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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.