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

Holiday Bizarre: A Jewish Christmas! Now a New Musical

The wholly unholy Christmas parody Wisemen opens December 13.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Dec 05, 2011 at 09:45AM 0 Comments

Photo courtesy Ish Ishmael

Bad Santa.

The lovable schmendriks behind Tractor Tavern’s annual Holiday Bizarre: A Jewish Christmas! have turned their unholy Christmas parody into a fully formed musical this year, complete with equity actors and a klezmer/hip-hop/mariachi score. Opening December 13 at ACT, Wisemen follows three lawyers—Goldberg, Frankenstein, and Murray—hired to represent Joseph in a paternity trial over Mary’s pregnancy. An anti-Semitic Santa, gangsta-rapping Easter Bunny, and God preside, and the pope gets his own slow jam. “It’s very absurdist,” says cocreator Eli Rosenblatt. You don’t say.

Wisemen is at ACT Theatre Dec 13–22.

Read on for more of our top holiday season picks.

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Tags: Theater, Holiday Events, ACT

The Variety Show Is a ‘Hypnotic Circus’

Dance-theater performance lets big talent dabble in the absurd.

Posted by: Allyson Marrs on Apr 26, 2011 at 01:30PM 1 Comments

Photo: courtesy Gennadiy Kondratyev.

Spectrum Dance, Seattle Dance Project, and ACT team up for The Variety Show.

Cross-dressing hosts. Floozies with hula hoops. Two nearly naked men jumping in sync to Method Man’s “Release Yo’Self.” You can’t call it The Variety Show without holding true to the name. But this crazed collection of short dance-theater pieces benefits from the touch of star choreographers—Spectrum Dance’s Donald Byrd and Seattle Dance Project’s Timothy Lynch among them—and two beloved emcees, Cherdonna and Lou. It’s a hypnotic circus of cabaret and clowning, Euro disco and somber solos.

But the fun starts with the Cherdonna and Lou show, whose appearances are fleeting but memorable. Lou, rocking a gold pantsuit and George Michael scruff, plays a tiny piano as Amazonian Cherdonna—a blonde Frankenfurter in a skin-tight leotard—perches on top, singing “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” They bring the laughs, while pieces like Lola, featuring Kylie Lewallen, show a darker fury, the agony of lust. Lewallen plays the sorceress, placing a Bellatrix-style Cruciatus Curse on three men who writhe about in pain on the floor. It’s hard to look talented while playing the tortured soul; these guys pull it off.

And then there are those hula-hooping floozies: three dames in lingerie, garters and feathers trying to impress judge Tim Lynch with their less-than-stellar hula hooping. Donald Byrd directs their slow seduction, and sets it to Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Alabama Song.” Like the rest of the show, this piece embraces the unconventional, and gives some very talented dancers the opportunity to let loose—even forgoing the traditional curtain call to flail about the stage, with a skip and a twirl.

The Variety Show, a collaboration by Spectrum Dance Theater, Seattle Dance Project, and ACT’s Central Heating Lab, is on at ACT Apr 28–30, and then at Spectrum Dance Theater Studio May 6 & 7.

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Tags: Dance, ACT , Spectrum Dance , Seattle Dance Project

Spreading the Wealth: ACT Gives Big Money to Intiman, Seattle Rep

It was a fundraising gala to remember.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Mar 08, 2011 at 04:00PM 2 Comments

ACT’s executive director gave big to Seattle Rep and struggling Intiman Theatre on March 4.

File this under Reasons To Love Seattle: In a classy move on Friday, the executive director of A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) donated big money to both Seattle Repertory Theatre and Intiman Theatre at the Rep’s annual gala fundraiser—a boon for Intiman, which needs to raise $1 million by September to stay in business. The Puget Sound Business Journal reports that during a Raise the Paddle live auction, ACT’s Carlo Scandiuzzi “leapt to his feet to say he [and wife Laile] would not only match every $100 donation, turning it into $200 for the Rep, but he would also give another $100 per raised paddle to Intiman…. At that point, almost every paddle at the gala shot up in the air.”

The Scandiuzzis ultimately donated $42,000—$22,000 split between Seattle Rep and Intiman—and prompted 5th Avenue Theatre board member Kenny Alhadeff and his wife Maureen to give money to ACT. I mean, where else does this happen?! When do competitors give so readily to each other? Would Starbucks bail out Dunkin’ Donuts? It gives me the chills, the good kind.

