There was a woman, born in 1902, who lived to be 101 years old. She became a dancer, then a film actor. In her early 30s, she directed two of the most acclaimed films in the history of cinema. She was friends with important people. Critics said she was as good as Eisenstein. But then something went wrong--no one would fund her films. So she became a photographer instead. There was a woman, born in......

Chad Goller-Sojourner's Sitting in Circles With Rich White Girls: Memoirs of a Bulimic Black Boy opens tonight at the BrownBox Theatre @ the Rainier Valley Cultural Center, and runs through Sunday, July 20. Tix available online. In terms of identity, Chad Goller-Sojourner either hit the jackpot or got the short end of the stick, depending on one's perspective: a gay black man raised by a white family with a "girl's" eating disorder. "I thought it......

Sometimes you watch a play without ever leaving home; either it never leaves the neighborhood of the familiar or you don't. And sometimes a play invites you into its home--certain things are familiar or not, but the center is not your center, and you almost drunkenly try to make sense of it, slipping and willing your eyes to focus. It's not that you forget to tell yourself you know better, that's not a blue sky......

Photo courtesy of the Paramount/STG By the time we made it to the Paramount for Avenue Q's opening night last night, just about everyone we know had told us how much we were going to love it. That's a high bar our friends and family set for this show. Now we know it's because they knew it could deliver. We found ourself wondering early on how casting goes down for a show about puppets.......

FULL PUPPET NUDITY: You might have noticed that big banner on the side of the Paramount advertising puppet cleavage Avenue Q. Well, tonight is opening night, so if you haven't gotten your tickets for this ever-so-brief run of the Tony Award-winning show, now's your time. Seattlest will be there tonight for the kick-off, but then it's up to you to get out and see those puppets sing and swear all over the place. June 10-22......

When we first meet him, 40-something actor Andrew Weems has gotten lost on his way to a reading in New York, and his peripatetic, rootless existence catches up to him--broke, burnt-out, and frozen in place, not knowing which direction to go, he sounds like Jack Lemmon in Death of an Acting-man: bitter, wry, crabby, self-defeated. In stewing over being lost, other travails present themselves (including a rat barking all night in the walls of his......

TEENY BOPPER EXPRESS: Disney's High School Musical opens at the Paramount tonight, so maybe steer clear of the teenagers downtown. If you have your own teenager, maybe it's a good night to set them free with their friends so they can go sing along and goo-goo-ga-ga over the cute boys and dreaminess of this sensational teenfest. 7:30 p.m. // Paramount Theater // $20-67 plus fees WOMEN'S BASKETBALL: Seattlest made it to the Seattle Storm's opening......

Avenue Q is going to be hitting the Paramount this summer, and word on the street is that the banner they'll be hanging on the theater is simply scandalous. According to the press release: Seattle Theatre Group unveils most controversial banner to date at 1:00 PM on the east facing exterior of The Paramount Theatre. Be the first to see Lucy, star of Broadway's Avenue Q, in all her provocative glory. "This is the......

Fourteen very talented actors and directors have come together to perform Neil LaBute's Autobahn, a collection of five scenes that do what LaBute does best: take a very raw look at personal relationships. All of the scenes are set in the front seat of a car, and highlight conflict between two people--most with only one of the actors speaking. The stories take place in the aftermath of an event that has left the characters with......

Who knew Dr. Lion was from India? He's a physician. He's a lion. Duh. We've read Richard Scarry books hundreds of times—both as a wee tot and as a parent—and a subcontinental accent for Busytown's resident physician Dr. Lion never occurred to us. When Auston James' Lion gave Lowly Worm his check-up, we realized it was a perfect detail—and, happily, Seattle Children's Theatre's production of Busytown has perfect details in abundance. That's good, because......

Shrek: For your information, there's a lot more to musicals than people think. Donkey: Example? Shrek: Example? Okay, er... musicals... are... like onions. Donkey: [sniffs onion] They stink? Shrek: Yes...NO! Donkey: Or they make you cry. Shrek: No! Well, sometimes. Donkey: Oh, you leave them out in the sun and they turn brown and start sproutin' little white hairs. Shrek: NO! LAYERS! Onions have layers. Musicals have layers. Onions have layers... you get it.......

Cirque Du Soleil presents Corteo under the blue and yellow big top at Marymoor Park in Redmond beginning Thursday, April 24. Corteo has captivated fans on nearly every continent, so we asked Alison Crawford, Corteo senior artistic director, to share a few secrets about what makes the show tick. Corteo is a story about a clown’s funeral, but it is also a celebration of life, Crawford said. "Everything from the set, costumes and make-up resemble......

Tonight's show starts at 8pm and Sunday's matinee is at 2pm. Tickets are available online or at the Paramount's box office before the show. Programs for both performances are available on the Ailey site. As the curtains parted at the Paramount last night to reveal an undulating gray mass of dancers at center stage, it was immediately obvious that we were in for an evening of dance vastly difference from the usual Seattle repertoire. When......

The Diary of Anne Frank @ the Intiman // through May 17 // // Tickets $10-$50 // Special talks and events on March 31, April 6, 10, 27, 28 and May 3 When this Seattlest was nine, we visited our grandparents in Brooklyn one weekend. While there, the synagogue hosted a book fair. Our grandparents, being a center of the temple community, went and took us with them. We still hold a distinct memory of......

