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Theater

On Stage: The Art of Racing in the Rain Opens Tonight

Book-It Repertory Theatre adapts Garth Stein’s best seller—just don’t expect furry costumes.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Apr 20, 2012 at 09:00AM Speech Bubble 1 Comments

Man’s best friend Pup Enzo (David S. Hogan) and his human Denny (Eric Riedmann)

Photo: Courtesy Alan Alabastro

David S. Hogan sounds like he’s training to be a boxer: weight lifting, resistance training, jogging. Six days a week of workouts, more than he’s ever done to get ready for a part in a show. Then again, he’s never had to play a different species before.

Hogan has big paws to fill this month when he stars as loyal mutt Enzo in the stage premiere of Garth Stein’s best-selling novel The Art of Racing in the Rain, newly adapted by Book-It Repertory Theatre. Not only is the character beloved by pet owners and animal apathetics alike, but playing the furry narrator demands hours spent crawling (or racing) around on your hands and knees. Anyone over the age of two would agree: That ain’t fun.

The even greater challenge, though, is embodying a not-so-ordinary pooch who dreams of being reincarnated as a man. He yearns for opposable thumbs and scorns the monkeys who don’t deserve them. While the theater has produced other stories featuring dogs—John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, Pam Houston’s Cowboys Are My Weakness—Book-It co–artistic director Myra Platt, who adapted Racing for the stage, said “we still struggled with Enzo’s particular desirous destiny to become human…. Casting an actor to portray a dog: we wondered, would there be enough dramatic tension in hearing a dog talk on and on about how much he wished he could talk?”

Find out how Book-It brings Racing to the stage in our April feature ‘This Dog’s Life’.

The Art of Racing in the Rain
Opening night Apr 20, thru May 13
$22–$44, Center Theatre (formerly Center House Theatre)

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Tags: Theater, Seattle Center, Book-It Rep, Seattle Center House, Garth Stein, Dog Lovers

Recap

The Week in Review(s)

Misfits and oddballs ruled our cultural calendar.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Sep 30, 2011 at 03:00PM Speech Bubble 0 Comments

Photo courtesy Washington Ensemble Theatre.

Boys will be boys Tim Smith-Stewart as Emory in MilkMilk Lemonade.

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Pick of the Week Book-it Repertory Theatre should take more chances, like it did adapting Olympia novelist Jim Lynch’s Border Songs. While there’s an inherently juicy narrative about guards patrolling the Washington–British Columbia border for drug smugglers, illegal immigrants, and terrorists, that’s not what this story is about, and certainly not why we care. We’re in it for Brandon Vanderkool. Played by Patrick Allcorn, Brandon is a 6’8, dyslexic, bird-loving Border Patrol agent who’s as quirky as a Miranda July film. You’re expected to write off Brandon as a nitwit—but there’s something special about this gentle giant. Are all border guards this misunderstood? Closes Oct 9.

Rolling in the hay’ With a few more dance routines, Washington Ensemble Theatre’s MilkMilk Lemonade could be It Gets Better: The Musical. Inside the barn on a lonely chicken farm, two fifth grade boys play house. Like adults. They don’t really know what sex or sexuality is yet—life’s truths are simpler at this age. Like: Effeminate little Emory will get beat up if he sings show tunes at school. Pyromaniac bully Elliot can’t tell anyone he likes Emory. And someday Emory’s best friend Linda—a talking chicken—might end up on his dinner plate. Despite learning early on that life is f’n hard, this lovable cast of misfits, led by adorable grown-up Tim Smith-Stewart as Emory, empowers us to hold our heads high during a choreographed ribbon dance. Closes Oct 10.

Ballet’s “It Boy” Now I know why Christopher Wheeldon is one of the most in-demand choreographers in modern ballet. On opening night of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s All Wheeldon program, I left enamored by two completely different performances: the spare and tender “After the Rain pas de deux” by Maria Chapman and Karel Cruz, and a gleeful one-act comedy ballet that goes behind the scenes of a dance rehearsal. Wheeldon understands both nuance and parody, creating kooky prima ballerinas (Laura Gilbreath) and lasting images. I likely won’t forget Chapman, bent over backwards and frozen in place, carried across the stage like a prop by a bare-chested Cruz. Closes Oct 2.

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Tags: Review, Theater, PNB, Dance, WET, Book-It Rep

Theater Review

Book-It to the Center House for Sense and Sensibility

It feels just like falling in love with Austen for the first time.

Posted by: Annie Rose Favreau on Jun 07, 2011 at 03:35PM Speech Bubble 0 Comments

Do I spy a husband over there?
Photo courtesy Alan Alabastro.

As the plucky Dashwood sisters of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility navigate the treacherous ranks of the English gentry, couples get together, break up, and form new relationships with alarming regularity. They’re spurred on by gold-diggers, broken vows, and secret engagements; basically, it’s much ado about falling in love for a second time.

