Culture Fiend

Cue the Sweaty Palms: First Date Opens at ACT

Plus: what’s in the pipeline next season at 5th Avenue, Village Theatre, and more.

Posted by: Seattle Met staff on Mar 08, 2012 at 10:00AM 0 Comments

Blind dates are tricky enough with the rise of Facebook stalking. And then there’s that pesky inner voice—the ghosts of partners past and overzealous matchmakers. See how a Wall Street trader and Soho artist fare amid all that noise in the world premiere of musical First Date, coproduced by 5th Avenue Theatre and ACT Theatre. Kelly Karbacz and Seattle’s Eric Ankrim (recently a charm-the-milk-out-of-the-cow Curly in 5th Ave’s Oklahoma ) star.

First Date
Mar 10–May 20, ACT, $15–$69

And if you haven’t heard…

— David Schmader’s new solo show, A Short-Term Solution to a Long-Term Problem, returns to Richard Hugo House March 23–April 14 after a sold-out run in February. Known to some as associate editor of The Stranger—and to others as the foremost authority on Showgirls —the reliably funny scribe examines his life post-9/11, including new love, a scary diagnosis, and marrying a Mormon man in California.

SEASON ANNOUNCEMENTS

— 5th Avenue Theatre will bring back Cameron Mackintosh’s Les Miserables, featuring new orchestration and brilliant Victor Hugo-inspired backdrops, June 27–July 7; tickets go on sale March 29 at the friendly hour of 12:01am. Following Les Mis, the theater launches a 2012–2013 season with the return of Tony-winning musical Memphis, which got its start here in 2009, followed by The Addams Family, Elf: the Musical, The Music Man, Grey Gardens (coproduced by ACT—we’re excited about this one), Jersey Boys, and The Pirates of Penzance. Subscriber tickets are currently available.

— Village Theatre will kick off its 2012–2013 season this fall with a little Huck Finn. Musical Big River opens September 12, followed by Fiddler on the Roof, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, new musical Trails (a coming-of-age story about two childhood friends hiking the entire Appalachian Trail, from Georgia to Maine), and Chicago.

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Tags: 5th Avenue Theatre, ACT , Village Theatre, Hugo House

Oklahoma! in Color

An interracial cast gives new meaning to the musical at 5th Avenue Theatre.

Posted by: Kathryn Robinson on Feb 10, 2012 at 01:00PM 0 Comments

Curly (Eric Ankrim) goes for broke to court Laurey (Alexandra Zorn) in Oklahoma! at 5th Avenue.

I grew up singing the songs of Oklahoma!. My dad, an old soldier, used to croon the opening lines to “People Will Say We’re in Love” not as “Don’t throw bouquets at me,” but as “Don’t throw grenades at me.” But never having seen it performed, I didn’t know the plot. I relied on 5th Avenue Theatre’s production for that.

To wit: A goofball white cowpoke, Curly, competes with the surly black farmhand, Jud, for the affections of the beautiful farmgirl, Laurey. She gives enough thumbs-up signals to Jud and enough hard-to-get nonsense to Curly to encourage them both in their romantic pursuit of her—but as the musical unfolds we learn that Curly is earnest and cheerful and hard working, and Jud is angry and increasingly menacing, with a chip on his shoulder and a disturbing interest in pictures of naked women.

Laurey is attracted to both; a dilemma her psyche attempts to work out in the famous dream ballet scene at the end of the first act. Laurey’s danced courtship with Curly is all pirouettes and rainbows. Her dream dalliance with Jud, however, is a darker thing entirely: a rape, or something close to it, thanks to the brilliantly, violently physical choreography of Spectrum Dance Theater’s Donald Byrd.

The 5th Avenue’s most significant update to the beloved 1940s musical was to make it a reflection of the racial dynamics of the Oklahoma Territory at the turn of the century. As a result, this production of Oklahoma! could make a person think it was a play about the tragedy of the black experience in America—which renders the whole giddy last scene of the show offensive and off-putting; almost part of another play.

