If you haven't seen The Nexus Project yet—and if you're content to watch Obama on every blog in the goddamned country tomorrow morning—tonight's your night.

The Nexus Project is a bunch of short plays by (mostly) good Seattle-affiliated writers: Paul Mullin, Elizabeth Heffron, Mike Daisey, Scot Augustson, Marya Sea Kaminski, Waxie Moon, Stephanie Timm, and so on. (My review here.)

From director Mark Jared Zufelt:

tonight I wanted to make you aware of a very special talkback we're having with NEXUS playwrights MIKE DASIEY (author of 21 DOG YEARS), PAUL MULLIN (2008 Stranger Genius Award-Winner) and SCOT AUGUSTSON (author of the delightfully adult Srgt Rigsby puppet shows). Admission is free, with the purchase of a ticket to NEXUS Program B, TONIGHT (7:30PM) at Richard Hugo House.

Normally, I'm against "talk-backs" always and everywhere (I can't even write the word without scare quotes).

But Daisey, Mullin, and Augustson are three of the best talkers I've ever met. They're all funny, gutsy, and fast on their feet. It doesn't matter whether they're talking about theater or Swedish meatballs—you should go.

(And it won't be rebroadcast on every blog in the goddamned country tomorrow morning.)

^{This Loamy Excellence, by Mike Daisey.}

The Seattle Rep just dubbed Jerry Manning—an old man of the mountain in Seattle theater—as its acting artistic director. (How does the Puget Sound Business Journal always get arts-administration stories up so quickly?)

He's directed some good shows around Seattle. (A few: John Lennon's Gargoyle at Schmeater, Thom Pain at the Rep, the long-running Stones in His Pockets at the building formerly known as CHAC, the doomed production of Nocturne that ran for two seconds, and so on.)

The Rep is being cagey about whether Manning will slide from "acting artistic director" to "artistic director" once Esbjornson leaves. According to the swifties at PSB:

In his new position as acting artistic director, Manning will work side by side with Managing Director Benjamin Moore while the theater’s board evaluates its organizational model to determine the appropriate artistic and business-management structure.

The board will complete that process before beginning a search for a permanent artistic director.

Locals seems to be winning at the regional theaters lately—just what they've always wanted, right? Intiman hires Sheila Daniels (and, to be fair, some guy from Pasadena), the Rep hires Manning, ACT hires Carlo Scandiuzzi, and the shows running at Intiman and ACT? All local actors.

It's what theater folks have been clamoring for for years—except for the niggling feeling that theaters are doing this out of compulsion, not conviction. Because they can't afford fancy out-of-towners any more.

Now when they start producing local playwrights, then you'll know they're really in trouble. (That one's for you, Paul Mullin. And you, Scot Augustson. And all y'all.)

Anyway: temporary congratulations to the Rep's new temporary artistic director. (And apologies for my cynical reading of what is doubtlessly a well-deserved promotion.)

Intiman has been looking around to replace the steely, capable Laura Penn for months now. The search ended a few days ago, when Intiman found Brian Colburn, the 35-year-old managing director of Pasadena Playhouse for the last four years.

He seems like a good hire for a bunch of reasons:

One. Colburn is young, and all regional theaters want to do these days is youth themselves up.

Two. Pasadena Playhouse is a quality establishment, a lovely little Spanish mission-style building with a courtyard a nice fountain.

It lives in a smart community—Caltech people, NASA people, the Jet Propulsion Lab people—that also supports the Norton Simon Museum. The only play I've seen there, Orson's Shadow back in February, was quality. Nothing revolutionary, but quality.

(The play dramatizes real-life rehearsals where Orson Welles directed Laurence Olivier in a production of Ionesco's Rhinoceros, with New Yorker theater critic Kenneth Tynan working as a kind of dramaturge. It's a fucking disaster.)

Three. The Playhouse is in good financial shape. It brought in $9 million in revenue in 2006—the most recent year for which tax forms are publicly available—and ended the year with a $2.7 million surplus. (Intiman, by contrast, brought in $6 million in 2007 and spent about as much.)

Four. The Playhouse also hosts a fringe company—the Furious Theater¹—something Intiman, and every regional theater in America, should do. Big theaters lending their resources to nimbler, more adventurous organizations can only help them.

ACT is already leaning in that direction with Central Heating Lab, which presents fringe theater, dance, burlesque, comedy, and other stuff you wouldn't normally expect to see in a regional theater. ACT wisely hired the Lab's founder, Carlo Scandiuzzi, as managing director a few weeks ago. (You can read the Theater News column about that here.)

So that's two promising managing directors in just two weeks—a bizarrely good streak for Seattle theater.

¹Furious Theater, incidentally, produced the Los Angeles premiere of Back of the Throat, by local playwright Yussef El Guindi. That play had its world premiere at Theater Schmeater and went on good reception and reviews in NYC and LA.

This week, in my profile of burlesque/"boylesque" dancer Waxie Moon (aka Marc Kenison: Juilliard graduate, dancer for the prestigious José Limón Company, co-founder of Washington Ensemble Theatre), I wrote:

Waxie introduced something new to burlesque: pathos.

I was talking about a little pathos in her character, her peculiar combination of diva and busted ho.

Little did I know she was about to release this, which kicks pathos-in-burlesque to a whole new plateau.

Now that's what I didn't know I was talking about.

Read the rest of the story—which features a leather daddy, Waxie stripping for Cyndi Lauper and Fred Schneider, and Diana Ross acting like a total bitch—here.

Last night, just before 11 pm, I was walking past the police station at 12th and Pine. As I passed the entrance, a man in a head-to-toe Carmen Miranda costume (complete with towering fruit turban) came storming out.

He looked at me and shouted, "THEY WOULDN'T READ ME MY CARMEN MIRANDA RIGHTS!"

I love a man who can really commit to a pun.

You know what you should do this weekend?

Go to Smoke Farm, that raw, 360-acre wonderland just an hour north of Seattle that is slowly becoming the place where I want to die—down by the river, on a late spring evening—and let the coyotes chew on my bones.

(Briefly: Smoke Farm is a former dairy farm run by a few well-intentioned people—Stuart Smithers, a UPS philosophy professor; Craig Hollow, a local architect; others—where good things happen. It has hosted theater and literary retreats, education programs, medieval cook-outs with the best chefs in Seattle, and so on. There's a field where people camp, a river where people swim, a rustic kitchen where people congregate and meet and cook and drink: It's pretty much paradise.)

