Through Dec 30.
Lola Tarot Rainier Valley Cultural Center
Through Dec 11.
Bad Dates Seattle Repertory Theatre
Through Dec 18.
Avoiding Christian theater during the holidays should have been a no-brainer. Taproot Theatre is typically solid during the regular season, but when you go there to see a show called A Radioland Christmas, you're pretty much asking for a lecture on the "real" meaning of Christmas. Still, I would have preferred a sermon to the awful, cross-eyed compromise on display here. A couple of Christian platitudes are smuggled into the dialogue of a fourth-grader, but mostly the playwright seems to think that the holiday spirit is best communicated through slapstick, product placement, and idiotic peroxide blondes.
A Seattle radio station is staging its 1943 Christmas special, but the script isn't finished yet. The plot unfolds in the most predictable way possible. There are a flurry of lame high jinks involving a mercurial actress, a radio ventriloquist, and a baritone with psychosomatic laryngitis. A few too many spit-takes and stage slaps later, the radio program is a huge hit. (Especially among the station sponsors, who dig the plentiful references to Boeing bombers! Flights to Alaska! And acres of clams!)
The actors phone in their performances--except, weirdly enough, Rhiannon Kruse, the actress playing the dumb blonde. (Kruse's most recent theatrical roles have been for the Disney Cruise Line, which makes me suspect that any actor whose career consists of miserable bit parts should be forced to spend a season or two prancing enthusiastically for cartoon-obsessed children and their beleaguered parents. Disney evidently teaches humility.) The rest of the production is useless and unforgivably boring.
* * *
But nothing can compare to the wretched theater-going experience I had at Lola Tarot the following night. (Nothing, that is, besides maybe watching steam rise from a compost pit.) The self-help genre has afflicted the book world for some time now; film is falling victim too with such New-Age treacle as What the #$*! Do We Know?!. Of course theater had to be next in line.
Lola Tarot is, by all appearances, wildly popular. Several weeks into the run, the Rainier Valley Cultural Center was packed with people, who sat and watched serenely as a man who had two-inch tufts of gray chest hair protruding from his hot pink leotard executed a warm-up routine with a pretty, athletic woman in a blond ponytail. According to an informal hand-count as the performance began, nearly half of the audience members were repeat customers.
The show consists of audience members coming up to the stage with questions for the tarot cards. After an assistant draws three cards, the cast acts them out. There is nothing remotely interesting about the process. The performances are feeble (the chest-hair guy swathed himself in a butter-yellow sari and a gold mask to portray the Sun card, then slowly spread his arms and announced, in a drawling monotone, "I am the Sun") and the scenarios totally devoid of imagination (acting out the time-management query of a guy who described himself as "a man of many talents," including bass guitar, one of the actresses preened and screeched, "Look at ME! I'm a ROCK STAR!").
The only redeeming aspect of the portion of the performance I watched (after an hour and 15 minutes, I had to flee) was the mind-bogglingly bizarre questions from the audience. I will quote one supplicant, a nice-looking, middle-aged woman, in some depth: "My question is, are my dreams for humanity possible?" When asked what her dreams consisted of, the woman responded, "Well, I don't know if it's a dream or a vision. My vision is that humanity is sort of half-baked. And, um, I want to know if humanity can get baked all the way." Neither the performers nor the audience took notice of her hilarious, inadvertent pun.
* * *
I wish I could say that the final show I saw this week made me rethink my foul attitude toward the late-fall theater season, but Bad Dates is basically a bad play. Adequately directed by Allison Narver, Bad Dates is a whisper-thin, intermittently funny one-woman show about disastrous dating experiences (cholesterol, insects, and the Romanian mafia feature prominently). As Haley, Anne Allgood flashed a cute Texas accent and a good deal of skin (she spends most of the show trying on and shedding various ludicrous outfits), but her presence flickered whenever she was distracted by the enormous quantity of stage business. The design, including a lighted arch of framed designer shoes, was diverting but frivolous--completely in line with the play itself.
