Recent Stories in Theatre

Tamara Ober's charming "Pipa," from SPF 4

But before I get to the two solo works I saw last week, I have to call out some of the exciting shows on this week's docket. Tonight I'm going back for a pair of artists previously featured on The SunBreak: Paul Budraitis with Not. Stable. At all., and Norman Bell with Subprime!, along with recent Cornish grad Mike Harris' Traveling Panties. And tomorrow, one of the most exciting works at SPF 4 opens: Gin Hammond's Returning the Bones. Hammond, a graduate of Harvard and trained at the Moscow Art Theatre, has produced a powerful show about racial and national identity that's supposed to be amazing, and I'm still trying to find time to go see it. Point is, SPF 4 has a lot to offer, so be sure to check out the full schedule and go see some of this stuff.

Movement artist Tamara Ober, a long-time member of Minnesota's Zenon Dance, has created a charmingly odd little performance piece with Pipa. Using monologue and physical humor in addition to dance, Ober constructs a compellingly clumsy character in a way only a trained dancer could. At the opening, she's on the floor, and immediately sits up into a microphone, creating a big thump that reverberates through the sound system....

Billy Connolly has been making people laugh since the 1970s with his hilarious, off-the-cuff stand-up performance.

On television Connolly starred in the final season of the popular sitcom Head of the Class. He has also starred in a wide range of films including Indecent Proposal, Muppet Treasure Island, The Boondock Saints (I and II), Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, and the upcoming Gulliver's Travels.

Billy Connolly performs March 12 and 13 at 8 p.m. at the Bagley Wright Theatre.

Been to Seattle before?

Never once. I've always wanted to, but all the tours I've been on just never went there. You know people say it rains there all the time but I don't give a shit, I'm Scottish, I'm waterproof.

Any naked dancing planned for your visit?

No, I usually only do that on those documentary travel films I do. I got into the habit of doing it because I did it once and then I was thinking, oh, what do I do to top that for my next film, and I thought, ah fuck it, I'll just do another naked dance. Actually the last one I did in New Zealand and I did a naked bungee.

I hope nothing was harmed by whatever harness you were wearing.

No, it's a boot thing. It's a boot harness that's calf-length. And the rest of me was pink and fluffy.

You've had a long career in which you've sung folk music, written books, acted in numerous movies and television shows, and of course, stand-up comedy. Do you have a favorite? What makes you happiest?

Comedy is my calling. The rest of it is incidental. I like acting and I like acting well, and music is something, well, some people are musicians and some aren't and I'm an aren't. But comedy--it's at once exhilarating and frightening. And when I'm on the stage doing it, I'm very very happy. 

You're going to be doing two shows in Seattle, and you've done a lot of marathon, multi-date runs of shows in your career. How do you keep it fresh and exciting doing so many shows in a row?

It's kind of a weird thing. It takes work. I do about two, two and a half hours usually and it's kept fresh by trying to remember it most of the time. Half the time I can't remember everything so I have to make up stuff. I don't write it down, you see. I've never written it in my life. I was tempted to try writing it down afterward when things went really well, but I never got around to doing that.

There was an ad-lib I did once that lasted a very long time. It was a whole sketch, just ad-libbed. It's on YouTube, you can look up "Billy Connolly Wildebeast." And that's its only performance. I've thought since, maybe I should do that wildebeast thing, but what did I say about them wildebeasts, ah fuck it, I don't remember.

You've played many different roles on film, but most people know you as a comedian. How fun was it to play Il Duce, a complete badass, in The Boondock Saints?

Oh, I loved that. It's brilliant. Being a badass is wonderful because badasses do interesting things. Nice guys are just nice. They go to work and feed their family, but a badass can kill people they don't like with a nine millimeter. It just gives life that little slant. That happy little slant of your fantasies. It's a wonderful world to live in for ninety minutes....

Seattle Opera's Falstaff, all on its own, might make you believe in the future of opera. (It runs through March 13, and for this Sunday's Family Day matinee tickets are $15 for students.) Verdi's last opera reminds you that everything grows old and decays, and yet there is spring. Similarly, director Peter Kazaras finds a way to bow to opera convention, while returning the work to rowdy life. Falstaff's motto, that we humans are ridiculous creatures, can fall flat--if it's delivered without risk or sincerity.

This production--comic, high-spirited, gorgeous, and incorrigibly lusty--makes that realization an unexpected gift.

I'll start with Falstaff, as he would have hoped if he weren't fictional. This is the British bass Peter Rose's first outing as Shakespeare's rotund fount of self-regard, and it is "The first of many, I predict," said General Director Speight Jenkins. Seattle operagoers have seen Rose as Baron Ochs (Rosenkavalier) and King Marke (Tristan), but neither of those roles called for anything like Falstaff's world-devouring charisma.

Rose is wearing a fat suit--if you arrive early enough, you see him get into it, as part of Kazaras's idea to bring you closer to the stage--but it's not that heavy. It's his acting chops that send him crashing onto a bench when feeling beleaguered or lumbering across the stage in pursuit of Alice Ford (Svetla Vassileva).

