Culture Fiend

Met Pick: Cheap Beer and Prose

Where culture and cans of PBR collide.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Mar 11, 2010 at 09:00AM 0 Comments

The perfect combination.

Book readings don’t have to be dull, says Brian McGuigan as he rattles off some of the better anecdotes from past Cheap Beer and Prose nights at Richard Hugo House—where the cans of PBR cost $1 and the entertainment gets a little wacky.

“People get onstage with grocery bags from QFC and they throw groceries at the audience…”

“Just before Dave Schmader’s reading, his dog passed away. He was hit by a car right in front of Dave. Dave didn’t know what to do…so he emailed me later saying, can I bring a dog with me? He ends up bringing his dog’s best friend, a pug, onstage and proceeds to read his essay with the dog sitting in a chair, looking at the audience.”

But cheap beer doesn’t translate to cheap thrills. “It’s not a drunken silly fest, and it’s not stodgy,” says McGuigan, who in 2005 came up with an alternative to “pretentious, expensive” outings by selling dollar cups of wine at free poetry readings at Hugo House. “I think really good readings are performance art. That’s what I have in mind when I create events.”

Tonight’s CB&P lineup includes Janna Cawrse Esarey, author of travel memoir The Motion of the Ocean: 1 Small Boat, 2 Average Lovers, and a Woman’s Search for the Meaning of Wife; Jonathan Evison, whose All About Lulu won the 2009 Washington State Book Award for fiction; former Stranger theater critic and playwright Bret Fetzer; and Stacey Levine, a 2009 Stranger Genius Award winner and author of short story collection The Girl with Brown Fur.

Cheap Beer and Prose starts at 7 and ends with an open-mic session, which you can sign up for at the door. So much fun for just a couple bucks.

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Tags: Thirsty Thursday, Books & Talks, Hugo House, Cheap Wine and Poetry, Cheap Beer and Prose

Met Pick: Moisture Festival

Three weeks of aerialists, burlesque, clowns, dance…the list goes on.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Mar 11, 2010 at 09:00AM 0 Comments

Aerialistas at Aerlift IV
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This isn’t your average girl group. The Aerialistas—Poppy Daze, Lillian Dish, Viola Sugarlump, Lucy Rose and Opal Divine—will be hanging around this weekend (pun very much intended) as one of the opening acts of the Moisture Festival, a three-week melange of comedy, burlesque, and vaudeville performances across the city. I can only imagine the word “moisture” is a nod to the bubble acts…at least, I hope that’s all it is.

Find the festival at ACT Theatre, Fremont’s Hale’s Palladium, the Georgetown Ballroom, SIFF Cinema, and Vashon Island’s Open Space for Arts & Community. It runs through April 4.

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Tags: Weekend, Festival

Catch It Before It Closes: Falstaff

There are only two shows left. Don’t miss this Seattle Opera production.

Posted by: Hayley Poole on Mar 11, 2010 at 08:00AM 0 Comments

As the audience trickles into McCaw Hall a half-hour prior to Seattle Opera’s production of Falstaff, there is a measured amount of surprise to find the red curtain is already raised, and the cast puttering away onstage as if they had taken a wrong turn getting to the dressing rooms.

Up there is Peter Rose, who plays the title role. He dips a feather pen in a bottle of ink, ready to compose a letter on parchment paper, tapping his foot to Paolo Conte’s Via Con Me. Bardolph, Falstaff’s aide, is flitting across the wood-planked risers in his heart-speckled boxers, tweeting on his iPhone and gripping a Starbucks latte. Nannetta Ford (played by former Seattle Young Opera artist Anya Matanovic) is fitted for a billowing hoop skirt. It’s hard not to join the flock of onlookers who crowd the orchestra pit to gawk at these period incongruities.

The scene is one of many delightful surprises you find in director Peter Kazara’s ingenious take on Verdi’s final opera, a merger of romance and comedy. Kazara manages to turn tavern brawls and lots of name-calling into something graceful—Falstaff referred to as a “beached whale,” “gross watery pimple,” and “fat-kidney rogue” sounds melodically glorious coming from the pipes of the fresh-faced Sasha Cook and mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, who first debuted as Falstaff’s Mistress Quickly in the Met Opera. And only a cast of this caliber could pull off a perfectly harmonized operatic nonet at the end of the second scene.