Because—spoiler alert!—when Jud-as-black-man brings all his years of frustrated serfdom and unrequited lust to a last violent encounter with Laurey, he’s no longer just some isolated loner/loser; now he carries the African-American experience of forced servitude and presumptively threatening sexuality onto the stage. Considering Jud’s destiny in the next scene, and the trumped-up trial that follows—the plot, if Jud is black, has entered the realm of tragedy.

All of which message would be fine— great even—if it weren’t trapped in a musical where everyone gathers for a few laughs from the show’s clowns and a big showy reprise of the victory song, “Oklahoma!” at the end.

Oklahoma!
Thru Mar 4, 5th Avenue Theatre, $29–$139

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Tags: Theater, 5th Avenue Theatre

Win a Four Pack of Tickets to Oklahoma!

5th Avenue Theatre updates the 1940s musical with an interracial cast and gritty choreography.

Posted by: Seattle Met staff on Feb 09, 2012 at 01:00PM 1 Comments

Eric Ankrim stars as cowpoke Curly in Oklahoma! at 5th Avenue Theatre.

Oklahoma! officially opens tonight at 5th Avenue Theatre, and we have a four pack of tickets to give away to an upcoming performance on Thursday, February 23, at 8pm.

Dare we say it, these seats are good: row P, dead center, orchestra level (a value of about $400). It’s a close encounter with the updated Broadway musical, whose familiar Rodgers and Hammerstein tunes are still intact (“Surrey With the Fringe On Top,” anyone?), but now features Jud Fry played by a black actor (Kyle Scatliffe), and gritty, emotionally charged choreography by Spectrum Dance’s Donald Byrd.

To enter to win, email SeattleMetTix@gmail.com with “Oklahoma” as the subject, and a reason why you want to see the show, by Thursday, February 16, at 5pm. The winner will be notified by email shortly after the deadline.

Oklahoma!
Thru Mar 4, 5th Avenue Theatre, $29–$139

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Tags: Theater, 5th Avenue Theatre, Ticket Giveaways

Free Tickets to Oklahoma! at 5th Avenue Theatre

They’re giving away 2,100 tickets this Saturday—time to queue up.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Jan 18, 2012 at 12:00PM 3 Comments

Eric Ankrim is Curly in Oklahoma!, opening February 3 at 5th Avenue Theatre.

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Eric Ankrim is Curly in Oklahoma!, opening February 3 at 5th Avenue Theatre.

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Spectrum dancers rehearse the dream ballet in Oklahoma!.

It’s like Black Friday for thespians. Starting at 8am this Saturday, 5th Avenue Theatre will hand out free tickets to its February 5 performance of Oklahoma!. There are more than enough passes to go around (2,100), with a limit of four per household. All you have to do is queue up—hopefully not in the snow—and accept that fact that you’ll be missing the Super Bowl.

Ah yup. This free show is at the same time as the big game. But 5th Ave knows its audience—this giveaway is for the men, women, and children who only watch the Super Bowl for the commercials (and you can DVR those anyway). In exchange for a night of nachos, light beer, and extreme grunting, you’ll get to see an updated production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, with new choreography by Spectrum Dance’s Donald Byrd.

The Tony-nominated choreographer earned accolades for his work on Broadway’s The Color Purple and his collaborations with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. But since signing on as artistic director of Seattle’s Spectrum Dance Theater a decade ago, he’s taken the lead locally in creating unflinching, emotionally charged dance performances, interpreting everything from domestic abuse to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through modern dance. In his hands, and with the help of director Peter Rothstein, Oklahoma!will receive a more critical treatment. Don’t dismiss it as a lightweight cowpoke love story with a jaunty score (“Surrey With the Fringe On Top,” anyone?). There’s a darkness to the script regarding turn-of-the-century race relations—in 1906, the Oklahoma Territory was home to one of the nation’s largest communities of freed slaves—and 5th Ave plans to honor that reality with an interracial cast. It’s a new look with a familiar score. The wind, as always, will go whipping down the plains.

