Category: News

With Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel coming soon, the full cast has been announced for the 5th Avenue Theatre/Spectrum Dance Theater collaboration. With Tony Award-nominated choreographer Donald Byrd at the creative table, under the direction of 5th Avenue Theatre’s Producing Artistic Director Bill Berry, rehearsals have begun.

Named “the best musical of the 20th century” by Time Magazine, and a personal favorite of Richard Rodgers himself, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel tells the story of carnival barker Billy Bigelow and mill worker Julie Jordan. Their romance comes at the price of both their jobs. He attempts a robbery to provide for Julie and their unborn child. Things go wrong but he is given a chance to make things right.

The coming production will star Brandon O’Neill as Billy Bigelow. O’Neill returns to Seattle following his Broadway debut in Disney’s Alladin. Other roles include Collins in the 5th Avenue Theatre’s acclaimed production of RENT, Hanuman in Ramayana at ACT Theatre, and Gabe in the world premiere musical First Date.

Laura Griffith will play Julie Jordan. She’s played in several roles on the 5th Avenue Theatre stage including Lucy Honeychurch in A Room with a View, the Lady of the Lake in Monty Python’s Spamalot, and Cunnegonde in Candide.

Other actors in the production include Anne Allgood, Eric Ankrim, Allen Fitzpatrick, Cynthia Jones, and Joshua Downs.

Here’s a clip from the 1956 movie of Carousel, starring Shirley Jones and Gordon MacRae, singing “If I Loved You”:

The Seattle Symphony’s been busy. As they gear up for their performance with legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman they announced several new additions to the Seattle Symphony family.

Spanish conductor Pablo Rus Broseta has been named Seattle Symphony’s Douglas F. King Assistant Conductor starting in September 2015. Rus Broseta has previously served as Assistant Conductor of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Liege in Belgium, the Valencia Youth Symphony Orchestra in Spain and the Dutch National Opera Academy. With the Seattle Symphony, he will conduct a wide variety of concerts in the 2015-16 season. Here’s a clip of him conducting:

The Seattle Symphony also announced the appointment of Ruth Reinhardt as Conducting Fellow for the 2015-16 season. Reinhardt was recently named Chief Conductor of the Lincoln Center Chamber Orchestra and is currently finishing her Master of Music degree in Conducting at The Jullliard School.

Violinist Cordula Merks was recently appointed as Seattle Symphony’s Assistant Concertmaster. She has been a member of the Seattle Symphony’s violin section since March 2011. Merks has been guest concertmaster with several orchestras, including the Dresden Philharmonic and the Portuguese National Opera.

Finally, Seattle Symphony welcomed Eric Jacobs to their clarinet section. Jacobs has played previously with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Los Angeles Opera, amongst others. Here is Jacobs playing in a concert at USC’s Newman Hall:

Tyrone Brown is a freelance director and producer who coaxes music and purpose out of thorny topics like race, history and identity. He works with Brownbox Theatre, a company dedicated to re-imagined Black theatre, and he’s an MFA alumnus of Seattle University as well as the prestigious Drama League Directors Project in New York. Recent directorial successes include last summer’s acclaimed Passing Strange at ACT and Black Like Us at Annex.

Brown joined me for this post-Christmas edition of Five Friday Questions.

What’s the best performance you’ve seen lately? 

Now I’m Fine by Ahamefule Oluo at On The Boards. It was a truly original and inspiring work of art, a near-perfect combination of comedy, music (big band), theatre and performance art. Bravo, Ahamefule Oluo, okanomodé, Samantha Boshnack, Josh Rawlings, Evan Flory-Barnes, D’Vonne Lewis and anyone else involved in the production. Bravo!

What’s your favorite place to go after a show? 

LUCID Lounge in the University District, Plum Bistro and Lost Lake Cafe on Capitol Hill, Island Soul in Columbia City, or any Yogurtland.

What music gets you pumped up? 

Lately, anything by Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington with a dash of Kendrick Lamar and Mary J. Blige.

What do you listen to when you’re sad?

Billy Strayhorn and Billie Holiday.

What’s your strategy for coping with the long Seattle winter?

Listening to music, going to the movies, watching House of DVF, getting laid and plenty of sleep. Probably in that order.

What’s the most useful thing anyone’s ever taught you about working in theatre?

Work on the end of the play first, the importance of recording and archiving your work, and that “the devil is in the details.”

When the Seattle Symphony launched their in-house label last spring, it’s doubtful they considered the possibility that among the first batch of releases would be six (SIX!) Grammy nominations including three for their very first release, Works by Dutilleux, two for Become Ocean by John Luther Adams (an SSO-commisioned work) and a Producer of the Year nod for engineer Dimitriy Lipay. This marks the most Grammy nominations in a single year of SSO’s entire 111-year history.

The nominations are:

Works by Dutilleux 
Best Orchestral Performance
Best Classical Instrumental Solo by Xavier Phillips 
Best Engineered Performance

Become Ocean by John Luther Adams
Best Contemporary Composition
Best Engineered Performance

Producer of the Year
Dimitriy Lipay

The 57th Grammy Awards ceremony will be held February 8. 

In highly welcome local theatre news, the Seattle Rep announced yesterday that Robert Schenkkan’s Tony Award-winning play All the Way has become the highest-grossing production in their history. Less than two weeks after opening, ticket revenue has surpassed Lily Tomlin’s The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe and Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking for the top spot. Sales have been so brisk that the Rep added a second “marathon day” for audiences to experience both All the Way and its followup, the world-premiering The Great Society. The two shows overlap through December and January.

