Harlequin Productions

posts about shows at Harlequin Productions

Harlequin Productions Turns up the Heat with “Million Dollar Quartet”

On December 4, 1956, a “twist-of-fate” brought Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins into the same space for a once-in-a-lifetime jam session at Sun Records. Just imagine what that jam session must have been like! Historical memory, nostalgia, and imagination is brought to life as Harlequin Productions takes audiences back to that incredible night with the Tony nominated musical, “Million Dollar Quartet!”

Four Shows for the Spring

Similar to a vibrant garden, our arts scene in Thurston County is filled with a variety of artistic companies and artists who are consistently adding color, beauty, joy, and their own lovely fragrance to our lives. Let Oly Arts be your “florist” this spring and give ideas of what you can add to the bouquet of your lives: TAO’s Anna Considers Mars — Harlequin’s Where the Summit Meets the Stars — OFT’s The Hobbit — and SPSCC’s Anastasia the Musical.

Oly Arts Spring 2026 Print Edition

The print edition of Oly Arts magazine is published! This is our 10th anniversary edition and it includes The Oly Arts Origin Story and much more! Find out where you can pick up a free copy and/or read and download the PDF version.

Bryan Willis’s Special Valentine’s Love Note at Harlequin

‘How Much the Heart Can Hold’ (Saturday, Feb. 14 only) is a multi-faceted celebration of love featuring scenes, poetry, quotes and even love notes penned by audience members. “It’s such a fun piece,” said Bryan Willis, who created the show with the late Linda Kalkwarf and included pieces by other local writers. “This is not a play I could have written 30 years ago. The nature of love changes as we age. We have successes and failures. … In the course of the play, we follow this couple who meet as grade-school students, and we follow them until they are in their golden years.”

DARK TIMES

Harlequin’s 2026 season begins with a classic thriller, Wait Until Dark by Frederick Knott, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher. To heighten the film noir fun, the production is presented in glorious monochrome, with black and white sets and costumes, and make-up and light trickery to mimic the look of a classic black-and-white thriller. To assist both actress Helen Harvester who plays Susan, and the production team, the company brought in a sight-impaired consultant, Chandra Scheschy, a theater professional recommended by the Washington State Department for the Blind. The play runs January 23 – February 8.

Murder Most Moral

It’s autumn, and time for a classic whodunnit — and you don’t get more classic than Agatha Christie. What most people enjoy about her mysteries are the ingenious plots, the wickedly complicated alibis and ruses, and of course the eccentric detectives — brittle but brilliant Mrs. Marple, delightfully dippy Tommy and Tuppence, and the “little grey cells’ of that Belgian prodigy, Monsieur Hercule Poirot.
Starring John Serembe as Hercule Poirot, and Russ Holm as Monsieur Bouc, and directed by Scott Nolte, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express plays Oct. 3-Nov. 2 at Harlequin Productions.

Review: Is This a Room

Aaron Lamb, director of Harlequin Production’s Is This a Room, has created a piece of moving, powerful theatre with a light and confident artistic hand. Jeannie Beirne’s set design, Savannah Van Leuvan’s lighting design and Keith Jewell’s sound design with its weird cover of the redacted dialogue rendering it unspeakably inaudible, accomplishes a trifecta. The strange stage set enables us to take in the equally strange encounter that occurred on June 3, 2017, when 11 FBI agents arrived unannounced at the home of Reality Winner (portrayed most affectingly by Olivia Finkelstein, in her Harlequin debut).

A Valentine’s Oratorio: How Much the Heart Can Hold

“How Much the Heart Can Hold” by Bryan Willis and Linda Kalkwarf will be performed one night only at Harlequin’s State Theatre. Inspired by the words of writer and artist Zelda Fitzgerald: “Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.” Directed by Kathryn Dorgan, the play is a series of illustrative scenes tied together with readings of what Willis calls “snippets of wisdom, culled from a variety of writers and thinkers, that guarantee inspiration for lovers of all ages.”

A Christmas Carol from Harlequin Productions Takes Center Stage This Holiday Season

“A Christmas Carol,” playing at Harlequin Productions Nov. 29 to Dec. 24, “is the greatest redemption story ever told, wrapped up in the trappings of a ghost story,” said Artistic Director Aaron Lamb. “A story of redemption is fundamentally a story about hope and forgiveness. If audiences leave a little more hopeful and a little more open to forgiveness after they see this production, we have succeeded.”

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