Oklahoma!
5th Avenue Theatre, 1308 Fifth Ave, Feb 3–Mar 4

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Tags: Theater, 5th Avenue Theatre, Spectrum Dance , Ticket Giveaways

Musical Vanities Begs the Question: Where’s A Good Bonfire When You Need One?

Despite the best efforts of actress Billie Wildrick, ACT’s new production is all fluff.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Feb 15, 2011 at 10:00AM 0 Comments

Vanities star Billie Wildrick flies away with it. Photo: courtesy Chris Bennion.

Vanities: A New Musical, now on stage at ACT Theatre, follows three women through the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, from their cheerleading days at a Texas high school to sorority sisterhood at an unnamed college, and then to a penthouse apartment in Manhattan. There they reunite—it is unclear why—and end up exploring the myriad reasons why one’s high school friends are not one’s adult friends.

Coproduced by 5th Avenue Theatre and ACT, with 5th Ave’s David Armstrong at the helm, the new production is a musical remake of the original, songless Vanities—a 1976 off-Broadway comedy by Jack Heifner. The original play was a major commercial success, and for a time the most-produced play in the world. But critics never liked it, citing shallow characters, ill-devised plotting, and general fluffiness. Thirty-five years later, matters have not improved much.

From the moment we first meet the three women, it is obvious we have seen them many times before. There is clipboard-carrying control freak Kathy (Cayman Ilika), tiny, rule-abiding Joanne (Jennifer Sue Johnson), and Mary (Billie Wildrick), the blond slutty one. Seems there always has to be a slutty one. Songs are sung, and then comes an announcement over the loud speaker that the president has been shot. We in the audience—those of us not hiding lobotomy scars under our combovers, anyway—understand that it is President Kennedy who’s been shot. But not Joanne: “The president of the student council has been shot?” For such obtuseness to be charming, the audience needs to like Joanne, yet we have been given no reason to do so. Before we have time to puzzle over this, it’s off to college, where Kathy’s boyfriend has just dumped her.

But who the hell, I found myself asking as the play skidded into Act Two, is Kathy? Ilika is a striking woman with a strong set of pipes, but other than the consistency in character name, I have no reason to believe she was portraying the same person from act to act. Utterly unyouthful, but at least present, in her portrayal of high school Kathy, she seems to slowly evaporate as the play goes on. At the Manhattan penthouse where she lives in Act Three—a paid woman, not working—we are meant to understand she seeks to find herself via…meditation? (Literal) star-gazing on the veranda? Something like that. It’s inscrutable writing, and Ilika, despite her talents, seems lost in its vagaries. Johnson’s Joanne can be funny—she earns laughs when she develops a stumbling, champagne-induced honesty in the third act—but she veers too clunkily between rigidity and cartoonishness to achieve anything meaningful.

And so it is that Wildrick-as-Mary yoinks the show from her castmates. In a second-act solo, she nimbly converts the Steve Miller Band-ish “Fly Into the Future” into something that feels honest—a small-town woman escaping claustrophobic circumstances and a toxic family situation—despite an absurd red vinyl get-up that appears to have been plucked from the costume archives of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. By the time we get to Manhattan, Wildrick has conjured, from some place far outside this production, a blistering aura of despair around her character’s femme fatale bravado. She stomps around the penthouse porch in stiletto heels, commanding the audience to drink her poison cocktail of glamour and pain.

It’s not quite enough to save the play, but I’ll certainly buy tickets to whatever Wildrick does next.

Vanities: A New Musical is at ACT Theatre through May 1.

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Tags: musical, Review, Theater, 5th Avenue Theatre, ACT

$30 Tickets to 5th Avenue Theatre

It’s Christmas in July: Get discounted tickets Friday for the upcoming A Christmas Story: The Musical.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Jul 28, 2010 at 09:30AM 0 Comments

You’ll shoot your eye out, kid! A Christmas Story gets the musical treatment at 5th Avenue Theatre.

