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......

God knows we love that funny, brainy ole Tom Stoppard. If you're not an Oxford undergraduate or an actor of bit parts, though, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is just likeable, a diversion about the way we divert ourselves from facing death. Stoppard deploys his fearsome rhetorical skills, disembowels Hamlet, ponders probability, and argues mightily that death "is not." (So you can't, strictly speaking, be dead.) You can't keep Stoppard fans away from this kind......

Arcadia @ UW Playhouse Theatre Weds - Sun, through May 6 // Tickets: $15 general/$12 senior/$10 student The handy thing about the UW Drama Department producing Tom Stoppard's Arcadia is that you can pop over to the UW afterwards and register for a classes on fractal mathematics, Byron's poetry, English gardening, chaos theory, Romanticism and Classicism, thermodynamics, and maybe a refresher on Fermat's Theorem. There's a determinedly intellectual bent to the play, which revolves......