Rock 'n' Roll by Tom Stoppard

Directed by Kurt Beattie at ACT

I like Tom Stoppard's plays and I like classic Pink Floyd so this play was a good match for me. As it is a Stoppard play he includes several different elements including Classic ideas of Love and the Czechoslovakian Velvet Revolution.

The play quickly switches between these themes and it was little difficult for me to follow especially since I didn't know much about the Velvet Revolution.

For me the main theme is about nostalgia and the trouble of looking forward and back in our lives.

This was my first show at ACT Seattle and I was impressed by how intimate the space was. This show was in the round so no seat was very far back.

The Seasons by Val Caniparoli

Music: Alexander Glazunov

This was an odd neo-classical ballet. Dryads and Satyr dance around in a loose story about the transition of the seasons. The definition component were the wavy arm motions throughout. While it's good to see new kinds of choreography, and it did work a few times, the wavy arms were overused to the point that they turned comical and we were laughing to ourselves when they reappeared.

Mopey by Marco Goecke

Music: Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach and The Cramps

A teenage-angsty fun solo performance. It's a great piece for solo male dancer. We've seen it three times and each time the transition from the classical music to The Cramps' "Surfin' Bird" is a well-timed jump of energy for the performer and audience.

I think I've seen it enough for a while, though. A break of two years should be good.

Petit Mort by Jiri Kylian

Music: Mozart

This ballet is set apart by its props. Guys have foils that they balance and bend. The Ladies have large black dresses on wheels. It's fun with some unusual choreography.

Opus by Michael Hollinger

A play about the struggles and intimacies of an accomplished string quartet. I liked the contrast of the characters and between their past and future.

Diana Szeinblum's Alaska

An interesting and mildly engaging piece. With all the hype and writeups we had heard before we saw this piece, along with the sold-out crowd, I had expected something much more substantive.

It was mostly interesting to watch, but didn't really say anything and the dancing wasn't very innovative. Not all that different from many other middle-of-the-road performances we've seen by others. It did have some nice live music accompanying.

This show will be available to watch online in January when OtBTV premieres. Here's a 2-minute excerpt.

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts

A downer of a play about a very dysfunctional family.
The script is lively with complex interplay of dialogue and a few moments of painfully good timing.

Transition by Reggie Watts & Tommy Smith

This was a great, fun, energetic, and thought-provoking evening that included musings on romance, race, and the dis-humanity of our ever increasingly technologized lives, as well as wildly creative music (including of course, a love song to Sasquatch), and many very funny homages to 80s pop culture.

For me this evening was a perfect balance of message and entertainment, allowing us to enjoy thoughtful ideas with plenty of sweetness, never crossing the line to either pointless spectacle nor overly-serious artyness.

The 39 Steps adapted by Patrick Barlow

Seattle Repertory Theatre


A zany spy thriller with Pythonesque humour. Lots of fun stagecraft with a train chase, shadow play and two actors playing about a dozen characters, some in the same scene.

Doesn't amount to much, though.

Maillot's Roméo et Juliette

Pacific Northwest Ballet

Music: Sergei Prokofiev
Choreography: Jean-Christophe Maillot
Scenic Design: Ernest Pignon-Ernest

The second performance we've seen in two years.
I think it may be my favorite full-length story ballet.
I like the light and shadow on the white set pieces and how the set moves and lighting shifts to create different spaces throughout the performance.
The story has a very good balance of passion and comedy.

Tanja Liedtke's construct

Construct was an incredibly dynamic, athletic and precise dance performance. It loosely followed a chronology of growing up and featured scenes of that in quick succession. What struck me was how precise the dancing and choreography was.

An early scene featured one dancer trying to prop up the other two who were stiff, tippy and jointed like mannequins. He eventually gets an electric drill and starts bolting and adjusting the limbs of the other two. The coordination of the movements were amazing. He would point at a knee and, without actually touching, the dancer's knee would turn and bend resulting in their whole body tumbling. This kind of finely tuned interaction continued throughout.

The overall style of almost mechanistic movement reminds me of Kidd Pivot and I very much like that.

