As the 2024-25 theater season kicks off, the Seattle stage scene is in a state of transition – to put it mildly.
The two major Equity playhouses have new artistic directors. Dámaso Rodríguez, former head of Portland’s Artists Repertory Theatre, is unveiling his first full season at the flagship Seattle Repertory Theatre.
Meanwhile, ACT Theatre recently lost its well-regarded artistic director, John Langs, who after 10 years at the helm suddenly announced this spring that he was heading east to run the theater department of his alma mater, North Carolina School of the Arts.
Filling his post, at least temporarily, is new interim producing artistic director Elisabeth Farwell-Moreland. She has a solid background locally, with stints as a longtime producer at Seattle Rep, and her work with Village Theatre and Cornish College of the Arts. (A national search for Langs’ replacement will commence in 2025.)
Left: Dámaso Rodríguez, former artistic leader of Portland’s Artists Rep, begins his first full season as artistic director of Seatlle Rep. Right: Elizabeth Farwell-Moreland, taking the interim artistic reins at Seattle’s ACT Contemporary Theatre.
But ACT has other important matters to sort out, too. The company is planning an ambitious merger with the long-established Seattle Shakespeare Company, and some crucial questions are under consideration: What kind of artistic leadership will the joint organization have? And will the two nonprofit entities meld or reshape their boards of directors? How will both share ACT’s multi-theater facility? And who will they hire as a new managing director?
The merger may well help streamline costs for both companies, in one of the costliest cities in America.
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Additional theatrical outfits are trying out new arrangements to stay solvent but preserve their artistic operations.
Intiman Theatre has taken over management of the Erickson Little Theatre, in a collaboration with Seattle Community College, and is opening its season with a series of cabaret shows.
Seattle Children’s Theatre and Seattle Rep will now share the same box office and ticketing service. And limiting the number of actors on the payroll is prevalent, too. Consider Village Theatre’s shrinking of King Arthur’s Round Table, in a Camelot with an eight-member cast.
Financial woes have of course plagued many regional nonprofit American theaters for decades – but more acutely since the pandemic. The bottom line is top of mind for Taproot Theatre, a family-oriented fixture in the Greenwood district, which is engaged in a critical funding drive. And Seattle Rep recently restructured and downsized its staff, but also has met and exceeded the $20.2 million goal for the “first act” of a five-year funding campaign for future sustainability.
Although theater attendance is gradually picking up, it isn’t booming. While hit shows have filled the houses, subscriptions and donations are not up to prior levels. And more than a few longtime theater patrons who are staying away are complaining about too many politically didactic productions, shows that lecture rather than entertain them.
Such knotty issues, and the good news of an upcoming King County cash infusion for the arts, are explored in an in-depth recent report on the state of Puget Sound area theater, in The Seattle Times.
Even in bleak eras, theater artists and companies still standing are intrepid. As they struggle to devise a new normal, the fall calendar includes some promising shows.
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Here are a few standouts:
“POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive”
From left: Cassi Q Kohl, Anne Allgood and Gin Hammond play members of the presidential staff in ACT Theatre’s “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive.” Photos: Rosemary Dai Ross
ACT Theatre opens with the Seattle premiere of Selina Fillinger’s ribald political farce about a male U.S. president’s inner (female) circle – including his wife, his press secretary and his chief of staff – as they try to stamp out a scandal before it burns down his administration.
The extended one-act received mixed notices on Broadway last year, but its Washington, D.C., debut at Arena Theatre was greeted warmly by Washington Post critic Peter Marks, who positioned it somewhere between the feminist film comedy 9 to 5 and the cable TV hit Veep.
ACT has assembled an adept local cast, led by the practiced farceurs Anne Allgood and Annette Toutonghi. And director Jillian Armenante was an ace member of Annex Theatre in the 1990s before becoming a busy TV actor and Los Angeles stage director of note.
(As it happens, the show arrives just before an actual female president may be elected … with an inner circle of men?)
Sept. 9-29; ACT Contemporary Theatre.
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“The Adding Machine”
The Williams Project, an adventuresome, peripatetic Seattle company, has renamed itself The Feast. And the ensemble continues its vigorous investigation of the American dramatic canon with a staging of this century-old Elmer Rice play, which presciently warned about the dehumanizing impact of technology.
