Results tagged “act”

RECOMMENDED For these Unclosings @ New City Theatre. Local visual artist phenom Susie J. Lee has taken her studious exploration of the transience of memory out of the art gallery in this collaboration with dancer/choreographer Ying Zhou. Utilizing some impressive technology, Lee has put together a dramatic live performance/art installation/dance piece that builds on her already impressive catalog of achievements. (1404 18th Ave. Fri. & Sat., 8 p.m. Tix $15.)

RECOMMENDED 14/48: The World's Quickest Theatre Festival @ On the Boards. 14/48 has become a twice-yearly staple of Seattle theatre: dozens of actors, directors, and writers get together to throw together the best 10-minute plays they can pull off in 24 hours. The first weekend opens tonight with two showings of the first seven plays, based on themes divvied out to playwrights last night; tomorrow, there's a whole new set of plays--in total, 14 original plays in 48 hours. The festival runs for two weekends at OtB, with a new set of directors, writers, actors, and musicians next weekend. (100 W. Roy St. Fri. & Sat., 8 & 10:30 p.m. Tix $18-$35.)

ONE WEEKEND ONLY ARC Dance: Summer Dance at the Center @ Seattle Rep. Stunning contemporary ballet by the best local dance company you've never heard of. (Fri. & Sat., 8 p.m. Leo K. Theatre @ Seattle Rep. Tix $15-$25.)

Tres Tristes Tigres @ Freehold Theatre. Trinidad Martinez founded Magpai Production Group in Hamburg, Germany in 1998, but has made Seattle home for the last several years. She was one of the dancers in Pat Graney's much talked about House of Mind last December, and is now presenting three solo pieces developed with company members. (Fri. 8 p.m., through July 18. 2222 Second Ave., Suite 200; tix $15.)

OPENING Orange Flower Water @ ACT. Last December, New Century Theatre launched with a bang, with a lauded, controversial production of The Adding Machine. Their second show, opening this weekend, promises to go in radical new directions. A four-person bedroom drama, Orange Flower Water is every bit as intimate as The Adding Machine was epic. It's also dirty--18 and over, please. (700 Union St. Fri. & Sat. 8, Sun. 7. Tix $25.)

OPENING the break/s @ ACT. Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a poet, theatre artist, and educator who's produced a hip hop influenced solo performance piece that's generating buzz all over town. (700 Union St. Fri. & Sat. 8 p.m., matinees Sat. & Sun. 2 p.m. Tix $40-$55.)

RECOMMENDED Northwest New Works @ On the Boards. The NW New Works Fest returns in top form! The first weekend features a lineup of top Northwest dance groups on the mainstage, and a cast of brilliant experimental troupes down in the studio, our favorite part of the fest. The studio showcase plays Fri. 8, Sat. and Sun. at 5. The mainstage performances are Sat. and Sun. at 8. Next weekend, the lineup changes, so this is your only opportunity to see some of Seattle's best performers, including Helsinki Syndrome, featuring former Seattlester Rachel Hynes, live from London. (100 W. Roy St. Tix $14.)

It's fitting that the star of Richard Dresser's Below the Belt is an actor best known for sitcoms, because the play feels like a 90-minute-long one: There's plenty of one-liners, the characters are all archetypes, and the plot is all about lies, because a story about lies ensures that you can end up exactly where you started and that's exactly how sitcoms like to roll. That's not to say the play's bad—it's actually really funny—but it's not exactly the biting satire it's made out to be. Like so many contemporary plays, confronted with several possible directions to take a scenario, Dresser instead wussies out and aims straight for middle-brow sentimentality, leaving you with a funny but toothless take on the trials and tribulations of corporate peons.

ONE WEEKEND ONLY biome @ Seattle Rep. Capacitor, a San Francisco-based performance group that mixes dance, multimedia, and science, is finally back in town with biome. Originally scheduled for January, the performance was canceled when flooding closed I-5. Now, Capacitor is finally back for two nights with a stunning visual exploration of the micro-habitat of the rain-forest canopy, based on a close collaboration with scientists in the International Canopy Network, including Evergreen College professor Dr. Nalini Nadkarni. (Fri. & Sat., 8 p.m. 155 Mercer St. Tix $15-$25.)

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There are two ways to do Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: you can have Jekyll be the good guy--and he's the obvious good guy, or at least the traditional good guy, a doctor, who functions in society and is respected by peers and whatnot--or you can have Hyde, a mere Mr., be the good guy. Hyde is, of course, always the bad guy, the brute, the animal, the drunk, the pusher-downer of children. He's a "bad guy", but you can tell the story of Jekyll and Hyde in such a way that Hyde is the focal point of the audience's sympathy.

   

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the story, simply pulling it off doesn't count for much. The good people at ACT would really have to add something for us to walk out feeling as though this were anything more than a seasonal moneymaker (hey, they've been doing it for 25 years for a reason), and surprisingly, they actually delivered. When we left, we had a new-found respect for the old Christmas warhorse, because ACT managed to make us see the classic as though for the first time, tearing away all the horrible associations we've gathered from decades-worth of mediocre adaptations and reminding us of why Dicken's century-plus-old story is so essential.