Smoke Farm's third annual performance festival begins tomorrow. It's $25, including dinner and camping. (Cheap!) The acts will vary: some of last year's performances were awful, one—by Implied Violence—was shattering, and the dinner was prompt, plentiful, and delicious.

This year's roster has some promising folks:

Circus Contraption
PDL
Doug Nufer
Matthew Richter
Left Field Revival
and others

Dinner by Seth Caswell (formerly of the Stumbling Goat). Good weather by God.

More information here.

Here's a story for the folks who are constantly bitching about the lack of arts funding and think the government should just, like, pay for our theaters:

The Japanese theater world is currently in crisis over the question of to whom public theaters belong, since the decision by the New National Theatre Tokyo (NNTT) to appoint new artistic directors for each of its three divisions.

The Japanese government lavishly finances the NNTT and, as a result, treats it like a government bureaucracy. Which is causing major fuckups:

Tadaaki Otaka, the new artistic director of opera, who is slated to succeed Hiroshi Wakasugi, first learned of his appointment when he read about it in a newspaper. Otaka himself had never officially accepted the job.

More perplexing is the replacement of Hitoshi Uyama, the current artistic director of theater, who was appointed only last autumn. Uyama's productions of "Yakiniku Dragon" and "A Japanese Named Otto" (which he also directed), were both well received by critics and the public.

Granted: It'd be peachy for American artists to have more no-strings access to government money.

But that just isn't going to happen.

Even if the American government sponsored theaters, it would try to control them more tightly—and fuck them up more badly—than the Japanese government does.

Why? Because we're a big, diverse country with a reactionary conservative streak 2,000 miles wide. And nobody, elected or appointed, wants to risk his or her cushy government job on a visionary artistic director. Or playwright. Or director. Or anything.

So we're stuck with foundations and individual patrons, whose donations will dry up as the economy gets worse.

Which leaves us with old-fashioned capitalism, of the DIY rock 'n' roll variety, where you just cobble it together and make it work.

All this "actors deserve get a living wage" rhetoric thrown around by actors' unions and regional theaters—and, famously, Mike Daisey, in this essay for The Stranger—is, I'm sorry to say, totally unrealistic.

Sure, actors deserve living wages (everybody deserves living wages) but they ain't gonna get them any more than most rock 'n' rollers will get living wages. The analogy isn't as specious as you might think: regional theaters (as we know them) are going down, just like record labels (as we know them) are going down.

And when the theaters crumble, they're taking the unions (especially Actor's Equity) with them.

Then the only people left will be the cockroaches—the people with true grit who want to make theater because they want to make theater.

Theater, again, will become a deep calling with no promise of financial reward. (Which, I'm sorry to say, might even improve the form as a whole.)

We'll never be like Europe. We'll never be like Japan.

So all you theater artists are going to have to do it for yourselves: Produce burlesque shows to subsidize your experimental dramas; live in warehouses (like these guys); learn a goddamned trade (like this guy); seek out your own private Medicis—I know, that's a tall order the West Coast, where the nouveau riche haven't figured out how to be art patrons yet. But somebody's got to teach them. Might as well be you.

(And please do not rack up debt by going to a grad school that will only teach you to navigate Hollywood and the doomed regional theaters. Unless you're planning on being an LA star, it's a waste of precious time and money. Just get out there and make work.)

You can mewl about "living wages" and "not enough arts funding" while your theaters burn, but that won't put out the fire.

Nothing will.

One sentence, written by Annie Wagner, has appeared in almost every issue of The Stranger for the last three years. That sentence is:

The real point is not the adult-catechism monologue, but the script's gaps, in which Sister Aubrey Manning dispenses tissues to cover salacious displays of flesh and kitschy prizes to reward the dumbstruck targets of her improvisations.

That is from Wagner's review of the long-long-long-running Late-Nite Catechism and has lived in the theater calendar since she wrote it in 2005.

It's an elegant sentence. It explains a lot—the show, its tone, its themes, its audience—in a few well-chosen words. It is also unassailable. I've tried to edit it many times for space, never to my satisfaction. Like most Annie Wagner constructions, it has an underlying logic of interlocking parts hidden by a deceptively smooth surface. It's both rigorous and pleasant.

The 11-year-old Late-Nite Catechism closes at the end of August—which is also when Annie Wagner leaves The Stranger, and Seattle, for Chicago.

(Chicago, incidentally, is the city where Late-Nite Catechism was conceived and originally produced.)

That is Seattle's tribute to Ms. Wagner. Without her, the Catechism cannot go on.

As I damn well warned ya'll earlier, I was a guest on The Stay Up Late Show with Rebecca Davis last Saturday night. What joy!

We chortled, we chatted, I managed to name all of the damn Golden Girls characters, first and last names (shut up), and I honestly answered more personal questions than I generally consider healthy.

We even discussed little things like Jean Enersen (and her pursuant rumors), the fucking Real World, Seattle (don't ask me why), and whether or not I’ve ever seen Dan Savage naked (um, no). I was on with an opera singer/philanthropist called Jeffrey Henry, and a cute shaggy-headed comedian from Last Comic Standing called Jesse Case, and it was all just too freakishly delightful. And I heartily urge you to catch the next one. Which isn’t until next month, so you’ll have plenty of to get your outfit together. So. Start now.

Ooh! How dazzling you'll be!

This performance is better than what you get on certain stages, no?

New York magazine has a collection of head shots of actors who are trying out for the lead role in the (atrocious-sounding) upcoming Spider-Man musical. Is the new singing, dancing superhero to be found here?

Those who don't know about the upcoming Spider-Man musical, which will be directed by Julie Taymor with music by Bono and the Edge, can find more information here.

In the venerable tradition of releasing potentially controversial news on Friday afternoons—in the eternal hope that journalists will already be too drunk to report it—ACT Theatre has announced that its old managing director, Kevin Hughes, is stepping down after nine months.

Taking his place (with the title "executive director"): Carlo Scandiuzzi, an excellent choice.