Under the guidance of Feast director Ryan Guzzo Purcell, this adaptation will leap into the scary present by repositioning Rice’s tale “in a new age of mechanical evolution as artificial intelligence encroaches on creative work.” The company notes that for “this multimedia theatre event, both humans and AIs will write, act, direct, and design the play in real time, creating a revolutionary work of ‘cyborg theatre.’”
Sept. 12-Oct. 6; The Feast’s “The Adding Machine” at Lee Theatre, Seattle University.
“Guards at the Taj”
Across the bridge in West Seattle, ArtsWest Theatre and the Settle company Pratidhwani are collaborating on the local debut of this Obie Award-honored drama by Rajiv Joseph, known for his Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. (Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries was performed in Portland by the Enso Theatre Ensemble earlier.)
Putting its own spin on the seriocomic dynamics between a pair of underlings at the command of higher-ups (which brings to mind Waiting for Godot and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead), the script imagines a pair of 17th century Indian sentries guarding the newly erected Taj Mahal. Humorous chatter turns into something much darker and more momentous as the men face a brutal task that tests their friendship, loyalty and religious faith.
ArtsWest’s version includes live Indian music, and an “immersive” option whereby some patrons can be seated on floor cushions near the performers.
Sept. 12-Oct. 6; ArtsWest Theatre.
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“Funny Girl”
This 1964 Broadway musical has been hard to recharge, long after it launched the career of Barbra Streisand into the stratosphere. But it’s worth a try …
Inspired by the life of actress-singer Fanny Brice, it reimagines the early career and romantic life of one of the first Jewish female entertainers to become a bona fide superstar – while it also conjures the flavor of 1920s show biz.
The Jule Stein/Bob Merrill score boasts some familiar standards (“People,” “Don’t Rain on My Parade”). But the mediocre (mostly fictional) original book by Isobel Lennart was revised by Harvey Fierstein for a recent Broadway outing, and apparently (according to reviewers) not much improved.
Yet the new revival did well on Broadway under Michael Mayer’s direction, and it is a source of fascination for lovers of the Streisand version (including the 1968 film). It comes on national tour to Seattle’s Paramount Theatre, with Katerina McCrimmon as Fanny, and pop singer Melissa Manchester as her supportive mother Rose. (The tour does not come to Portland on this go-round.)
Sept. 24-29; “Funny Girl,” Seattle Theatre Group at The Paramount Theatre.
“Jubilee”
When the Fisk Jubilee Singers launched its first national tour in 1871, it was to raise money for one of the early historically Black colleges, Fisk University.
In financial distress, the Tennessee school was in danger of closing down. So, a nine-member a cappella chorus of male and female singers was assembled, most of them the offspring of newly emancipated slaves.
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During their tour, members experienced many instances of racism. But they not only helped save Fisk, they also introduced American (and later European) concert goers to the enthralling tradition of Black gospel music – while fighting stereotypical views of African Americans.
The rich history of the choir, which endures as a touring ensemble of Fisk student singers, is outlined in Jubilee, a musical play written by Tazewell Thompson, which debuted at Arena Theatre in 2019.
Seattle Opera diverts from its usual programming of large-scale works to present the Seattle premiere of a piece that should raise the roof of McCaw Hall, as it honors a cherished musical institution.
Oct. 12-26; Seattle Opera at McCaw Hall.
“Primary Trust”
Seattle Rep is beginning its season in late September (Sept. 26-Oct. 20) with Rodríguez’s ambitious mainstage mounting of The Skin of Our Teeth, a Thornton Wilder classic he previously staged at Artists Rep. (More about that after the Seattle version has opened.)
But the Rep’s smaller Leo K. venue at the Rep, with a stroke of good timing, is unveiling the Pacific Northwest premiere of Primary Trust — which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama this spring, after the Seattle production was announced.
Primary Trust centers on an isolated, lonely man in his 40s whose life turns upside down (in bad and good ways) after he loses the job he held for 20 years. And Eboni Booth’s play probes, with heart and humor, according to one review, “the half-dread of working-class Black characters in a one-freeway-exit corner of the Northeast” slated for gentrification.
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Oct. 24-Nov. 24, Seattle Rep.
