Kelly Rogers Flynt - Page 5

Hedwig and the Angry Inch at Arts West is one of the least passive audience experiences I've ever had. The dialogue and lyrics are clever and full of plays on words and popular culture references. Keep your ears perked to catch all of it, and a few might still slip by. But more than just vocabulary practice, Hedwig challenges your perceptions of norms, your comfort zone, and the very size of your heart. It will move you, tear at you, sucker punch you, make you laugh, and hold you in rapture. The show will leave you exhausted but hopeful and infinitely better than when you entered the doors.

Masterpiece, classic, epic, monumental - it's hard to find a word that encapsulates this production of Les Miserables. It is a timeless story of love, courage, and redemption that reminds us of what it means to be human. With moments of pageantry and beautiful stillness, the audience is drawn into another world and time. Yet through it all, the cast keeps you close, in the very palms on their hands devouring every word and syllable like starving children. Les Miz is everything you want in a show. It is all that and a bag of chips.

Wild Horses is a one-woman show that tells the story of one summer of her youth, a summer that changed everything. Summers used to be different. Kids and teens had to find their own ways to fill their time. With seemingly endless hours of opportunity and friends by our side, temptations and adventures awaited. Coming of age stories are always appealing because they are so relatable. The things we felt but didn't dare speak, the confusion and excitement of growing up - we've all been there. Playwright Allison Gregory takes us back to the summers of our youth. Although this story is specific, we know it; we can feel it too.

SMOKED! At Cafe Nordo is an immersion dinner theater experience into the Wild West. From smoking guns to smoked oxtail chili, this show delivers an authentic western feel. From the moment you walk into the door, you are part of the show's atmosphere. With good guys to root for, bad guys to boo and plenty of stiff drinks, Cafe Nordo delivers an evening of fun.

MACBETH at Seattle Repertory Theatre is hauntingly brilliant. Take the classic tale of ambition and lust for power, mix it with an ensemble of seven young women with dark imaginations, and add toxic manipulations and you have a new, gritty adaptation that will leave you speechless. Young adolescent girls are usually portrayed as innocent and hopeful, but here they are desperate, raw, misunderstood, and so easily slip across the line from fantasy to murder. The story of Macbeth has perhaps become too familiar to us. The tales linking masculinity with violence have become to ubiquitous, and we have become numb. This new retelling of Macbeth, adapted by the stupendous (there really is no other word) Erica Schmidt brings us back to the truth of the horrific nature of Macbeth's actions.

Lady Windermere's Fan at Taproot Theatre is a tapestry of tightly woven threads in which all are needed to tell the story. This show, an Oscar Wilde classic, is often produced in such a way that the humor overshadows the heart. Co-directors, Karen Lund and Marianne Savell, have instead chosen to explore the genuine fears and dilemmas that women of society faced in the late nineteenth century. With little power and few choices, these women struggled to uphold the ideals imposed by their society. Lady Windermere reminds us how easily a single decision can forever change the trajectory of a life. When authenticity is the cornerstone of a show, especially one with as strong a script as this, there is no need for a circus of distractions.

The women of Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche attack the play with smiles, sugarcoated sarcasm, and thinly veiled sensuality. There is a not a rotten egg in the bunch. The ensemble frolics its way through the silliness straight into the absurd. Laughs abounds, loves smolder, and you'll never look at quiche quite the same way again.

Welcome to Arroyo's is the story of two siblings in the aftermath of the death of their mother. Alejandro and Molly (Amalya) have different ways of honoring her memory that pervades every inch of their space - the business she ran below, and their apartment above. Alejandro decides to convert his mother's deli into a bar and lounge. Molly throws her grief out into the world in the form of graffiti. When neither of them is particularly successful, a stranger enters their lives and shakes things up.