This week's theater section is brought to you by the emotion Ambivalence. (Ambivalence: It is and it isn't™.)
I have mixed feelings about Mike Daisey at this awkward moment in his career:
Daisey is recalibrating. His observations seemed stale and flat-footed: Disney World is a bizarrely detailed consumerist fantasyland, Burning Man is disorienting and anarchic, Occupy revealed that power fears democracy and will break laws with impunity to suppress it. That's old news. And between the staleness of the information and the wobbliness of its presentation, American Utopias seems like the work of a performer who was publicly neutered and is still trying to find another pair of balls. They're out there, Mike. We want you to find them. Just keep looking—America is, after all, the land of reinvention.
(His upcoming show in Portland is, apparently, about how journalism works.)
- John Cornicello
Chow contributor Kim Fu has mixed feelings about Cafe Nordo's latest, Western-themed show:
Better to aim high and fail spectacularly than shoot for mediocrity and succeed. Reviews and word of mouth had led me to believe that Cafe Nordo productions are made in this spirit—bizarre dinner/theater hybrids that inspire love, hate, and bewilderment. Sadly, their latest show is dinner theater as we already know it: half-baked on both fronts, without meaningful integration of the two.
- Ernie Sapiro
Melody Datz likes Rainbow Fletcher and Zoe Scofield, but has mixed feelings about the other choreographers at Co-LAB 5.
Deciduous Urge, by Rainbow Fletcher of Can Can Castaways fame, is creepy, smart, and full of attitude. Dancers wearing tight black underwear, white button-up shirts, and black balaclavas move with such pointed deliberation that they seem to be thrusting limbs and gazes directly at the audience.
Dominic Holden has mixed feelings about all the single ladies at Seattle Opera:
As the audience hears only her end of the conversations, Focile conveys an invisible, silent cast: She haggles with the operator, scolds neighbors tying up the line, and, speaking to her lying lover, slips in details of her failed attempt to overdose on sleeping pills. Francis Poulenc’s violent score sounds like a Hitchcock movie, and Jean Cocteau’s libretto moves with the jumpy pace of an early-20th-century, avant-garde French play (it was based on one).
