A true sense of humor needs to balance all the elements of life, including the serious bits, with all their degrees of gradation. The UW's production of Picasso at the Lapin Agile succeeds at the lighter end of the scale. more ›

Fresh on the heels of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia live, today Seattle Theatre Group announced that Steve Martin will be coming to Benaroya Hall November 3. He'll be performing "an evening of bluegrass and banjo" with his backing band, the Steep Canyon Rangers. That sounds funny, right? Tickets go on sale this Saturday at 10 a.m. and will set you back $55-75, plus Ticketmaster fees. Not so funny, Steve. more ›

Legend has it that Tom Hanks took the part of Picasso in the first reading of Steve Martin's play Picasso at the Lapine Agile back in the mid-nineties. Martin tried multiple times to get this play about the big forces of the Twentieth Century--embodied by Einstein and Picasso--swirling around a Parisian bar made into a movie without success, but if he could ever get the project together, and if Hanks could take some time off from his busy ripping-off-Umberto-Eco career, and if, perhaps, Martin himself could take on a role...well, let us tell you right now--that movie would fucking suck. more ›

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Back in 1981, Mike Nichols directed a famous version of at the Lincoln Center in NYC, starring Steve Martin and Robin Williams. We recall that at some point in college, we saw an interview with Steve Martin about that production, and Martin said something memorably apt: "We decided to serve the comedy of the play, because the ideas would serve themselves." more ›

Starring Michael Caine as Clay Bennett more ›

Last night at the Showbox, we were reminded of something Gino Srdjan Yevdjevic said in an interview with us last year: we don't remember the quote entirely, but it was something to the effect of characterizing "world music" as "shit." Not the music or the musicians, per se, but rather the genre, a peculiarly American way of pigeon-holing and marketing foreign music. Gino understood the process only too well: back in the 1980s, he was a glammy Duran Duran-esque pop singer in his native Yugoslavia. Only when war forced him to flee to the US in the 1990s did he become a "world musician," performing traditional Balkans music in restaurants for disinterested diners under the name Kultur Shock. While he admitted the original incarnation of Kultur Shock could have done well, it's easy to see why he rebelled against the entire world-music cachet by adding punk rock guitar to the line-up and starting to yuk it up as a sex-crazed Eastern European immigrant à la Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd's "Wild and Crazy Guys." more ›

So, somehow it escaped our attention until yesterday that in the last issue of Seattle Weekly, Adriana Grant, the editorial assistant, was dispatched to do a hatchet-job on one of our favorite U-District Bars, Kai's Bistro. more ›

If you act quickly -- and we mean QUICKLY -- you may be able to sneak in some free theatre this evening, as part of Live Theatre Week (which we meant to tell you about earlier but forgot and thanks to Metroblogs for reminding us to remind you). What you do is you go to Seattle Performs, and register for a free account. This enables you to see which theaters still have free tickets to tonight's performances, and consequently enables you to dance a happy prospector jig because it's FREE HA HA! FREE! Participants include the Rep, ACT, Taproot, Annex, ArtsWest, UW Drama...the list goes on and on. We're going to be at The Underpants at ACT tonight, ourselves, Steve Martin's updating of a 1910 German social farce. more ›

Sunday afternoon, after watching George Mason ensure that we'd lose our NCAA tournament pool for the 17th straight year, we joined some middle-aged ladies, high school kids, elderly couples, and 20-something drama enthusiasts at the Seattle Shakespeare Company's excellent production of Cyrano de Bergerac. more ›