It’s not just the voices that make this opera a must-see. Set designer Donald Eastman creates a Globe-like atmosphere using minimalistic objects, allowing the rich costumes and talents to really shine.

The three-act play finishes with a comic fugue that doesn’t quite belong in the opera’s Elizabethan time-frame and doesn’t totally provide closure. Kazara exaggerates Verdi’s misfit ending by leaving his cast as costume-less as they began, playing on the final line “all the world’s a joke.”

It’s a joke you don’t want to miss.

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Lost Redux

Spoiler: We take a look what’s new and confusing in Episode 7 of the final season.

Posted by: Matthew Halverson on Mar 10, 2010 at 11:00AM 1 Comments

Poor Ben. Michael Emerson stars as Ben Linus in Lost.

Greetings, fellow Lost-o-philes. Your regular guide to WTFing through the previous night’s episode is off having her own island adventure (hopefully sans smoke monsters and khaki coveralls), so I’m filling in. Don’t worry, kids — we’ll get through this together.

I hate Ben. I don’t hate him for killing Locke or trying to kill Penny or forcing Sawyer to eat fish biscuits in a cage. I hate him for making me care. Despite all of his conniving and duplicity, as that bug-eyed bastard in the high-collared Banana Republic dress shirt dug his own sandy grave last night, just a diamond’s throw from dearly departed Nikki’s and Paolo’s plots, I couldn’t help but get a little misty about his seemingly inevitable execution at the hands of Illana. After all, as we learned in “Dr. Linus,” his only crime was that he just cared too much.

Mystery #1: How did flash-sideways Alex get to LA? At this point, you’ve either accepted the coincidental connections in the castaways’ flash-sideways world or you haven’t, so the fact that Rousseau’s daughter is a student in Ben’s modern European history class was either a dope surprise or an eye-roller. But whatever you thought about the development, it gave Mr. Linus — I mean, Dr. Linus — an opportunity for off-island redemption. The irrepressible schemer hatched a Machiavellian masterplan to depose Principal Reynolds and steal his job, only to find that the nurse-shtupping administrator could assure acceptance to Yale for hard-working Alex, so following through with the coup would sink her higher education dreams. Foiled! (Also lost in the failed power play: a choice parking spot for grumbly science teacher – and Ben co-conspirator – Dr. Arzt. But hey, big guy, at least in this life you didn’t explode and end up all over Hurley’s shirt.) Ben, it turns out, does have a heart. And while his island iteration put power before Alex, his sweater vest-wearing alternate version sacrificed a promotion for her future. Island Ben is another story, though: He laid out his “I watched my daughter die” sob story to Illana, who welled up and spared him — just minutes after FLocke promised to hand him the island. He may have rejoined Illana’s crew and offered Sun some help in rehabbing her seaside shack, but do we really think he’s not going to take Sir Smokey up on that offer?

Mystery #2: Is Jack invincible? The man of science has completed his transition to man of faith. When Richard begged Jack for help in shuffling off his immortal coil, Doc Shephard was happy to light the fuse on an unstable stick of dynamite and stick around to watch it burn — because he believed Jacob had chosen him for a higher calling and won’t let him die. And he didn’t! He has a purpose. And every week, it seems more and more that that purpose is a steel-cage death match with FLocke to decide the island’s fate. (Bonus question: When Richard groused that Jacob’s touch is curse disguised as a gift, was that just sour grapes, or might Jack be in for a faith-rattling letdown? Discuss.)

Mystery #3: Where the hell is Sawyer? Flocke continues to amass his army of anti-island misfit toys for…whatever it is he’s planning, but we’ve seen neither hide nor scruffy beard hair of his first recruit since “The Substitute.” Is Sawyer still in the cave, whipping up some boar stew for Flocke’s return? Or is he off hatching a plan of his own? (Once a con man, always a con man, I say.)

