's funny and sharp-tongued, and the creative team (including Albert Clementi, sets; Heidi Ganser, costumes; Tim Wratten, lighting; M. Elizabeth Heller, sound) have come up with a production that just about knocks......

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. The 5th Avenue Theater's production of West Side Story is better than just good sex--it's a fingers-gripped-around-the-headboard, eyes-rolled-back-in-head latex buster. And just like amazing sex, we had... Goosebumps......

Seattle Shakespeare Co.'s Macbeth Seattle Center House, Tickets $32 - $22 Thurs - Sun, through April 8 We loved this Macbeth's brutal, intense fight choreography (by Gordon Carpenter) -- swords clang, guys vault over the sets, thump to the ground and wrestle, hell, a baby gets stabbed. It was like the IFL onstage. That's gonna be a pretty bruised-up cast by the time this thing closes. On one hand, the performance as a whole......

As we were saying the other day, the Seattle Rep is producing a play next season by playwright (actor, screenwriter) Robert Schenkkan, who lives in Seattle and whom we first met at Victrola. (You know him for authoring the magisterial The Kentucky Cycle, or from his appearance on Star Trek: TNG or in Pump Up the Volume.) Seattlest: By the Waters of Babylon: it's a newer piece, right? What got you started on a......

This just in: Seattle Rep’s 2007-2008 season in the Bagley Wright Theatre begins with Shakespeare’s beloved comedy, Twelfth Night, followed by a powerful play about the Cuban revolution, The Cook by Eduardo Machado. A new play, The Breach about Hurricane Katrina comes next, then the classic Molière comedy, The Imaginary Invalid, and finally Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney brings his skills to a classic Greek adventure in The Cure at Troy. In the Leo......

You should go see Balagan Theatre’s wild west version of Titus Andronicus at CHAC, but if you want a taste of what you’re getting into before you go you should check out episode 501 of Southpark. In that episode Cartman avenges a humiliation by arranging the deaths of his tormentor’s parents. Then he chops them up and tricks the kid into eating their corpses in a bowl of chili. Weak sauce? Cartman’s also arranged to......

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......

The Comedy of Errors is another Shakespeare play featuring mistaken identities. The Seattle Shakespeare Company's production sets the mistakes in Louisiana, with bananas and pirates and a terrific set with so much overgrowth you think Max is about to make an entrance. There's much singing of ballads and sea shanties, and it feels like the patter was punched up by Simpsons writers. It was also sold out the day we went, so they may......

Twelfth Night reminded us of that Capitol Hill party where you drink too much and spend all your time flirting with someone who puts you off and then later you see them begging someone else to take them home, but by then you just shake your head and stagger off to the Canterbury to meet up with friends. The young Two Hours Traffic puts together a sometimes creditable stab at the play. The Chamber......

With the Seattle Shakespeare Company's productions, it seems as if they're always hit or miss. Their current season has contained some of each, and the current play, The Winter's Tale, is a mixed bag. In this case, the set design and art direction is plain ol' lovely, while the acting leaves a bit to be desired. As a whole, the play is a rumination on the varied potential of love. The first half concerns......

Someone from the Zune marketing borg emailed last week and asked if Seattlest wanted to be assimilated announce a show. And, hell yeah, of course we do, so much so that we even have some amateur Zune ad copy prepared: "Once you go brown..." Well, that's all we've got so far. We're working on it. So the band for this free and public show is Secret Machines from the Lone Star State, which happens to......

Answers will be forthcoming this afternoon, along with final standings and any other information we feel like we can cram into a post. In the meantime, entertain yourself with the questions from last night's quiz at the Old Pequliar: Round 1: Geography 1) What is the busiest airport in Europe, measured by passenger traffic? 2) What glacier created Lake Washington, Puget Sound, and Green Lake? 3) What country is home to the tallest skyscraper in......

"The more the merrier." Shakespeare, maybe? We don't know. Anyway, it's true. But it's difficult to just invite someone tag along to a big city pro or college sporting event. There's the matter of getting tickets in the same row, or of being able to afford tickets in the first place. These barriers do not exist for high school sports. Seating is always of the festival variety, and tickets--well, if you could afford to go......

They're not big fans of the Blue Angels over on SLOG. Anthony Hecht writes: Aptly described by a friend as “sky NASCAR”, these giant wastes of taxpayers (sic) dollars whiz around the city at like 300 feet all weekend, scaring the bejeeezus out of everybody. Are the Blue Angels "wastes of taxpayers (sic) dollars"? Depends on how you define "waste." For many people, watching the Blue Angels "whiz around the city" is an exhilarating experience.......