posts about live theater, live performances, actors, acting, shows, and other theatrical things…
The summer print edition of Oly Arts magazine is published! Copies of the printed version are available free of charge throughout the area – find out where you can pick up a copy and see a list of articles in this issue.
At summer’s height, when many theaters are dark, two South Sound companies go out to play in picnic-perfect parks. Both Animal Fire Theatre and String & Shadow Puppet Theater stage major shows when the days are long and the skies most likely blue. Animal Fire is producing the seldom-staged and seriously silly Love’s Labour’s Lost, opening July 3, and String & Shadow. is producing a return of 2025’s Night at the Grand Opera. These outdoor productions will be performed in Olympia’s Decatur Woods Park and Wonderwood Park.
The Washington Center for the Performing Arts’ 2026-27 season, announced Tuesday, June 17, features the center’s traditional mix of Broadway shows, comedy, music, dance and family — plus two leading lights of literature.
“We’re very excited to have Amy Tan and Tim Egan coming in this season.” said Jill Barnes, the center’s executive director. Also among the season’s big names are satirical singing sensation Randy Rainbow (Oct. 15), comedy icon Tig Notaro (Nov. 13) and gospel giants The Blind Boys of Alabama (April 1).
Shoestring Circus performs “Dreamland” in Olympia from June 19 to 28. Only in its fourth year, Shoestring Circus was founded in Bellingham by four veteran circus performers: Osterloh, Matthew “Poki” McCorkle, Justin Therrien and Nicole Laumb. “We try to have a different show each year, so it feels to people who come every year that they’re coming into a whole new world,” Osterloh said. Only 15 performers were chosen from the 320 audition videos the circus received last fall.
Pipeline — now playing through May 10 at Lakewood Playhouse — revolves around Omari, a high school student played by Isaiah Myers, who himself is a junior in high school. Omari shoved a teacher, which is his third offense, and is now in a situation where he can either run away or face the potential consequence of jail time. As a young actor playing his own age, wrestling with the fury and shame of his circumstances, Myers is a magnetic presence onstage. He’s able to play a character who is smarter than he’s willing to let on, but too stubborn to back down from an impossible position.
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.
In recognition of 40 years of dedicated service to the performing arts in Thurston County and the South Sound, Washington Center Production Manager Roger McIntosh has been selected as the 2026 Excellence in the Arts Commitment to the Arts Awardee. The Center’s Star Dressing Room has been officially named in his honor in recognition of the organization’s “deep appreciation for four decades of service, care, commitment, and the philosophy that guided his work,” according to a Center Marketing and Sales Director Tineke Raak.
Double Shot Theater Festival in Tacoma is a kind of theatrical 100-meter dash. For roughly 20 years (festival creator Bryan Willis isn’t quite sure when it all got started), Double Shot has been assembling directors, actors, and playwrights to complete the Herculean task of writing, memorizing, rehearsing, lighting, costuming, and eventually performing 10-minute plays, all in about 24 hours. Saturday, April 18, and Sunday, April 19.
Theater Artists Olympia has a new home in downtown Olympia in what is now called The Jefferson Street Arts Center, at the former site of the Johansen Olympia Dance Center. In TAO’s first show there, Ruben Grijalva’s “Anna Considers Mars” (the very model of TAO’s trademarked “untamed theater” while speaking at the same time, to our fateful current condition) brings us to the not-so-distant future where the earth’s habitability is critically threatened by climate change, the human search for a new home is under serious consideration, and people are overwhelmed by having to live in a vividly augmented reality, in which they wear glasses that make them appear to others wearing the glasses to be better-looking than they really are.
In House Fire at Dukesbay Theater in Tacoma through March 29, what we’re seeing isn’t technically the afterlife, but rather a kind of purgatorial weigh station where Laurie finds herself after dying at the too-young age of 29. When the titular house fire ends it all, she says she was this close to changing her life for the better. And so, in this purgatory, Laurie is assigned three deceased people to take care of her “orientation” before she can move on to whatever the afterlife has to offer.