Shakespeare wasn't out to make fun of fat people--he wanted to skewer instead his famous knight's self-serving appetites. It suits Falstaff to both ignore and celebrate his girth, as the mood seizes him. In Rose's take, Falstaff's eyes are always roving for an angle. His insincerity in perfectly sincere. Yes, he will say anything to get a drink, a meal, or laid, but how could anyone miss that? Fair's fair. Rose's voice was as agile as his characterization: booming, cooing, snorting, petulant. He only seemed less than perfect in a few patter-ish runs, but honestly, you could argue that that too was characterization....

Heiner Goebbels. Photo by Jakob Rendtorff.

A recommendation for Inara George's wispy vocals was, to say the least, not what I was expecting to get from Goebbels. An energetic 57-year-old, born into the former West Germany, Goebbels is one of the most noted experimental composers and theatre artists in the world, whose 2007 piece, Songs of Wars I Have Seen, is being staged at On the Boards this weekend (Thurs-Sat, tickets $18) as part of a double-bill with Pacific Musicworks and Seattle Chamber Players' joint presentation of Monteverdi's operatic fragment Combattimento.

"It's true, my work is most often being seen by music critics, and only a few of them have eyes. That's a pity," Goebbels told me Monday, mere hours after he landed in Seattle. Goebbels' work is hardly limited to music and sound composition; he's as much a theatre director as a composer, and his work features both textual and visual elements well beyond the scope of a standard chamber orchestra. "It's happened only once, I think, in the last 20 years that—I think it was El Pais, the big paper of Spain—in which they were really fighting over who was the one who should write about the piece. And then finally the editor decided to send both the theatre critic and the music critic."

Goebbels' career as a composer and musician began in the 1970s, in the political crucible of West Germany, which was struggling with both becoming a more open and democratic society following the upheavals of the late 1960s and the radical domestic terrorist movements that followed, as well as continuing to deal with the legacy of the Second World War. In 1972 and '73, he even lived in the same squat as Joschka Fischer, a leading left-wing radical in Germany, who eventually served as the German foreign minister under Gerhard Schroeder in 2000s. A bit later, Goebbels began composing for the Sogenanntes Linksradikales Blasorchester, a left-wing protest orchestra that was trying to bring something more than folk songs and rock music to the New Left....

I'm not a sketch comedy person or--outside of Spalding Gray and Mike Daisey--much into monologues, but I have gone to the Solo Performance Festival for the past three years and have had each time a revelatory moment where I realize I will be coming back. There's a richness to the offerings--storytelling, music, dance, fiction, memoirs--that guarantees you'll find something intriguing, and the level of craft tends to be high.

SPF #4 is just kicking off and runs through April 3 (a full series pass is just $99). I see twenty different performers in the lineup, so what is that, $5 per show with the pass? Amazing. Then, look at the creator/performers: Tamara Ober, Paul Budraitis (interviewed here), Ki Gottberg, Peggy Platt, Suzanne Morrison, Waxie Moon, Erin Jorgensen, Norman "SUBPRIME" Bell (interviewed here)...

The right-sized production costs of solo performance are compelling, but tonight and a few times throughout the run, there's also "Best in Shorts," where you get an evening of solo performance small plates, as it were.

For a taste of the real stuff, that's Tamara Ober's Pipa, above, the story of "an accident-prone girl who is unable to take the direct route to anywhere." Ober, a member of Zenon Dance Company since 2002, has been called "charmingly rambunctious" by the Star-Tribune, which is an apt description for SPF itself.

I am not unbiased about this Falstaff at Seattle Opera (it runs through March 13). In fact, I am counting the hours until tonight's performance.

Previously, I saw the production performed by the Opera's Young Artists, also directed by Peter Kazaras, and was absolutely blown away how Shakespearean it was. That, I realize, sounds strange, but it's a Verdi opera and if you saw Seattle Opera's production of Verdi's Macbeth, you realize the latitude a director has. (I didn't love Macbeth.)

Drama is about choices, and Kazaras chooses wisely. Bernard Jacobson, in his Seattle Times review, goes all out. Jacobson is a thoughtful critic, and more immune to gushing than many. But he likes what he likes: "Kazaras' genius is to use genuinely original ideas to set the true message of an opera forth in a new and utterly arresting light."

There's plenty of great things going on this weekend, from Salt Horse's opening tonight, to ArtAttack's production of Fat Pig (just extended!) and the Balagan's Trout Stanley, to the closing of Glengarry Glen Ross down at the Rep. But that said, there's a bunch of top-notch, one-time-only events this weekend to keep you busy.

Tonight, Feb. 26, is the SAM Remix down at the Seattle Art Museum (8 p.m.-midnight, tickets $10, $8 students) the bi-monthly art-and-performance bash that tries to bring in the under-30 crowd. SAM Remix almost always sports an awesome lineup of events, but tonight's lineup is exceptionally good for two reasons: First, KT Niehoff's Lingo Dance are installing themselves as human sculpture throughout the galleries. It's part of a three-month project the company is developing with ACT Theatre called A Glimmer of Hope or Skin or Light. The second is a new work from Mike Pham, half of Seattle's performance art darlings Helsinki Syndrome, called Soccer Practice. Expect something funny, odd, physical, and--quite probably--involving glitter.