Mr. Scandiuzzi—a bright, energetic Swiss-Italian who grew up in Geneva—has been deeply involved in Seattle's arts scene since the early days at the Empty Space, when he was an actor. (His first production was The Return of Pinocchio, playing alongside ACT's current artistic director, Kurt Beattie.)

He was a concert promoter in the 1970s (bringing Devo, Nina Hagen, Iggy Pop, The Ramones, John Cale, and other to town). In the 1980s, he collaborated with local performance artists like Jesse Bernstein.

Scandiuzzi went on to produce films, founded IndieFlix and become a philanthropist, throwing money at theater, dance, and the Central Library downtown, which named a room after him.

His recent masterstroke was starting ACT's Central Heating Lab, profiled here:

People have been calling for the death of regional theater since it was born. The regionals are moribund for dozens of reasons: exhausted economies, overhead and union costs that keep tickets prices high, an old and dying subscriber base, their inability to adapt to a younger audience (viz., its preference for buying single tickets instead of subscriptions), and, of course, their failure to not bore the shit out of people.

But ACT, one of the feebler regionals (it nearly died of debt five years ago), is showing signs of renewed vigor with something called the Central Heating Lab, led by Carlo Scandiuzzi...

The Heating Lab promises something vital, something regional theaters have conspicuously lacked—a nimble, populist wing that can absorb the best local theater, dance, and literature, and put it onstage. Its genius has been to yank off the "events" blinders and start subtly programming a kind of counterseason for a whole other audience: the younger kind that likes to buy single tickets and doesn't think Alan Ayckbourn comedies about middle-aged couples having affairs are all that funny.

Coming in the next few months under the Lab's rubric: comedy by Black Daisy, Dart-Mondo, and Andy Haynes; music by "Awesome"; dance by Julie Tobiason (of Pacific Northwest Ballet); and The Adding Machine, the first production by New Century Theatre Company (the fledgling collective started by actor Paul Morgan Stetler, playwright Stephanie Timm, Stranger Genius Amy Thone, et al.).

When asked what the hell was wrong with the old managing director, ACT board president Brad Fowler was circumspect: "We were pleased with Kevin, he addressed the things we needed to focus on as we moved forward," and so on.

Fowler parried for several minutes: "But why did he step down?"

"He thought he could serve better as a consultant."

"So what was he doing that wasn't so great?"

"We were pleased with his performance."

A master of elision.

Anyway, congratulations Carlo. And congratulations ACT.

Is here.

I had high hopes for Nocturne, the famous show-length monologue by Adam Rapp that begins with the famously chilling opening:

Fifteen years ago I killed my sister. There. I said it.

Schmader reviewed it last weekend. He didn't like it:

"Fifteen years ago I killed my sister." So goes the famous opening line of Adam Rapp's Nocturne, laying out the central fact of this acclaimed solo play and leading into a characteristically Rappian flourish: "I can change the order of the words. My sister I killed 15 years ago. I, 15 years ago, killed my sister. Sister my killed I years ago 15. I can cite various definitions. To deprive of life: The farmer killed the rabid dog. To put an end to: The umpire killed the tennis match. To mark for omission: He killed the paragraph... To slay. To murder. To assassinate. To dispatch. To execute. You can play with tenses. Will kill. Did kill...."

Thanks to Rapp's relentless thesaurian pirouettes—the linguistic equivalent of treading water, prettily—his efforts are too often in vain. Saddled with a script so dense and flowery it makes Tennessee Williams look like a minimalist, Doescher is a winning actor in a no-win situation.

The thing is, I like Rapp's "thesaurian pirouettes"—not everyone's, just Rapp's. I became a Rapp fan four years ago, after seeing WET's production of Finer Noble Gasses (reviewed here), a disturbing, funny play about a small group of strung-out, vacant-eyed friends living in a trashy apartment.

One of the actors (Lathrop Walker, maybe?) had to take an extremely long onstage piss. Marya Sea Kaminski Finer Noble Gasses and told me at the time that it wasn't a trick—the actor was actually pissing in an actual bucket:

"I think he drinks like a liter and a half of water before the show," Kaminski said. "He's got it pretty well timed, but tech week was hilarious--stopping and starting the play, his bladder was in passionate confusion."

(I'm not sure I believe her, but I will always love her for saying "his bladder was in passionate confusion.")

Anyway.

Nocturne was supposed to run for three more weekends but, after Schmader's review came out, actor Craig Doescher emailed to say he was canceling the rest of the shows, but didn't blame Dave:

... in SUCH an intimate space (25 seats), it is a REALLY hard show to give/receive, no matter how much finessing, and in execution—no matter how well-intended—it just wasn’t achieving what the show could and should achieve. A darn shame, but I see it crystal-clearly, and feel responsible for people who come to my shows, so I made the difficult but necessary decision.

I don't know exactly what that means, except no more Nocturne. And that Craig Doescher has a rare, valuable sense of responsibility for his audience.

I enjoy two things: Crank calling Hillary Clinton at 3AM every morning, and 9 to 5. The movie. From 1980-ish. Waaaay before I was born. (Hush up.)

I’ve said it before (and I shall undoubtedly say it before again), I love me some 9 to 5. LOVE IT! In my list of all time favorite movies, it is right up there with Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and the movie that hasn’t been made yet that I star in that wins me an Oscar. 9 to 5 changed my life. I’m not sure exactly how, or if it was for the good, but...

The strange thing? I hadn’t seen it in at least fifteen years. Tragic! Sinful! Disturbing beyond comprehension! I know! So I did what I had to do, and I did it just last week: I Netflixed the damn thing or whatever, and, glory. How I still love it. How it fills me with joy. And how totally it holds up, baring the gigantic telephones, the conspicuous lack of PCs, and the maniacal XEROX machine the size of box car that brings Jane Fonda to tears. It holds up so well, in fact, that I spent at least twenty minutes of film time pointing at the screen and screaming, “This HAS TO BE produced for the STAGE! Do you hear me, ye gods? It just HAS to be!”

Well, ye gods were listening. Or ReBar had their damn spies following me. As usual. Behold:

For Immediate Release: IAN BELL’S BROWN DERBY SERIES! PRESENTING: A RIDICULOUSLY STAGED READING OF: 9 to 5!