Final thought: The answers are — finally — really starting to flow. Which is good, because I can stop throwing things at the TV in disgust. But just as the climactic clash between roll-reversed FLocke and Jack is ramping up, Charles Freaking Widmore has to show up in his sub. (A cool development, for sure, but how cheesy — in a Scooby-Doo-villain sort of way — was the periscope popping up out of the water?) Is the battle royale for island supremacy about to become a three-way?

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Tags: Television, Lost

Billy Connolly, Master of Profanity

After 40 years of doing stand-up, some things come naturally for the actor-comedian.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Mar 10, 2010 at 09:00AM 1 Comments

When you’ve been doing stand-up for 40 years, certain things come naturally. Like swearing. “I’ve sworn all my life. I relax into the profane,” comedian Billy Connolly once said during a routine. “People say a limited vocabulary makes you swear. I don’t think so. I know at least 127 words.”

And shows like the ones scheduled for Seattle Repertory Theatre (March 12 and 13) don’t come scripted—they just happen. To craft his gregarious, bawdy sets, Connolly pulls from a lifetime of material: his childhood in Scotland; working in Glasgow’s shipyards; playing an “ultra-violent guy” in The Boondock Saints and a loveable teacher in Head of the Class; even the many manifestations of his beard.

So when he comes to Seattle, don’t ask him what he has planned. I already did. Let him wing it instead—with a wink, smile, and a curse.

It’s your first time here. What have you heard about Seattle?

When I lived in LA, lots of people were moving to Seattle because it was less insane and just as beautiful. They always talk about the rain—but then again, they always talk about the rain in Vancouver as well, and I’ve never actually noticed. I mean, I’ve been there in the rain but…I’m Scottish! Rain schmain. Give me a break. I’ve been on a campaign for years to stop weathermen from calling rain bad weather.

[But] I can’t wait to see the place. I want to see Frank Gehry. I think these are the designs of a drunk man. And [Seattle’s] the home of the coffee revolution. And you invented grunge. And Kenny G lives there! Or maybe he was just performing there.

What kind of show are you doing at Seattle Rep? What can we expect?

I don’t know. I’ll see when I get there. I have lots of stuff—old stuff and new stuff—and I like to make stuff up. I’ll try and get my instant feelings of Seattle, and … well, I don’t know! I haven’t a clue. That’s what I’ve done all my life.

Is there anything that’s been bothering you lately that you might vent about onstage?

Ermm, the smoking ban. Yeah. I smoke cigars and I would like a place to do it. I’m doing something completely legal and people are stopping me from doing it and I’m pissed off with the politically correct. I’m tired of people who have my best interests at heart. I could kick their bony asses. You know, leave me the fuck alone and stop trying to make me eat brown bread. … And cigar smokers are lovely people; they should be welcome in places! Unlike those awful cigarette smokers who poison the air.

Ha, how are cigar smokers different?

I don’t know what it is but I feel very at home with them. I’ve met very few cigar smokers I didn’t like, but I’ve met plenty of cigarette smokers I didn’t like. [Laughs.] Cigarette smokers differ from cigar smokers in as much as you’ll never see a circle of guys in a room talking about great cigarettes they’ve smoked. Nobody’ll be telling you about a 1956 Lucky Strike: It was amazing! I have it saved in a box.

What’s your best cigar story?

I’ve had a few great cigars. You know what I’ve got? I have a box of cigars called Cohiba Lancero signed by Fidel Castro. My friend’s a politician in Britain and he was meeting Fidel Castro, and I asked him to do it.

You’re coming to town right before St Patrick’s Day. Any plans for the holiday?

I’ve never done anything for St Patrick’s Day in my life. That’s when amateur drinkers go out. Real drinkers stay home. It’s like New Year’s—real drinkers stay home on New Year’s because the amateurs are out making an ass of it [laughs]. People going “woooo!” when they’re drinking.

Go “woooo” when Billy Connolly does stand-up at Seattle Repertory Theatre on March 12 & 13. Tickets are $45, available here.

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Tags: Seattle Repertory Theatre, Theater, Comedy, Billy Connolly