“Native Gardens” says "Don’t Fence Me In"

Cast of Native Gardens (Naomi Ishisaka)

Native Gardens

Intiman Theatre

(at Jones Playhouse)

Through September 30, 2018

Oh, the difficulties with neighbors! Have you ever moved into a new house and shortly afterward figured out that the perimeter of your plot shows that the next door neighbors have encroached a few inches or feet over your plot line? It’s actually not all that uncommon. That’s what happens to Pablo and Tania del Valle in Karen Zacarias’ play, Native Gardens.

You can see how they handle their dilemma in Intiman’s smart, funny production housed at the Jones Playhouse. The crackerjack cast of Phillip Ray Guevara as Pablo, Sophie Franco as Tania, Julie Briskman as Virginia and Jim Gall as Frank (with some help from Gloria Alcala and Yolanda Suarez) handle all the angst and banter with perfect comic timing.

New Village AD Jerry Dixon Envisions Musical Theater’s Future

Jerry Dixon (Serge Nivelle)

Wouldn’t it be such divine fun to have one of our local musicals headlined by Mario Cantone as the lead? Alas – I’ve been informed by a close source that Mario would rather not work that much and if he does work, he goes for big bucks to make it “count.” 

Who’s my “in the know”? Why, it’s his husband, the new artistic director of Village Theatre: Jerry Dixon! He’s a pretty good source!

SGN got to sit down with Mr. Dixon to have an extensive and wide-ranging chit chat about the shape of Musical Theater and what might be coming down the pike. Mr. Dixon is a powerfully intellectual thinker with deep appreciation for the collaborative art that is theater and few limits on visions for the kinds of people he’ll meet as a new ambassador for Village work in the future.

SGN spoke to Dixon…. Ok, I’m switching to “I” and “Jerry”…. Here is a little primer on Jerry Dixon: Wikipedia says he is an “actor, director, lyricist, choreographer, and composer best known for his work on the Broadway stage.” He married Mario Cantone in 2011, having been constant companions for 20 years by then!

September Theater Openings - Back to School Edition

Legally Blonde (Danielle Barnum)

The Noteworthy Life of Howard Barnes cast (Mark Kitaoka)

Richard III (John Ulman)

Skeleton Crew cast (John McLellan)

Reliably, when kids go back to school, theater productions explode all over Seattle. This month, we have very interesting choices, from playwrights some may be particularly wishing to see on stage (Karen Zacarias, Native Gardens, Dominique Morriseau, Skeleton Crew), a homegrown musical incubated in Village’s new musical development pipeline (The Noteworthy Life of Howard Barnes) and an exciting all-female Richard III that follows last year’s Henrys.

 

Peruse below and see other tantalizing offerings. Ding! The bell just rang! Hurry!

Prelude to a Kiss, Strawberry Theatre Workshop, 9/6/18-10/6/18

Peter and Rita fall for each other and decide to get married. During their wedding reception, an old man kisses Rita. Peter soon realizes that the kiss has caused Rita and the man to switch bodies. As he searches for a way to switch them back, Peter faces the dilemma of loving Rita in the body of a terminally ill man or staying married to a stranger posing as his wife.

www.strawshop.org/prelude.html

Native Gardens, Intiman Theatre, 9/6-30/18 (at Jones Playhouse)

You can’t choose your neighbors. In this new comedy by Karen Zacarias, cultures and gardens clash, turning well-intentioned neighbors into feuding enemies. Pablo, a rising attorney, and doctoral candidate Tania, his very pregnant wife, have just purchased a home next to Frank and Virginia, a well-established D.C. couple with a prize-worthy English garden. An impending barbeque for Pablo’s colleagues and a delicate disagreement over a long-standing fence line soon spirals into an all-out border dispute, exposing both couples’ notions of race, taste, class and privilege.

http://intiman.org/nativegardens

“Rules of Charity” is not charitable toward its characters

Rules of Charity (Ken Holmes)

Rules of Charity

Sound Theatre Company

Through August 25, 2018

It’s pretty apparent what drew folks at Sound Theatre Company toward the play Rules of Charity by the late John Belluso. Belluso was a playwright with physical challenges and wrote characters with physical challenges in his plays. STC’s theme is toward “radical inclusion” and that theme has been reflected by identifying barriers unwittingly erected against variously challenged communities and working to eradicate them.

In some areas, the company has been extraordinarily successful, particularly in their gorgeous production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with deaf and hearing actors, giving the deaf community both access to Shakespeare from watching an ASL-signed production and also giving more platform to deaf actors to perform.

While Rules of Charity is written with the central character as a man living with cerebral palsy, the play itself is much less successful in connecting emotionally with an audience. It’s clear that many audience members disagree with that statement, and some have been and will be deeply connected.

New "Phantom" Lives up to reputation

(courtesy The Phantom of the Opera tour)

The Phantom of the Opera

Paramount Theatre

Through August 19, 2018

Well, guess what! I liked the musical The Phantom of the Opera a bunch more than I expected to. See my preview at http://sgn.org/sgnnews46_32/page21.cfm. (What kind of critic, you grumble, uses the phrase “a bunch more”?) Truly, the famous songs that have become popular from this musical, particularly The Music of the Night, and The Phantom of the Opera, made me feel like running away instead of marking my calendar for productions to see.

This touring production is quite honestly very lavish and attentive to making a great experience for an audience. It’s opulent to look at when it needs to be and dark and mysterious, too. The folding and unfolding set works beautifully to change locations. The falling chandelier is not really all that scary (it doesn’t fall that fast), but it’s really pretty.

One aspect that definitely delighted me was how campy funny some of the moments in the musical are – at least in this production. There are two scenes in the production office of the opera company where the characters all produce notes written to them by the Phantom, as he threatens them variously to pay him or else, or let Christine sing or else, or various other demands or else. It’s clear that they know it’s a joke and make the most of the moment. It got big laughs from the audience.

Bee Smart and Make a Bee-line to see “Queen”

Queen (Pankaj Luthra)

Queen

Pratidhwani (at ACTLab)

Through August 19, 2018

If you love playwriting that crackles with tension and possibility, is laugh out loud funny, and full of surprising emotional twists, and takes on a very topical and important subject all at once, then you need to hie yourself over to ACT Theatre for Pratidhwani’s production of Madhuri Shekar’s play, Queen. Sometimes, it’s not clear why a title exists with a script. This one is pretty clear – it’s about bees and colony collapse disorder: CCD. So, it involves queen bees.

Also, it’s a story of two women doctoral candidates who are supreme. Supremely smart, and supremely good at their research, and supremely honorable in their intentions. Sanam Shah (Archana Srikanta) and Ariel Spiegel (Isis King) have been studying CCD at UCSanta Cruz and think they are on the verge of proving that a Monsanto chemical is the real culprit. They have been studying a model of research that Sanam is convinced has taken into consideration every variable that can be controlled for and excluded impacts from every variable that can’t be controlled for.