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As of December 23, two candidates are poised to take over the Bathhouse Theater on Green Lake. The bureaucratic and secretive process run by the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation has come down to a choice between the Seattle Public Theatre -- a lefty group which primarily tours schools and offers classes on such subjects as "Theater of the Oppressed Classes" -- and the Village Theater of Issaquah, which apparently believes Seattle is underserved by the Paramount, Moore, and 5th Avenue theaters, and would like to bring its productions of classic musicals to our city.
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Stranger Personals
Susan Trapnell, former managing director of A Contemporary Theatre, has been appointed by Mayor Schell to head the Seattle Arts Commission, replacing Wendy Ceccherelli. She will go before the Culture, Arts, and Parks Committee of the city council, which must confirm her appointment, in late January. Trapnell seems like a smart choice for the post: Her leading role in moving ACT from lower Queen Anne to its current, three-theater space in the former Eagles Auditorium has been a stunning success. The flexibility of having three spaces has allowed ACT to produce on multiple levels, particularly allowing it to book small shows by local artists like Lauren Weedman and Kevin Joyce in its cabaret space, while using its larger venues to host the kind of last-year's-off-Broadway-hits productions that are the bread and butter of our Equity theaters. Her first task should be to address the out-of-control downtown real-estate development that is in danger of killing off much of Seattle's fringe theater -- and coming up with a solution that doesn't require everyone to move to Sand Point.
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I was surprised to learn, reading a review of a new Tropicalia CD compilation in last week's Seattle Weekly, that "a radical imbalance exists between the amount of press given Brazil's late-'60s Tropicalia movement and the amount of this music readily available for the casual record-buyer." "Where did I get all my Brazilian pop CDs, then?" I thought, before remembering I'd gotten most of them on a spending spree in Rio de Janeiro. But a couple of minutes surfing through cdnow.com confirmed that Caetano Veloso has 14 CDs in domestic release, while Gal Costa has eight, Milton Nascimento 15, and Gilberto Gil nine. Not to mention that David Byrne's excellent 1989 compilation Beleza Tropical is still available new. Beyond that, I've discovered an excellent web-based catalog run out of the San Juans, Brazilian Music Enterprises (www.brazmus.com), specializing in inexpensive imported Brazilian CDs of bossa nova, samba, choro, forró, capoeira, classical, jazz, as well as the music Weekly reviewer Michaelangelo Matos refers to as "avant-garde," which in Brazil and on this website is simply referred to as MPB, or Brazilian pop music.
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Belated congratulations to artist Josiah McElheny and curator Rhonda Howard, both of whom received good news in December. McElheny's congrats are due to his being selected for this spring's Whitney Biennial -- the first Seattle artist so honored since Gary Hill's quintuple-Biennial run between 1983 and 1991. The Whitney's decentered curatorial approach, using six curators from around the country this year, has paid off for Seattle -- though McElheny, a brilliant artist, is an obvious pick for a Biennial. Howard's congrats are due to her recent promotion from assistant curator to associate curator, replacing Thom Collins. Yes, I realize those two titles sound synonymous, but they're not. Howard's currently working on Shifting Ground: Transformed Views of the American Landscape, a large, broad-based exhibition using the Henry's collections of everything from 19th-century landscape painting to contemporary photography to explore the many permutations the landscape genre has undergone in America.
Send gossip and complaints to eric@thestranger.com.
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