Category: Feature

In July of 2014, I had been somewhat excited to see The Book of Mormon. My parents scored tickets, so I didn’t have to pay—big plus. Also, I like going to live shows in a general sort of way, mainly for the conversational ammunition. 

ME: “I went to this or that show last night.”
SOMEONE ELSE: “Oh, really? How was it?”
ME: “Well let me tell you—for the next several moments, I won’t be desperately grasping for something to say!”

That kind of thing.

I certainly expected it to be good. It was hyped to the moon. It won so many Tonys that I’m pretty sure they ran out of statuettes. Jon Stewart had said it was “so good it makes me fucking angry” and the New York Times called it “something like a miracle.” Actual respected critics were claiming that it was the funniest musical ever. So, yeah, I would say that I was moderately excited—roughly a 7.2 on the excitement scale.

I wasn’t emotionally prepared to watch the greatest live show I have ever seen. That’s the sort of thing you need to steel yourself for. I quickly became overwhelmed. The show began with Trey Parker’s pre-recorded voiceover about the history of Mormonism. It was amusing, but not unexpected. Then the curtain opened, and the show proper opened with the musical number “Hello!” About 45 seconds in, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I had fully expected Book of Mormon to be funny. I thought South Park was funny, I thought Team America: World Police was (occasionally) funny. What I had not anticipated was that the show would be beautiful.

Let me be absolutely clear: not everyone will find Book of Mormon to be “beautiful.” Even people who laugh their asses off through the entire show might look at me cockeyed for using that particular word to describe this kind of entertainment. You see, Book of Mormon is unbelievably offensive. It’s so offensive that I couldn’t explain to my grandmother in any sort of detail what was so offensive about it. I didn’t want to be responsible for putting that kind of imagery in her head. The show gleefully crosses all of the major lines: race, religion, rape, AIDS, genocide, Star Wars—then it creates entirely new lines and dutifully proceeds to gleefully cross those.

I’m no great fan of provocation. I lost my taste for shock comedy about ten years ago and haven’t looked back since. I’m old and tired and I’ve had my fill of being provoked. What Book of Mormon accomplishes, to my mind, is something more like catharsis. It’s a relentless barrage of horrifying language, hysterical jokes and gorgeous, impeccably crafted music. My brain had a hard time processing songs like “Hasa Diga Eebowai,” which is a fun and catchy parody of The Lion King’s “Hakuna Matada.” Also: the name of the song loosely translates to “Fuck you, God.” It’s a jaunty little ditty about the unimaginable horrors that the show’s Ugandan characters endure on a daily basis.

Book of Mormon is the musical theatre equivalent of a tight rope act at 1000 feet, without a net. There are a million ways it could end in disaster, but Parker and Matt Stone somehow pull it off. One of the major reasons it somehow delights more people than it repels is the fact that Book of Mormon has a huge heart. It never doubts the sincerity of its young missionaries even as it mocks them as repressed, naïve and delusional squares. Each and every Mormon, hilarious as the show clearly finds them, is undeniably operating with the purest of intentions. The persistent fusion of withering cynicism and deep-rooted humanity is bracing and strangely moving.

There is something undeniably powerful about this show. Consider this: Book of Mormon is an absolutely merciless takedown of the Church of Latter Day Saints. A sizable percentage of the jokes are about how ridiculous and implausible the mythology of the Mormon Church is. It’s unquestionable that Stone and Parker find this religion to be founded on lies and delusions. And yet when I saw it last year at the Paramount, the Church of LDS was actually advertising in the programs. It was a full-page promotion that said “You’ve seen Book of Mormon, now are you ready for the real thing?” The Mormon Church has, for the most part, had a somewhat amused and often welcoming reaction to the phenomenon. It’s the Teflon musical.

When a piece of art really resonates with me, I get a weird tingly feeling that shoots from my lower back, up my neck and over the top of my scalp. It’s actually a bit unpleasant if it happens a lot—not necessarily painful, but involuntary and spooky. I get it when I watch Terrence Malick films or when I listen to Enter the 36 Chambers. During the final musical number of the first half of Book of Mormon—a hilarious song called “Man Up” which made me cry for reasons I do not understand—the tingling was running up and down like I’d been hooked up to a car battery. It was actually scary. Long after the curtain call, I couldn’t stop thinking about the show. I blathered about it to anyone who was interested, and several people who clearly were not.

Before I saw Book of Mormon I wasn’t really a fan of musicals; nowadays I can’t get enough of them. It was  the Rosetta Stone of musicals for me. I see all the singing and dancing that I once viewed as weird and unnatural and I think “Oh, I get it now!” Nowadays, I count The Sound of Music among my favorite movies. I’m getting heavy into the cinema of Vincent Minelli. I currently own the original cast recording of the musical in question and I am in the market for more. The Book of Mormon flipped a switch somewhere inside me. It was an oddly profound experience to come out of a show that features the line “I have maggots in my scrotum” no fewer than four times.

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The Book of Mormon runs through January 10 at The Paramount. Check out our intervew with AJ Holmes (Elder Cunningham).

The Sound of Music is a nearly three-hour-long musical about an Austrian nun teaching some spoiled Austrian kids how to sing. I hope that’s explanation enough for why it took me well over three decades to watch this classic film. When I was a little kid, I didn’t want to watch musicals, period. They were verboten in little boy culture—a toxic hazard, like antique stores, asparagus and girl butts. My mom was (and still is, I’m pretty sure) a huge fan of musicals, but no mother is Icarus-like enough to try to get her snotty little jerk to plow through a three-hour musical history lesson. As I grew into my teens and my film fandom developed, I developed more patience for older films, but I wanted to watch R-rated adult stuff; mature, edgy classics like The French Connection, The Godfather and First Blood. Sound of Music was just too stodgy and clean. As I’ve grown into what can medically be described as an “adult,” I’ve gradually come to appreciate and enjoy musicals. Hell, I even write a regular column about opera. 