Tomorrow night, Sat. Feb. 27, the Canoe Social Club above Theatre off Jackson is hosting what promises to be the sexiest fundraiser for Haitian relief yet, Hotties for Haiti (10:30 p.m., $15, 21+), an evening of performance by local burlesque and aerial performers including Tamara the Trapeze Lady, Lara Paxton, and Violet Tendencies. I've been told to expect nonstop striptease and table dancing, with your drool-slathered dollar bills destined to travel quickly from g-string to helping the people of Port-au-Prince.

And finally, I've saved the best for last: all weekend, the Seattle Chamber Players are hosting a stunning series of concerts called Icebreaker V: Songs of Love and War at On the Boards (tickets $18). Here's the deal: for the fifth year in a row, SCP is presenting a festival celebrating the best contemporary European chamber composers. Each of the five concerts features a different nation and deals with different themes, and to top it off, SCP is bringing in guest performers from around the globe, from Polish soprano Agata Zubel, to Denmark's FIGURA Ensemble....

I was not looking forward to Legally Blonde. I thought it would be juvenile, so instead of inviting a friend as my plus-one, I took my nine-year-old niece to the show. Saved me from asking a favor of a friend, and served in furtherance of my Uncle of the Year campaign. But a funny thing happened: I liked Legally Blonde more than my niece did.

Yup, I was pretty skeptical too. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

The show, a national touring production that plays at the 5th Avenue through March 14, is tons of fun. It drew me in from the first, with the peppy ensemble piece "Omigod You Guys." (I know--sounds horrible, huh? It's not.)

I remained dubious, though. Any show can have one good number; just check out a Don McLean concert. But the next song, "Serious," a romantic duet that kickstarts the story, was good too. Pretty soon I stopped assaying every song and just let this classic American tale of optimism triumphant take me away, Calgon-style....

Beth Graczyk and Jens Wazel in Salt Horse's "Man on the Beach." Photo by Tim Summers.

Proper seating being in short supply, dancer/choreographer Beth Graczyk explained the inspiration for the piece while sitting on a wooden box; Corrie Befort, also a dancer and choreographer, was perched on the middle rung of a folding ladder, while composer/sound artist Angelina Baldoz was relegated to a miniature chair that, much to the amusement of her cohorts, raised her a scant half-foot off the floor.

"I went down to the beach with some family members," Graczyk recalled of a day almost two years ago in Port Townsend, "and saw this man who kept repeating these very simple gestures over and over again. And the way that he was set against the ocean, he was in perfect silhouette, and nothing was surrounding him. It was so particular, because it seemed like the whole environment really framed him, like he had gone there of all places because that's where he could be who he really was. And yet he was so internal, it was like there was a little sheath or bubble wrapped around him."

That image—a solitary man with long arms, alone on a beach, carrying on with a portrait of a woman—captivated Graczyk, and when she brought it to her collaborators, they were likewise transfixed by the mysterious man who was stuck in his own life, trapped in a personal drama. ...

Rachel Permann and Martyn G. Krouse in Fat Pig. Image courtesy of Artattack Theater Ensemble.

Director Justin Lockwood claims Fat Pig's characters are trying to do well, but that's just not true. LaBute's characters are always sociopathic at best, psychopathic at worst. And the work itself is typical LaBute: casual cruelty, people being terrible to people, although at least in this play, no one ends up dead or maimed or otherwise physically harmed. Spoiler alert? 

Instead, boy (Martyn G. Krouse as Tom) meets girl (Rachel Permann as Helen), and they really like each other--Krouse and Permann both bring some seriously sexy, flirtatious heat. Too bad traditionally handsome Tom can't get over the fact that Helen has some meat on her bones. Though smart, anxious Helen is ostensibly the titular character, Fat Pig is not so much her story, as the story of everyone's reactions to her. Tom's immature work frenemy Carter (Lockwood pulling double-duty and relishing the douche-otype) has his own weight hangups, while a girl at work Tom used to date (Lisa Every as Jeannie) can't get over the fact that he'd rather date a fatty than her crazy ass. Bland, weak-willed middle manager Tom just doesn't have a clue how not to care about what others think....

Ty Alexander Cheng, Joel Myers & Patrick Pulkrabeck in Spectrum Dance's "Farewell" at the Moore Theatre. Photo by Gabriel Bienczycki, Zebra Visual

Seeing as how that "impossible totality" is essentially the subject of Farewell, it seems fair to get all lit-crit about it. The concepts in the show could form the basis of several doctoral theses (and, in fact, I'm pretty sure at least one or two were read from during the show). Aesthetically, choreographer Donald Byrd seems to have taken Jameson's idea to heart: his subject is simply too big, too complex to grasp all at once, so instead the audience gets pieces, bits of information, processed and transformed through both memory and media. News photos of Tiananmen Square and Sept. 11 hang at odd angles from the ceiling; a lecturer reads from various texts you only half hear over the din of Byron Au Yong's live drumming and news-report-laden sound collage; the dance is performed in the round, with the audience seated on three sides.