According to its website today, Intiman has raised $146,471.51 with a goal of $500,000 by the end of March. To find out more or to donate, go to intiman.org.

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Tags: Seattle Repertory Theatre, Theater, ACT , Intiman Theatre, Fundraiser

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

Recommended: The Female of the Species

ACT Theatre’s latest mainstage play pokes fun at feminism.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Jun 29, 2010 at 11:00AM 0 Comments

Suzy Hunt makes writer’s block look like fun in The Female of the Species. Photo courtesy Chris Bennion.

Within the first five minutes of ACT Theatre’s latest play, The Female of the Species, Margot Mason (Suzy Hunt) has deftly removed her bra and tossed it to the ground, where it lies just beneath the floral…err, vitality of a Georgia O’Keefe print hanging on the wall. Tribal statuettes adorn the mantelpiece of Mason’s study; a MacBook sits idly on her desk. If there was ever a caricature of a feminist writer in her element, this is it.

But rather than descend into clichés, Joanna Murray-Smith’s send-up of feminism—based on the true story of 1970s feminist icon Germaine Greer—is a whip-smart satire that manages to poke fun at dogma on both sides of the gender divide. Equality of the sexes, you could say. No one is spared: the aging, arrogant writer/professor who seems to have peaked with tomes The Cerebral Vagina and Madame Ovary. The seriously disgruntled former student, Molly (Renata Friedman), who holds Mason at gunpoint in her own home (remember, true story!), but is actually a softie who wants a caring man and lots of babies. There’s Mason’s daughter, Tess (the hilarious Morgan Rowe), an overworked, undersexed housewife, and her metrosexual husband Bryan (Paul Morgan Stetler). There’s a brutish cab driver who’s a caveman-philosopher, a stylish gay publisher—they all have a role in this farce.

Director Allison Narver sends characters in and out of the hostage scene at a healthy clip, keeping the insanity moving briskly as the gun is bobbled and gender politics debated. Though plot choices often come second to witty banter—with characters appearing for contrived reasons—the acting is so strong, the jokes so well wrought, that you just kind of shrug and let it unfold. To steal a quote from the play: “Feminism needs theatricality; otherwise it’s pompous wind.” It’s certainly ripe material for a good comedy.

The Female of the Species runs at ACT Theatre through July 18.

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Tags: Review, Review, Theater, ACT

Five Q’s for the Soft Rock Kid

Mark Siano knows ’80s music and where to find skeleton pajamas.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Feb 23, 2010 at 09:00AM 1 Comments

They’re the best around: Mark Siano and the Freedom Dancers.

If you haven’t seen The Soft Rock Kid before, here’s what you need to know: Local comedian Mark Siano and an assortment of buddies, the Freedom Dancers, celebrate all things ‘80s with their musical parody of cult classic The Karate Kid. Spandex, cheesy Phil Collins tunes, and big, big dance numbers with more than a hint of Flashdance and Dirty Dancing are included. It’s either a girls’ slumber party on stage, or a moment of genius—I haven’t decided.

But it’s very popular, and it plays at ACT Theatre for the last time ever this weekend. Before the Freedom Dancers hang up their leg warmers, Siano answers four random questions (and one legitimate one).

What’s your favorite Karate Kid moment?

When he crane-kicks the bad guy in the face at the end.

Do you know where to find skeleton pajamas like the ones the Cobra Kai kids wear on Halloween?

Try Party @ Display and Costume Supply around Halloween. [Display and Costume has stores in Seattle, Issaquah, and Everett.]

Where in the city should people go to dance to ’80s music?

Noc Noc has an ‘80s night, but I’ve yet to frequent it. The best dancing is at Neighbours (1509 Broadway) and they keep the ’80s in high rotation.

Which Phil Collins song do you like better: “Sussudio” or “You Can’t Hurry Love”?

Easy—“Sussudio” is way more fun.

Any new projects in the works?

I’m creating a new show for El Gaucho’s Pampas Room called Shaken, Not Stirred. It’s a ’50s Dean Martin-style music, comedy, and dance show that comes with an amazing four-course dinner. It starts Saturday, March 27.

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Tags: Theater, Soft Rock Kid, ACT