We were walking down Broadway at lunchtime trying to decide on the perfect uncrowded, sun-soaking lunchspot, when it came to us. Actually, it was printed on a sign that advertised La Puerta's lunch specials. That's when we remembered that La Puerta has an upstairs deck overlooking Broadway -- and that their food is resolutely mediocre, virtually guaranteeing light occupancy. How right we were. Just one couple was sitting outside, discussing a California "growing" operation. We......

FULL PUPPET NUDITY: You might have noticed that big banner on the side of the Paramount advertising puppet cleavage Avenue Q. Well, tonight is opening night, so if you haven't gotten your tickets for this ever-so-brief run of the Tony Award-winning show, now's your time. Seattlest will be there tonight for the kick-off, but then it's up to you to get out and see those puppets sing and swear all over the place. June 10-22......

It's a little eerie--one of the shovels has picked up a 15' stretch of I-beam and is using it to drag swaths of rubble up into a pile. Obviously there's someone in the cabin operating the thing, but glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, it looks like a machine has learned how to use tools. So goodbye old Broadway QFC! Goodbye, old Broadway Taco Bell! Goodbye, old house! Maybe now we'll see some......

Bruce Lee photo courtesy of the AP If this announcement had come on April Fool's Day, we'd have thought they went a little overboard with the prank. A Broadway musical about the life of Bruce Lee and his journey to martial arts and movie stardom? Apparently so. Today, Elephant Eye Theatrical announced their latest musical Bruce Lee: Journey to the West, which is scheduled to debut sometime during the 2010-11 season. According to the press......

Avenue Q is going to be hitting the Paramount this summer, and word on the street is that the banner they'll be hanging on the theater is simply scandalous. According to the press release: Seattle Theatre Group unveils most controversial banner to date at 1:00 PM on the east facing exterior of The Paramount Theatre. Be the first to see Lucy, star of Broadway's Avenue Q, in all her provocative glory. "This is the......

Not exactly news in the sense that we didn't know it was coming...but, the day of reckoning is finally here. Dick's is serving fries that have been cooked in trans fat-free oil. We decided to take one for the team. We trucked it all the way to Dick's on Broadway for lunch today, just to see if the fries are any worse than the trans fat-cooked fries we had a few weeks ago. Granted,......

The Seattle Men's Chorus has announced its 2008-09 season and it includes (gay gasp!) Debbie Reynolds. As a girlfriend of ours (the platonic kind) noted, "I bet those men about had a heart attack." Also in the 08-09 season: a Christmas concert called Fruitcake which, according to the press release, will be "soaked in spirits; with a bit of spice, nuts, and fruit tossed in for fun." The release also said the show will......

Are you looking for exciting theatre outside the Seattle city limits? If you are interested in the artistic works of people from all around the Northwest, you can still check out the four remaining shows of the Northwest Playwrights Alliance (NPA) Festival of Northwest Plays in Tacoma. The festival will showcase three new full-length plays and several 10 minute plays with themes varying from disaster survivors to “tongue-in-cheek potty humor.” Proceeds from the festival......

On this Valentine's Day, we also take the time to honor the kind of love that exists between two straight dudes -- the primarily heterosexual feelings that a man has for his BFF. Exhibit A: Stan and Kyle. Exhibit B: Jay and Silent Bob. Exhibit C: Matt and Ben, the celebrity spoof of the relationship between Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, focusing on the period right before they became famous (i.e., the making of......

We're gonna start asking Seattlest Dan to pick our lottery numbers. A full year ago he looked into a cloudy future and typed:We predict next year will see even higher numbers at Metro Transit as job growth continues and "gas prices remain high." Ridership is going to skyrocket when either the Viaduct closes to traffic or light rail starts coming on line, but neither of those will likely happen in 2007.The bus people have dutifully......

Once upon a time in a land not so far, far away, our head exploded. DreamWorks Theatricals and Neal Street Productions, Ltd. have announced that Shrek the Musical will play an exclusive world premiere engagement at The 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle, August 14–September 21, prior to opening on Broadway in the fall of 2008. Preview performances will begin in early November at a theater to be announced. Shrek the Musical is an entirely......

As after all great magic tricks, we're still puzzled how this was done. God knows we love Ballet -- like everyone else who works around Broadway and Pike. It's not just a restaurant, it's our unofficial cafeteria. We've got the menu memorized, the staff all know we like tea and bring us a pot without asking, the price is always right. But we do eat there a lot, so today we walked into the QFC......

Seattlest was adamant that we were going to sign up for Gold's Gym on Broadway yesterday. We'd decided that we were ready to move beyond the gym at our apartment complex and that Gold's hit the sweet spot of equipment and convenience (the YMCA on 23rd is closer, but the equipment is lacking). So post-brunch we made our way there, smiling that we were going to finally check this off of our to-do list. Here......

Last night, a besuited Crispin Hellion Glover took the stage at Broadway Performance Hall with the perfunctory greeting: "Good evening. Presently, I will read to you from eight books." And he did. Now, we were kinda expecting something along those lines, as the Northwest Film Forum's blurb on his film events this weekend announced: All performances preceded by Glover’s one-hour slide show, which consists of ten eight different stories dramatically narrated by Glover himself.......

Seattlest is still getting our bearings after spending the last few weeks of 2007 on the east coast, but one of the most surprising things we've seen is commentary lamenting the closure of the Taco Bell on Broadway. Really? Their food was awful even by Taco Bell standards, and their only saving grace was their late hours. They were an eatery of last resorts. Good riddance. Our collective g-i tract (we're very close here in......