So it’s fitting that Book-It Repertory Theater’s new adaptation gives audiences the chance to fall for Sense and Sensibility all over again.

As per Book-It’s trademark style of interweaving narration with dialogue, the play pulls its heart, wit, and wry society jabs directly from the text. For an author often considered prim, Austen certainly has bite: “Colonel Brandon is the kind of man everybody speaks well of and nobody cares about, whom everybody is delighted to see and nobody remembers to talk to.”

The show’s pace is breathless—in a good way. With a few words of narration and a slide of a drape, you’ve switched from the countryside to London. Pete Rush’s uncomplicated set makes the most of the Center House’s bizarre performance space, using tracked curtains to create rooms, silhouette screens, a death shroud, and the rolling hills of England.

The play’s strength is its cast, where the delight is in the details: Marianne’s (Jessica Martin) melodramatic head toss as she flings herself down on the chaise lounge, Elinor (Kjerstine Anderson) letting her snark flag fly in dry side comments to the audience. John Dashwood (Shawn Law) has a desperate need for wifely approval—he looks like the Regency era-equivalent of Beaker the Muppet. Lucy Steel’s (Angela DiMarco) precise facial expressions run the gamut from sly to OMG.

But the actors’ swift tempo also bulldozes through some important sequences. Though I’m usually a David Quicksall fan, he didn’t take time to explore the moments of vulnerability that make Colonel Brandon so attractive. At these points, the show feels like a “best of” scene list from the novel, rather than a theatrical production in its own right. Yet while Austen’s original book will always be the favored lover, I certainly didn’t mind spending the evening in the arms of this adaptation.

Book-It’s Sense and Sensibility runs at the Center House Theater thru June 26.

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Tags: Review, Theater, Book-It Rep

Theater

Book-It Tackles Great Expectations

Seattle’s great book adaptor presents literature’s most lovelorn orphan.

Posted by: James Ross Gardner on Feb 16, 2011 at 11:00AM Speech Bubble 1 Comments

Pip synch The orphaned protagonist in Great Expectations (Lee Osorio), no matter the version, always gets the cold shoulder from Estella (Sylvie Davidson). Photo: courtesy Alan Alabastro.

We’re going to get into Book-It Repertory Theatre’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations in a second, but first… poor Pip.

Poor, poor Pip. An escaped convict threatens to gut the orphaned protagonist like a mackerel. His big ugly sister seems to be under the impression she’s raising a punching bag rather than a younger sibling. And when Pip does catch a break—with a gig playing at some batty rich lady’s house—he’s ridiculed by the mansion’s pre-teen Succubus. And, battered house orphan that he is, he gets a crush on the girl.

Sure, he falls into some dough thanks to a mystery benefactor—which allows him to dodge a grimy future as a small town blacksmith. But even that turns to spoiled figgy pudding when Pip learns that the benefactor is Mr. Gut-An-Orphan himself, the escaped convict (who ends up being a pretty decent guy in the end, but still). Also, Christ, how many incarnations must a fictional character take on?

Western Civ has been reinventing Pip ever since Dickens penned the story a century and a half ago, most famously in the 1946 film adaptation of the novel (directed by David Lean). The film is a dark, surprisingly faithful and satisfying take on the book, and—bonus!—Alec “Obi-Wan Kenobi” Guinness plays Pip’s sidekick. But the farce is strong with this one: Grown-up Pip, in his 20s in the novel, is played by John Mills, then nearly 40.

Fast forward five decades—and a metric Pip load of BBC adaptations—and Ethan Hawke takes on the role opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in a modern update set in Manhattan. Then a slew of more made-for-TV versions. And then there’s South Park Pip, a recurring character on the Comedy Central cartoon who get’s his own episode in the show’s raunchy adaptation of the Dickens tale (see below).

Fortunately, Book-It’s Pip (Lee Osorio) seems just right. This is in part thanks to Osorio’s performance—studied, tortured, narrowed eyes telegraphing the character’s moral ambivalence—but also thanks to a superb script by Lucinda Stroud. The actors read expository lines straight from the novel, often referring to their own characters in the third person. (Watching the play, it’s tempting to pose a challenge: Could Book-It pull off an adaptation of any novel? Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian? Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park?)

The script, the minimal cast (nine actors, most playing more than one character), and the Spartan set (comprised mostly of benches and bed sheets) strip the story down to its thematic core in a way that not even Dickens, with his sometimes bloated, paid-per-word prose, was able to do.

What we’re left with, to turn in our minds long after we’ve poured out of the Seattle Center’s Center House Theatre and shouldered into the windswept, concrete landscape below the Space Needle, is the novel’s essence, its central themes of class struggle, unrequited love, and identity—identity reinvented again and again and again.

Okay, now is the time on Culture Fiend when we watch South Park’s take on Great Expectations…