From any one point, you can't see the whole—the images tilt away from you, dancers block your sight-lines of other dancers. But the effect works. During one segment, with most of the company seated directly in front of where I sat in the front row of the bleachers off stage right, I watched as a lyrical duet unfolded as nothing more than a series of arms and legs extending beyond what was blocking my view. So there is, the work suggests, some order in all that chaos.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. In Farewell, Byrd plays with a number of concepts and themes that he tries to make add up to a big whole: the titular "contemplation" on US-China relations. One of the core influences, and the most remarked upon before the show, is Ma Jian's novel Beijing Coma, about a man wounded in the Tiananmen Square protests who spends 12 years in a waking coma. Structurally, Farewell duplicates that narrative by proposing a subsequent coma victim as a result of Sept. 11. The relationship between 1989 and 2001 is painfully high-concept—namely, the idea is that in both cases, a state of emergency threatened the stability of the neoliberal world order, and in the name of preserving that stability, human and civil rights were curtailed....

Spectrum Dance Theatre's artistic director Donald Byrd. Photo by Gabriel Bienczycki, Zebra Visual.

Farewell is second part of Byrd's ambitious three-year project with Spectrum called Beyond Dance: Promoting Awareness and Mutual Understanding. Last year, Byrd—known for his high-concept, intellectual work—presented A Chekhovian Resolution, which explored the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and its wider ramifications in the Middle East and abroad, and next year the program concludes with a work about Africa.

In crafting Farewell, Byrd was primarily inspired by Ma Jian's 2008 novel Beijing Coma, a first-person narrative told from the perspective of a man left in a waking coma following the suppression of the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square. From there, as Byrd explained in an interview after the rehearsal, he built the work out into a sort of triptych, with the novel linking the events of Tiananmen Square to the attacks of Sept. 11.

"The Student Democratic Movement in China in 1989 was significant in China's history, and China is different because of those demonstrations," Byrd said. "It's different because it shifted its focus from conversations in the country around how progressive it would be in terms of citizens' rights, what kind of rights they would give to the people, the government being—not liberal—but allowing for more kinds of discussions around democracy. After June of '89, that conversation went away. The conversation, not only among the government but among the people, shifted to economic concerns."...

Russell Hodgkinson and Charles Leggett. Photo by Chris Bennion.

"First prize is a Cadillac. Second prize is steak knives. Third prize? You're fired." That iconic line from David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross is one of the most easily recalled by those of us who've seen the all-star film version. This line is completely absent from the play, of course, as it belongs to Blake, a character written into the film by Mamet for Alec Baldwin. For those who've only seen the film, it is at first difficult to imagine it without Baldwin's character. Blake is a brusque, dominating figure whose jarring speech to the salesmen at the beginning of the film startles first-time viewers into understanding they're in for something a little different.

Happily, my little worry about no Blake was for naught. Moments after the curtain is drawn, Blake never existed.

For the uninitiated, Glengarry Glen Ross (Seattle Repertory Theatre; runs through the 28th; tickets $15-$59) is the story of four inglorious Chicago real estate agents driven to desperate acts in an attempt to keep their jobs.

As the audience moves about, finding their seats or standing in the aisle chatting, the curtain is wide open, an impressive set visible to all. It's a slightly run-down office mere feet from the El train. File cabinets, cardboard boxes, and four nondescript desks make up the main floor, and metal stairs lead up to a private office where a man in a necktie and suspenders pokes around, sifting through papers and smoking a cigarette. He's a mere curiosity at first, until the house lights begin to slowly come down and people rush to take their seats. Our man walks down the stairs, casually flipping lights off as he moves through the office. The audience finally becomes silent. He dons his jacket and puffs on his cigarette a few more times before opening the front door, hitting the final light switch, and walking out of sight. And with the thud of the door closing behind him, the theatre goes black. ...

Ryan Higgins, Angela DiMarco, and Sarah Budge in Balagan Theatre's production of Trout Stanley

Set in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Trout Stanley (Thurs-Sun at the Balagan Theatre through March 6; tickets: $12-$15) opens with Sugar DuCharme (Angela DiMarco) dancing to Heart's "Magic Man," which ought to please any Seattleite worth their bacon. She's in a knick-knack-filled shack (Maridee Slater has fully transformed the bare concrete of the Balagan basement) that she's stayed inside of for ten years, kept company only by her twin sister Grace (Sarah Budge), who works at the town dump, where the dead bodies of young women their age turn up annually.

At this point, you should have some sense as to why the New York Times said the play "could give wacky talkiness a good name." And if wacky talkiness appeals, by god, you can do no better currently for the price.