Frank Hart is a pig. He takes advantage in the grossest manner of the women who work with him. When his three sassy assistants manage to trap him in his own house they assume control of his department and productivity leaps, but just how long can they keep Hart tied up? It’s revenge of the Nerds for “Office Cathies”!

Indeed! The inimitable Nick Garrison is to play Judy Bernley, Jane Fonda’s character (I would have made a great Judy Bernley--or Jane Fonda for that matter), my friend Andrew Tsakos plays Lilly Tomlin’s corpse-napping character Violet (I would have made a great Violet), Brandon Whitehead plays Mr. F. Hart (that sounds about right to me), and an actress I am not familiar with called Rebecca Davis is playing Dolly Parton’s girl, Doralee. And she better be damn good, because I would have made a spectacular Doralee. Word.

The event is only three nights, July 29th through the 31st, at, duh, ReBar. Reservations will not be taken, so come early. I will be ensconced in the front row for every performance. I might even cry a little for no apparent reason. If it happens, please, just...look away! For the love of God! Look away!

Thank you in advance.

For next April, the Rep has replaced A Winter People (an adaptation of The Cherry Orchard set in revolutionary China) with Wishful Drinking, Carrie Fisher's autobiographical solo show.

(Despite the best efforts of Mike Daisey, Allen Johnson, and Lauren Weedman, the words "autobiographical solo show" always make me a little queasy. Still, hope springs eternal.)

From the press release:

Carrie Fisher is the life of the party in Wishful Drinking. Onstage, she recounts her true and intoxicating story with the same strong, wry wit that she poured into bestsellers like Postcards from the Edge. Born to celebrity parents Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, Carrie lands among the stars when she's picked to play a princess in a little movie called Star Wars. But it isn't all sweetness and light sabers. As a single mom, she also battles addiction, depression, mental institutions, and that awful hyperspace hairdo. It's an hilarious [sic] take on an incredible tale - from having Elizabeth Taylor as a stepmother, to wedding (and shedding) Paul Simon, from having the father of her baby leave her for a man, to waking up one morning and finding a friend dead beside her in bed. Don't miss this outrageous chance to get ‘Carried' away.

Wocka, wocka, wocka!

In this week's paper, Charles Mudede writes about a film that succeeds by eschewing cinema's "fruity old aunt" (those words by Tilda Swinton), theater, Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra.

In the department of crossover artists, I'd also like to point to Implied Violence, a performance company that this weekend begins its triptych, Our Summary in Sequence. (Details and more on IV by Brendan Kiley here.)

I got a sneak-preview image of the setting they've constructed for this weekend's performances, inside a South Lake Union warehouse, and it looks like an art installation in itself.

Last night, at approximately 10 pm, approximately 100 people simultaneously texted me the precise location of Robin Williams: Laff Hole, Re-bar, sitting in the back. So I went. There he was.

_{Photos by Christopher Frizzelle.}

Old Man Williams sat through the show, laughed a little at some things and laughed a lot at others, including Face Off, the Laff Hole version of a staring contest: Two comics stand toe to toe and try to make each other laugh with short phrases. The first one to laugh or break eye contact loses. From last night's Face Off, between a man and a woman whose names I didn't catch:

Man: "Gestapo casual Friday sweater."
Woman: "Short bus orgy."

Old Man Williams loved "short bus orgy." Loved it. Clapped, shouted, quoted it later in the evening.

Then:

Man: [Makes the cunnilingus, tongue-between-fingers gesture]
Woman: In your dreams.
Man: I've had nightmares.

The woman broke. The man won.

The last comic of the evening was Ross Parson, a sad-sack comedian whose best joke is: "Stuttering only helps beat-boxers." It was his 21st birthday and, just before his set, Old Man Williams jumped on stage to sing him happy birthday and talk for awhile.

It was precisely what you'd expect: manic riffing, jumping between characters (the Angry Scotsman, the Sibilant Gay Man), jokes about anal sex and Seattle ("it's like San Francisco, but without as much money"). He showed off his calves. He grabbed his tail.

"Comedy is born—and aborted—in rooms like this!" Old Man Williams shouted. People went bananas. He went bananas.

The People's Republic of Komedy sent a dictate this morning saying Old Man Williams might return to do a longer set in the coming weeks but didn't explain why he showed up in the first place. Just passing through? Scouting for talent? Or scouting for jokes?

He does have a reputation as a joke rustler. (Radar wrote about it last year.) So if you hear "short bus orgy" in Patch Adams II, you'll know where it came from.

More photos after the jump.

Continue reading "Robin Williams Crashes Laff Hole" »

Were you in the original production of A Chorus Line that played at the Shubert Theatre in New York in the '70s and '80s (and forever changed the course of Dan Savage's life)? An email just went out to local media from the publicist at the Paramount...

I am hoping you can help us with a unique endeavor… As you may recall, the National touring engagement of A CHORUS LINE, the longest-running American musical in Broadway history, is set to take the stage at The Paramount Theatre August 5 – 10, 2008. The most recent national touring production of A CHORUS LINE, was in Seattle last during 1987!

Since the show was on Broadway for 15 years - from 1975 – 1990 - we are fairly confident that there may be a cast member or two from that original production who may now reside in the Greater Puget Sound area and we want to find them and we are hoping you can help us do that!!

See the notice below and if you could post this in the paper once or twice between now and August 1 – we are hopeful we can find some of these Broadway cast members.

No word on what they're going to do with these formerly lithe '70s sybarites who must now be all pruney and broken. Bring them up on stage? Ask them their feelings? Electrocute them? The whole notice--and the email address to use if you know anyone--is after the jump.

Continue reading "All I Ever Needed! Was the Music! And the Mirror! And the Chaaaaance! To Daaaaance! For yooooou!" »

When one knows deeply that he is wrong, as Mr. Frizzelle does, there is nothing to be done but to insult the enemy and hide behind an older writer.

Not being wrong myself, I don't mind elaborating. Mr. Kiley writes this:

Angela Pierce as Blanche gives a slick, orthodox performance, and sails through Blanche’s late-play mad scenes without succumbing to the crazy-person caricature that has wrecked so many Blanches, Ophelias, and Lears.

This is exactly right for the first nine words. Then it veers into Frizzelle Territory: Wrongton. Pierce breaks into caricature several times in her late-play mad scenes, what with the squawking and the squalling. This is what ruins Blanche at Intiman.