Nonetheless, when this assignment landed on my desk, I was still somewhat apprehensive. It’s kind of hard to explain why that was, but I’ll do my best to articulate it again: The Sound of Music is a nearly three-hour musical about an Austrian nun teaching some spoiled Austrian kids how to sing. Added to this: Julie Andrews never did much for me. Mary Poppins was all about the cartoon penguins as far as I’m concerned. Some of the songs I was familiar with from the film were far from favorites of mine: “The Sound of Music” and “Climb Every Mountain” always seemed forced and corny to me.

But by god, it’s partially my job to watch famous movie musicals for the first time—and not coincidentally, the 5th Avenue Theatre’s production of The Sound of Music is currently running through January 3. And so, a few nights ago, I brought home the Blu-ray and hunkered down. Here are some of the things that I learned.

This movie is absolutely wonderful.
You hear me, myself before three days ago? YOU ARE A FOOL. It turns out that there’s a reason this movie is beloved by all. How about that? So, all of those people that made it one of the biggest box-office smashes in film history, all of the academy voters who gave it approximately five thousand Oscars, all of the people at the AFI who placed it at #40 on the top 100 films of all time… I guess they weren’t totally full of crap, hard as that may be to believe. This movie is GREAT.

Robert Wise—whose work I’ve always admired—directed the bejesus out of it, as he is wont to do. The film begins with a spectacular helicopter shot pushing in on Julie Andrews swooning in the greenest field imaginable amidst an utterly spectacular mountain backdrop and it just keeps getting more impressive from there. It’s a three-hour movie that flies by at a breakneck pace. Julie Andrews is iconic in a challenging role. Those kids, those damned Von Trapp kids are the cutest damned things in the entire world. It’s just pure, heart-warming, life-affirming, toe-tapping goodness. One of the best representations of the kind of premium product Hollywood was occasionally capable of in the mid 20^th century. I’ve watched three musicals for this column so far. I liked Dirty Dancing more than I thought I would, I tolerated Grease (barely), but I LOVED The Sound of Music.

I have pretty much seen half of this already through cultural osmosis.
This is one of the biggest, greatest, most cherished films ever made. The first half contained almost no surprises because I’d heard all of the songs or absorbed the rest through film and TV references, clips, retrospectives, conversations, MST3K quips, you name it. It reminded me of the first time I saw Casablanca or read Hamlet; about every other minute I thought, “Oh, this is where that line and/or image comes from!” Song-wise, everybody knows “My Favorite Things” and “Do-Re-Mi,” but “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” was one of the songs my mom would belt out while dancing around the house to embarrass me while my friends were over. I recognized another song because it was referenced in “I Believe” from Book of Mormon (of which I have the original cast recording). The Sound of Music is built into the cultural framework of Western society, like Star Wars and Mozart. Now I understand why. 

Robert Wise was a saint.
It was WC Fields who famously said, “I don’t like working with kids, now go fetch me seven gallons of scotch.” Thousands of other people have no doubt expressed similar sentiments (with or without the scotch), and there’s a good reason for that: kids are kids. They’re not famed for their reason, professionalism or cooperativeness. And poor, poor Mr. Wise had to handle seven of these things (well, to be fair, the older kids could’ve been in their 30s for all I know) for a movie that includes many, many elaborate song and dance numbers. If you want a really good example of setting the difficulty level for directing a scene to Maximum, look no further than the biking sequence in “Do-Re-Mi.” This is eight people, many of them children, all of them singing AND doing choreographed bike moves while a giant camera tracks alongside them in a truck. Just imagine the logistics of that. I promise you that these days they would do this all with CGI and then they’d say “Thank God we have CGI.” My best guess is that it took them fifty-six billion takes to get that shot. That kind of patience and dedication is astonishing, but a lot of this movie has that  “we’re not going to settle for anything less than perfect” kind of feel. It’s a highly polished gem, and I have no idea how Wise managed to live into his 90s after weathering that kind of stress.

The “So Long, Farewell” scene is absolutely intolerable.
If you are one of the deranged few who have still not seen this movie (what is wrong with you?), there is a scene in which the Von Trapp family is having a lavish party and the kids must go to bed. What happens next is absolutely one of the most shameless and brutal things that has ever happened in the history of film. The kids perform a song wherein each one of them bids High Austrian Society “So long, farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, adieu.” Then, one by one, they get kicked in the butt and prance up the stairs. Because the people who made this film are impossibly cruel, the bit ends mercilessly with the littlest girl being too tired to make it up the stairs, so she falls asleep in a little singing heap, so the other kids must scoop her up and carry her off as they all softly sing “goodbyyyyeee.” The partygoers down below wave up to them and reply “goodbyyyyye.” It is death by cuteness. It is demonic and unfair. It grabs you by the softest part of your soul and punches it in the balls repeatedly until you want to die. I can’t stand it. It’s the best.

Nazis? Nazis!
But that’s okay, because there are Nazis in this movie! Nothing even remotely cute about those guys! The Nazis are only a vague peripheral threat until the final third of the movie, when Anschluss finally drops. The big red swastika banners are particularly jarring when they arrive, as this is almost entirely a movie about love and life and loving life and impossible cuteness until the very last act. I vaguely knew that there were Nazis in The Sound of Music, but of all of the things that I had culturally absorbed about the film, I literally had no idea how it ended. So when Captain Von Trapp, Maria and the kids run afoul of the Third Reich, it was actually pretty damn suspenseful for me. Sure, I thought that it was somewhat unlikely that this adorable singing family with whom I’d just shared so many delightful adventures would be gunned down by goose-stepping monsters, but I didn’t know for sure.

But that’s okay, because there are Nazis in this movie! Nothing even remotely cute about those guys! The Nazis are only a vague peripheral threat until the final third of the movie, when Anschluss finally drops. The big red swastika banners are particularly jarring when they arrive, as this is almost entirely a movie about love and life and loving life and impossible cuteness until the very last act. I vaguely knew that there were Nazis in The Sound of Music, but of all of the things that I had culturally absorbed about the film, I literally had no idea how it ended. So when Captain Von Trapp, Maria and the kids run afoul of the Third Reich, it was actually pretty damn suspenseful for me. Sure, I thought that it was somewhat unlikely that this adorable singing family with whom I’d just shared so many delightful adventures would be gunned down by goose-stepping monsters, but I didn’t know for sure.

