For the past twelve years, audiences have been filling Intiman Theatre for it's annual holiday production of Black Nativity. I've seen it few times; lastly in 2008 when I gave it a rave review. For many, it's become an annual holiday tradition, a la The Nutcracker. It's so popular, in fact, that the sold out shows simply outgrew the space at Intiman - so they found it a bigger home at the Moore Theatre in downtown.

The production boasts a shiny new set, complete with impressive wooden pews and two massive roof rafters hanging above-head. You're transported to a vibrant, African American church, where noted gospel maven, Pastor Patrinell Wright, is at the helm of the non-denominational choir. In real life she heads the Total Experience Gospel Choir; many of it's members also fill the Black Nativity stage. You will still rejoice at the glorious voice of Pastor Wright, guaranteed to warm the cockles of any cold heart. You will still hop to your feet and greet your neighbor or three. If you've never been to a black church, the second act comes pretty close!

However, you needn't be religious to enjoy amazing music and a sassy re-telling of the nativity story. Choreographer Donald Byrd of Spectrum Dance Theatre was brought in this year to orchestrate the professional dancing that accompanies the poems of Langston Hughes and soulful gospel of the choir. The talented Bojohn Disciple returns as Joseph, with Spectrum's Amber Nicole Mayberry as Mary; both incredible dancers. It's homegrown church meets Alvin Ailey.

Black Nativity only runs through December 26th, so hurry up! Tickets here.

Photo credit: Chris Bennion

A Tuna Christmas


ArtsWest


Through December 24

by Alice Kaderlan

When I was first introduced to Tuna, Texas and its wacky residents, it was the '80's and only the first in the Tuna series, Greater Tuna, had been created. I knew virtually nothing about Greater Tuna when I saw it the original cast of Jaston Williams and Joe Sears at the Pasadena Playhouse and went because I was visiting L.A., had a free evening and knew the reputation of the Playhouse.

I'll never forget that performance. The script, an affectionate satire of the fictional "third smallest town in Texas," was brilliant and the acting range of Williams and Sears, who between them played more than 20 male and female characters, was astonishing. Williams, Sears and their writing partner Ed Howard went on to develop a Tuna franchise of sorts with Williams and Sears starring in the subsequent A Tuna Christmas; Red, White and Tuna; and Tuna Does Vegas.

When I saw Williams and Sears in A Tuna Christmas in the '90's, they were as elastic and captivating as ever and if that production didn't have quite the same shock of the new, it was still an enchanting evening of theater. So it was with high expectations, for the script if not the cast, that I approached ArtsWest's offering this year.

I'm pleased to report that I was not disappointed. The script is more lighthearted than that of Greater Tuna and contains one hilarious Texas-style one-liner after another like "She looks like death chewing on a cracker," "I've seen better hair on anchovies," and "If we can't kill it, it's immortal." The colorful local "residents" are all there too. Bertha Bumiller is still hanging in as the loyal wife of a cheating husband, Didi Snavely is as curmudgeonly as ever, Petey Fisk is still saving wildlife (including lemmings, scorpions and deer ticks) and Helen Bedd's beehive hasn't dropped an inch.

But A Tuna Christmas is about more than one-liners and has a narrative thrust with Bertha at its core. Over the course of the play, the character of Bertha is written to become less of a caricature and more of a vulnerable human being. The last scene, which has her dancing romantically with the divorced radio host Arles Struvie, is supposed to tug at our hearts, and did in the original production. But this is where Jay Jenkins' acting ability falls short. Although he's terrific as the bluebird-shooting Aunt Pearl, he doesn't have the range to change his persona sufficiently from character to character nor the depth to make Bertha real. As a result, despite Buckly Mahoney's best efforts as the abandoned husband Arles, the scene just peters out.

Mahoney, on the other hand, is a wonder to behold. Whether he's playing the crotchety, cigarette-smoking used-weapons dealer Did Snavely, the haughty Vera Carp or Charlene Bumiller, Bertha's snotty teen-aged daughter, Mahoney completely changes his voice, accent and body language as easily as he does his costumes. He steals every scene he's in and it's easily worth the price of admission to watch him in all his delightful splendor.

