It's not often that we can tell just from glancing at the stage that we'll like a play, but with the Seattle Rep's The Imaginary Invalid, we felt like great things were in store the moment we caught sight of the silly, sumptuous velvet hatbox of a set. (Runs through March 22; tickets $15-$59, $10 for 25-and-under.) Much like its crazy old coot hypochondriac, Argan (Rocco Sisto), the play gets to its feet creakily, expelling......

In the westerns we read growing up, cowboys were always punching each other right in the solar plexus. A scene in the lonelyhearts drama By the Waters of Babylon did that to the Seattle Rep audience last night, leaving people gasping and in tears. It was a lucky punch, though -- most of the time the play telegraphs exactly what's coming next: quips and tedium. If you go, go for Suzanne Bouchard's outstanding performance as......

In the lobby of the ACT Theater, 25 minutes before curtain of A Christmas Carol, a pretty 20-something girl wearing a cute holiday sweater surveys the scene. Four Dickens Carolers are singing in lovely harmony. Children toddle by, then look back at the carolers, their eyes wide with wonder. Garland and lights are everywhere. The 20-something's face spreads into a wide smile. She turns to her boyfriend and stage-whispers: "I love this!" What's not to......

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......

Seattle Rep's The Murderers is three monologues, one after the other, that thankfully get more entertaining as the show goes along. Each monologue deals with a murder (or murders) committed at the Florida retirement community, and sends up a different view of senior citizens -- as old moneybags who keep their heirs on tenterhooks, as randy old goats, as cash cows for the unscrupulous. It's a mildly dark series of "I-dun-its" for Matlock's urban audiences......

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 --......

As if Bart Sher weren't enough artistic ordnance, Intiman is also packing Craig Lucas in its Associate Artistic Director holster. (That's Craig Lucas, author of the book for The Light in the Piazza, author of the plays Prelude to a Kiss, The Dying Gaul, and The Singing Forest, and author of the screenplays for Longtime Companion and The Secret Lives of Dentists.) Following up on his terrific adaptation of Uncle Vanya, Intiman is staging the......

If kaboom-style fireworks aren't the bang you're looking for, stop in at ACT for the theatrical fireworks of David Hare's Stuff Happens, reviewed here. It's the play about Iraq and the rockets' red glare, the difference between the spark of liberty and the blinding torch of neocon ideology. (The title refers to Donald Rumsfeld's disingenuous retort to questions about U.S. forces' disregard of post-"liberation" lawlessness.) By all accounts, it's a thought-provoking (almost 3-hour) imagining of......

You've heard this: Pizza is like sex: even when it's bad, it's still pretty good. Same with West Side Story. When the music's by Bernstein and the story's by Shakespeare, you could cast Tone Loc and Rhea Perlman in the leads and still have something great. The 5th Avenue Theater's production of West Side Story is better than just good sex--it's a fingers-gripped-around-the-headboard, eyes-rolled-back-in-head latex buster. And just like amazing sex, we had... Goosebumps......

Souvenir @ ACT Tues - Sun, through June 10, Tickets $10-$54 ($10 students, 25-and-under) Before the Salon of Shame, long before, in the 1930s and '40s, people had to make do with socialite Florence Foster Jenkins, who shared her stage with no one -- except her accompanist Cosme McMoon. The Internet reports: A dumpy coloratura soprano, her voice was not even mediocre - it was preposterous! She clucked and squawked, trumpeted and quavered. She couldn't......

Marya Sea Kaminski as Rachel in My Name is Rachel Corrie on the Leo K. Stage at Seattle Repertory Theatre March 15 through April 22, 2007. Photo copyright Chris Bennion 2007. Writing on The New Republic Online in November, 2006, James Kirchick snarkily commented, "Of all the subjects for a 90-minute, one-woman show, Rachel Corrie ought to have been at the bottom of the list." Rachel Corrie was an Olympia native and Evergreen State......

Blue Door is part confessional crisis, part historical saga -- or part Philip Roth's The Human Stain and part Alex Haley's Roots. It's showing in the smaller Leo K Theatre at the Rep, which features continental seating (no center aisle) and jumpy Rep subscribers. We sat down 10 minutes early and stood up 8 times to let people in and out. Holy crap. Don't let anyone tell you older people are all ruled by......

It's a sad thing, but even narcissists die. They don't like to admit it, but they do. When other people die on them, it's almost worse, losing their attention. Edward Albee's work makes a carnival out of conversational cruelty, the verbal fireworks ceaselessly mean-spirited and bitchy. In the first act of The Lady from Dubuque, we learn the acid-tongued Jo is in chronic pain from a terminal illness. Should we suffer from it too?......

No matter what Dane Cook's myspace page says, the Reverend Dr. Samuel McKinney, narrator of the gospel musical Black Nativity, is the only person you'll see on a Seattle stage this month who went to school with Martin Luther King, Jr. Our favorite part of this consistently entertaining show was watching 80-year-old McKinney--who also once met Langston Hughes, its author--tap his toes, silently sing along, and break into a smile during the solos by the......