The Threepenny Opera A Play with Music Based on John Gay’s THE BEGGAR’S OPERA By Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann English translation of the dialogue by Robert MacDonald English translation of the lyrics by Jeremy Sams January 29th, 7:00pm January 30th, 7:00pm January 31st, 2:00pm & 7:00pm Performed and produced …
In this white-knuckle thriller, Susan Hendrix, newly blind, seems an easy mark when three ruthless criminals invade her Greenwich Village apartment. Forty-seven years after its 1966 premiere, Jeffrey Hatcher has adapted Frederick Knott’s (Dial ‘M’ for Murder) original script with crackling, claustrophobic, and calculated efficiency. When the lights go out, survival comes down to nerve, …
Given the flights of fancy of both the Roald Dahl novel and the Danny DeVito film of Matilda, it seemed only a matter of time for Matilda to get the musical treatment, which it did in 2010 with music and lyrics by Tim Minchin and book by Dennis Kelly. Now, Matilda the Musical is hitting Tacoma Little Theatre through December 28, directed by Jennifer York, with a sizable cast of child and adult actors, led by Hazel Barnett and Nell Edlund, trading off performances as Matilda.
In preparation for next year’s 45th anniversary season, the Creative Theatre Experience Board of Directors has announced the selection of Kristina Cummins as their new program director and Kyle Murphy as executive director. In addition to these staff leadership changes, the CTE Board of Directors has elected new officers to its executive team, with Nora Gant as president, Jerod Nace as vice president, and Louise Doran as treasurer/secretary. Together with Murphy’s new-fashioned thinking and old-fashioned commitment to community theatre arts, and Cummins’ long experience teaching and directing theatre with young people and actualizing in them her love for the craft, Creative Theatre Experience looks ready to go boldly into the future.
Tacoma Little Theatre’s Murder Mystery Dinners return with Knock ‘Em Dead.
If you fancy yourself a part-time gumshoe, you may be interested to know that the game is once again afoot. These evenings of interactive theatre began in 2017 as fundraisers for TLT before they broke out and became regular productions. TLT put on three of them a year until the COVID pandemic forced them to go on hiatus. 2024 saw their return, and November 20, 2025, marks the opening night of the first Murder Mystery Dinner of the season.
Tony Kushner has never shied away from theatre with a political message, as evidenced by his landmark two-part masterpiece Angels in America. As it turns out, politics was in Kushner’s theatrical DNA beginning with his first play, A Bright Room Called Day, which runs from November 14 to 23 in a revival by the South Puget Sound Community College Theatre Collective.
Heartsparkle Players began doing Playback Theatre in 1991 as a way to support
elementary school children in developing empathy and reducing bullying. Students told stories about when they received and gave acts of kindness. In the beginning, they performed primarily in schools and later began commissioned performances for organizations, faith groups, and finally they added public performances. They have held their public performances at Traditions for 28 years, often collaborating with other community groups. Founding member Debi Edden said, “We want to bring hope, stories and community to our gatherings.”
Theater, from the beginning, has been a space for confronting death and life’s existential questions. Shakespeare, in Julius Caesar, has much to say about both. Fast forward to the current zeitgeist, and the evil that men, mostly men, are doing, from one side of the earth to the other—climate derangement, a new ICE age, nuclear proliferation, war crimes and lawlessness from sea to shining sea—looks very much like it will have enduring if not undying consequences. Olympia Little Theatre’s September 2025 production of Sarah Ruhl’s quintessentially quirky comedy, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, was directed by Kendra Malm and Toni Holm. It contained pertinent messages for today.
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.
The Fall/Winter print edition of OLY ARTS N0. 34 is published! Here is a list of the articles and where in the Olympia area you can pick up your FREE copy. Enjoy!