And you know what? If you are one of the warped fools who have still not bothered to watch this three-hour musical about an Austrian nun teaching some spoiled Austrian kids how to sing, I’m not going to spoil it for you here. You just have to experience it for the first time for yourself. And you really, really should. Millions upon millions of people (and now—finally—me) can’t be wrong. And go check it out onstage if you can. I’d like to go too, but I’m not sure I could handle it. Goodbyyyyyyye. 

I’ve read Raymond Carver in a variety of life situations over the years: in the library of a small college on the northeast coast of Florida, in a shabby apartment above an upholstery shop in the Blue Ridge Mountains and finally, beneath the melancholy clouds of Washington, the state he called home for the last decade of his life. I styled my twentysomething self in the mold of a Carver protagonist: broke, rootless, unlucky in love, a drinker. I liked Carver’s terseness, his knowing resignation, the way he treated working class people with delicacy and humanity. I was struggling to get by with a string of blue-collar jobs but I had higher artistic aspirations, just like ol’ Ray.

Though it’s been years since my last Carver binge I’m a lifelong fan, so I had to see Book-It’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, an adaptation of four short stories that was one of the theatre’s first productions back in the early 90s. I might’ve had doubts about their ability to tackle such a familiar, distinctive authorial voice but I’d last seen Book-It’s Slaughterhouse-Five and enjoyed it to the depths of my Vonnegut-loving soul. 

Of course, What We Talk About is as far as you can get from the time-travelling, war-torn, galaxy-spanning Slaughterhouse, so I was interested to see how they applied their patented adaptation process to this handful of small, intimate stories. They pulled it off. Here are three things Carver fans will love about the show (which closes this Sunday).

Dialogue

Carver has a keen ear for plain speech pushed to extremes. Hearing words spoken out loud that I had only previously read on the printed page opened up a new sense of the music in his undersold dialogue.

Carver had a knack for steering idle talk into conversational minefields, injecting menace into casual exchanges with acid asides and retorts. In the titular first act, Kevin McKeon’s tipsy Mel threatens to derail the boozy get-together with bursts of anger and inappropriate flirting. You’re put on edge, waiting for it—and him—to fall apart completely. It’s a dynamic familiar to anyone who’s spent much time around alcoholics—Carver was one—and the first act nails it.

Humor

Carver can work it the other way, too, plucking comedy from sadness and anger. In “The Student’s Wife,” Carol Roscoe rages incandescently at her ex-husband, played by McKeon, and he narrates deadpan: “Make no mistake: I feel I’m home.” It’s the biggest laugh of the show, arising out of a moment of fury.

Likewise in the first act’s story of Terri’s doomed ex, each new revelation she and Mel share about Ed’s downward descent into stalking and madness—guzzling rat poison, botching a gunshot to the head—lands like another punchline, wringing laughs out of the blackest possible circumstances.

Reading Carver as a Very Serious Young Artist in my twenties, it was all about the thwarted fortunes of down-at-heels men sitting alone at kitchen tables lighting cigarettes and cracking open bottles of gin. Seeing the stories manifested onstage, I realized that my earnest youthful humorlessness caused me to miss out on plenty of zingers.

“Cathedral”

The show ends on this perfect little jewel of a story, one of the best ever written. Though Carver denied it was intended as a metaphor for making art, it’s impossible not to find parallels. Placing our perceptions in another’s hands, giving form to contours previously only dimly perceived; this is the work of both the writer and the theatre artist. “Cathedral”’s stoned, late night epiphany about the possibility of human connection resounds onstage as it does on the printed page: clear and joyful. It’s a dual testament to what Book-It does, show after show, and to the power of Carver’s work.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love closes this Sunday, October 18.

Western theater has long been fascinated with “the Orient.” For hundreds of years, East Asia was like a distant planet to the people who live west of the Caucusus. A planet populated by strange, unknowable, alien-like beings. If you think this is starting to sound insensitive, well, that’s about perfect. Depictions of Eastern culture and people were often painfully uninformed until, oh, let’s say about 20 years ago. But much as we find Mars and Pluto fascinating today—despite and because of how little we know about them—writers and audiences couldn’t get enough of stories set in the “exotic” lands of the East.

Waterfall, showing at the Fifth Avenue Theater through October 25, is a show that would scarcely have been imaginable 50 years ago. It’s an old-fashioned romantic musical for American audiences largely framed from an Eastern perspective. The story is narrated by a young Siamese/Thai (same thing, of course, but it shifts with the time periods depicted) man in the 1930’s who is fascinated by America, but ultimately a proud representative of his own national heritage. There is one representative of white America in the show, and cross-cultural misunderstandings certainly abound, but Waterfall is a story about Thai history and Thai people.

It’s taken a long time to get to the point where an Asian story can unapologetically stand on its own in front of a Western theatre audience. The evolution has been slow going and it has produced many cringe-worthy moments, but looking back can give you a good idea of how far we’ve come.

The Mikado (1885)

Gilbert and Sullivan’s Savoy smash hit was originally conceived as a way to covertly satirize British politics of the time. In telling the story of a wandering prince, his awkward romantic entanglements and an arranged beheading, however, the English masters managed to deliver a master class in cultural tone-deafness, which, in all fairness, probably seemed like vivid realism to London audiences at the time. Even while trying to atone for some of Mikado’s excesses in 1908, W.S. Gilbert still comes across as quite condescending toward an entire culture: “It has recently been discovered that Japan is a great and glorious country…the Japanese, however, attained their present condition of civilization very gradually, and at the date of my story they had peculiar tastes, ideas and fashions…many of which they discarded when they found they did not coincide with the ideas of the more enlightened countries of Europe.” Ahhh…the kooky attitudes of the past.

