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I'm a dedicated and curious multimedia journalist, with extensive experience in freelance feature writing and arts criticism alongside my career as a news editor and content management specialist.
Arts and performance journalism
As in 'Cambodian Rock Band' and 'The Great Leap,' Lauren Yee's new play at Seattle Rep mashes up communism and pop culture, in a mix that resonates beyond its historic setting.
In Elmer Rice’s 1923 play “The Adding Machine,” an office drone is plunged into existential crisis when his accounting job is replaced by mechanical technology. A hundred years later, artificial intelligence promises (or threatens) to do much more: write all our emails, create all our spreadsheets. And maybe, perform in all our plays?
WET turns 20 this year, an occasion that will be marked by a production of “Scrambling the Goose,” a new collection of dozens of short plays presented in a different order every night, as determined by the audience. Sounds ambitious. Sounds risky. Sounds like WET, a company that’s shape-shifted many times over but retained a consistent ethos of playful experimentation and striking design work.
As renowned for her unfiltered perspective as her stunning mezzo-soprano voice, Patti LuPone is a Broadway legend among legends. Whether you’ll ever see her on Broadway again is an open question. She resigned from the Actors’ Equity union last year and has been noncommittal about returning to the Broadway stage.
The holiday show has become an annual tradition for the drag-queen duo, who rose to fame on “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” which Monsoon won twice. They’ve co-written and performed a holiday show every year since 2018, including a streaming special in lieu of a live performance in 2020. This year, they hurtle back through the decades in an attempt to correct the wrongs of the past and save Christmas.
In Heidi Schreck's "What the Constitution Means to Me," she stands onstage in a yellow blazer as sunny as her disposition and delves into 250 years of national pain and a weighty dose of personal agony too.
There's never been a Village Theatre without Robb Hunt. He was part of a group that founded the Issaquah-based institution in 1979 and, at the end of this season, he will step down, following the "monumental" challenge of the last two years.
Valerie Curtis-Newton misses live theater. The head of directing and playwriting at the University of Washington School of Drama and the founding artistic director for Seattle-based theater company The Hansberry Project, Curtis-Newton is firm in this belief: The magic of theater is untranslatable to another medium.
For nearly 20 years, the 5th Ave has served as a testing ground for new work, giving them the out-of-town tryout that's a rite of passage on the path to the Great White Way. How have those shows fared?
The noise builds gradually in the Seattle Repertory Theatre rehearsal room where preparations are underway for "As You Like It," the second production in the Rep's nascent Public Works program. Like 2017's "The Odyssey," the cast of "As You Like It" numbers close to 100. In this packed room, a din is inevitable.
Roger Guenveur Smith, whose one-man shows about Rodney King and Huey P. Newton were brought to the big screen by Spike Lee, is bringing his solo show "Frederick Douglass Now" to the stage at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute. It's no mere history lesson.
Desdemona Chiang can’t see into the future, but that’s not going to stop her from trying. The prolific director, 37, who has a new show opening at Seattle Public Theater (SPT) this week, is hesitant to ascribe too much responsibility for social change to the theater.
Theater criticism
Secrets are abundant in York Walker’s “Covenant,” a slice of Southern Gothic horror that stews together some classic ingredients: sexual repression, religious fervor and the blues.
Its timeline: sprawling, unfolding over more than 150 years of American history. Its appearance: imposing, playing out on a stark canvas. Its run time: intimidating, stretching well over three hours with two intermissions. Its scope? Well, “The Lehman Trilogy” is less of an epic than its trappings might suggest.
Is a single song enough to make a musical worthwhile? Let’s be clear: There are a number of rousing moments in the revival of “1776,” Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone’s 1969 show about the events leading up to the American Revolution, now onstage at Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre in a national tour stop. Rousing is hardly radical though, and it’s not until the show is nearly over that directors Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus’ output lives up to their ambitions.
Any doubts that a musical about 9/11 could work were quelled long ago by "Come From Away," the disarming tale of how the citizens of a small town in Newfoundland, Canada, rose to the occasion when 38 commercial planes were diverted there following the terrorist attacks.
Paul and Jean are a couple from Wisconsin celebrating their 24th anniversary in Cairo. It's not going so well. A romantic evening with a Nile River cruise has fallen apart, and an offhand remark has spiraled into an admission that he doesn't find her sexually attractive anymore.
The faint scent of distant wildfires and a low, hazy sky functioned as the backdrop to the opening of José Rivera’s “Marisol,” from The Williams Project, last Friday, Aug. 13. Performed outdoors, through Aug. 29, it’s one of Seattle’s first full-scale theater productions since the pandemic began. But before the show, director Ryan Guzzo Purcell’s safety preamble had nothing to do with COVID-19.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' An Octoroon is a play that gives you a shot in the arm and a punch to the gut. It's thrilling and mesmerizing and discomfiting. It's framed by meta-theatrical pretense, but its center is a kind of artifice that used to be more palatable to theatre audiences: the melodrama.
Oh, hello. Who's that at the door? Why it's that creaky old Hollywood property all gussied up in a new wig and a fresh set of false teeth, here with designs to take up residence again in our pop-culture-loving hearts.
A megawatt-cheerful, innuendo-laden tap dance opens Clare Barron’s Dance Nation, a jolt of sunshine that gave me a good feeling about the play to come. Then, there’s a gruesome leg injury — and I got really excited.