Jerome Robbins' West Side Story Suite

Jerome Robbins was the choreographer for the original 1957 Tony-award-winning production of West Side Story, the well known Broadway classic that was turned into a musical movie in 1961. In 1995, Robbins extracted a sequence of dances from the musical to make this ballet suite for the New York City Ballet.

While in this form Chad, unfamiliar with the storyline, found it difficult to grasp what the story was fully about, the dancing was all nonetheless engaging and suprisingly still felt very current if you didn't mind the datedness of the wardrobe. The issues of street life and racial tensions that it addressed are still very much with us, and the choreography still expressed these difficult issues in a way that felt relevant and interesting.

Update: We saw this again on 11/6/2009
I (Chad) was able to follow the store better the second time. While it is odd to have ballet dancers singing, it was pulled off mostly well and I enjoyed it better this time.

Susan Stroman's TAKE FIVE ... More or Less

Chad and I first saw this piece last year as part of PNB's Laugh Out Loud! Festival. It was a favorite of ours then, and it was equally enjoyable the second time around.

Based on the interesting and enjoyable music of Dave Brubeck's Take Five and Paul Desmond's Blue Rondo a la Turk and Strange Meadow Lark, this is an engaging piece choreographed for 11 dancers. Very energetic, complicated, and musical, with plenty of interesting visual elements.

Balanchine's Slaughter on Tenth Avenue

We saw this as part of an evening of short works at PNB's Broadway Festival.

Balanchine originally choreographed this piece for the 1936 Rogers and Hart musical On Your Toes. In 1967 he made a ballet with new choreography but with the same general concept for the New York City Ballet.

Slaughter on Tenth Avenue is a ballet-within-a-ballet, which itself tells a story of a strip joint and a customer who falls in love with the boss' girl. In the larger ballet, a jealous premier danseur has hired a mobster to kill his rival during the premiere of Slaughter. PNB made use of the lower boxes and enacting the mob setup outside the curtain to set the story up.

They also showed a bit of a movie version of Slaughter on a giant movie screen before the beginning of the performance, which was interesting for historical perspective.

The performance itself was catchy and fun.

Christopher Wheeldon's Carousel (A Dance)

Christopher Wheeldon created this piece in 2002 while he was resident choreographer for the New York City Ballet. We saw its Seattle premiere as part of an evening of short works at PNB's Broadway Festival. It is a reinterpretation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1945 musical of the same name, a story about the ill-fated marriage of a carnival barker to a young woman who works in a mill.

While the ballet is based on the story, it is not really a story ballet. It was really more of a thematic and emotional riff on the relationship of the two young lovers and the difficulties they faced living in two different worlds.

I found this ballet particularly visually striking, especially the interesting tensions it created using the corps as a swirling and frustrating barrier of society, people, and movement, always getting between the two as they reached to connect with one another. One very striking scene had the dancers holding poles to simulate the carousel itself, while the couple tried to find moments of connection while mostly being blocked by the swirling carousel.

This is the 3rd piece of Wheeldon's to enter PNB's repertory, the first 2 being Polyphonia and Variations Serieuses.

The Seafarer by Conor McPherson

A Seattle Rep production by Conor McPherson of a contemporary Faust tale set in a poor Irish fishing town.

Tim Etchells & Theatre Replacement's That Night Follows Day

That Night Follows Day is a theater piece created by Tim Etchells, exploring the ways adults shape children by the things we say to them.

Etchells originally created this piece for a Flemish theater company, and this is the first time he has allowed an outside artistic company to remount his work. It was the US premiere.

That Night Follows Day has a large cast consisting only of children, and this production was directed by Vancouver's Theatre Replacement.

The set was simple and basic, a large piece of playground equipment. Most of the piece had some or all of the kids standing up at the front of the stage saying lots of various phrases that "You tell us..."

While this concept could have easily had a cutesy and contrived result, the kids, the script, and direction pulled it off in a way that ended up being quite powerful and thought provoking. While there were a few unavoidable "aww, cute" moments, by and large the experience was more of the sober "out of the mouths of babes" variety. Very few of the things said were things that kids would not have naturally said, leading me to wonder about the script creation process. Did Etchell sit down with kids and get their input in creating the script? Maybe by asking them a few questions, and then writing down what they said? Whatever the true source, the script certainly rang as genuine observations of kids on adult behavior and teachings, with blunt and often very funny honesty.

