While one might not think first of a musical based around classical music when thinking of weekend plans, Bohemia shines – especially if accentuated by a glass of the anise-flavored alcohol known for dreamy-electric inspirations. It’s the kind of challenging and thoughtful theater the city is best at.
Mary Lambert, the Seattle-area songwriter made famous for her feature on Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ song, “Same Love,” is returning to the Emerald City stage Oct. 29th to play a set at the Crocodile Café. For one of music’s best – and most vulnerable – stage performers, coming back home will prove both cathartic and joyous.
Kimball Allen, host of the glitz-camp variety show, Triple Threat, slated regularly at Seattle’s Triple Door Theater, has lived in the Emerald City just a handful of years. Yet, Allen is well aware of the talent pool the city has to offer. And the skillful artists that saturate the city move him so that he knew he had to bring them regularly under one roof – and so his show, some two years ago, was born.
“I’m a writer and a storyteller. Different stories need different kinds of voicing.” These are the words of SassyBlack – aka Seattle’s Catherine Harris-White – an artist, producer, writer and all around versatile expressionist who generates work at such a high volume that it can feel at times that she’s doing so that no one genre, label or category can catch up to her.
Phillip Chavira, recently hired as the new Executive Director of the Intiman Theater, has a motto: “Keep color on stage.” And he means it. Prior to moving to the Emerald City some three-and-a-half months ago, Chavira produced Eclipsed on Broadway in New York City, which featured the first-ever all-female cast, playwright and directing team on the famous theatrical thoroughfare.
Seattle filmmaker Wes Hurley recently debuted his newest project, Little Potato, to cheering audiences at SXSW. Metaphorically, the movie (co-directed by Nathan Miller) is a story about suffering repression and experiencing relief. Literally, though, the story is about Hurley and his mother leaving a dangerous and corrupt Russia to find freedom in America.
Re-bar occupies a strange and lovely place in Seattle – both spatially and historically. The bar, located in the nebulous Denny Triangle, has provided a safe space for queer nightlife in the city for decades. It’s also where Nirvana staged its record release show for Nevermind (and where the band was famously kicked out of that same night).
With a composed, sweet, and measured voice, the woman behind the spastic, exaggerated femme persona known as Cherdonna Shinatra describes her upcoming projects. The tone of the conversation is markedly different compared to the character’s at-times cartoonish physicality, but the woman behind Cherdonna, Seattle’s Jody Kuehner, has no problem with the concept of dichotomy.
Keon Volt Price is not afraid of sex – not afraid to talk about it, to dance sexually in public or even to laugh about it. “Sex is in every culture,” says the Seattle-based 29-year-old dancer and burlesque performer. “No matter how you feel about it, it’s in every culture.”
For Seattle’s Marc Kenison – known also by his stage name, Waxie Moon – boylesque is still shaping and defining itself as an art form. Kenison, a prolific performer who identifies as a boylesque dancer first and foremost, says the style was born from early 20th century burlesque shows.