"Billy Elliot" – A Joyous Event at Village

Billy Elliot older and younger duet (Mark Kitaoka)

Billy Elliot the Musical

Village Theatre

Issaquah: through July 3, 2016

Everett: July 8-31, 2016

Village Theatre has undertaken an enormously difficult challenge with the mounting of the musical Billy Elliot, by Elton John and Lee Hall. I think they’ve pulled it off, by golly!

It’s based on the movie about a young British boy who finds a love of ballet, during the 1983 mining troubles there. The gritty miners, including Billy’s own family, have great difficulty moving past their prejudices about ballet, but finally find their way to supporting Billy in his quest to get to ballet school.

June Theater Openings Aren't Quite Busting, But Nice

Justin Gregory Lopez in Paint Your Wagon at the 5th Avenue Theatre (Mark Kitaoka)

June has a smaller group of theater openings than usual for this city. Maybe that means you can make it to each one of these before the month is out!

9 Circles, Strawberry Theatre Workshop, 6/2-25/16

9 Circles is based on the infamous case of former 101st Airborne Division Pfc Steven Dale Green, convicted in a federal court in 2009 of raping and killing an Iraqi fourteen-year-old girl and murdering her family. Green was discharged from the military in May 2006 after being found to have a personality disorder. He was sentenced to multiple life sentences in civilian court and hung himself in prison. 9 Circles won the 2011 Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award.

http://www.strawshop.org/9-circles.html

Paint Your Wagon, 5th Ave, 6/2-26/16

This may look like a classic musical, but it’s being billed as a “revisal” – a reworking of an old version. The music remains, with classics like They Call the Wind Maria, but the book (script) has been rewritten by Jon Marans. It’s the story of the rise and fall of a remote mining town during the height of the Gold Rush. Men and women from around the world take a leap of faith and journey to California to seize hold of the American dream, only to find themselves swept up in a clash of culture, passion, greed and romance. Filled with local veteran performers and a few imported powerhouses, this is an exciting opportunity.

https://www.5thavenue.org/show/paint-your-wagon

"Emily Linder" at Taproot Hits the Funny Bone as Well as the Heart

Charity Parenzini and Laura Kenny in The Realization of Emily Linder (John Ulman)

The Realization of Emily Linder

Taproot Theatre

Through June 11, 2016

Emily Linder has had a realization. She’s going to die in a couple of days. She tells her daughters, who have mixed feelings of belief, and demands that they plan her funeral. But she tells them exactly what she wants to have at the funeral, including helium balloons!

So begins the current play, The Realization of Emily Linder, at Taproot Theatre. Playwright Richard Strand includes a lot of contemporary stressors of families: elder care issues, managing illness, losses of spouses in later life, adult children coping with aging parents, sibling rivalry and more.

ArtsWest Presents Exquisite "Death of a Salesman"

Kyle Anton Johnson, David Pichette, Drew Highlands in Death of a Salesman (Michael Brunk)

Death of a Salesman

ArtsWest

Through May 29, 2016

I can’t say I wasn’t a bit skeptical when I heard that ArtsWest was planning to mount Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in their season. It just didn’t seem like a play that fit all that well into their oeuvre, nor was I sure that it was a classic that stood the test of time all the way to now.

That was before I saw the production that slayed me with its precision and relevance! This is a stunning effort!

There are still two more weekends to see this play, and to see David Pichette play Willie Loman at the exact right moment in Pichette’s career. He is heartbreaking, alternately optimistic and caustic, and no holds barred either way.

Sprawling “The Brothers K” gives as much as it demands!

The Chance family (Chris Bennion)

The Brothers K

Part 1: Strike Zones

Part 2: The Left Stuff

Book-It Repertory Theatre

Through June 26, 2016

Last year, Book-It Repertory Theatre took a big gamble: they adapted a very long book, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, into a two-part play that asked audiences to spend an entire day at Seattle Center, eat, wait, and watch the entire event. The plays were about the history of Jews in comic-book creation and a couple of fictitious cousins. Both productions were so well done, so well-acted, adapted, presented, that the experiment succeeded.

That success, following another blockbuster two-part presentation of The Cider House Rules, was apparently enough for them to contemplate trying again with another big book, The Brothers K, about a nuclear family, baseball, and the 1960s into and surrounding the Vietnam War. Since the plays just opened, the success at the box office is still to be determined, but my opinion is that they have again succeeded in presenting a compelling and excellent work that justifies the time demanded of an audience!

Don’t Miss “A Hand of Talons“

Stephanie Kim-Bryan in A Hand of Talons (John Ulman)

A Hand of Talons

Pork Filled Productions

Through May 21, 2016

The third time’s more than the charm! Ms. Maggie Lee has written three steampunk plays all set in the same “universe” and the third installment, A Hand of Talons, is now on stage at Theatre Off Jackson, produced by Pork Filled Productions.

Lee’s world includes magic and spicy Asian women who kick things and hit things and shoot things, if they need to. In this iteration, three scions of the Yao family are being threatened with expulsion from the larger Yao clan, and must put aside their differences to save their control of their portion of the world.