theater

  • Plant a Seed Day at The Seattle Public Library

    Are you looking for a way to celebrate the joy of spring weather with your child? Are your green thumbs beginning to itch? With the weather getting warmer and spring blossoms popping all around us, it’s time to start planning your vegetable gardens and flower beds.  Gardening with children can be especially rewarding. The Seattle… Continue reading

  • Happy Hallowe’en: A Spooky Story for you.

    After years of sharing thrilling tales with a lunch hour crowd in the Central library, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to share a short and spooky tale for Hallowe’en, on NPR’s All Things Considered. Enjoy! For more such tales, join us at the library for Thrilling Tales: the story time for grownups. Continue reading

  • A Conversation with Mark Morris and Peter Boal

    An extraordinary conversation will take place on Tuesday, April 28, 7-8 p.m. in the Microsoft Auditorium, Central Library, when Pacific Northwest Ballet Artistic Director Peter Boal engages in a lively discussion with director and choreographer, Mark Morris. Co-sponsored by Seattle Theatre Group, this event requires no tickets or reservations, but seating is limited and available on… Continue reading

  • Frost/Nixon at the Library.

    For many of us who grew up in the early 1970s, Richard Nixon was almost a storybook figure, his iconic visage glowering from hundreds of political cartoons, his resignation speech one of our “where were you when” moments. (At Summer camp, eating supper in silence while listening to the radio, since you asked). As years go by, his administration… Continue reading

  • Music at the Library in April

    The Library’s April programs offer previews of ballet and opera, and a live music concert. All programs are in the Microsoft Auditorium, First Floor, Central Library. Pacific Northwest Ballet Preview: Kent Stowell’s Swan Lake 12– 1 p.m., Tuesday, April 7 Discover Kent Stowell’s exquisite choreography and Tchaikovsky’s beautifully expressive music in a preview of Pacific… Continue reading

  • Last Minute Gift Ideas: Best Musicals

    Need help finding a last-minute gift for Broadway-loving friends? Here are a few suggestions of recent original cast recordings that should brighten their holidays! Three of these shows were nominated for the 2008 Tony Award for Best Musical and the fourth one is in the running for a nomination for 2009. “In The Heights”, by… Continue reading

  • Thrilling Tales: A Storytime for Adults

    I can remember attending story hour at the Magnolia branch library when I was a kid, just as thousands of children still do each year at libraries all over the city. I’ve never stopped loving stories, but as I grew older they stopped having a storytime for me. So I started one myself, and every other week for the past… Continue reading

  • Off The Map

    “William Gibbs’ first painting was twenty inches high and thirty-one feet wide, one foot shy of the perimeter of my room. The dimensions suited the subject, the ocean’s horizon. He hung it so that when I lay on my bed, I could stare out fourteen miles to the horizon any way I looked. Encircled by… Continue reading

  • Artist Oliver Herring at the Seattle Public Library

    On Saturday June 28, The Seattle Public Library downtown hosts an all day group performance of TASK by Oliver Herring. Co-sponsored by the Frye Art Museum, On the Boards, and the Tacoma Art Museum, the piece revolves around spontaneous interactions between a group of volunteer local performers working to complete “tasks” assigned first by the… Continue reading

  • Ghost Singer as Author

    As I read a recent Seattle Times review of the traveling production, My Fair Lady, the name Marni Nixon “jumped out” at me. The former Seattlite was playing the non-singing role of Higgins’ mother. What a surprise, she’s still active, I thought. A long time admirer of hers, I wondered what would it be like… Continue reading

  • Who was Shakespeare?

    While the academic world is solidly behind William Shakespeare of Stratford, such notables as Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Derek Jacobi, Walt Whitman and Orson Welles have questioned whether he could have written the works credited to him. Among those who suspect that Shakespeare of Stratford was not the author of the plays and sonnets, the candidates… Continue reading

  • Comedy from Canada

    Are you constantly annoyed by what’s on commercial television and find you have watched all the hot HBO series from beginning to end? Try Slings & Arrows, a three season comedy from Canada available on DVD. The story takes place behind the scenes of the fictional New Burbage Festival, a theatre troupe modeled loosely on… Continue reading

  • Bard Bio

    As a lifelong Shakespeare fan, I’ve known of the various debates about which of his plays came first, whether Shakespeare was indeed Shakespeare (and not, say, Francis Bacon), whether he loved his wife, how educated he was, and so on with the minutiae.  I admit I haven’t much cared, preferring to focus my attention on the sublimity… Continue reading