Jack Willis (pictured) stars as LBJ in the role he originated—covered by obscure upstart Bryan Cranston in the Tony-winning Broadway production—and Bill Rauch directs. The plays run until January 4.

Check out our interview with the plays’ dramaturg and longtime Schenkkan collaborator Tom Bryant and Gemma Wilson’s feature and review of the show for City Arts and stay tuned for more about the blockbusting production here at Encore.

These technologically-enhanced pointe shoes, called Electronic Traces, record the pressure and movement of a dancer’s feet on the ground and transmit them to a mobile device, providing a digital record of elegant motion. The resulting images are reminiscent of Hitsuzendo, the Zen art of calligraphic brushwork. Imagine the PNB’s next performance immortalized with these Arduino-powered devices!  

Here’s a video of the E-Traces in action:

The Ikeda piece played relentlessly on this idea.  Frank concludes, “Ikeda’s work demonstrated the meaning of true excellence in the collaboration of art and science. A painting using a computer algorithm may not mean much. A dance based directly on an idea in mathematics may not reveal much. But when artistic explorations in the terrains of science truly work, they do much more than just interpret a map of a scientific idea. Instead the unique power of artistic expression reveals wholly new human landscapes within that terrain.” 

A brief clip of a performance:

The Maestro comes onstage to a roar of applause. He has a little piece of wood: the baton. With it he will stand at the podium, face a throng of musicians, and, with nary a word, count off a piece of music in front of them. One, two, three, and with a flick of the wrist or the wave of the arm, the orchestra creates music, shepherded by the Maestro.

Clemency Burton-Hill wrote a piece for BBC about what a conductor actually does:

BEAT TIME

Famed composer and conductor Richard Wagner once wrote, “The whole duty of a conductor is comprised in his ability always to indicate the right tempo.” Is the music supposed to be slow? Slower? Fast? The conductor shows the band through movement, facial expression and the like, how time will envolve in that short span of music.

CONVEY

The conductor is there to bring the music to life, communicating their own sense of the work through gestures. They bring their own sensibilities to the piece. There is shade and light and color, and the conductor’s baton is a paint brush.

LISTEN

Burton-Hill quotes Tom Service, author of Music As Alchemy: Journeys with Great Conductors and Their Orchestras: “The best conductors are the best listeners…They become a lightning rod of listening; a focus so that the players and the conductor can become something bigger than all of them.”

LEAD

Pierre Boulez,  a French composer, conductor, writer and pianist, said of conducting, “You have to impose your will – not with a hammer, but you have to be able to convince people of your point of view.”

BE A CONDUIT

The conductor is the vision connection between the audience and the music – the bridge between what’s seen and what’s heard.

BE KNOWLEDGEABLE

A conductor can not simply stand up on the podium ready to play a symphony by Beethoven without ever having studied the score. They could – of course – but by studying the piece one can interpret it. By interpreting it, one can color it.

GET THE GLORY (OR SHAME)

If the performance is a good one, the conductor gets the lion’s share of praise. If the performance is a bad one, the conductor gets the lion’s share of flak.

BE A FIGUREHEAD

A conductor can be more than a conductor. Their personality and vision can change the culture of not only an organization but the culture of classical music itself.

Here’s a bit of Seattle Symphony’s Ludovic Morlot conducting Verdi’s Requiem…

On November 20, Paul Allen-owned Cinerama is reopening, bigger and better than before with the opening night of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 at 8 pm.

Cinerama has been closed for renovations for months because Paul Allen wants to make it the best movie theatre in the nation. He started by saving the 1960s icon from being torn down. Born in 1963 as Seattle Martin’s Cinerama it was retroffited in those early days to show 70 mm films on a huge curved screen. Currently, Cinerama is one of only three movie theatres in the nation to be able to show three-panel Cinerama films.

With millions of dollars, Allen brought the theater into the 20th century and beyond. The new-fangled Cinerama opened in 1999 with state-of-the-art technology. With this most recent closure, Allen installed the world’s first commercial digital laser projector, a machine that has a light output of 60,000 lumens. The films will now be more clear and have higher color accuracy than ever before.

After seeing The Hunger Games at the Cinerama, movie-goers will undoubtedly be hungry for more…

ACT announced that Artistic Director Kurt Beattie will retire at the end of the 2015 season after twelve years at the helm of the award-winning organization currently celebrating their 50th season. He’ll be succeeded by Associate Artistic Director John Langs.

“Kurt has been steadfast in his commitment to our loyal audience, to shepherding new works, and to creating a groundbreaking new programming model through our Central Heating Lab,” says Board President Colin Chapman, “We know that his legacy will continue to feed the artistic soul of ACT for years to come.”

Beattie has long roots at the theatre, playing his first role there in 1975. In 2001 he became Associate Artistic Director and was then promoted to AD in 2003. He’s overseen eleven Mainstage world premieres in his tenure and countless memorable productions, along with developing the Central Heating Lab and overseeing the multi-year collaboration with the Hansberry Project.

Next year Beattie will direct Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Travesties. After that he’ll serve as Artistic Director Emeritus, shepherding long-term projects already in development as well as acting and directing for future productions.

His successor, John Langs, is an award-winning director who’s received accolades for his work in New York, LA, Chicago, and Milwaukee and overseen a dozen premiere productions. Next year he’ll direct The Three Sisters in the Central Heating Lab, Mr. Burns, a post-electric play on the Mainstage, and the 40th^h anniversary of A Christmas Carol.