Stanley's fine, if you don't mind him grunting while he picks up his women as though he can't handle them. Kiley sees this as a nod to his humor and vulnerability; I see it as the equivalent of farting onstage and trying to hide it. If he's doing it for effect, I'd really like to see other signs of vulnerability in the interpretation, and there are none.

Stella: She's a rock. Stella has never seemed so solid and so desperate at once. I loved her. Wanted to be her friend. Wanted to take her away from all this. Wanted to be a new kind of Stanley for her. Do with that what you will.

As for the sound design: Mr. Frizzelle, they played the horrible, horrible music every five secs. Aren't you going a little easy on the hometown heroes? And, while we're at it: Should we trust your take on Streetcar when your take is essentially that it's great because it doesn't suck the way you expected it to?

Mary McCarthy practiced criticism, unlike Jen Graves, who practices criticism when she writes about art but merely deploys synonyms for "I don't like it" when she writes about plays on Slog that she thinks I have thought too highly of. Cornered just now about her uncharacteristically undefended critique (Blanche, we are told, is "bad"--how laconic!), Ms. Graves said that she did not want to go into it--the practice of defending her assertions with particulars--because Mr. Kiley, our man in the theater department, had not yet published his review of the show. Naturally, I encouraged Mr. Kiley to share his not-yet-published review of A Streetcar Named Desire, which he did, which means, I think, that now we will hear from Ms. Graves her thoughts in full regarding the "bad" Blanche and the "not quite good" Stanley and the "better than she had any right to be" Stella. (Right, Ms. Graves?) "Bad" how? "Better" how?

Let us dive back into the Mary McCarthy essay, from which we can all learn lessons, even Ms. Graves, about asserting things and then defending them. (Hi, Jen!) This will be a long quote, just to provoke a bunch of comments about how long quotes are, like, really difficult to scroll past or whatever.

This variation on the mother-in-law theme [instead of a mother in law who comes and gets in the way, it's a sister-in-law] is the one solid piece of theatrical furniture that A Streetcar Named Desire can show; the rest is antimacassars. Acrimony and umbrage, tears, door-slamming, broken dishes, jeers, cold silences, whispers, raised eyebrows, the determination to take no notice, the whole classic paraphernalia of insult and injury is Tennessee Williams's hope chest. That the domestic dirty linen it contains is generally associated with the comic strip and the radio sketch should not invalidate it for him as subject matter; it has nobler antecedents. The cook, one may recall, is leaving on the opening page of Anna Karenina, and Hamlet at the court of Denmark is really playing the part of the wife's unwelcome relation. Dickens, Dostoevsky, Farrell rattle the skeleton of family life; there is no limit, apparently, to what people will do to each other in the family; nothing is too grotesque or shameful; all laws are suspended, including the law of probability. Mr. Williams, at his best, is an outrageous writer in this category; at his worst, he is outrageous in another.

Had he been content in A Streetcar Named Desire with the exasperating trivia of the in-law story, he might have produced a wonderful little comic epic, The Struggle for the Bathroom, an epic ribald and poignant, a comedie larmoyante which would not have been deficient either in those larger implications to which his talent presumes, for the bathroom might have figured as the last fortress of the individual, the poor man's club, the working girl's temple of beauty; and the bathtub and the toilet, symbol of illusion and symbol of fact, the prone and the upright, the female and the male, might have faced each other eternally in blank, porcelain contradiction as the area for self-expression contracted to the limits of this windowless cell. Mr. Williams, however, like the Southern women he writes about, appears to have been mortified by the literary poverty of such material, by the pettiness of the arena which is in fact its grandeur. Like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire and the mother in The Glass Menagerie, he is addicted to the embroidering lie, and though his taste in fancywork differs from these ladies', inclining more to the modernistic, the stark contrast, the jagged scene, the jungle motifs ("Then they come together with low, animal moans"), the tourist Mexican ("Flores para los muertos, corones para los muertos"), to clarinet music, suicide, homosexuality, rape, and insanity, his work creates in the end that very effect of painful falsity which is imparted to the Kowalski household by Blanche's pink lampshades and couch covers.

All right, Ms. Graves. Out with it. (And, it must be admitted: your opinion of the sound design is not wrong.)

While Christopher and Jen shout at each other about Streetcar—Christopher: "You're just gonna say Blanche was bad and not support it?" Jen: "I just couldn't let your review stand!"—I'm putting up my goddamned review because I'm the goddamned theater editor and what I say (about theater) goes.

Ahem.

A Streetcar Named Desire
Intiman Theatre
Through Aug 2.

"I want to find the humor in Stanley," director Sheila Daniels told me in an interview a few weeks before Streetcar opened. "Brando didn't find it."

Daniels—and actor Jonno Roberts—did. Those able to tear themselves from the image of Saint Brando will see new dimensions in Tennessee Williams's icon of masculine inadequacy and rage. He's funny and loutish, still a sexual tiger but more vulnerable. This Streetcar inspires thoughts of a prequel, when we find out how Stanley became Stanley.

Daniels’s production also shines a light on Mitch, mostly thanks to Tim True, who plays the victim of Blanche's dishonesty and Stanley's cruelty with a sad, mumbling grace. Angela Pierce as Blanche, gives a slick, orthodox performance, and sails through Blanche's late-play mad scenes without succumbing to the crazy-person caricature that has wrecked so many Blanches, Ophelias, and Lears. Chelsea Rives is a quiet triumph, keeping Stella simple and doomed.

The wound in this Streetcar —and it's a gaping, festering one—is the "Blue Piano," the occasional music Williams describes in his stage notes as "tinny piano being played with the infatuated fluency of brown fingers." Daniels and sound designer Joseph Swartz apparently read this as "portentous chords laden with heavy reverb that bludgeon—and occasionally make a mockery of—the play’s pathos." The ominous notes that followed Blanche's revelation that her first husband was gay are egregiously goofy.

But Daniels has coaxed quality, multihued performances out of her actors. We will begin to remember them once we have forced ourselves to forget that goddamned piano. BRENDAN KILEY

Christopher Frizzelle calls Intiman Theatre's current production of A Streetcar Named Desire "really something." I can agree insofar as everything, even that which is not much, is something.

For me, this Streetcar was flat. It had a sort of acceptable forgettableness. This play is supposed to be a curvaceous beast!

