Here they are getting ready in a storage closet at the Frye Art Museum.
Here they are getting ready in a Frye Art Museum storage closet. The Frye doesn't have a green room. Kelly O

On opening night of Genius/21 Century/Seattle, a retrospective of artists who've won Stranger Genius Awards, Frye Art Museum director Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker admitted to the crowd that they didn't know what a green room was before they undertook this exhibition.

The reason the Frye needs a green room these days is because, in addition to the four-month-long art exhibition, the Frye commissioned a bunch of original performances. When I interviewed Sarah Rudinoff and Chris Jeffries about what they're going to perform tonight, we did it in a storage closet filled with buckets, galoshes, and museum lights.

Chris Jeffries is an omni-talented musician who has composed the music and the book for many original musicals. ("The book" is just fancy musical-theater talk for "the words.") His musicals are about such topics as Fatty Arbuckle, Russian revolutionaries, Oedipus Rex, and gay icons. He's also Dina Martina's laconic accompanist at Re-Bar.

Sarah Rudinoff is an actor and singer who can bring down the house big-budget productions at places like 5th Avenue Theatre, but is most admired among critics for her envelope-pushing autobiographical solo shows.

Their Frye performances this weekend are going to be a mix of all of the above—original songs, Joni Mitchell songs, storytelling, and more. Referencing Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ("Never mix, never worry"), they're calling their Frye collaboration "Mix/Worry."

What will you be performing at the Frye?

RUDINOFF: We're doing an excerpt from my solo show Go There. Chris played piano underneath all the stories in that show. He probably references close to 150 songs in the underscoring of that show. And then we're doing four original Chris Jeffries compositions from different musicals that he's written.

JEFFRIES: And then two songs from yet-to-be-produced musicals. One is from a Jack Kerouac novel. It's possible it's the first approved stage adaptation of a Kerouac novel. And the other is a song based on a famous Craigslist missed-connection post about two men in love.

RUDINOFF: And then we're collaborating on a Joni Mitchell mash-up. We're doing "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and "The Magdalene Laundries."

JEFFRIES: Two late Joni Mitchell songs interspersed with a prose passage from Roberto Bolaño's 2666 about the serial murders of women in Juarez.

Read more of that interview here.

They perform at the Frye tonight at 7 pm and Saturday at 2 pm.