This Glorious Quest: Harlequin’s Man of La Mancha Inspires Audiences

By CHRISTIAN CARVAJAL Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s two-part novel The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha, first published in 1605 and 1615 — concurrent with Galileo, the King James Bible and Shakespeare — has been called the greatest novel ever, easily the most influential of the Spanish Golden Age. That novel inspired the 1965 …

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The Rocky Horror Picture Show at Olympia Film Society

By NOAH SHACHAR Some movies win Academy Awards, are nearly forgotten and hardly spoken about again. Some movies are simply boring, while others are entertaining or insightful. But a few movies ignite themselves in a blazing pyre to emerge as a phoenix from smoldering ashes ever livelier, more passionate and mesmerizingly intriguing — growing and …

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Sharon Stearnes and the Wonderful Wurlitzer

By KAREN LUNDE Back in the mid-1920s, the Liberty Theatre, a vaudeville house, contained a Wurlitzer 2/9 theater pipe organ. After a renovation in 1948, the Liberty became the Olympic Theater. In the 1980s, it was completely rebuilt and evolved into The Washington Center for the Performing Arts. Throughout the building’s evolution, the mighty Wurlitzer …

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Raising a Glass to Life’s Misfits

By Karen Lunde Comedian Drew Carey once said, “Oh, you hate your job? … There’s a support group for that. It’s called everybody, and they meet regularly at the bar.” Not everyone in Daphne’s Dive, a play by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudés, hates his or her job; but everyone has a story, and …

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Thereby Hangs a Tale

By CHRISTIAN CARVAJAL Lacey will soon have its own theatrical troupe. Artistic director Kevin McManus explains, “Seven of my closest friends and I gathered together to form a theater company. We got ourselves a little 501(c)(3) license and are heading toward a three-production, inaugural season.” That fledgling company is Goldfinch Productions. “It’s exciting and a …

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Other People’s Lives

By Alec Clayton Tumwater High School is presenting a student-written play, “Other People’s Lives” by Caelyn White, an 18-year-old graduating senior. “Other People’s Lives” is structured like seven interconnecting short stories, all loosely related with different principal characters. It focuses on a single neighborhood and the conflicts the various neighbors face. “I think it is …

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Arts and Culture Events This Memorial Day Weekend

By Billy Thomas As the weather continues to warm up, and the sun — that’s that bright thing in the sky, for those of us who have forgotten, due to its infrequent presence — begins to shine brighter, the promise of a long weekend is a reprieve from the slog. For readers who are looking …

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Heather Matthews as adult Alison in SPSCC's Fun Home

Come to the Fun Home

By CHRISTIAN CARVAJAL Fun Home, a musical based on the 2006 graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel, is coming to South Puget Sound Community Theater (SPSCC). The musical tells the story of Bechdel’s tumultuous relationship with her parents and her process of coming out, to herself and others, in college. It opened off-Broadway in 2013, then …

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A Doll’s House: A Forerunner of Feminism Updated and as Relevant as Ever

THEATER REVIEW by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS Henrik Ibsen’s controversial classic A Doll’s House as presented at Harlequin Productions is stunning, and as relevant now as it was when it shocked theater-goers in 1879. Director Aaron Lamb has updated it with modern sets, costumes, music, and a highly stylized opening and closing that are …

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Local Theater Makes It Big

Tacoma Little Theatre’s production of The Pillowman took top honors at the American Association of Community Theatre Region IX competition in Spokane this year and is going to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania for the national finals in June.

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