I had an idea that Trout Stanley the work of a young playwright (seems true) who had just discovered the joys of getting staggering word-drunk, but it turns out that Claudia Dey writes like this all the time. The Toronto playwright says she drew upon her experiences cooking in bush camps for Trout Stanley, and she has penned a far-North flood of monologue that, in this context, has just one subtext--gnawing loneliness....

Russell Hodgkinson, John Aylward, MJ Sieber, R. Hamilton Wright, Charles Leggett, the cast of Seattle Rep's "Glengarry Glen Ross." Photo by Derek Sparks

Six and a half feet tall, with long hair, rough-hewn features, and a penchant for black leather jackets, Wilson Milam manages at once to stand out and to disappear in plain sight. Have him pointed out to you in a crowd and you can't help but notice him towering over the rest; pass him on the street and you probably wouldn't look up. It's an effect that's well suited to his personality: friendly but somewhat taciturn, in an interview he would sometimes stop mid-sentence to ponder something, an odd flicker of a happy memory crossing his face, only to ultimately defer the question.

Milam's also one of the most successful theatre directors you've likely never heard of, and certainly one of the most successful theatre artists to emerge from Seattle in last few decades. His career began in collaboration with playwright and actor Tracy Letts in Chicago in the early Nineties, with Milam directing Letts' first two plays, years before the he wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County. From Chicago, Milam made his way to London where he's been based for more than a decade, making a name for himself as a director of new plays, perhaps most notoriously with the premiere Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore, a darkly comic bloodbath of infamous proportions that's being staged at ACT Theatre in October.

Last year, Milam made his Seattle debut as a director with a widely praised production of Conor McPherson's The Seafarer at the Rep (itself a bit of bloodbath of booze), and now, he's returned to direct one of the plays that's been a life-long dream of his: Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet's 1982 masterpiece about an office of desperate real estate salesman, starring a who's who cast of Seattle's best actors, including R. Hamilton Wright, MJ Sieber, and Charles Leggett. The show opens tonight, Feb. 10, and runs through the 28th; tickets $15-$59.

I met with Milam a couple weeks ago to discuss the play and his career over coffee at Caffe Zingaro in Lower Queen Anne, near the theatre. Asked what part of town he grew up in, he chuckled and responded: "Bellevue. Back when QFC was still a pasture land, and there was no bridge. I still say the 'new' bridge."...

Actor and writer Brian Copeland

"Here's the letter verbatim," he continued, "as it was written, unsigned: 'As an African-American, I'm disgusted every time I hear your voice because you are not a genuine black man.'"

That letter, and the phrase it provided—not a genuine black man—have long since become famous across the nation, having reached Copeland at just the right moment. A long-time comedian, writer, and Sunday morning radio talk-show host in the Bay Area, Copeland was looking for a way to create a longer work, and that insult proved to be just what he needed. His solo show that took that phrase as its name debuted in 2004 and became the longest-running one-man show in San Francisco history, with runs in New York and Los Angeles to boot. His 2006 memoir, Not a Genuine Black Man: My Life As an Outsider, became a bestseller and has been adopted at high schools, colleges, and city-reads programs around the country. And this weekend only, Seattle has the chance to see Copeland, who is bringing Not a Genuine Black Man to Theatre off Jackson for four performances, produced by Backwards Ensemble Theatre Co. (Feb. 11-14, tickets $25 sliding scale/$15).

And all because of an anonymous insult. It's true that in a lot of ways, Copeland doesn't conform to the African-American norm. He's Catholic (just 3 percent of US Catholics are black), his comic heroes include decidedly white humorists like Carl Reiner, and much like the president, his diction makes him too "white" for some blacks. "Barack Obama went through this," Copeland pointed out. "The first debate, on YouTube, first questions was, 'Are you black enough?' First question. And his answer was, 'Well, I can't get a cab.'"...

The Stone Dance Collective, part of Chop Shop: Bodies of Work, at the Meydenbauer Center Feb. 13 & 14. Photo by Zebra Visual.

In person, Stone looks the part of the classic suburban mom, casually dressed, her blond hair cut shortish and pulled back. But the appearance of domestic normalcy is mostly a facade--in person, Stone is as vociferous and passionate a proponent of contemporary dance as any you're likely to meet, at once strongly opinionated and an ambassador for the art form overall.

Since moving to Seattle in 1995, Stone has been the choreographer and artistic director of her own company, the Stone Dance Collective, a teacher at both the Washington Academy of Performing Arts and the International School, and, for the last three years, the driving force behind Chop Shop: Bodies of Work, the Eastside's biggest festival of contemporary dance, which goes up this weekend at the Theatre at the Meydenbauer Center in downtown Bellevue (Sat., Feb. 13, 7:30 p.m. & Sun., Feb. 14, 3 p.m.; tickets $15-$25).

Raised in Phoenix, Arizona, Stone began choreographing work at age 14, before she really studied dance technique, which left a strong impact on her art. "I really had to create my own language," as she described it. After graduating from Arizona State, she bounced around the country--studying choreography at Harvard, dancing in Boston, performing musical theatre in LA--before heading to the Laban Centre in London to complete her master's. It was there that she first founded her collective and met her husband, before relocating to Seattle, where she restarted her dance collective on Capitol Hill....