Sex and death may be the ultimate artistic preoccupations, but photographer Chris Engman makes a strong case for time, space, and the illusory nature of reality as being close runners-up. His carefully constructed interventions, photographed against monumental landscape backgrounds, are each illustrations of a particular conceptual idea, often relating to perception or duration. Although certain of his effects could be approximated digitally (swapping out backgrounds while keeping the subject the same, for example), Engman chooses to do all of his work in the real world, believing that the final outcome justifies the effort. The resulting photographs do indeed display the textures and imperfections of their contrivance, and they are stronger as a result – in fact, that’s part of the point.

Take Equivalence, for example, one of the high points of the exhibit. A striking 3 x 4 foot color photo of an arid Eastern Washington prairie, it includes a complex picture within the picture, a recurring theme in Engman’s work. The project began by Engman constructing a huge cross-shaped wooden framework almost twice the artist’s height, a collection of thin wooden strips dividing up 15 window-like views. This set up was photographed on a cloudy day, and then re-photographed in exactly the same spot on a clear day some time later. Only in the second shot one can no longer see through the open framework; instead, the openings have all been filled with the images from the first shooting session, meticulously pasted in and positioned so they match up exactly with the existing view.

So precise is Engman with his intervention (his pieces also question the utility of work) that we’re only vaguely aware that something is not quite right. Then we notice the clouds in the framed view suddenly being replaced by clear sky just outside the frame. Engman has also included other cues as to the visual jujitsu at play, particularly in the foreground, where a piece of extra lumber leans casually against what should be thin air inside the framework, coming to rest on a piece of clear sky. Not only does the board stay upright, it casts a shadow on the sky, the shadow continuing down what is in fact a flat photographic surface, and not the deep space that it appears to be.

Taking the back-and-forth a step further, Engman has chosen not to repair a bit of broken stripping at the upper corner of his construction so the crinkled edge of the photograph itself meets the actual surrounding, while the cracked wooden bits dangle alongside. This is precisely the sort of real-world messiness that is designed out of purely digital manipulation, and it gives the image a distinctive, quirky spin; nothing up my sleeves – or is there? The magician shows you how the trick is done, but it works just the same.

It took me repeated viewings to sort out the several intersecting worlds within the image, and I’m not sure I’m done. A similar photograph, entitled Three Moments, takes the picture-within-a-picture idea one step further. Set in an even more barren wasteland, one that would do nicely for a Biblical drama or post-apocalyptic movie, Engman has inserted a billboard-like, nine-panel photograph of the same location, again exactly aligned with its surroundings. What’s different here is the photographed view includes within it another upright photographic panel, set at right angles to the first, and equally seamless in its integration with the environment. The picture obviously required three separate trips to the same location to create the two mounted photos, and Engman has purposely complicated the deal by the careful inclusion of contradictory shadows, easily overlooked but crucial to the effect. The foreground panel casts a shadow on the ground behind and beyond, and because the panel is set slightly up on rocks, we can see where the shadow starts and then suddenly stops, crossing the boundary between what exists now – the panel in the desert – and what existed before, the desert without the panel. The background panel is set up on even higher rocks, and casts its disappearing shadow in the same way, only going in the opposite direction, at what was clearly a different time of day.

So the final image is an impossible composite, straightforward and yet unresolved, shifting before our eyes as we notice new and perplexing details. Like the process of perception itself, what seems to be simple is anything but. Engman is showing us that our awareness of the visual world is based on habitual assumptions and educated guesses, mental gymnastics that are far more imperfect than we like to imagine.

Other images in the exhibition pursue a similar theme – what you think you see vs. what is actually there - in a somewhat different way. I particularly like Object, Shadow, which features a perfectly square, black shadow on a white salt pan desert, on one level a goof on early abstract painting like the black-on- white squares of Kasimir Malevich. More to the point, the black shadow exists at once both in depth and flat like a sticker, and it appears symmetrical even though it actually widens as it goes back. Engman includes in the picture the method of its construction, a bizarre, trapezoidal frame that is anything but square but nonetheless casts the shadow of a square, at a precisely calculated moment at a particular calculated angle.

None of this is new, of course, especially in painting; distorted images which read correctly from one favored angle were the inspiration for an entire sub-movement in art as far back as the 18^th Century, and M. C. Escher made the subject of reality versus illusion the theme of his entire graphic output; Magritte depicted paintings which continued into landscapes. But photographs have an authority, a ring of truth, all their own, and Engman carefully exploits our blind trust in the camera image to give his reworkings a sharper edge.

