“Most of my songs are about bugs, but this one is about a lizard,” announced local artist Guayaba (FKA Aeon Fux) earlier this year to an audience at the Crocodile. While she probably intended this comment to be jokingly self-deprecating, it was also a fair summary of her set.
At first glance, Singin’ in the Rain at Village Theatre and King Charles III at Seattle Rep might seem to have next to nothing in common. One is a screen to stage transfer of a most beloved 1952 MGM musical satire of Hollywood ushering in talking pictures, while the other is an audacious, Masterpiece Theatre sort of drama, imagining the turnover at the top when Queen Elizabeth finally breathes her last.
With the abundance of theatre in Seattle this season, I was late catching two really special shows that both close this weekend. Smaller companies tend to have a harder time building audiences, even in spaces with smaller seating capacity. But if you like intimate musicals, the Reboot Theatre and Second Story Rep have some dandy fare on stage right now!
Beautiful–The Carole King Musical may have won only 2 of the 7 Tony award nominations it garnered in 2014 but it provides everyone from confirmed theatre subscribers to sometimes jaded critics with a show to root for and embrace, because, well, it is beautiful.
How many female “buddy” films from India can you name? Exactly. Angry Indian Goddesses is a valiant attempt at breaking into the female buddy film format, with ambitious narrative choices and a truly important subject matter.
Oh what a few years on Broadway in the smash hit Disney musical can do. Don Darryl Rivera is an impish, butterball of a comic actor/singer, popular in the Puget Sound for much of the last decade returns to Seattle after 2.5 years (with no end in sight) of playing Iago in the smash Aladdin, to steal every minute he is onstage in the 5th Avenue’s impressive Man of La Mancha.
If you weren’t one of the lucky ones who got to see the amazing Emmy, Tony, Oscar, and Grammy winning talents of Rita Moreno at Edmonds Center, the night the big storm of the century predicted here didn’t hit, you didn’t have the guts of the nearly full house at Edmonds Center for the Arts, nor have such a grand time.
What would you do with a second chance at the one who got away? This is the question filmmaker Tim Kirkman set out to answer in his feature film Lazy Eye, the story of a man whose long lost lover suddenly reenters his life fifteen years after deserting him.
A venerable and important play, an acclaimed playwright, a proven director, a capable cast, and more leads one to expect Seattle Repertory Theatre’s production of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun to be a must-see of the current season.
Two movies about gay sex, one a fictionalized account of a murder that rocked the porn industry, the other an account of the dangers of hooking-up with a stranger. Both are a study in contrasts, and both will be showing as part of Twist, Seattle’s recently re-branded queer film festival.
Maybe the best summary of Mykki Blanco’s raison d’être comes from Blanco herself. In an interview on Youtube, she responds to a question about acceptance by mainstream hip-hop by stating, “I didn’t come to be accepted, I came to be visible.”
It should go without saying that stories about race such as this one are just as important in our time as the history they depict. But it cannot, and in fact bears repeating. Stories about race, such as this one, are just as important in our time as the history they depict.