And that was in the sections that went smoothly.

This production is also endowed with extraordinarily embarrassing moments—moments typically reserved for community theater, moments that are the result of fatal, big-picture design decisions—largely revolving around the sound design.

The interpretations of the three main characters struck me this way: bad (Blanche), not quite good (Stanley), better than she had any right to be (Stella).

When the main attraction is Stella, your Streetcar's off the rails.

(Brendan's real review is coming in this week's paper; I just had to offer the counterpoint to Frizzelle today.)

The production of A Streetcar Named Desire at Intiman right now is really something--amazingly, for such a wax museum of a play, the principal actors burn through the material at a temperature that melts away the wax, that feels organic and unpredictable. They are all, believably, blind to one another, these people. I'd always thought of Streetcar (which I'd only ever read) as a cheesy, mid-century melodrama, a scenery-as-food piece, but I was totally carried along by the performances that Sheila Daniels (profiled by Brendan Kiley last week) got out of these actors.

Last night I was flipping through the Mary McCarthy collection of essays A Bolt from the Blue, which includes theater reviews she wrote for Partisan Review and elsewhere, and I came to her piece "A Streetcar Called Success," in which she savages Tennessee Williams' play (she gave me all my ideas about it, it turns out) and, while she's at it, his entire career. An excerpt from the end, when she goes off about his career:

If art, as Mr. Williams appears to believe, is a lie, then anything goes, but Mr. Williams's lies, like Blanche's, are so old and shopworn that the very truth upon which he rests them becomes as garish and ugly, just as the Kowalski's apartment becomes the more squalid for Blanche's attempts at decoration. His work reeks of literary ambition as the apartment reeks of cheap perfume; it is impossible to witness one of Mr. Williams's plays without being aware of the pervading smell of careerism. Over and above their subject matter, the plays seem to emanate an ever-growing confidence in their author's success. It is this perhaps which is responsible for Mr. Williams's box-office draw: there is a curious elation in this work which its subject matter could not engender. Whatever happens to the characters, Mr. Williams will come out rich and famous, and the play is merely an episode in Mr. Williams's career. And this career in itself has the tinny quality of a musical romance, from movie usher to Broadway lights... Pacing up and down a Murray Hill apartment, he tells of his early struggles to a sympathetic reporter. He remembers "his first break." He writes his life story for a Sunday supplement. He takes his work seriously; he does not want success to spoil him; he recognizes the dangers; he would be glad to have advice. His definition of his literary approach is a triumph of boyish simplicity: "I have always had a deep feeling for the mystery of life." This "Hello Mom" note in Mr. Williams's personality is the real, indigenous thing... The cant of the intelligentsia (the jargon, that is, of failure) comes from his lips like an ill-earned recitation: he became, at one point, so he says, "the most common American phenomenon, the rootless, wandering writer"—is this a wholly fitting description of a talent which is rooted in the American pay dirt as a stout and tenacious carrot?

Three thoughts: one, that's a fucking long paragraph (I even skipped some sentences); two, though this is a pretty convincing, embarrassing portrait of Tennessee Williams's work, that very work continues to be produced in leading theaters in the country (like the Tony-laden Intiman) while A Bolt from the Blue was most recently seen sitting on bookstore remainder tables; three, God love Mary McCarthy. That bitch could write.

From a press release for the upcoming production of Shrek: the Musical:

"Mayor Nickels Welcomes Everyone’s Favorite Large Green Ogre to the Emerald City."

So the mayor is welcoming himself to the city? But he's not green...

He just thinks he is.

The New York State Theater—part of Lincoln Center—will now be known as the Koch Theater, after New York's richest citizen, who just threw $100 million down the old theater-hole.

Koch is also a major donor to the Republican party, and ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket in 1980.

Randy Newman and Roger "King of the Road" Miller are my favorites for Great American Songwriter. Randy for his savage humor, Roger for his goofy wit.

Some favorite Roger Miller stories. From Wikipedia:

When he was seventeen, he stole a guitar, but turned himself in and chose to join the Army rather than go to jail. He later quipped, "My education was Korea, Clash of '52." Upon leaving the Army, he went to Nashville to work on his music career.

From the Roger Miller box set:

Roger Miller: I was raised in Erick, Oklahoma.
Interviewer: What's that near?
Roger Miller: It's close to extinction.

Ditto:

L.A. Cop: Can I see your license?

Roger Miller: Can I shoot your gun?

Paul Constant just made me a very, very happy man by loaning me his Roger Miller box set, which includes "Reincarnation," a song I heard once in high school and was never able to find again.

I should've just used YouTube:

We'll pass over the slide show—obviously made by one family member for another—in silence. But the song!

This month, Taproot Theater is producing Big River, Roger Miller's musical adaptation of Huck Finn. It's the first Taproot show I've been excited about in a dog's age.

Yuri and Dmitri Kuklachev are a father-son team of Russian clowns and proprietors of a cat circus called Moscow Cats Theater. They began training cats in 1977, were one of the first Soviet-era performers to tour the United States, and are famous in 80 countries. They've won awards, been commemorated on stamps, and are beloved by children, grandmas, and cat fanciers everywhere.

Last year, Yuri and Dmitri toured the United States and performed at the Seattle Rep.

Except they didn't.

The Russian clowns who performed at the Rep last April were, apparently, impostors. (Copycats, if you will. And you will.) According to a lawsuit filed by the real Yuri and Dmitri Kuklachev, the impostors stole the real Russian clowns' names, clothes, and hairstyles and toured the country as the Moscow Cats Theater.

The Russian clowns are pissed. They've filed a suit in New York against the impostors, the impostors' U.S. promoter (Mark Gelfman), and every theater where the impostors performed, including the Seattle Rep.

"We don't know anything about this," the Rep's communications director, Ilana Balint, said this afternoon. "We haven't been served any papers."

"Well, they're gonna get served papers today or Monday," said the Russian clowns' lawyer, Gary Tsirelman. "We're just beginning a lengthy process."

The Russian clowns have filed the suit in Brooklyn and are suing for: "federal and common-law trademark infringement, false endorsement, unfair competition, false designation of origin, dilution of a famous trademark, and violations of anti-cybersquatting law, rights of publicity and privacy, fraud, conversion, prima facie tort and unjust enrichment."