Chad said afterwards that he found himself throughout the show flipping back and forth from feeling like these kids' parent or uncle, to identifying directly with the kids themselves, depending on the particular subject matter. I had a very similar reaction, especially during the moments when they braved into the hurtful and identity-crushing sorts of statements that most of us have heard on numerous occasions by thoughtless or badly behaving adults who were supposed to be guiding us through our childhoods.

But ultimately the overall result of the piece was sweet, powerful and thoughtful, leaving the mostly adult audience with meaty food for thought about the significant impact our offhand words and actions can have on the malleable young people around us, whether those might be our own children, or just a young future citizen passing us by on the street.

Betrayal by Harold Pinter at The Seattle Rep

This is the first Pinter play that I have seen. That seems unusual to me because he is one of the most famous 20th century playwrights and I minored in theater in college. I had heard that his plays had a particular sparseness of dialogue with deliberate timing. After seeing the Rep's Betrayal, and I think it's representative, I believe I like Pinter's style. The sparseness and compactness (it's 74 minutes) have an efficiency that I enjoy.
The Rep's production was very good. The actors fit their parts well and the set was appropriate and subtly flexible.
The story is about adultery and the play is about memory, trust and people's histories with each other. The structure is unusual and magnifies the dramatic irony in a very satisfying way.

Los Angeles Guitar Quartet with Seattle Symphony

The LA Guitar Quartet is a group of guitar virtuosos that has been performing for 27 years. The show had two distinct halves. Before the intermission were performances with the symphony and after the intermissions were performances by just the quartet.

first half:
Manuel de Falla's Selections from El Armor Brujo Ballet
Sergio Assad's Interchange for Guitar Quartet and Orchestra
My most distinct recollection of these performances was that I didn't care for the guitar and orchestra together. I have this feeling in general about soloist/orchestra combinations with violin and piano soloists. Of the ones I have heard it is rare that the performance is enhanced by the combination rather than a fully integrated orchestra or a pure solo performance. In this case it was four guitarists and the orchestra and I thought the guitarists more than capable of carrying themselves without the orchestra. This includes the percussive knocking on the guitars and other alternate playing styles. The breaks as the compositions moved between the orchestra and guitars were abrupt and not well integrated.

second half:
various short works for guitar including Baden Powell's Samba Novo, Paulo Bellianati's A Furiosa, traditional's (;->) Shenandoah and Aaron Copland's Hoe-Down from Rodeo
I enjoyed the second have tremendously. The quarted demonstrated their flexibility, skill and overal pleasure of playing. The 5-song Imagens de Brazil section was especially enjoyable giving a selection of samba, basa nova and other styles.
There was also a section of American classic songs including a Sousa march, The Black Horse Troop! That was fun surprise.

Garden & Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur

From SAAM's literature:

"This groundbreaking exhibition of 58 artworks will present new facets of Indian painting that flourished in the royal courts of Rajasthan from the 17th to the 19th century. In addition to the exquisite narrative "miniatures" with which we are familiar, the exhibition will include breathtaking monumental images that convey an unsurpassed intensity of artistic vision and religious fervor. Produced for the Rajasthan nobles, these paintings have never been published; most have been seen by just a few scholars since their creation. This is the first time these paintings will be exhibited in the United States."

–Josh Yiu, Foster Foundation Associate Curator of Chinese Art

I have been looking forward to seeing this exhibit ever since it was first announced in the SAM calendar, and on the whole I was not disappointed. The exhibit had two main types of paintings, secular paintings of court life and politics, and religious paintings expressing mostly the Nath flavor of Yogic theology. While the secular paintings were a bit interesting from a historical perspective, allowing the viewer to see what court life looked like in that place and time, and were painted with the same artistic style as the devotional paintings, they didn't offer much after the first painting or two for anyone who is not a student of this particular historical period.

The devotional paintings, however, were an entirely different experience altogether. I am glad that by chance I happened to enter the exhibit the wrong way round, viewing all of the devotional paintings first before getting to the court paintings, which were placed at the front of the exhibit.