Raaaalphie! Do you know how good the 1983 movie A Christmas Story is? Good enough for TBS to show every Christmas for 24 hours straight! To get children to stick their tongues to flagpoles around the world! And good enough to turn into a musical. Little Ralphie sings wistfully about getting a Red Ryder BB gun this Christmas at 5th Avenue Theatre—and there’s a special one-day ticket deal this Friday.

Starting at 9:30am Friday, July 30, tickets for A Christmas Story: The Musical go on sale for $30 (a savings of $50) for performances November 26 to December 8. The sale lasts until Saturday, 9:30am, and doesn’t include a $3 service fee per ticket. You can buy them online at 5thavenuetheatre.org, at the box office at 1308 Fifth Avenue, or by calling 206-625-1900. Limit nine tickets per person.

A Christmas Story: The Musical runs Nov 26-Dec 30 at 5th Avenue Theatre.

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Tags: Theater, 5th Avenue Theatre, Ticket Alerts

Recommended: Candide

5th Avenue pays tribute to Leonard Bernstein with the right amount of wicked and wise in this comic operetta.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on May 28, 2010 at 12:00PM 1 Comments

Candide (Bahorek, left) and Cunegonde (Griffith) experiment with happiness in Candide. Photo courtesy Chris Bennion.

5th Avenue Theatre continues its homage to Leonard Bernstein—part of a citywide festival honoring the late composer—with the rarely produced Candide, a darkly satirical operatta that’s about as different from last month’s screwball comedy On the Town as you can get. Put simply, one has dancing sailors, the other earthquakes, shipwrecks, and bubonic plagues. Though Bernstein’s buoyant score for Candide has aged well with time—he wrote it during a particularly prolific period when he also completed West Side Story—the book based on Voltaire’s novel has changed repeatedly. Broadway audiences in the late 1950s were put off by Lillian Hellman’s grim interpretation, and it continued to receive mixed reviews until Hugh Wheeler rewrote a lighter rendition in the late 1970s, with the help of Stephen Sondheim (lyrics).

Thankfully, 5th Avenue’s artistic director David Armstrong splits the difference by choosing to produce a version of the operetta written by the Brits—John Caird for the UK’s Royal National Theatre—that stays more faithful to Voltaire’s text. The result is a smart, salacious epic with a booming score and voices to match. Stanley Bahorek is impressive as young Candide, a guileless boy on a quest for love and happiness who spends more time in bed with disaster than with his beloved, Cunegonde (an awful name, by the way). Laura Griffith turns in the show’s standout performance singing Cunegonde’s aria “Glitter and Be Gay” with ease—like hitting four high-E flats is the aural equivalent of running out to get coffee. She’s outstanding, and reason enough to see the show.

Candide’s journey takes him from Bavaria to Uruguay, even to the fabled city of El Dorado, until he realizes that optimism, contrary to the teachings of his “master” Dr. Pangloss (David Pichette), is just the “obstinate insistence that all is for the best.” But as twisted as Voltaire’s story gets—they spend a lot of time with an old woman with one buttock—its commentary on class distinctions and true satisfaction is ultimately hopeful; it makes for a worthwhile story to reinvent once again.

Candide runs through June 13 at 5th Avenue Theatre.

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Tags: Review, Theater, 5th Avenue Theatre, Final Weekend

Review: Legally Blonde

The movie-turned-musical is all charm, sass, and squeals.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Mar 01, 2010 at 02:00PM 0 Comments

Sorority sisters back up Elle (Becky Gulsvig) as her “Greek chorus” (get it?) in Legally Blonde the Musical. Photo courtesy Joan Marcus.