I found other images in the show which dealt with shadows and sequence less engaging, but I was blown away by the photograph Senescence, a picture dealing with age and decrepitude. Two sequential photographs feature an industrial yard somewhere in a city. In the first image there is a carefully stacked pile of several dozen short, fat logs, seen end on. In the second image the logs have been carved into hundreds of sections and reassembled into exactly the same pile, now held together with tight ropes. The effect is –surprisingly - very Portrait of Dorian Gray, with the sections between wood chunks reading as wrinkles. It’s a fascinating, scary picture - time made palpable - and what’s worse, personal – a sort of post-modern memento mori, and a quintessential Northwest image to boot.

-- By Gary Faigin

A Christmas Story


Fifth Avenue Theatre - through December 30

Intiman Theatre's Black Nativity


Moore Theatre through December 26

by Alice Kaderlan

On the surface, the two Christmas musicals now on stage at the Fifth Avenue and Moore Theatres couldn't be more different. The Fifth's new production of A Christmas Story is a musical retelling of the holiday movie favorite about a young boy's machinations to get his parents to buy him a BB gun for Christmas. Intiman's Black Nativity, now in its 13th year and restaged for the Moore Theatre, is a gospel-inspired hybrid of the Christmas story and an African-American church service.

But both productions have a number of things in common including terrific casts, inventive staging, enormous energy and audiences prepped to love every minute.


Whether to see one, both or neither is a personal decision but whatever you decide, it's nice to have a musical theater alternative to the other traditional holiday productions now playing around town.

Call me a Scrooge but as much as both shows provide an engaging experience while you're in the midst of it, neither one has much staying power despite their strengths. As boisterous and slick as A Christmas Story is, it depends largely on memories of the movie for its impact. This is partly a function of the fact that a stage production can't reveal the most delightful aspects of Ralphie, the BB-gun obsessed boy. The movie close-ups allow us to enjoy Ralphie in all his adorableness and Peter Billingsley's facial expressions are a critical part of what makes him such an engaging character.

On stage, however, those expressions are lost and as good as Clarke Hallum is as a song-and-dance kid, he doesn't have quite enough charisma to focus the story on Ralphie's travails. The result is that Broadway veteran John Bolton steals the show as Ralphie's bumbling but lovable father. Bolton's rendition of the musical number "A Major Award" is a tour de force of rubber-faced, spaghetti-legged mugging and it's impossible to keep your eyes off him whenever he's onstage.

The other problem is that although the story line retains the most memorable scenes from the movie – a kid with his tongue stuck to a frozen flagpole, Ralphie's fantasy of writing an A+++ Christmas essay, brother Randy's pig-like eating habits – and the charm of writer Jean Shepherd's original words, there's almost nothing to this show but one musical number after another. Thanks to the wonderful cast and splashy production elements, it's easy to be carried along but in the end, there's a little too much syrup and not enough pancake.

Like A Christmas Story, Black Nativity counts on familiarity to flesh out the theater experience and it was obvious opening night that many audience members were Black Nativity regulars. It's not hard to understand why. The first act is a hand-clapping, foot-stomping celebration of the story of Jesus' birth, based on a beautifully narrated script by Langston Hughes. Director Jaqueline Moscou so successfully breaks down the fourth wall between performers and audience that the entire theater turns into an enormous performance space.

The problem comes in the second act when the stage is transformed into the interior of an African-American church complete with real-life pastor, played for the first time this year by Ebenezer AME Zion Church's Pastor Alphonso H. Meadows, Jr. After the dazzling first act, which includes stunning new choreography by Spectrum Dance Theater's Donald Byrd, the second act is less a performance than church service-lite. There are some beautiful and moving songs, especially Leonard Piggee's rendition of "I'm Looking for a Miracle," but the act generally pales in comparison to the theatrical pizzazz of the one that came before.

Even so, Black Nativity offers a stirring evening of music and dance with strong voices, a solid musical quintet and dancers, especially the megawatt Amber Nicole Mayberry, who give physical shape to the uplifting music.

Xavier: Ready when you are!

Curtis Ashby: Ready!