While all of these paintings were the work of dedicated artists in the court atelier, most of the paintings did hold a purpose other than simple expression, and that is to be shown at court along with stories and discussion as visual illustrations to assist the education of those present. Due to that, many of them are part of a series of paintings in a storytelling series, or are within the painting themselves presenting an elaborate story, much like a good graphic novel without words.

Even if I didn't already have spiritual leanings towards India, I would have found most of these paintings to be very interesting. Anyone who knows anything about Indian theologies knows there's some pretty good stories there, especially from a graphic perspective. Take this image on the right for example, from the Tulsidas Ramayana. I mean, anyone who isn't interested in a picture showing the adventures of a royal, a guard, a blue guy and a couple of monkey men crossing the land in search of a kidnapped lady in distress just plain doesn't know anything about good stories! And this is of course to say nothing for the actual art itself, which is so rich, colorful, inspired and wildly creative I'm not sure how you couldn't fall in love with it at first sight.

There were many such large story paintings telling various stories and explaining various geographies and characters of well-known devotional stories. Among the most breathtaking of these was a huge 3-panel set of paintings telling the story of Krishna Lila, which tells of young Krishna unwittingly luring a bunch of female cowherds into the woods, causing them all to become inspired with a longing for divine love. After luring them from their home lives, a multiplicity of Krishnas peek out and play with the gopis among a huge and amazingly lush forest, until he leaves them searching among the trees for his hopeful return. The delicate beauty of the detail of the painted forest with all of its tiny flowers and creatures is one I could probably sit and look at all day without tiring of.

Apart from the lush and comic-book like paintings of all the various stories and characters, there were two full rooms depicting stories of the most cosmic order. According to the exhibit text, many of these depicted concepts and images are not known to have been painted anywhere else (as opposed to the devotional paintings of the stories, which like our Western tradition of depicting biblical scenes, is a widespread and often-repeated topic for devotional artists). These paintings made the brave attempt to depict the nothingness and allness that is god/the universe itself.

One such painting, depicting the universe before any corporeal forms were taken, is simply a canvas of varying shades of shimmering gold paint with various textures. These paintings too were intended to be shown in sequential order, depicting first the absolute nothingness/allness and gradually the progression of lesser godly forms that were assumed out of this none-ness to create the corporeal world we exist in today. The image from the beginning of this post shows the middle part of the progression, when Spirit (left) and Matter (right) emerged from the nothingness (the gold background). I found this room of paintings in particular to be very riveting, even though the actual paintings themselves were much simpler in graphic detail than all of the other paintings in the exhibit. I almost wished I could just stay in that room all day.

You can read more about the show, and see a slide show of images from the exhibit here.
You can see the book that goes along with the exhibit here.

Faure's Requiem, Op. 48

The perfomance we saw was guest-conducted by JoAnn Falletta with the SSO. The SSO was joined by the Seattle Symphony Chorale and soloists Joyce Guyer and Michael Anthony McGee. The piece also used SSO's pipe organ.

Faure originally composed this piece in 1886-87; it was first performed in 1900 in Paris.

The program promised that this Requiem would be different in tone than many others, and having heard a few (can't remember which), we both agreed. As Faure himself said of the piece, "it is gentle in character, like myself." There was no fire and brimstone anywhere to be felt, which was really nice. It was meant to be more of a consoling piece for the mourners than other Requiems I have heard.

The result was quite beautiful. I was engaged with it throughout, and was moved to tears during many moments, especially during the beautiful solos of McGee. It was for me a definite musical success in that it seemed to truly communicate through music the feelings & experience it was intended to convey.

Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 1 in F-sharp minor, Op. 1

We saw this piece guest-conducted by JoAnn Falletta with the SSO. The piano soloist was Nikolai Luganski.

This 3-movement concerto was originally composed in 1891 and revised in 1917. It was originally performed while Rachmaninov was still a student at the Moscow Conservatory. He was dissatisfied with the original, but was pleased with his final 1917 revision. It never attained the popularity of his other Concertos, and remains the least known of his works for piano and orchestra.

The piano part was somewhat interesting, obviously required alot of skill, and seemed to move some of the audience members sitting near us. However, it didn't do much for me and I ended up being pretty bored by the end. I liked the energetic first movement the best of the three movements.

There was a fair amount of woodwinds, but hardly any percussion to speak of.