Someone asked me this morning what I thought of Legally Blonde—the movie-to-musical now playing at 5th Avenue Theatre —and before I could stop myself, out came: “Super fun.” Sorority-speak had gone to the brain after a night spent watching the surprisingly clever adaptation of Reese Witherspoon’s box-office hit. Sure, the show opens with Delta Nu sisters in Juicy Couture jumpsuits squealing and singing “Omigod You Guys,” but what it lacks in substance it makes up for in spunk, with one of Broadway’s most endearing heroines since Elphaba’s misunderstood Wicked witch. Becky Gulsvig is perfectly cast as Elle Woods: a Malibu blonde who decides to win back her ex, Warner (golden-voiced Jeff McLean), by following him to Harvard Law. She of hot pink outfits and heart-shaped notebooks doesn’t quite fit in at Hahh-vard, so she seeks solace in a hair salon. And so the story goes…

Director/choreographer Jerry Mitchell takes this fish-out-of-water tale and gives it a makeover, complete with imaginative dance routines—“Whipped Into Shape” is a song-and-jump-rope number—and bit characters (including two dogs) that now steal the show. To quote hair stylist Paulette (a hysterical Natalie Joy Johnson), Ven Daniel’s hunky UPS guy is “walking porn,” with a strut and soundtrack that prompted more than a few catcalls from the ladies in the audience. And though the music is largely forgettable, the lyrics are not. After the climactic courtroom scene, you might leave musing: “Is he gay…or European?”

Legally Blonde plays at 5th Avenue Theatre through March 14.

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Tags: Review, Theater, 5th Avenue Theatre, Legally Blonde

Review: South Pacific

In Bart Sher’s adaptation, “Happy Talk” is racier than you ever imagined.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Feb 01, 2010 at 12:00PM 0 Comments

Bloody Mary gets real in this adaptation of South Pacific. Photo courtesy Peter Coombs.

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Bloody Mary gets real in this adaptation of South Pacific. Photo courtesy Peter Coombs.

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Lonely sailors show Bloody Mary a little love in South Pacific, now through February 21 at 5th Avenue Theatre. Photo courtesy Peter Coombs.

In the 1958 film version of South Pacific, what you see is what you get. Polynesian woman Bloody Mary is all smiles as she sings “Happy Talk,” gently urging a young Lieutenant Cable to bed and wed her daughter Liat. The lieutenant makes googly eyes at Liat while Liat does those chirpy “talky talk” hand gestures. They’re clearly in love, and the Mama Hen couldn’t be prouder.

But look closer, says stage director Bart Sher, whose adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical opened at 5th Avenue Theatre last night. In the original text based on James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize–winning short stories, you find a darker truth behind the glossy “guy loves girl” storyline. “First of all, [Bloody Mary’s] not even Polynesian—she’s from Vietnam, and an imported worker,” Sher told us in a recent interview. “And ‘Happy Talk’ was about a woman trying to sell her daughter to somebody to get her out of poverty. When you played it for what it was, it changed how you heard the song.”

Indeed it does. In the touring production of Sher’s hit Broadway revival, “Happy Talk” turns desperate as Bloody Mary (Keala Settle), a pitbull in black lipstick, tries to make a sale. It’s a subtle change—one of several that gives some much-needed depth to the 1949 script. Sher’s South Pacific isn’t just about dames; it’s also “about race, and a world of people going through enormous changes, and about the risk and anxiety of war,” he said. Through restored dialogue (cut from the original play), we learn more about Nellie Forbush—a wide-eyed nurse from Arkansas who claims she’s “born with” her prejudices—and Lieutenant Cable, a preppy Princeton grad who worries what the gang at home would think of his “native” girl.

But fear not, fans of enchanted evenings. This three-hour version still has the memorable score, the original orchestrations, sets and backdrops straight from Lincoln Center, and a Nellie (Carmen Cusack) with a Wicked pedigree, beautiful voice and plenty of cock-eyed optimism. Remember: Sher is, and always will be, an entertainer. This is the guy whose first play as artistic director of Intiman Theatre—Shakespeare’s Cymbeline —had singing cowboys. Ten years later, there are jiving GIs…but that’s only the beginning.

South Pacific runs through February 21 at 5th Avenue Theatre.

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Tags: reviews, Theater, South Pacific, 5th Avenue Theatre, Bart Sher