The reviews for Olivier Wevers' 3Seasons—the first full-length production by his company Whim W'him—last month were nearly all glowing and positive (including mine). A surrealist exploration of the consequences of consumer culture, executed with charming aplomb by Whim W'him's crew of Spectrum and PNB dancers, it largely won over audiences and critics alike.

Kaori Nakamura of Whim W'Him. Photo by Marc von Borstel.

One of the few dissenting voices was The Stranger's art (and sometimes dance) critic Jen Graves, who, in a Jan. 20 Slog post, criticized Wevers' representation of women in the piece, saying he was like a "novelist who can't quite write women, or who isn't that interested in trying." Aside from a guest post on the OtB blog by dancer/choreographer Catherine Cabeen, Graves was the only critic to tackle the piece from a feminist angle.

But yesterday, a big—and somewhat surprising—voice in the dance community threw down: Spectrum Dance's artistic director and choreographer Donald Byrd, who's been accused of sexist representations himself (as he admits). Writing in his blog on the Spectrum site, Byrd described (without directly naming the piece or the choreographer) his experience watching 3Seasons:

There were two moments in particular that were startling and caused me to gasp (and those of you that know me, know that it takes a lot to make me gasp). In the first, a woman was being violently “humped” by a man in the center of the stage just before the lights went to black ending one of the sections of the piece. The second involved the same woman being tossed upside down in a waste dumpster with her legs sticking straight up, just before another black out, this time signaling the end of the piece and the program.

Inside the dance community, based on a number of conversations I've had since 3Seasons ran, tongues have been wagging over these images and sequences, performed by PNB's Kaori Nakamura, who plays a sort of Mother Earth role and is frequently the object of abuse by the madcap consumers in the rest of the corps. Many described the "humping," performed by PNB's Lucien Postelwaite [Postlewaite is the one who places her in the trash], as "rape," with which I agree (rape of Mother Earth, get it?). Byrd also fails to mention that Nakamura was smeared with fake blood before being dumped in the garbage can.

But here's the kicker, and something I didn't know until after the fact (due to a lack of research and interest), which is why so many people are talking about Nakamura's treatment: she's Wevers' ex-wife, from before he came out. Postlewaite, who humps her onstage, is Wevers' current husband, the two having married in California before Prop. 8 overturned gay marriage.

This is the center of Byrd's critique, the "biographical" angle.

"With this additional information, other questions cascaded. What is he saying about his relationship with his ex? How does he really feel about her? What does he think of his current life with his current partner in relationship to his old married life? Does he realize that these kinds of questions might arise for viewers? How does the ex feel about what was happening to her on stage?" Byrd writes, before acknowledging: "I could go on but I won’t because what this points out is that none of these questions have anything to do with whether what happened on stage succeeded as a piece of good dance or not."

Byrd has something of a point there at the end, but it's an evasive one. Someone who's produced a work based on Baudrillard's Seduction should surely be aware of Barthes' critique of authorship; anyone in the audience who saw 3Seasons and knew those relationships saw something drastically different in that piece, as will anyone who reads Byrd's post or this article (or who paid attention to some of the preview press; Wevers & co. hardly hid the fact—it was noted at least in Michael Upchurch's Seattle Times preview).

At the time, insofar as I noted the casually misogynistic representations of femininity, I wrote them off as in keeping with the work's overall themes, and, of course, sexist representations are hardly unusual in the arts. But with a few weeks' reflection and discussion, I see the largely fawning critical response to Wevers' work as a dramatic failure to address the questions the work raises.

This isn't to say 3Seasons was bad—I still disagree with Graves' overall assessment—or that Wevers is a jerk (he and Nakamura remain close, obviously; she is in his company, as is described as his "best friend"), but if not a single critic besides Graves even discussed gender, and it took Donald Byrd to semi-publicly discuss the biography, what are the rest of us doing but writing pull-quotes for Whim W'Him's future grant applications? Seriously, we didn't even get the real story.

Classical ballet doesn't get more classical than The Sleeping Beauty, this production especially, which, as PNB's Doug Fullington explains it, has a lineage that extends right back to its original choreographer, Marius Petipa. When Kaori Nakamura, as Princess Aurora, balancing en pointe on a single foot, has each of her suitors turn her, hold, then release, four successive times, it's such an apotheosis of style that it's hard to believe a human ankle is involved. (PNB's production, running through February 14 at McCaw Hall, employs rotating casts, so your Princess Aurora may vary. Tickets are $25-$160.)

One of the humanizing qualities of such an idealized art form is that, even with notation, there's no better way to be sure of a choreographer's intent than seeing his work yourself. Ronald Hynd's wonderful version is just two choreographic generations from a 1921 Diaghilev production that toured to London, which gets you right back to St. Petersburg and Petipa.