This Seattlest took one look at the weather forecast and headed to sunny Florida yesterday. Now here we are in our hometown of DeLand, population 24,375 (per 2006 census). Our mother doesn't have wireless at the house, and is operating off a 1997 iMac. It's cute and compact, but slow as hell, so we headed out this morning for the one source of public wifi in town: Boston Gourmet Coffeehouse. A couple of things about......

Are food safety and food tasty mutually exclusive goals? You have to ask after both Zesto's and Wild Ginger show up on the P-I's list of Seattle's dirtiest restaurants. Zesto's, the venerable burger joint of 15th N.W. and 65th, has the most "red critical" violations of any restaurant in Seattle this year: 15. Frankly, if it takes 15 red critical violations to get the yumminess into their burgers and shakes, we will assume the risk.......

Maybe the first thing we should tell you about Striking 12 at CHAC -- besides the SAD tie-in, the rave reviews, or the fact that only 600 people in Seattle will have the chance to see it -- is that you can win half-off tickets to it. A limited number of $15 tickets are being held for those who correctly answer the following trivia question:Name at least one of the bands featured the first year......

"On October 1, when tickets went on sale for the Seattle premiere of Jersey Boys," the press release solemnly informs us, "all 5th Avenue Theatre box office records were broken." Obviously someones of a certain age miss their white doo wop. A big money-maker on Broadway, Jersey Boys is the story of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons and how they ruled the airwaves between 1962 and 1967, on the strength of Valli's signature falsetto.......

No. But that doesn't make this factoid from a political campaign article in today's P-I any less disturbing: "If it's OK to notify a political campaign about this guy, what about the neighbors he lived near for months?" said Ed Troyer, a spokesman for the Pierce County Sheriff's Department, pointing out that [Mitt] Romney's aides were warned about [Daniel Thomas] Tavares's presence here during the candidate's recent campaign swing through Seattle, though Troyer's own office......

We're not going to fault Nordstrom's for their decision to ax the piano players in some stores. Instead, we'll blame Nordstrom customers, and their preference for new-fangled pop music. From the Seattle Times: Some Nordstrom department stores are discontinuing their live piano notes in favor of commercially recorded music piped in over speakers. Nordstrom's store at Bellevue Square recently did away with its pianist, and the Alderwood mall store in Lynnwood will soon follow suit,......

Conventional wisdom says these days ain't happy ones for pulp-and-print publications. Circulation's down. Ad revenues are down. Everyone wants to read online. So nearly every newspaper, magazine and television news program has a host of blogs these days, to compete with the millions of self-described experts, autodidacts, conspiracy theorists and Chuck Norris-aficionados who propagate the blogosphere with their own brand of citizen journalism (read: poor spelling and poorer grammar). Indeed, it's hard to get noticed......

The script to Birdie Blue is the sort that, if there was any justice in this world, would have been unceremoniously trashed by every producer whose desk it crossed. Unfortunately, this being the real world and all, this awful script has been produced off-Broadway and in regional theatres all across the country, despite the fact it's guilty of every terrible conceit and device you could associate with the modern theatre. Nothing would have made us......

On our walk back up from the Pike Street Victrola the other day, we noticed a new store has arrived in the space that used to be a...what?...ethnic foods, was it? We always meant to go in and see. But we didn't. Not even during the "Going Out of Business" sale. God, it was awful. Some days the owner would come out and stand there, looking downhearted. Eventually we started looking for reasons to cut......

Unconfirmed reports from Halloween night place a Peet's "Coming Soon" sign at Broadway and Denny. Maybe a scary mask obscured someone's vision? Dunno, but we're interested to find out. A Peet's at that intersection would be a preemptive strike in anticipation of a Broadway light rail station. Anyway, we're stuck indoors right now and can't get over to Denny to check it out. Since you performed so spectacularly last week getting a shot of the......

Maybe it was the woods in Into the Woods at 5th Avenue Theatre that made us think of it as the "Schoolhouse Rock" of musicals -- they're cardboardy, blocky swirls of of branch and leaf painted a not-found-in-nature green. But the 5th Ave's show itself -- inspired by Bruno "I was wrong about everything" Bettelheim's Uses of Enchantment -- brims with '70s-childhood nostalgia, rhythmic energy, and a love of lyrical ping-pong that recalls the gleeful......

True story! The other afternoon we were IMing about some important work-related stuff with our friend Scott G. and he asked if we'd seen Spamalot at the Paramount yet, and and we said, "Nope, you?" and it turned out he had, so he started to tell us about it and we said -- in a flash of brilliance -- "Hey, would you mind if this ended up on Seattlest?" So you’ve been in a touring......

Man, you tend to forget what dark is in the city until the lights go out. Last night on the Hill we drove Roanoke which had no power, central Broadway which had power, Olive-ish Broadway which had no power and finally Pike/Pine which did. Where the power was out it was like a big blanket had been thrown over the area and the sky was somehow responsible for the lack of light. The dark......

It's not often that a play comes along that unites both senior citizens and the people who want to kill them. If your parents are elderly, this may strike you as "fair and balanced" theatre. Seattle Rep's The Murderers also unites the talents of "highly respectable playwright" Jeffrey Hatcher and respectability's opposite in many ways, actress Sarah Rudinoff. Her character Minka says about killing: "You do it once, it just gets easier and easier --......

Last night, in the face of too-cold-too-soon autumn weather, we corralled our friend (and friend of the Slog) Carollani into her badass newish car and headed over to the 5th Avenue Theater for the official opening night of Lone Star Love--a Broadway-bound musical playing now through Sept. 30. We'll just cut to the chase. Lone Star Love has everything it needs to be a huge, raucous Broadway hit. There's the ballsy black woman, the......