(Tsirelman was referred to the Russian clowns by a colleague. "They needed a vulture in court," Tsirelman said, "someone very vicious who does not take no for an answer. They said, 'find us the biggest a-hole out there.' And that was me.")

Some history: The Russian clowns have been doing their cat-circus act since 1977. Sometime in the 80s, an assistant stole the Russian clowns' act, names, costumes, and hairstyle, and tried to tour the USSR. Soviet police eventually shut them down.

Fast forward to December 2006: The real Russian clowns finished a real tour of the U.S. and returned to Russia, expecting to come back for another U.S. tour in 2007.

From the complaint: "Within days of Yuri Kuklachev's departure, his [U.S.] promoter, M. Gelfman... secretly filed a registration with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to register the famous Kuklachev's 'Moscow Cats Theater' mark in his own name." He also bought www.moscowcatstheatre.com

Then Gelfman (allegedly) trotted out the impostors, changed their names and dyed their hair, and sent them on the road.

The Russian clowns are currently seeking $10 million in damages, but that might grow—Tsirelman says he's still getting calls from across the country (and the world) from people who saw the ersatz Kuklachevs. "I hear their show was pretty bad," Tsirelman. "A lot of disappointed grandkids."

So why are the Russian clowns suing individual theaters, like the Rep, when the theaters were duped like everybody else?

"Trademark law does not require defendants to have knowledge or intent to deceive," Tsirelman said.

In short: Ignorance is no excuse.

Gelfman and his defense lawyers have not returned requests for comment.

Stay tuned.

John McCain denied a Republican colleague's claim that he roughed up an associate of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega on a diplomatic mission in 1987, saying the allegation was "simply not true."

Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., told a Mississippi newspaper that he saw McCain, during a trip to Nicaragua led by former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., grab an Ortega associate by his shirt collar and lift him out of his chair.

McCain may be denying it, but he's gotta be loving it. Roughing up actual commies down in Central America? It's probably total bullshit, but the mental image certainly won't hurt the tough-guy character McCain is trying to develop.

As the first commenter on the Wall Street Journal report wrote:

maybe some other ner-do-wells deserve a thrashing too. I’ve got no problem with his slapping one of those thugs upside the head. Wish i could have done it myself. Go John!!
Comment by Sandanista Shot Put - July 2, 2008 at 3:59 pm

Senator Cochran (a five-term Republican from Mississippi) has been a McCain antagonist, but now endorses him—and who better to deploy a bit of crypto-flattery for McCain to deny than a former enemy?

Nifty bit of double-backflip campaigning there, Senators.

This is Joey. He learned to slackline three years ago after watching a guy do it in the woods. More on slacklining here. Photos are by Kelly O.

(Hey, Circus Contraption--you gotta put Joey in your next show.)

Tomorrow night, the Swedish Housewife brings her Everything but the Kitchen Sink Cabaret to the lush confines of the Triple Door. She plucks 11 acts from her 21 years of producing shows and her enviable stable of counterculture stars for one night of glorious madness. The mighty El Vez will be debuting material from his upcoming tribute to John Sex, and the thrilling Queen Shmooquan will bend your mind with her transcendental madness. Fresh from triumphant performances in New York, Provincetown, and London, Seattle's one and only megastar of camel-toed razzle-dazzle, Miss Dina Martina, will be in town for a rare summer appearance. There's much more on board, including the inimitable Waxie Moon, and your hostess for the evening, NYC's one-eyed wonder Miss Astrid.

Come early, have dinner, and if the crowd at the Joey Arias show last month is any indication, you'll be rubbing elbows with a who's who of Seattle's alterna-gays.

An eagle-eyed—eared?—commentor on this post, about Intiman's mysterious new Disney musical, says:

Sher mentioned working on a new musical adaptation of "The Huncback of Notre Dame" in Seattle on KUOW last week. Could that be the Disney musical?

Of course, if Intiman were to produce Hunchback, it'd be the greatest stroke theatrical irony since Molière keeled over and died while playing a hypochondriac.

The last Hunchback musical in Seattle was, of course, this Hunchback, from 1998. As Dave Schmader once wrote:

Hunchback captured the imagination of everyone who’s ever wondered, “What’s the worst thing that could happen if a New-Agey blues rocker with a lot of money and a weird Hunchback fixation decided to take it to the stage?”, and left its small but lucky audiences cheering a world that would allow such a monstrosity to come to fruition.

Please God, let Intiman's new Disney musical be Hunchback. And please let it star Styx frontman Dennis DeYoung.

From today's Seattle Times.

Sher's win catapults him to the top of the A-list of Broadway directors. Though he moved recently from Seattle to New York, and has various Big Apple projects in the works (including a new musical about martial-arts superstar Bruce Lee), Sher is contracted through 2009 to head Intiman, where he just staged the new play "Namaste Man."

Asked if his win helps his hometown company he said, "Of course it does — it helps us attract better artists, better producers and other things down the road." He also mentioned that Intiman will develop "a big Disney musical next year," with the title to be revealed later.

A "big Disney musical"? At Intiman? Why?

It's not like Disney really needs the resources of a non-profit theater to develop its next Broadway flop, and Intiman certainly doesn't need its cultural capital devalued by producing Toy Story 2, starring Larry Ballard. (As much as I'd like to see that... )

I've got a call out to Intiman and am postponing my freakout until I have more information. But—really? Seriously?

I can't believe it.

(Thanks for the heads up, Mike Daisey.)

South Pacific won seven Tony Awards in all, including Best Director and Best Revival of a Musical.

(For the first commentor on Christopher's post below—Sher is the longtime artistic director of Intiman Theatre. This is his third nomination for Best Director, and his first win. Last year, Intiman won the Tony Award for regional theater. At a Tony Awards party this evening, a spokeswoman for Intiman told the crowd: "Bart says he couldn't do what he does out there if not for the support he has here." "That's very, very sweet of [Bart] to say," whispered a longtime Intiman subscriber sitting next to me, "but it's just not true.")

Other big winners tonight: In the Heights (a musical about a Latino neighborhood in upper Manhattan), Passing Strange (a picaresque musical about a middle-class black kid from Los Angeles who travels to Amsterdam and Berlin), and August: Osage County (Steppenwolf's play about a family of fuckups and pill poppers).