But wait! The Seattle Gilbert and Sullivan Society stirred up controversy just last year by staging an all-white “yellowface” revival of the classic, controversial musical. I didn’t see the show so I have to reserve judgment, but many people in the Asian community (and other communities, no doubt) were aghast. So, of course, it’s always worth pointing out that just because things are better now, doesn’t mean they’re great.

South Pacific (1949)

No article about shifting cultural perspectives in Western theatre would be complete without Rodgers and Hammerstein. But here’s a little twist! This show was shocking and offensive to some audiences at the time because of its positive portrayals of interracial marriage and racial tolerance. A lot of the outrage had to do with the song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” which seems like a fairly safe, downright banal anti-racist ditty today, featuring lyrics like this:

“You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear, 
you’ve got to be taught from year to year
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught
To be afraid of people
Whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a different shade
You’ve got to be carefully taught.”

I mean, can you imagine? Of course, repressed authority figures at the time absolutely could not imagine. They thought the message was downright communistic. An actual politician, on record, said “a song justifying interracial marriage [was] implicitly a threat to the American way of life.” Oh, and just for good measure, when the national show came to Georgia in 1950, actual lawmaker Rep. David C. Jones wrote, “We in the South are a proud and progressive people. Half-breeds cannot be proud.” It’s always jarring to remember that it was not all that long ago that not being racist was considered politically incorrect in many parts of America. 

Madame Butterfly/M. Butterfly/Miss Saigon (1904, 1988, 1989)

You can tie together a lot of history with the saga of Puccini’s Madame Butterflyand its modern adaptations. As far as operas are concerned, Butterfly was a much more gentle in its racial caricaturing than Puccini’s China-set Turandot. Cio-Cio-san, the Japanese child bride who pines for her disinterested American naval officer husband for years, is a sympathetic and tragic figure. The saga of their doomed relationship can be read as a condemnation OR a celebration Western attitudes of cultural superiority. Or neither, really.

M. Butterfly Playwright David Henry Hwang preferred to read it as a master class in exposing Western feminization of the East. His story is also about the doomed marriage between a travelling Western man (a French diplomat, in this case) and an Eastern woman (Chinese). Only in this case, the woman is a spy. Oh, and the woman is also a man, who successfully convinces “her” husband that “she” is female for 20 years. Sounds kind of ridiculous, but it’s actually based on a true story. Hwang makes this epic deception seem plausible by rooting the diplomat’s delusions in popular stereotypes of Asian women, and then Asians in general. They are submissive, mysterious, unknowable and weak. As the spy (Song) puts it, in one of his/her monologues:

“The West thinks of itself as masculine—big guns, big industry, big money—so the East is feminine—weak, delicate, poor… but good at art, and full of inscrutable wisdom—the feminine mystique. Her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes. The West believes the East, deep down, wants to be dominated—because a woman can’t think for herself. …You expect Oriental countries to submit to your guns, and you expect Oriental women to be submissive to your men.”

This is a righteously angry play, intent on turning the tables. In Madame Butterfly, the American sailor arrives just in time to see his lovesick Japanese wife committing seppuku. But in M. Butterfly, when Song reveals his true identity to his “husband,” he then coldly smokes a cigarette and watches while the Western diplomat does himself in.

Miss Saigon is a far more conventional adaptation of Puccini’s opera. Basically, it’s Madame Butterfly set during the Vietnam War. Butterfly is now Kim, a 17 year-old Vietnamese prostitute, and the Western man is an American soldier. It doesn’t work out. The show was a smash hit in London, but blew up into a massive controversy when the show moved across the pond to Broadway. Famed (and great) British actor Jonathan Price was all set to reprise his lauded performance as a pimp called The Engineer.

Problem was, the character was half-Vietnamese; Price was not. There were calls to recast the role with at least a partially Asian actor. The Actors Equity Association refused to allow the Price casting to stand. There were cries of racism against Asians. Then, of course, came the retaliatory cries of racism against Caucasians (boo-hoo). The show was cancelled. Then it was brought back. In the end, Pryce ended up playing the role and the show made a fortune, but the whole thing became a persistent open wound for the New York theatre community and (hopefully) a cautionary tale for theatre and the arts in general.

It proved, once again, that the theatre of West-meets-East has a way of bringing about unwanted discussions. That’s definitely a good thing.  

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Waterfall The Musical runs at the 5th Avenue Theater through October 25th. 

Next month the Pacific Northwest Ballet stages an entirely new production of Nutcracker after the triumphant 32-year run of its previous incarnation by Kent Stowell and Maurice Sendak. This new staging uses George Balanchine’s 1954 choreography and features costumes designed by Ian Falconer, the illustrator and children’s book author best known for the beloved piglet Olivia.

In anticipation of this epic transformation, I visited the Pioneer Square studio of Erik Andor, who’s been busy fabricating the mouse costumes for the new show. Andor is a costume design whiz in his own right—you might’ve seen his work most recently on the Rep’s celebrated Lizard Boy or for such high-profile clients as Cirque de Soleil and the Rockettes—and in this new undertaking he brings those skills to bear interpreting Falconer’s designs from the ground up. He walked me through his process.

“They sent me the artwork, I had a look at it, assessed it, and then we had ongoing conversations as I started to make a prototype. Costume director Larae [Hascall] is really involved, too, because the dancers have to wear these. The criterion is to meet the designer’s vision but also there are safety considerations because they’re dancing in them.”

“I started with the head. He was really attached to having kind of a bump in the nose, so we worked on that. They’re simple shapes but they’re really specific. They have a square forehead, these ears that are pointy and big thick whiskers.”

“The first one we did looked too much like a chipmunk; it had really fat cheeks. We talked about the mouth a lot. [Ian] has a particular way of doing mouths and ears on his animals. These mice are meant to be a little ‘nervous nelly.’ They’re high-anxiety mice, they have this nervous feel to them. You can see it in the posture of his sketches.”

