Enchanting New "Red Riding Hood" Is a Hit With the Kids!

 

Claudine Mboligikpelani Nako and Conner Nedersen in Red Riding Hood (Angela Sterling)

Red Riding Hood
World Premiere
Seattle Children’s Theatre
Through March 6, 2022
 
Playwright Allison Gregory and director Steven Dietz make a great team. Long-time marital partners, they also have a lot of experience in the realm of children’s theater. And here is the world premiere of Gregory’s new play, Red Riding Hood, they have teamed to produce a winning production.
 
They’ve mind-melded with two of Seattle’s best performers, Claudine Mboligikpelani Nako and Conner Neddersen for a two-person, enchanting, silly re-enactment of the famous fairytale. Neddersen plays a theater-geek named Wolfgang who sees an empty theater and decides he’s going to treat the audience to a one-person show about this tale. Suddenly, he’s interrupted by a deliveryperson who is intrigued by his idea and wants to join the fun.

CTP addresses two current theater discussions: Original voices and Women with “Starling”

Cast of "Starling" (photo Danielle Barnum)

Next up for Confrontational TheaterProject: Starling by Julia Nardin and Samm Murphy. This relatively new company started out with two guys who wanted to put on a particular play. Beau Prichard and Baron Von Oldenburg did Proof in 2012. Beau says, “It sold out and worked the way we wanted and Baron suggested we just keep going. He gave the company the money to continue. I made a short list of projects I wanted to do, (but first) found three local playwrights who had one acts they wanted to have done and called it Lifelines and produced that in 2012, as well.”

Asked where the name of the company came from, Beau says, “(We think) the productions should tackle something important and give the audience something to digest. They should be talking about it on the way home and even have it come up several days later as they continue to think about what it brought up for them.

“We wanted a strong word and the dictionary definition (says ‘confrontation’) can be a debate or discussion. It doesn’t have to be a fight, which is what the word often means to people: conflict, direct antagonism. That’s not what we mean. We mean open discourse about a difficult topic. You know people will have different ideas, but there can be a way to talk about all of them.

"Lollyville" creators celebrate 15 years of writing partnership

Juliet Waller Pruzan and Bret Fetzer (photo Eli Pruzan)

 (via Capitol Hill Seattle)

A long, long time ago, Juliet Waller Pruzan was a dancer and choreographer and had a cool idea she wanted to make into a dance/theater piece. She had a vision about people’s secrets flying out of them and getting caught in the branches of a particular tree. She knew that Bret Fetzer wrote original fairytales and performed them. She had seen him perform at On the Boards 12 Minutes Max and decided maybe he would be the guy who could help her create a performance.

There was magic in that request, apparently, because not only did they create a ten minute piece and successfully apply to On the Boards Northwest New Works festival (and entitle it The Gossip Tree), but they went on to create multiple more plays.

Their latest creation actually is a revision of their first ten minute play, now entitled Lollyville and produced by Macha Monkey, a ”fearless, funny, female” theater company on stage May 2-24 (8pm) at RichardHugo House.Through the years, they have revisited that initial concept and revised and revised and now have a new concept.

Both Bret and Juliet have a history with the building the theater is in. Juliet says, “I really love the theater and have a long history of performing there when it was New City and danced there in the ‘90s.”