Seattle Spotlight: July 2008

It’s summer-in-the-park time and outdoor performances of all sorts are planned for the next several weeks. Greenstage stages Twelfth Night and Hamlet (July 11-August 16) for its 20th season in the park. Seattle Shakespeare Company debuts its collaboration with Wooden O Theatre with Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (July 10-August 3). Another Shakespeare offering is in Skagit Valley, as the Skagit River Shakespeare Festival present another production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream touring local parks, and Merchant of Venice and All’s Well That Ends Well in repertory at McIntyre Hall, July 31-August 10.

For children, park performances include Wind in the Willows from Theater Schmeater (July 11-August 9), and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (July 12-August 10) as she wanders with Open Circle Theater.

If you insist on staying inside, you can still get a taste of the outdoors with Taproot’s production of Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, featuring book by William Hauptman, with music & lyrics by Roger Miller (July 9-August 9). Or slick your hair with Grease at Tacoma Musical Playhouse (July 11-August 3). Marriage-minded? Check out Bellevue Civic Theatre’s performance of I Do I Do (July 11-19) by Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones, the authors of The Fantasticks.

A musical on a more provocative note is bare: a pop opera revealed at Artswest (July 9-July 26), a full-fledged rock musical about seniors in a Catholic boarding school and their struggles with first love, sexuality, drugs, parents, and religion.

SecondStory Repertory sends out radio signals from Greater Tuna (July 25-August 23). Inspired by the hallucinatory science fiction prose of Philip K. Dick, Scotto Moore closes Annex’s season with interlace [falling star], a new full-length play (July 25-August 23). Intiman stays firmly on this planet with A Streetcar Named Desire (July 3-August 2), directed by Sheila Daniels, with Angela Pierce as Blanche DuBois.

Edge Theatre gets political with Mother Courage and Her Children (Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, July 5-20), Bertolt Brecht’s most passionate and profound statement against war. More politics of a German sort is brought to you by Strawberry Theatre Workshop as they debut a new play, Leni (July 10-August 9), by Sarah Greenman. This bio play about Leni Riefenstahl focuses on the question of an artist’s responsibility, as Riefenstahl continued to insist art and politics are separate and that the film work she did for Hitler was in the world of art.

Angels in America — which has not been performed in Seattle since 1994-5 — gets a presentation of both of its parts, but by different theaters and overlapping dates. Part 1: Millenium Approaches is performed by Absurd Reality Theatre (July 24-August 9) and Part 2: Perestroika is at ReAct (July 17-August 10), and you might want to decide if seeing the second part first is the way to go. Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic is set in America in the 1980s against a backdrop of greed, conservatism, sexual politics, and the discovery of AIDS.