“I figure out how to make it, what are the best materials, and move forward with that. Then we look at the body. Obviously these things have to last and be built really well, so that’s different than doing something for a commercial or a movie. These things have to have a lot of longevity; everything has to be laundered and maintained and replaced. Like, if the noses break they have to be able to be swapped out over the years. That’s a really big consideration.”

“We’ve been trying a bunch of different materials. For this one I explored a couple new things. This is a kind of high-density foam that is pretty rigid but super lightweight.”

“This is what’s called reticulated foam, which has a lot of different applications—you’ll see it in speakers or cushions on boats. It’s really breathable and you can wash it; because it’s a dance show and they’re gonna be sweating in these things, on occasion they’re gonna have to wash the costumes. So these can drip dry.” 

“A lot of times when I’m making these big pods or body shapes, there are reinforcing hoops in them. These don’t have anything like that, so the shape is really just made from the pattern—they don’t have a structure inside. It’s a safety thing; if someone falls, you don’t wanna fall on a big hoop or anything. They’re pretty soft.”

“There are 16 mice: eight adults and eight children. Then there’s the mouse king: he has seven heads. This is the mockup, just to approve the size and shape and proportion and also use it as a technical model to look at balance and see if somebody could wear it. It’s so big, and this dancer dies onstage—he fights and dies, falls on the stage and some other mice pick him up and carry him out. Because the head is so big and awkward we have to develop a secret way of keeping it strapped to his body and keeping him safe.”

“The tails are really cool! My favorite part of the whole thing. They’re super lightweight, hand-carved three-dimensionally out of that same kind of foam. They’re really light and rigid so they can actually stand away from the body. They have this fabric core in the middle and then we take little slices out of ‘em.”

“When the dancer twitches their hips the tail has a really cool movement. Ian has this way of doing these tails where they’re sort of thick—the costumes are bulbous and thick.”

“They have human hands and human feet, so the only challenge is the visibility. The heads are actually worn on top of the head, and you see thru the throat; you’re not looking through the head.”

“I’ve done a lot of different kinds of stuff, and everything’s fun in its own way. The Nutcracker is such a Seattle institution, it’s gonna be around for a long time and a lot of people are gonna see it. So that’s cool.”

George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker runs November 27 through December 28.

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An alluring priestess with a mysterious past is pursued by a pair of fishermen who share a brotherly bond. Honor, jealousy, and communal duty complicate the love triangle. A long-buried secret saves the day. This is Georges Bizet’s classic opera, The Pearl Fishers. Let’s meet the cast, shall we?  

The role of Zurga, head fisherman, will be played, depending on date, by Brett Polegato or Keith Phares. 

Here’s Polegato singing “Dovunque al mondo… Amore o grillo”:

Here’s Keith Phares singing in a production of Elmer Gantry: 

The role of Nadir, the fisherman, will be played, depending on date, by John Tessier or Anthony Kalil, in his Seattle Opera debut.

Here’s Tessier singing from Salome:

Here’s Kalil singing from La Boheme: 

The role of Leila, a priestess, will be played, depending on performance, by Maureen McKay or Elizabeth Zharoff.

McKay was in a production of Beethoven’s Fidelio:

Here is Zharoff in a performance of La Traviata:

See you all at McCaw Hall:

We sent illustrator Joe Garber to Cafe Nordo for Bohemia, Mark Siano and Opal Peachey‘s cabaret homage to 1890s Prague. Here’s his absinthe-soaked interpretation of the show.

When confronted with nudity in a theatrical performance I usually have a three-part reaction that goes as follows:

1. Oh no, they’re getting naked.
2. Okay, so they’re naked. I can deal with that.
3. Human bodies are weird and cool!

My immediate reaction (#1) is a stubborn holdover from my prude evangelical upbringing; the naked body, that cesspool of sin, must be kept covered lest lustful demons invade the soul. Reactions #2 and #3 reflect my status as an ardent cultural consumer who’s curious about humans, their bodies and how they’re represented. All three reactions are sprinkled with the prurience that is my lot in life as a hetero male (or as a sexual being of any orientation, for that matter). If it’s true that the underlying subconscious urge of all social interaction is Eros, the emotional voyeurism of theatre makes an excellent playground for this impulse.

I like watching artists push boundaries and invoke that frisson of vulnerability. Stage nudity introduces a special kind of danger to a show, a risk shared between performer and spectator. The irony is that however exceptional the dramatic energy conjured by disrobing onstage, there’s nothing more ordinary and universal than the human body.

There’s been much talk of this lately. Washington Ensemble Theatre’s Dirty and ACT’s Threesome both featured nakedness and dealt explicitly with sexuality. [Check out Gemma Wilson’s write-up of the two shows.] Misha Berson wondered whether full-frontal is daring or merely distracting (count me in the “daring” column every time) and Christopher Frizzelle questioned her facts and cringed at Berson’s “hedging.”

I enter this discussion as someone thrilled by the other recent skinfest on the Seattle stage, Slaughterhouse-Five. The context of that nudity was mostly in human vulnerability and captivity; prisoners of war forced to strip by Nazis, humans imprisoned in an terrarium on an alien planet au naturel. There were wangs galore—call it Sausagehouse-Five. As one showgoer tweeted: “More male nudity than five seasons of Game of Thrones!”

The fantasy of the unstuck-in-time story, briskly toggling between continents, galaxies and phases of life, was granted real heft with ample amounts of fully exposed flesh. Given Vonnegut’s penchant for the carnal and scatological, the nudity was apt and well-placed, yet I still couldn’t resist having Reaction #1 as four males of the ensemble were ordered to disrobe by their guards; Oh no! They’re getting naked! But the play was so entertaining and philosophical and messily human that I quickly cycled to Reaction #3 and stayed there.

A couple weeks later, on a particularly hot day, I met a buddy at the local de facto nude beach. I’m Protestant modest, and other than the occasional late night drunken hot tub dip I generally avoid public nudity. But that afternoon in broad daylight, emboldened by the bravery of Slaughterhouse-Five’s cast still fresh in my mind, I dropped trou and dove in for a liberating swim. I’ve been back numerous times since. It’s kinda become my New Summer Thing. My wife, a multiple-Burning Man alumnus who doesn’t bear the same burden of prudery, seems proud of my newfound lack of inhibition.