The musical performances tonight were, as usual, ill-suited for television broadcast. They just weren't designed for, and don't translate well onto, screens. I wonder how much damage they do each year, as people channel surf into their favorite number from Grease and think: "fuck, that's awful—see, that's why I don't go to theater."

Between those and the ads for Vesicare ("fewer urges and leaks!"), the message seems to be that theater is for the tone-deaf and the incontinent.

Still: Congratulations, Mr. Sher.

...just won a Tony for directing South Pacific.

The best thing about this year's Tony nominees is the number of contending plays and musicals by/starring/about people who aren't honkies: Passing Strange, In the Heights, Thurgood, a black version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a South Pacific starring actual Asian Americans, and so on.

From a great article on this year's Tony Awards in the Washington Post:

This season, eight major Broadway shows prominently feature blacks, Latinos or Asians. There's "South Pacific," which -- for the first time in this musical's history on Broadway -- stars Asian Americans in Asian roles. (Loretta Ables Sayre, who plays Bloody Mary, is nominated for a Tony.) That's a far cry from 1991, when there was an uproar over casting English actor Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian in "Miss Saigon."

Ten performers of color have been nominated for Tonys tonight, including Stew, the creator and star of "Passing Strange." (Whoopi Goldberg, a Tony-winning producer in her own right, will be tonight's host -- marking the first time the Tonys ceremony has had a lone emcee of color.)

The TBP has been a regional theater custom for years. Trying to attract dollars from the rising black middle class is smart business and a little artistic affirmative action is perhaps wise, but watching a TBP, no matter how good or bad it is, always gives me the uncomfortable feeling that the mostly white audience and mostly black artists are mutually condescending to one another.

Again from the Post:

No one tracks the number of people of color working on Broadway, but many observers say that things have changed greatly from more than 20 years ago, when Actors' Equity conducted a four-year survey of working actors and found that 90 percent of actors on Broadway were white.

Things, obviously, are changing.

Not only are there more black artists, but more black producers, who recognize the economic value—not just the social, artistic, and moral value—of getting away from producing a "black play" here and a "Latino play" there. This year will prove that producers and theaters should put up as much quality work by artists of color as they can. And audiences will reward them for it. Like James Baldwin said: "Black people ignored the theater because the theater has always ignored them."

Looks like the sun is setting on those days, thanks to years of courage and sweat by artists like George C. Wolfe, Suzan-Lori Parks, August Wilson, Lloyd Richards, and others.

Again, from the WP article:

"Every single day I wake up in the morning saying, 'What are we doing here?' " says Stew, who co-wrote "Passing Strange" with musical partner Heidi Rodewald. "We never thought this would happen. . . . Not only did we not think we were going to Broadway, we didn't want to go to Broadway."

Stew says he insisted on making art how he saw fit -- which meant, he says, that he fought with the producers at every turn.

"They can't force us to do anything. Nobody has to sell out here. . . . Only artists who wimp out change their script. All a Broadway producer can do is close the show.

"This is like an experiment every night. To see if this weird curio can exist in a mass audience. I really look at it as a science experiment. Every night."

It's working, Stew. And sorry to sound Pollyanna about it, but your success should make everyone feel hopeful.

My review of Seattle Shakespeare Co.'s All's Well That Ends Well didn't fit into the print edition this week, but it's online now.

I ask you: Has there ever been a more disingenuous marketing campaign in Seattle theater history? (Or a more ill-fitting dress?)

Romantic comedy? Really? "Love's healing begins in our own hearts"? Really? Way to make me positive the director hasn't a clue what the play is even about. It reminds me of people who read the stalkerish Sonnet 116 ("Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove"--shudder!) at their weddings, just because the word "marriage" appears in it. But the production is worth seeing in spite of itself:

... [Y]ou'll forget all of this soon enough, because the cast is strong, the comedy is undisguised, and the self-hatred and terror at the play's center busts right through its cheerful packaging. Sarah Hartlett is perhaps an unlikely choice to play Helena, the lovesick fool who throws herself at a lover (Connor Toms, just okay) with full knowledge of his contempt. She's a bit too old for such mooning, and her huge, goofy smile—much prized in children's theater productions—disposes us to suspect Helena's more tender moments. At the same time, though, Hartlett's reckless energy powers through the fairy story–inspired illogic, making Helena's bed-trick schemes seem like loads of fun, even when they're not quite plausible.

Times and info at our theater search.

According to a doorman at the Paramount, about 50 delicate souls stormed out of last night's opening of Avenue Q.

"They were grumbling about it being 'inappropriate,'" the doorman said. "But I don't have any sympathy for idiots who buy tickets and don't even know what they're going to see."

Avenue Q is a grown-up parody of Sesame Street—by some former employees of Sesame Street—that opened in a 150-seat theater Off Broadway and, in 2003, became a magnet for Tony and Drama Desk Awards.

The puppets sing about disappointment and ennui, getting drunk and one-night stands—grown-up stuff, but nothing outrageous.

One character (based on Bert) is a closeted gay Republican who sings about his "girlfriend" in Canada. After the song's final line ("I can't wait to eat her pussy again"), a couple behind me rocketed out of their seats and angrily flew up the aisle.

I'm just sorry Avenue Q didn't make it out here sooner—it's a funny, successful parody of kids' shows, with learn-and-grow lessons for adults. As they sing in the final number: "Life may be scary, but it's only temporary."

Now please enjoy the opening number, "It Sucks To Be Me":

More information on tickets and show times here.

Remember back in April when Laff Hole (the weekly stand-up comedy night by the People's Republic of Komedy), announced they were hopping nightclubs, leaving Chop Suey for Capitol Hill Arts Center?

And I wrote wrote this on Slog?

...moving back to CHAC, which has been a revolving door for theaters and arts organizations, doesn’t seem like the best idea—not least because PROK and CHAC already lived together once, a couple of years ago. It didn’t work out.

And, as wise people say, there are no second acts in love.

PROK should move to Re-bar, home of Dina Martina and Brown Derby and Greek Active and two decades of marrying drinking, theater, and comedy. The Republic and Re-bar belong together.

Well slap my face and call me yenta: PROK just announced they're leaving CHAC and moving to Re-bar.