Yet you don't think of The Sleeping Beauty as, narrative aside, slumbering unchanged for a hundred years. It exists, in Mircea Eliade's formulation, in illo tempore, in a once upon a time adjacent to the present. (On the other hand, this is a three-hour ballet with substantial action in pantomime, not a sing-along fairy tale, so while I can vouch for its immediacy, I can also vouch for the adorable little moppet behind me talking throughout, kicking seat backs, doing an impromptu dance break, beating time on an arm rest, and guzzling her way through a juice box.)

The Prologue presents the baby's christening, in a kingdom with access to yards of gold lamé--Peter Docherty's costumes start out storybook and trend towards Bedazzler--with seven fairies bearing gifts of beauty, temperament, beauty, and so on, each having a little solo. Sadly, Carabosse the wicked fairy was left off the invitations, and shows up enraged, promising deadly spindles on sixteenth birthdays, before the Lilac Fairy of Wisdom (Carla Körbes, last night) steps in to water down a death sentence into a coma....

The various contributors to "Break a Heart" at On the Boards. Photo by Tim Summers.

Sleeping Beauty at Pacific Northwest Ballet (Feb. 4-14; tickets $25-$160). A masterpiece of Romantic ballet, with a score by Tchaikovsky, PNB's production of Sleeping Beauty is based on British choreographer Ronald Hynd's painstaking 1993 reconstruction of Marius Petipa's 1890 original. I sat in on the dress rehearsal last night, and was wowed (along with a dozen or so starry-eyed little girls) by the sumptuous production and Princess Aurora's glorious movement.

Break a Heart at On the Boards (Feb. 11-14; tickets $18). A host of Seattle choreographic talent joins forces to present an evening of movement exploring love, which is of course set opposite Valentine's Day. Break a Heart features work by Wade Madsen, Crispin Spaeth, Diana Cardiff, Kristina Dillard, ilvs strauss/Jody Kuehner, Sara Jinks and Juliet Waller Pruzan/Stephen Hando....

Opening night of "Project 3" (two more shows, February 5 and 6) from the Seattle Dance Project was a leggy affair, onstage and off, as dance compatriots from Pacific Northwest Ballet stood in their sculpted way and chatted while waiting for the show to begin.

It was intimate and social, until the lights went down, and then it was all business, but still very intimate. In the small theatre at ACT, the dancers' frictive slides and spins joined a soundtrack of pressured breaths, and it seemed a good bet that those in the front rows were close enough to be hit with beads of sweat.

With a program as varied as "Project 3," at least one work is bound to win your heart, though it may not be the one you expect. I went on the strength of the world premiere of "To Converse Too" from Edwaard Liang, but it was Betsy Cooper's "In Another Land" that surprised me. Michael Upchurch was fond of Mark Haim's "No more sweet hours of rapture." Sandra Kurtz highlights Kent Stowell's "b6."

Bach's Cello Suites and bold backlighting by Peter Bracilano were co-stars in Liang's work, featuring six dancers, four men and two women. Liang's hint that it's about conversation shows you more of his finger than the moon, but it's still a mesmerizing feat of interlocking balletic motion, and deeply personal glimpses of relationship and control....

Friend Rachael and I got all gussied up Sunday night to go find out why it was that two unabashed musical theater fans like ourselves didn't know diddly about South Pacific (at the 5th Avenue Theatre, Tuesday-Sunday through February 21; tickets $25-$103). By night's end, we knew the answer. This Rodgers & Hammerstein so-called classic about love in World War II hasn't aged well.

I don't regret spending three hours watching the outstanding sets and the tremendous vocal talent in this national touring production, and I wouldn't have regretted buying a ticket. If you are a fan of musicals, you should go. But if you're the type of person who's only going to see a musical once in a while, save your money for the 5th Avenue's productions of On the Town and Candide later this year. [For a contrary view, consider "11 Reasons Not to Miss South Pacific."]

Let me first absolve the director, cast, and crew of any responsibility. Bartlett Sher's staging is inventive and adds a little Heart of Darkness tinge to the story. Rod Gilfry has as powerful a baritone as I've ever heard. As "little hick" Nellie Forbush, Carmen Cusack is cute and charming and everything that role should be. The comic relievers--Matthew Salvidar as Luther Billis and especially Genson Blimline as Stewpot--throw strikes. The fault lies with Rodgers & Hammerstein themselves....

Bruno Beltrao and Grupo de Rua's "H3". Photo by Anns V. Koiij.

It's a fine question to ask. Not that women in the audience weren't responding—you could almost hear the panting at the end, as eight physically ripped, sweating (and most shirtless to boot) Brazilian dancers took their bow—but Beltrão's H3 is an almost Mametian (in terms of its masculinity, rather than its misogyny) exploration of men interacting with men, from the opening moments, where a pair of dancers stare down the audience, to the closing moments of chaos, the dancers each taking more and more expressive and athletic poses on an increasingly darkened stage. In between, H3 offers a detailed examination of the way men establish themselves among their peers, compete with one another, and ultimately turn to machismo as a means to exist in the world.