Having broken through this modesty barrier in my own life, I was curious about how actors approach the far more daunting prospect of stage nudity. I asked the two actors who spent the most time undressed in the play: Erik Gratton and Sydney Tucker.

Erik Gratton

Erik Gratton played middle-period Billy Pilgrim, a witness to wartime atrocities who’s come unstuck in time and space. Tethered to two other actors playing earlier and later iterations of his character, Gratton somehow stitched the three roles together with vividly rendered midlife angst. His brilliant performance ranged widely from caustic resignation to existential combativeness to lusty elation, much of it occurring in the buff.

Where do you fall on the exhibitionism-to-modesty spectrum?

I hate clothes and wearing them, but I don’t seek out opportunities to be naked in front of others. I have done underwear in a few shows and in New York I did an entire play in my boxers. That was more emotionally difficult, maybe because in that piece the near-nudity was more overtly sexual in tone and purpose.

I’m not particularly modest, I’d say. There was no hesitation in my answer when asked if I was willing to appear naked onstage. On some level I’d say it was even a bucket-list item. It’s a kind of professional artistic marker: I had a big tap number; I got a standing ovation in the middle of the show; I got a really baller death scene; I did nudity.

Does getting naked change your experience of the play? Do you prepare any differently?

I’d say it was STAYING naked that was the strange thing. In my first moment of nudity, I bared my ass during drunken sex. Reactions varied from shocked silence to nervous laughter to occasional exclamations or audible intakes of breath. And then it was over. The next nude moment is when aliens tell me to take off all my clothes while four castmates are commanded to strip by their Nazi captors. Pretty dark stuff there, and an emotionally difficult scene for the audience to deal with: watching people’s humanity being stripped from them along with their clothes.

For me it’s the next scene, where the lights came up on me, totally nude and spread out in a BarcaLounger. It’s an incongruous image and the audience isn’t ready for it. Usually there was a big, building, supportive wave of laughter from there right through my character’s regimen of naked calisthenics. We’re all uncomfortable, but we’re uncomfortable like watching an episode of Girls or Louie. It’s laughter of recognition of the audience’s shared body issues, their (and my own) insecurities given solid pudgy form right in front of them. And that laughter was an incredible feeling.

But with one or two audiences there was utter silence during that scene or an audible intake of breath when the lights came up and then silence throughout. That right there is the actor’s nightmare. That’s the naked-in-high-school dream in real life. It’s just awful. You can feel eyes, judgment. See people squirm and cover their eyes. That’s some rough stuff, but you tell yourself that those are the audiences with deeply ingrained shame issues and that it might be great for them to see you jiggle and flap your way through some naked jumping jacks, downstage center. And then you do that. For art.

Before rehearsal started I was tempted to go on a diet, triple my cardio and get into decent shape, but that would have been disrespectful to the author, who describes Billy Pilgrim early on as being “tall and weak” and “shaped like a bottle of Coca-Cola.” No escaping that description. So the physical preparation for rehearsing and performing the role was pretty standard. It was helpful to have a scene partner (Sydney Tucker) who was naked as well. It feels more normal in the middle of hundreds of clothed folks to share the stage with another nude one. 

It’s beach season, when just about everyone has some insecurity about their body. Do you have any advice for feeling comfortable in your own skin in front of others?

I was talking to a male actor friend yesterday who had done full nudity a few years ago and he said that taking off his shirt onstage was a bigger mindgame than taking off his pants. I can endorse that statement as similar to my own experience, though I think Slaughterhouse-Five cured me of the personal shame aspect of swimming or other beach activities. The vast arena of humanity is pretty forgiving of—and doesn’t really care about—what I look like.

Of course, my experience in this nude adventure has been heavily influenced by my own privilege. This is the first time someone has asked me to take off my clothes on stage or film or TV. I’ve got women friends for whom this is a daily or weekly occurrence. I can’t imagine how that and the other ingrained and objectifying aspects of daily life influence their experiences with similar roles. My nude performance gets couched in descriptors like “brave” and “fearless” while women’s performances are often assigned more sexual adjectives. Seattle writers have been pretty respectful to all the nude performers in Slaughterhouse-Five, I’d say, aside from one reviewer who called me “doughy”—which I’ll try and fail to forget. 

Sydney Tucker

Sydney Tucker played a handful of ensemble parts in the show with sportive buoyancy—her rascally turn as one of Kilgore Trout’s newspaper delivery kids had me hoping to see her in more comedic roles. She also played porn star Montana Wildhack, Billy’s Earthling consort in the Tralfamadorian zoo. Her nude, full-body shriek before the blackout at the end of Act One landed like a thunderclap in the theatre.  

You’re also a burlesque dancer. What’s the difference between performing burlesque and dramatic nudity?

In both instances I am playing a character so it’s easy to distance myself from the audience in that way. The biggest difference is that when performing burlesque, my character doesn’t speak any dialogue so my brain can concentrate on the dancing and the music. When acting and being naked, I had to remember to be a “real” person who interacts and moves through space. 

Does getting naked change your experience of the play? Do you prepare any differently?

I don’t know if being naked changed my experience because ultimately that’s the only experience I had, you know? “Naked” was on my costume plot. It became part of the character and her world. It was so freeing. In terms of preparation, it was a mental game. The nudity is in the book, we didn’t add it in for shock value and it’s crucial to the telling of the story. 

Do you have any advice for feeling comfortable in your own skin in front of others?

I think RuPaul says it best: “If you don’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?”

My first writing assignment for Encore was to watch the film Dirty Dancing for the first time in my life and record my thoughts. I liked it more than I thought I would, particularly that beam of inarticulate light that was the young Patrick Swayze. It wasn’t the kind of movie that I’d watch twice, but I could definitely see what the hype was all about. Did I have the time of my life? Not necessarily. Had I never felt that way before? Perhaps, perhaps.