What are you supposed to say about a play that bored you to tears but isn't exactly bad? This was the question we were mulling over last night after seeing Kevin Kling's How? How? Why? Why? Why? at the Seattle Rep. Kling is best known as an NPR contributor, which explains the audience's lustful appreciation of the show; How? How? Why? Why? Why? is basically an amalgam of This American Life and Prairie Home Companion,......

It's not so often you get to see a play as thoroughly pleasing as Reefer Madness: The Musical. Yes, we admit: we've bemoaned musical adaptations of movies in the past, and we could find plenty to complain about with this production (occasionally uneven cast, venue leaving something to be desired) if we tried, but really, that's all nitpicking. In sum total, this is the most recommendable and enjoyable piece of theater we've seen in Seattle......

THEATRE: Young Jean Lee's Theater Company presents Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven (A Show about White People in Love), which is an aggressively exotic title for someone raised in Pullman, WA.Writer/director Young Jean Lee's worst nightmare was to make a confessional, ethnic identity play with a flowery Asian-sounding title. So, the young NYC-based artist did just that [...] a character named "Korean-American" navigates increasingly disturbing levels of a pseudo-Korean world intercut with......

MUSIC: If you're not heading to the Gutter Twins, maybe try another direction. Almost exactly two years ago, we went to hear Trespassers William and their psychedelic folk pop. Said Audrey, "with the band's varied instrumentation and singer Anna-Lynne Williams' steady, hollow voice, their sound is haunting and hypnotic." The question is, have they found a hook to hang a song on? You make the call--check out one of their newest songs on the......

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......

Are you looking for exciting theatre outside the Seattle city limits? If you are interested in the artistic works of people from all around the Northwest, you can still check out the four remaining shows of the Northwest Playwrights Alliance (NPA) Festival of Northwest Plays in Tacoma. The festival will showcase three new full-length plays and several 10 minute plays with themes varying from disaster survivors to “tongue-in-cheek potty humor.” Proceeds from the festival......

Hollywood Knowledge: Tonight the Northwest Screenwriters Guild hosts a talk with special guest actor/screenwriter Walter Dalton. Dalton has written for TV (Laverne and Shirley, Barney Miller, Benson) and appeared on it (Rhoda, Mork and Mindy, Northern Exposure, and Millennium). He'll discuss a Hollywood career's ins and outs, then hang around for a Q&A session. Saturday he'll lead a workshop on pitching. Friday 7-9pm, Saturday 10am-2pm // NWSG, Clear Channel Bldg, 351 Elliott Ave W......

Local Singer/Songwriter Joanna Horowitz got a crazy idea a year or so ago. A long-time musician involved in the theater business, she thought it might be fun to write a musical. Enter 100 Heartbreaks... The plot, in a nutshell: Singer/songwriter Charlane wants to cross over into country music. She figures that, if she gets her heart broken 100 times, maybe she'll be ready to write an honest country heartbreak song. She gets stuck when......

On this Valentine's Day, we also take the time to honor the kind of love that exists between two straight dudes -- the primarily heterosexual feelings that a man has for his BFF. Exhibit A: Stan and Kyle. Exhibit B: Jay and Silent Bob. Exhibit C: Matt and Ben, the celebrity spoof of the relationship between Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, focusing on the period right before they became famous (i.e., the making of......

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......

We're sure we don't need to say this, but you can't miss your caucus. This is the first year in our whole time in the Pacific Northwest where it matters what Washington voters think. If you're still wondering where to go, here are two Dem or GOP caucus locators. Caucusing starts at 1pm. We understand that if you know who you support and you don't want to spend an hour or two talking about it,......

Even though he grew up in Seattle and has recently joined the UW jazz studies faculty, and even though he had an intriguing-looking gig at SAM during last fall's Earshot Jazz Festival, we still haven't managed to catch a performance by trumpeter Cuong Vu. But we'd sure like to catch him tonight at UW's Meany Hall and finally hear him in person. Equally at home with funk/rock rhythms and a more ethereal ECM-style vibe, Vu......

Mike Daisey has been in town performing his notorious Monopoly, a controversial monologue exploring the excesses of American capitalism (particularly of the Wal-Mart variety). But this weekend, Daisey turns his withering gaze on the theatre itself, with How Theater Failed America at the Capitol Hill Arts Center. Daisey takes aim at the theater for its manifold failures: its pretentions, its disconnect from the world around it, its self-satisfaction. (Check out a five-minute sample over at......

We went in to Hey Girl!, the performance piece by Italian experimental theatre troupe Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, at On the Boards last night with high expectations. We'd be dishonest if we didn't admit we were somewhat disappointed, but we still recommend the show highly. After all, it features some of the greatest stage magic we've ever seen, with effects and images that stick with you longer than the inkling you have while watching that, thematically,......

Sometimes a good ski movie can console you during an off year, but we're already having a record-breaking snow season (ok, it's no 1998, but still, the quality and volume of the snow we've been getting this year is reminiscent of our days growing up in Utah for what that's worth). So maybe you don't need a powder porn flick to fuel your stoke, but we're thinking that Steep (showing in a limited run at......

Do dancers hibernate in winter? There's an explosion of dance activity coming up as January draws to a close. Had we but world enough and time, we'd go to all these shows, but time's chariot won't permit us to make up all the stops. Here's the wealth you have to choose from: January 25 - 27: The Bridge Project @ Velocity Dance Center. Two young Seattle choreographers and one team (Kristina Dillard, Kelly Sullivan, and......