Ravel's La Valse

We saw this piece guest-conducted by JoAnn Falletta with the SSO.

It's a piece we've heard before, used for a Balanchine ballet of the same name. (While Ravel originally planned the piece years before he worked on it in full, he ended up completing it in 1920 as a commission for a ballet that was never performed for Sergei Diaghilev.)

This is an interesting & engaging waltz. It's heavy on woodwinds.

Ravel described La Valse as an "apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, which was linked in my mind with an impression of a fantastic whirl of destiny leading to death." The program says it "proclaims its arrival as surely the most stridently modern work of its day."

The Road To Mecca by Athol Fugard

The Road to Mecca is a play by contemporary playwright Athol Fugard, with a story based loosely on the life of artist Helen Martins. We saw the Seattle Rep's production of the show, directed by Leigh Silverman and starring Marya Sea Kaminski, Dee Maaske, and Terry Edward Moore. The play was originally produced in 1984, and was adapted into a film in 1992.

The real Helen Martins lived from 1897 - 1976 and was the creator of the Owl House, known today as a national landmark in South Africa. She woke one day to her singular vision of turning her home and yard into a sort of Mecca away from Mecca, and spent the rest of her life up until her death working on it. Especially the inside of her home made great use of the play of light, using ground glass, mirrors, and other reflective surfaces and objects to catch and reflect the light in different ways.

The action of the play takes place all on a single night, very late in Helen's life, when her good friend Elsa, a 20something schoolteacher living far away in the big city, arrives for an unexpected and brief visit to her dear friend in the dusty and desolate desert for some very important and pressing reasons, which we learn more and more about as the play progresses. As the evening moves on we discover Helen has been having troubles with the rest of her small-town community, and that her friend Marius (town pastor and no friend of Elsa's) is due for a visit later that evening where Helen will be faced to make a very important decision about her living conditions.

For a story that takes place completely in one room involving just three characters and several compressed hours of action, this play is immensely rich. It has very much what I think of as a traditional essence of theater quality about it in that it is all about the actors and the story, and would have been be almost as engaging a theatre experience were it taking place only on a bare stage with three plain chairs and a the most basic lighting effects. Fugard has pared things down to provide us with just the most essential defining moments in the lives of the three characters, which leave us knowing an entire lifetime's worth of living, philosophy, and personal growth for all three. The effect was riveting throughout, and would never have worked were it not for the wonderful acting of the expertly-tuned cast.

This isn't to say the set design and lighting had no effect. With the primary subject of Helen's life being her artistically rendered living quarters, which came alive in the cast of candlelight, the play was made immensely richer having the visual references to enhance the actor's dwelling place. We didn't need to imagine the magic that Elsa was speaking of when she described how glorious Helen's work looked, because the set and lighting showed that beautifully themselves.

You can hear an excerpt of a radio adaptation of the play by LA Theatre Works here.

Chelfitsch: Five Days in March

Chelfitsh is an alternative theater group from Japan. The narrative of Five Days in March is a simple story of what was going on in lives of several 20-ish Japanese people during the US invasion of Iraq. The invasion is a backdrop to tales of coupling, music and protests. The script is Japanese with projected supertitles in English.

The key part of the performance is the theatricality of it. The performers dress and talk naturalisticaly and the set is almost completely bare. The store is told in repeating cycles with overlapping performers voicing the first-person narratives of the characters. The actors gesture and walk in partially movements repeated in cycles. Hard to describe in words: a performer drops his arm in a casual style, then lifts it and drops it again and again while talking.

I liked the show. The story was humorous and mildly titillating enough to hold interest. It was confusing to follow due to the changing performers and repeating narrative. This confusion surprisingly became enjoyable as it combined with the physical movement of the performers.

After the show I realized it reminded me of minimalistic theater movements I learned about in college. I had never seen such a show live and it seems like Chelfitsch is a contemporary follower of that. I enjoyed how Five Days in March focused strongly on movement and language and the memory of that stayed with me afterwards.

Balanchine's Jewels

Jewels is a ballet by the well-known choreographer George Balanchine. From the program:

"Balanchine's unique Jewels, made for New York City Ballet in 1967, is a three-act plotless ballet and the first of its kind."

