HAPPENINGS

This Week in Arts: Wednesday Roundup (1/8)

Happy new year! A jam-packed month starts off with a relatively quiet week (unless you’re in the throes 14/48, that is). Here are some great picks to start your arts year off right.  

 

Openings

This week, Sound Theatre Company — the Gregory Award-crowned “Theatre of the Year” — opens its world premiere production of Reparations, by Darren Canady, at the historic Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute in the Central District. Associate Artistic Director Jay O’Leary directs a great cast, with Allyson Lee Brown (Citizen), Tracy Michelle Hughes, Aishé Keita, and more. Reparations opens Friday and runs through February 2.

Also opening this week are The Rivals from Seattle Shakespeare Company, which also runs through February 2; and Peacock at the Can Can Culinary Cabaret, running through the end of May.

And at Seattle Opera, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, based on the Alexander Pushkin novel about a lost love, opens on Saturday, and runs through January 25.

 

Short Runs & One-Offs

There are few places as good to catch up with all your theatre friends in one place as 14/48: The World’s Quickest Theatre Festival, which runs this weekend and next at ACT Theatre. Each weekend features a different set of artists, and two nights of different short plays, all concocted (written, designed, rehearsed and performed) that weekend. See this weekend’s lineup of artists here.

Two great companies hold free readings of new work this week. On Sunday, Albatross Theatre Lab holds a reading of the horror play Pontypool by Tony Burgess, at University Heights Center. And on Monday, Sound Theatre Company reads Quantum by Tara Moses, at the Center Theatre Black Box Theatre.

Also on Sunday and Monday, Anne Allgood returns to the stage kitchen at Bon Appétit! at the Rendezvous, where Julia Child Prud’homme (Child’s grand-niece) tells stories and Mark Anders plays keys. Shows in this ongoing performance are Sunday and Monday this week, with a few more scheduled later in January and February. (See NWT’s review here.)

And apparently not content only to direct a world premiere this week, Jay O’Leary also opens a show with Porscha Shaw called Revive, which seeks to resuscitate the image of Blackness in America and explore joy through song, dance and spoken word. The show runs Monday and Tuesday only, at 18th & Union.

 

New Works in Dance

There’s a ton of new dance and other performance to look out for this month. This week, start with dance films at Northwest Film Forum in the Fuselage Dance Film Festival on Friday, and the premiere of Perpetual Vessels — which choreographer Alice Gosti, the Malacarne Dance Company, and filmmaker June Zandona filmed on a 100-year-old steamboat in Anacortes — on Saturday. Also on Friday and Saturday is the eXit SPACE Faculty Show, celebrating 15 years by showcasing dance, films, and installations in three shows at the Erickson Theatre. And next Wednesday, check out the latest installment of On the Boards’s quarterly Performance Lab series, this one called An Augur: Futrue Visions, co-curated by HATLO along with series co-curator Charles Smith.

 


Wednesday Roundup is a weekly (ish) feature, with NWT’s picks for the upcoming week and recaps around town.  

Want to plan your show schedule further out? See what’s happening on NWT’s Calendar page, which aims to list just about every theatre show in town. And for news on all the openings each month see Miryam Gordon’s openings coverage here.