Saturday afternoon MvB is going to talk to a pack of Emerging Critics at the Seattle Rep--and hopefully avoid being panned--before heading to the Moore for Compagnie Heddy Maalem's version of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps. Sunday he's packing for Iceland. Warm socks, etc. Dropping into town between flights to and from Paris, Ronald is going to attend a seminar on blogging at the UW on Saturday. Lots of traveling, as always, for Jay. He'll......

The Seattle Repertory Theatre has just announced its artistic director, David Esb...Esbjornson has decided not to renew his contract. When it expires on June 30, 2009, so will he. Esbjornson joined Seattle Rep in 2005, and we still have trouble with his name."Though we are genuinely disappointed with David's decision, we understand that a complex series of factors informed his thinking." said Marty Taucher, President of the Board of Trustees. "David is well into developing......

There's a rotting foot at the heart of The Cure at Troy (through May 3 at the Rep, tickets: $10-$59); you can almost hear Philoctetes's leg oozing as he walks. The stench is described well enough to draw flies to the theatre. And when he loses his mind with pain, screaming about his wound cracking open, blood everywhere, you'd really like to be elsewhere, and maybe less nauseous. That's the point--there are times it's not......

What are you supposed to say about a play that bored you to tears but isn't exactly bad? This was the question we were mulling over last night after seeing Kevin Kling's How? How? Why? Why? Why? at the Seattle Rep. Kling is best known as an NPR contributor, which explains the audience's lustful appreciation of the show; How? How? Why? Why? Why? is basically an amalgam of This American Life and Prairie Home Companion,......

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......

Is live theater still relevant in a society where computer users can create high-quality video and distribute it almost instantly via the web? That's been the subject of an ongoing, rancorous debate between two Seattlest contributors, Jeremy and Charles, both former theater artists. Jeremy maintains the theater can yet be a powerful art form -- Charles feels it's a dying, irrelevant medium (most likely wounded by its own hand). To stir them up appropriately, the......

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......

It was our second play at the Rep in as many months, so we know: a gay character in a Seattle Rep performance this season has about the same odds at survival as a redshirt on an away team mission did in the original Star Trek. That is to say, he dies. Apparently that's how you illustrate "families being torn apart" or something these days. The Breach tells the stories of a disparate group of......

This is pretty heartwarming stuff. The NBA asks teams who play against New Orleans to do a little community service while they're there. Teams do, often haphazardly, sending a couple of players along to some pre-selected site. But the Sonics entire staff--coaches, players, security people--showed up to serve food at a New Orleans substance abuse center for 45 minutes, reports the P-I's Gary Washburn. Then, after that, coach P.J. Carlesimo wanted to do more, so......

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......

If you're a Cuban exile somehow randomly transplanted from Miami to Seattle, don't go see The Cook at Seattle Rep. The overwhelming majority of sources (including this play) depict you as pretty angry, and The Cook will only further piss you off. If you're anyone else, go see it--You'll love it, although it may also piss you off. If you're a hipster or, less likely, a commie, dress up in your little Castro hat......

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 --......

Seattle Rep's Twelfth Night, which they're nerdily calling Twelfe Night as per the First Folio, is nearly shipwrecked by dull production design and the cast's inability to make anything of the esoteric wordplay that audiences once found witty, or at least clever. But the portrayal of life lived to excess is still gripping drama, and Frank X.'s steward Malvolio burns with a self-importance that veers from comic over-stepping to something much eerier. Tickets start at......

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......

As we were saying the other day, the Seattle Rep is producing a play next season by playwright (actor, screenwriter) Robert Schenkkan, who lives in Seattle and whom we first met at Victrola. (You know him for authoring the magisterial The Kentucky Cycle, or from his appearance on Star Trek: TNG or in Pump Up the Volume.) Seattlest: By the Waters of Babylon: it's a newer piece, right? What got you started on a......

This just in: Seattle Rep’s 2007-2008 season in the Bagley Wright Theatre begins with Shakespeare’s beloved comedy, Twelfth Night, followed by a powerful play about the Cuban revolution, The Cook by Eduardo Machado. A new play, The Breach about Hurricane Katrina comes next, then the classic Molière comedy, The Imaginary Invalid, and finally Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney brings his skills to a classic Greek adventure in The Cure at Troy. In the Leo......

We were really looking forward to Seattle Rep's Fire on the Mountain last night, in part because it's an Appalachian coal mining thing and we love the Steven Segal movie Fire Down Below based on the same. Yes, we know, it's an indication of some serious flaw in our cultural map if upon hearing "Appalachian coal mining" we respond with "Steven Segal!" Maybe we fixed it last night. Maybe the next time we hear "Appalachian......

If it's not a great Gatsby, we can blame F. Scott Fitzgerald's preference for establishing mood at the expense of story arc. The good news is that this production revels in atmosphere: Tom Lynch's pitch-perfect set design and Jane Greenwood's gorgeous '20s costumes -- combined with Scott Zielinski's dreamily radiant lighting -- conjure up exactly the right nostalgia for a time that never was. We could have done without the itinerant saxophonist, whose bluesy......

Seattlest dropped in at the Seattle Rep for the late August Wilson's final play in his ten-cycle series, Radio Golf. It's playing through February 18, and well worth making a trip to the Rep for, if only for the chance to see a Seattle theater audience that's not almost exclusively white. Tickets range from $22 - $36 ($10 if you're under 25 with ID). There are also rush prices 30 minutes before each performance.......

Local Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson died today. He had disclosed earlier this summer that he was suffering from terminal liver cancer. The Capitol Hill resident was 60. Upon news of his illness, tributes had begun to pour in. The Seattle Rep dumped a Neil Simon play in order to add a production of Radio Golf, the conclusion of Wilson's ten-play drama cycle, to its upcoming schedule. And a Broadway theater, the Virginia, will......