And now, my friends, the wheel has come around once more. Encore has called upon me to watch YET ANOTHER beloved musical period piece about dangerous love that I had somehow managed to go my whole life without seeing. You see, starting July 9 one of the most beloved and successful musicals ever to feature the line “Bite the weenie, Rizz!” is coming to 5th Ave. 

I just watched Grease for the first time. I honestly can’t explain why I’ve never seen this classic—it’s one of the biggest box office hits of all time, filled with smash hit songs and iconic performances. Really, though, it just never came up. I don’t think a single person has ever said to me “You know what? You should really check out Grease.” Maybe I just put out that cynical, this guy would never like Grease kind of vibe. It’s probably the same reason Mormon missionaries take one sight of me when I open the door and say, “Eh, never mind.”

Maybe I’ve just gone my whole life without running into real Grease aficionados. That’s no mean feat; clearly there are millions of them out there. But let’s stop beating around the bush and get down to brass tacks! I’ve got a lot of weirdness to cover. Here’s what I learned watching Greasefor the first time.

Grease is not a very good movie.

Settle down. I didn’t say it’s not fun or that the songs aren’t super-catchy. It is, and they are. But it is a very ramshackle little film: tonally disjointed, indifferently directed and featuring a pretty weak lead performance by Olivia Newton-John. You get the feeling that if this movie had any kind of plot whatsoever, you would be lost within five minutes. It was based on a very popular musical from 1971, so maybe the producers felt like the property and the songs were so beloved that they could put very little talent behind the camera and it would still work out okay, so long as the performers were appealing enough. Clearly, they gambled correctly.

At the helm was some TV director named Randal Kleiser (who went on to have further unremarkable journeyman success with Blue Lagoon, Flight of the Navigator and Honey I Blew Up the Kid) and he fills the movie with the kind of competent, unremarkable imagery that you might expect from a director whose name you’ve already forgotten. I watched this baby on Blu-ray and let me tell you, it looks adequate.  

Moreover, Grease can’t seem to decide what kind of movie it is. It’s kind of funny, sometimes. Kind of romantic, I guess. It’s a musical that goes long stretches without any songs. Sometimes there are fantasy sequences. Sometimes there are attempts at genuine emotional character arcs, but they are quickly abandoned. It tries to be sweet, dirty and cynical at different intervals, but none of it melds together. It feels more like a collage than a complete, cohesive whole. Mostly, it’s a sex, songs and nostalgia delivery system, and it certainly delivers on those three fronts.

What it lacks in quality, it makes up for with pure sleaze and energy.

Right now, I’m wondering just what I can get away with quoting from all of the lewd and lascivious dialogue in this movie. The song “Greased Lightning,” which is supposed to be about a car, is actually about how John Travolta’s character Danny is going to have lots of sex and enjoy himself very much in the process. I think there are twelve lines in this movie that aren’t explicitly or implicitly about sex. Here’s a passage of dialogue between Danny and one of his doofus pals:

SONNY: You mean she puts out?
DANNY: Oh, come on, Sonny, is that all you think about?
SONNY: Friggin’ A!

That exchange could just as well be between John Travolta and the movie Grease. Sometimes the characters get into trouble or interesting, formative events transpire, but the movie really isn’t interested in all that. Grease just wants to ditch all the drama and peek up ladies’ skirts from under the bleachers or figure out who has bigger jugs than Annette. Sure, Dirty Dancinghad some pretty ribald dancing in it, but Grease might as well be called Dirty Everything.

As a stand-up comic, I used to tell a joke about the song “Summer Days,” pointing out the horrifically suggestive nature of the line “Tell me more, tell me more, did she put up a fight?” Had I actually seen Grease, I could’ve had a solid 40 more minutes of material. It’s like Porky’s with songs and no nudity.

That said, if you get a bunch of good-looking, talented kids together and make them dance around and spew non-stop smut out of their mouths, you won’t hear me complaining (much). The movie is undeniably fun. It’s the kind of fun you have when you’ve had one too many shots at the bar with your friends and you all spill in to the streets at 2:00 a.m. with your arms around each other’s shoulders, shouting things at terrified strangers. It’s bad fun.

Newton-John Travolta are the Yin and the Yang of musical performers.

Newton-John has a wonderful voice. You have to give that to her. She belts out her songs like a person who was given one great gift, and that gift is definitely singing. Acting-wise, she’s a few clicks better than an athlete guest host on Saturday Night Live. Travolta, on the other hand, is pure charm and magnetism. From the moment he first cocks his head and beams at the camera, you’re thinking Oh, this guy knows what he’s doing. He’s funny, cocky, and absurdly handsome; he’s at peak Young Travolta. And he’s no slouch in the dance department, either. His voice, however, is a clear explanation for why his singing career never really took off.

But while I’m on the subject of Travolta: hmmm…absurdly handsome, cocky dancer in a romantic musical? Am I the only one thinking of Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing right now? There are a lot of parallels between these two iconic breakout roles. They’re both swaggering, steamy dance-hunks with hidden hearts of gold and soft spots for “nice girls.” But the question is: who does it better? To find out who’s the best of the period piece bad-boy dance-hunks, I put together this helpful and accurate chart:

Sensitive Dance Hunk	Travolta (Danny)	Swayze (Johnny)
Handsomeness	10	9.5
Sensitivity/Romance	4	9
Dance ability	9	10
Acting ability	7	3
Danger factor	5	8
Swagger	8	11
Total	43	50.5

Oohh, sorry JT, that’s clearly Swayze for the win! I’m sure you all saw that coming.

Stockard Channing blows everyone else out of the water.

Channing plays “Rizzo,” a brash young lady who, well, has sex a lot. Everybody in this movie has sex a lot, but I guess Rizzo somehow finds time to do it more. She also smokes, drinks, eats twinkies and can’t stand squares. She’s awesome.

During a sleepover, while the square (and boring) Sandy (Newton-John) is in the bathroom, Rizzo sings a mocking song about chaste, boring gals, laughingly singing “Look at me, I’m Sandra Dee, lousy with virginity!” and “I’m gonna get my kicks when I’m still young enough to get ‘em!” She’s not some lost, wayward soul who has sex to be liked. She just really digs sex, and doesn’t care about what anyone thinks about it.

