WEEKEND PREVIEW is your weekly guide to events in Thurston County. This week, we’ll give you all the details you need to break free from the winter gloom and brighten your day with opening plays, concerts and comedic performances. Click here to listen to our podcast version of Weekend Preview, sponsored by Sandstone Distillery. Follow the …
by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS In mid-January 2017, Olympia Little Theatre will produce a staged reading of A Lollard in the Wind: Chaucer’s Dilemma by local actor-turned-playwright John Pratt. Pratt was most recently seen in the leading role, Arthur Putnam, in OLT’s An Act of the Imagination. Based in part on Chaucer’s stories from …
by Christina Butcher for OLY ARTS Imagine you have five days to rehearse and perform the musical Les Misérables. Now add that you’re still a teenager and have little to no professional acting experience. It sounds overwhelming, but for 32 elementary, middle and high school students of the South Sound, it’s a welcome challenge. The …
THEATER REVIEW by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS Once again Theater Artists Olympia (TAO) has taken a classic and updated it to make it, if not better than the original, then at least more enjoyable and laughable for contemporary audiences. Philip Wickstrom, Pug Bujeaud and the TAO collective have updated Molière’s 17th-century farce The Physician …
by Guy Bergstrom for OLY ARTS The international hit Stomp—which first hit the London stage in 1991 and has been playing on Broadway since 1994—is coming to Olympia in January 2017. Creators Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas go back another decade to 1981. Cresswell is a self-taught drummer who left school at 15 for music. …
The audience is in control, and anything can happen during 30 Plays in 60 Minutes, this fall’s production by the Saint Martin’s University theater arts department. The program hails from Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind, created by Greg Allen. Its two-minute plays were written by The Neo-Futurists, a Chicago-based experimental-theater company founded …
THEATER REVIEW by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS Now showing at Olympia Family Theater (OFT), Elephant & Piggie’s “We Are in a Play!” is a small play that packs a big wallop for kids. I was not familiar with Mo Willems’ series of Elephant & Piggy children’s books before reading about them in the program. …
THEATER REVIEW by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS Quoting director Scot Whitney’s notes in the program for Harlequin Productions’ The Two Gentlemen of Verona, “Probably no one had argued that it is (Shakespeare’s) best work. It’s not…The jokes are often cheap, strained or downright corny. And though Shakespeare always played fast and loose with time …
by Ned Hayes for OLY ARTS Harlequin Productions has recently been posting behind-the-scenes updates with the hashtag #BestCrewEver. There’s justification for these humblebrags. In 2016, the backstage crew at Harlequin, headed by technical director Marko Bujeaud, was fortunate to add the very capable Bruce Haasl as assistant technical director. Haasl is an accomplished actor who …
by Ned Hayes for OLY ARTS During World War II, a young Jewish girl managed to document her survival and endurance through the travails of wartime Germany. Across five years and seven Nazi labor camps, Sala Garncarz Kirschner wrote over 350 hidden letters and kept them hidden. Sala kept hiding those letters for over 50 …