H3 unfolds in three distinct sections. The first is essentially narrative, centering on one dancer's character. As the show opens, he stands next to a far more self-assured counterpart, trying to follow his lead in staring down the audience. Then the weaker of the two begins to move, only to be shown up by his more assured and accomplished counterpart. Then, one by one, the other dancers move onto the stage, each in turn seeking to establish his own skills and ability. Ultimately, the original dancer finds a partner whose moves he carefully follows and thus is able to establish himself within the group....

Bart Sher (Photo: Team Photogenic)

Saturday night Bart Sher had the Tom Sawyer-esque experience, he said, of attending his own funeral. The occasion was "A Bash for Bart," a gala in celebration of his decade with Intiman--the title of which he confessed to some ambivalence about, as someone who'd had his skull fractured by a baseball bat as a child. The establishment of a Bartlett Sher Artistic Fund, funded by $2,500-per-couple plates at a Tom Douglas-hosted dinner, made it an august evening indeed.

Laurence Ballard was spirited up from Savannah, Georgia, to deliver an erudite envoi to Sher's 16-play stint: Namaste Man, The Skin of Our Teeth, Uncle Vanya, Prayer for my Enemy, Richard III, Three Sisters, Singing Forest, Our Town, Nora, Homebody/Kabul, Titus Andronicus, Arms and the Man, Nickel and Dimed, Cymbeline, The Dying Gaul, and Servant of Two Masters. (Misha Berson recaps the years here.)

"Woe," pronounced Ballard, to the actor who encounters Sher unprepared. And woe of a different sort to the actor who has prepared but has made stupid choices.

Broadway's Kelli O'Hara (from Sher's Light in the Piazza and South Pacific) sang, and literally kicked off her shoes. (Who knew Harry Connick, Jr., had done an arrangement of Piazza's "Fable"?) Ida Cole--the philanthropist who saved the Paramount and its Mighty Wurlitzer Organ for us--wished the Shers well, and reminisced about her former neighbors, saying they'd become family.

It was sweet--you got the feeling Bart would not sit still for cloying--and respectful, a paying of tribute to an artistic director who, these days, cannot be hired enough in New York, whether it's for theatre (Odets at Lincoln Center), musical theatre (Broadway's South Pacific), or opera (he passed the Met audition handily with Barber of Seville).

"Somewhat eclipsed by his recent successes in New York...," says the 2008 New York Times Magazine profile, "is the fact that he remains artistic director of the Intiman Theater in Seattle, a job he has held since 2000 and has done sparklingly enough to help the Intiman earn the 2006 Tony for Outstanding Regional Theater." (Predictably, they get Intiman's full name wrong: it's Intiman Theatre.)...

Seattle Dance Project's "Project 3" opens tonight, January 29, and will have seven performances this weekend and next at ACT. Tickets are $25. Here is a conversation with choreographer Edwaard Liang, whose work is having its premiere.

Pacific Northwest Ballet was bustling with bunheads when I met up with Seattle Dance Project co-founder Julie Tobiason in a conference room there, before rehearsal started on Edwaard Liang's new work. It's their third season performing as part of ACT's Central Heating Lab, but they gather their rehearsal studio time while--and where--they may. Julie had her third baby with her--she's part of a maternity explosion that's hit the group, and is sitting this set of performances out.

Tell me about starting the group.

SDP founders Tim Lynch and Julie Tobiason (Photo: Angela Sterling)

For us, it was like now or never. We had this great group of dancers around, and if you're going to say, "I'm going to fundraise for the next three years..." You don't know who'll be around. You just don't know. We were awarded two grants, and so that's why we started when we did. It just felt like if we wait, it's not going to happen. We're grassroots, if we realize our budget is going to be $5,000 off, we look to see what we can cut. It so bare bones anyway, but that's what we're all doing.

We started in 2007, rehearsing and getting pieces going. Our debut was with "Project 1" in January 2008. In our second year we did "Project Orpheus" in the fall, and then January 2009 was "Project 2." This season we did a collaboration with the chamber music group Simple Measures in November '09. Our idea in building repertory is to have a mix of collaborative productions and our own self-produced repertory productions.

Is everyone from PNB?

We're PNB heavy, that's part of the reason why we started. When I left I did some work with Donald Byrd over at Spectrum, I did some work with Maureen Whiting; I wanted to explore other modern and contemporary works. The ballet career--forty weeks a year, thirty to forty hours a week--I had done that since I was sixteen years old. So I wanted to do some things I felt I was motivated to do.

Timothy Lynch had retired the year after me from PNB, and I knew he wanted to continue dancing. You know, retiring from PNB doesn't mean your dance career ends, unless you decide that. We were talking about Maureen's work, and how much we loved contemporary and new works, and other dancers--Alexandra Dixon, Oleg Gorboulev was here teaching and doing some guesting, and Dana Hanson. We just had a great group of people hanging around with similar interests, so that's why we started it, really. Kory [Perigo] and Betsy [Cooper], they're from modern dance, though they trained in ballet....