At a certain point, she has a pregnancy scare, and you start to think that the movie is going to punish her for her wanton ways. The movie itself seems conflicted about her. Remember, Greaseis just like Danny’s doofus pal Sonny. It loves sex and ladies, but it’s also kind of dumb. Much as the movie halfheartedly tries to be judgmental of her, however, the character and Channing’s dominating performance always win out. By the end, as a casual aside, Rizzo shouts down to her friends from a Ferris wheel that the pregnancy was just a “false alarm.” And really, what else would you expect from Grease? If Rizzo had a baby, that might cut back on the amount of time she could spend having sex or talking about sex, and then she could no longer exist in this movie’s bawdy universe.

Every high school in every era had WAY more sex than mine did.

That’s just clearly a fact. There must have been something about the mid to late 1990s. I blame Clinton.

It’s all just good songs, dancing and chaos.

The producers of Grease were right. These songs are classics for a reason. Just put some people in front of a camera, play the songs, make the kids dance and everything’s going to work out all right. There’s a scene later on when a TV dance competition comes to Rydell High. The host nearly makes out with an under aged girl and it’s played for laughs, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about. If I were to detail all of the pervy sexism in this film, I’d never finish writing this column. 

The school gymnasium is packed with kids eager to win the big dance off. After the show begins, one kids screams “Hey! There’s the camera!” as if the immobile, six-ton Golden Age of TV monstrosity had somehow been invisible up to that moment. All of the kids pour into the frame, waving, smiling and dancing. We see folks a home smiling and waving at their kids on screen. That’s what Grease offers: the pure, senseless, giddy thrill of youthful energy and movement. Plus sex.

And so, in the end, Travolta and Newton-John—who have clearly been in love since the beginning of the film—reaffirm that they indeed are in love, wave to their friends and fly into the sky in a car with a transparent hood. There have been exactly zero flying cars depicted before this moment. That’sjust the kind of movie it is.

Bob Fosse was one of those cultural forces of nature who obliterated himself only after obliterating his art form and remaking it in his own image. Think Orson Welles or Kurt Cobain, Richard Pryor or Virginia Woolf. Not to mention Lenny Bruce, about whom Fosse directed a knowing and sympathetic biopic in 1974. These are artists whose impact was so great, even they could not withstand it. As a composer and choreographer, his most famous musical was Chicago—a perfect fit for Fosse’s style, with all of its outsized experimentation, sleaze and hard cynicism.

Cabaret, at the Village Theater through August 2, was not one of Fosse’s own creations, but he directed the brilliant Academy Award-winning adaptation of it (also in 1974—he was, to say the least, a workaholic) and it’s not hard to figure out why. Cabaret is about massive cultural changes as they are reflected through art. It’s about tumult, sex, outsiders, music and dance. Fosse was very much that guy.

In September of 1987, a week after Fosse’s death, Richard Christiansen of the Chicago Tribune wrote: “Bob Fosse’s death last Wednesday did not come as a great surprise. Fosse himself had virtually predicted his massive heart attack in detail in his 1979 semi-autobiographical film, All That Jazz.” Absolutely true. All That Jazz, one of the craziest, smuttiest, most inventive and shamelessly personal musicals ever made, is Bob Fosse saying, “I can’t go on like this much longer, but I’m not going to stop, even to save my own life.” Fosse’s cinematic stand-in, played by the late Roy Scheider, drinks, pops pills, smokes like an industrial chimney and blows up every important relationship in his life.

It’s all about the work for him. Nothing else matters. Fosse/Scheider may lament his seemingly inescapable death and the wreckage he’s left in his wake, but as long as his work stands up, it’s worth any sacrifice. It’s hard not to admire and romanticize bombastic figures like this, terrible as it may be to work with and/or love them. Other phrases that turn up in Christiansen’s eulogy include “his working method was relentless,” “incessant drive for precision,” and “a modern personification of the hard-living, hard-working showman of consummate drive and talent.” He was a full time artist. He was only moonlighting as a human being.

There’s a scene in the 1953 film Kiss Me Kate where Bob Fosse appears for about a minute. It was a very small part, one of Fosse’s first noteworthy appearances in a motion picture. This scene absolutely electrified the world of dance, and you can see why if you watch the movie all the way through. It feels like this: regular musical, regular musical, regular musical—HOLY CRAP WHAT JUST HAPPENED?! He enters the scene sliding (a signature move) and immediately carves a notch in the timeline, squarely between the past and the future of dance. The outlandish, physically challenging movies, the brazen sexuality, the rock-star swagger—all are fully formed.  It’s like LeBron James showing up at a Celtics game in 1952, when people were only doing layups. Ohhh, I didn’t know people could do THAT.

Fosse’s 1972 film version of Kander and Ebb’s 1966 Broadway musical Cabaret was a decidedly loose adaptation. As a film director, Fosse’s work was surprisingly cinematic, considering his theatrical origins—full of dazzling cinematography, breakneck editing and realistic performances. Many details were changed from the musical, but the film still captured the feeling of social and cultural change flourishing under the shadow of the encroaching oppression of the Nazi regime in early 1930s Berlin. The film is PG, but still feels somewhat dangerous today. It’s surprising how frank both the stage and film versions are about sexuality (though I’ve recently come to learn that supposedly stodgy old musicals can often be quite shocking).

Cabaret is very much in Fosse’s wheelhouse. It’s got sex, bohemianism, gritty showbiz details and a pervading sense of anti-authoritarianism. Plus, of course, meticulously crafted song and dance numbers. It also has an acute awareness of mortality. The good times at the Kit Kat Klub and the romantic seesawing of the protagonists are always pervaded with a subtle but unmistakable sense of sadness, because the viewer knows what the characters do not: just how tragically precarious everything in their world is. Of course Bob Fosse loved it. He successfully predicted his own death, after all.