Each "act", which in truth are more each like their own one-act piece, was created with a particular jewel in mind: Emeralds, Rubies, and Diamonds. While I can't remember exactly which one, I know we've seen at least one of these three acts on its own at some point over the past few years, as part of an evening of short pieces.

A little bit about Balanchine: Because both the current director Peter Boal (who was a student of Balanchine) and the previous long-time directors Kent Stowell and Francia Russell(who both danced for Balanchine) are strongly associated with this choreographer, a large number of the ballets Chad and I have seen at the PNB have been Balanchine works. He has defined much of what is now known as modern American ballet, and we have never seen a Balanchine work we did not like. As far as we've been able to tell, his ballets stand out from those of other choreographers primarily due to their strong musicality. That probably sounds strange to anyone who's never seen ballet, but in truth, alot of ballet does not have movement which goes right along with the music in the way that you expect something called "dance" to do. The other primary defining style for me is his obvious innovative experimentation with the ballet form, while still staying within the confines of what most of us traditionally think of when we think the word "ballet".

We got a unique opportunity for Jewels that we've never experienced before: we were invited to watch the dress rehearsal. Not only was this interesting because we got to see the dancers warm up onstage for their pieces before performing them (amusing especially for the incongruous combination of fancy dress costumes with leg warmers, warm-up pants, and sweatshirts), but it let us see the performance twice in the same week, each with a different set of principal dancers. I think seeing it this way changed the experience by deepening it. I believe I was able to pay much more attention to all the small details that I might not otherwise notice had I only seen the piece once.

One of those details that was very prominent in Emeralds was the unique use of arm movements. In traditional ballet, the arm movements are usually very specific and mostly seem to be there to put a finishing touch on the featured movement of the legs and body. But in Emeralds, the arm movements were themselves an important expressive part of the dance, and often seemed to be even more featured than the leg movements. The effect overall was very beautiful.

My personal favorite of the evening was Rubies, which has a Stravinsky score and is described in the program as "the American heart of Jewels." While it maintained all the essential ballet tradition in general, it was fun and obviously influenced by jazz style in the same manner Stravinsky's score was. While all of the costumes for Jewels (designed by Karinska, see my note below) are great, those for Rubies are especially interesting and fun, in many vibrant shades of red and a sort of modified flapper meets All-American Revue that really helped to draw attention and enhance the jazzy movements.

I liked Diamonds too, but not as much as the other two. This one was much more rooted in traditional ballet, and had alot of what seemed like very difficult technical dancing. There was quite a bit of spontaneous applause during and after the execution of alot of the crazy complicated spins and leaps involved during this act.

Factoid: Some very interesting history I learned from the program was about the costume designer Karinska, who was a longtime collaborator with Balanchine and is known as "one of the great dance costumers of the twentieth century." She was responsible for creating 9,000 costumes for the New York City Ballet, and even costumed 11 movies in the 40s and 50s, including Ingrid Bergman's Joan of Arc costume. Besides being a major influence on many other performing arts costumes of her era, she was responsible for two of the major costume design changes that have become standards in ballet today. One was the "powder-puff" tutu, which instead of the weird sticks-out-in-the-air pancake style that older ballets used, drapes softly onto the hips and bounces nicely when the dancers move.The other standard she created was the very modern-looking knee-length chiffon ballet dress.

Jonathan Coulton with Paul & Storm

Jonathan Coulton is a guy who plays guitar and sings geeky (zombies, fractals, aliens) pop songs. Paul & Storm are two guys who play guitar, piano and sing goofy (penises, chicken nuggets, advertisements) pop songs. They all played together at The Moore on Friday.

I like Jonathan Coulton; he appeals to my adult geek nature and is a very good song writer. I almost like Paul & Storm because they are funny and appeal to the 15 year old I used to be. P&S were the opening act though they joined JC for about half of his set as great backing singers. The flow of the show was hilarious as jokes started by P&S continued into JC's set (Arrrrr) and the crowd/performer dynamic was incredibly fun.
They were joined for a few songs by an ukulele player called Molly.

Coming soon...

Our review/comment posts will start sometime after January 22nd. Until then feel free to look at the official info about our upcoming events on the left of this page.