Xavier: Okay! So Curtis, tell me a little bit about yourself--how long have you been working and how did you get started?

Curtis Ashby: Well, my dad taught me to draw when I was real little, but I started painting with acrylics in 2005 when I was a junior in high school. My mom talked me into taking an art class.

Xavier: Your mom did? That's pretty cool, what made your mom think that would be a good idea? What do you think she saw in your work?

Curtis Ashby: Even by the time I was in 3rd grade, I was cutting shapes out of construction paper and making abstract art. I guess my parents thought it might be good to get some guidance from an art teacher but I had always refused! Ha Ha!

When I was younger, I guess I just saw things differently than a lot of kids my age did. My dad had taught me a lot about color and basic art technique. I remember I spent a lot of time drawing next to my father in his studio while he painted. He used to airbrush a lot when I was young. I think that was when I was first introduced to painting.

Xavier: Your dad was an artist then? What kind of work does/did he make?

Curtis Ashby: My dad did a lot of realistic work. Portraits, mostly. I think that might be why I turned so radically toward abstract art. Maybe we should fast forward to after high school! Ha-ha! That's when I met John Osgood and I started getting sucked in urban art.

Xavier: Sure, but I find this to be kind of fascinating. I also worked alongside my dad--he was a muralist in the California Mexican Muralist movement--funny thing is that I also rebelled and went into minimalist sculpture for a very long time--it seems like while having an artistic father is a good starting point to making art that rebelling seems to be a natural part of the formula as well!

Okay, so after High School, were you living in Seattle? Tell me a story!

Curtis Ashby: Oh cool! Yeah, I think growing up around art made for a great starting point, but I felt like I needed to do something different. I felt like abstract art really helped interpret what I wanted to say without creating a literal or realistic statement. My senior year, I had taken art lessons from Liza Morado in Tacoma. She's a Mexican folk artist, and I learned a lot about color and abstract expressionism from her.

I began creating abstract works using acrylics and spray paint and even found objects. I think I was attracted to abstract art because you aren't held down by just one idea or meaning when you look at a piece.

Xavier: So how did you and John Osgood meet?

Curtis Ashby: Meeting John was awesome for me because he has been a real mentor.
He's inspired my creativity a lot since I met him a couple years ago.

The first time I met him he decided to play a trick on me by taking one of my paintings off the table I had them on and then he waited to see how long it took me to notice it was missing! HaHa, it was at the West Seattle street fair. 3 years ago I think

Xavier: He took one of your pieces off of a table?

Curtis Ashby: Yeah! Ha Ha! He had his table set up next to mine and he saw that I was talking to someone and not paying attention. Needless to say, I kept an eye on everything after that!
After that I talked to him for the rest of the day because I really liked his art. At the time, I was super new to the art scene so I wanted to talk to everyone I met.

I was like a sponge. I still am!

Xavier: Nice! I haven't had a chance to interview John yet, so for those that don't know--who is John Osgood--please describe him to my readers and why this meeting is so important and cool!

Curtis Ashby: John is just one of those guys who is really inviting. He's cool to talk to because he's pretty animated when he talks, and it always seems like he's coming up with new ideas to paint, which really inspires me.

I think that day was cool because he had invited me to paint with him at his studio. I think his wife, Michele, had a lot to do with that too. They saw that I just wanted to learn as much as I could and I was lucky enough for them to take me under their wing

Xavier: For those few that don't know John and Michele Osgood and their Greenwood Collective are two of the most important voices, studios, forces in the Underground, Urban Art scene in Seattle. Plus John and Michele are just two of the most amazing and nicest people you will ever meet!

Curtis Ashby: I agree! Without them, I wouldn't be talking to you right now, haha! Since I first met you at a show John and I did earlier this year.

Xavier: Very true! But your work is pretty darn awesome and I am talking to you because of your work solely--certainly not because of anything else--would you take a moment to describe your work?

Curtis Ashby: Ok! I'd say my work has a heavy abstract influence, and I like to incorporate the use of bright colors similar to those you might see on signage, or even old houses. I just like a lot of texture too.

Nothing about my lines ore shapes are perfect and that's how I like it!

Xavier: Perfection is definitely overrated!

Curtis Ashby: That's what I think too! It's the imperfections that give a piece character and feeling! Sometimes, I'll go over lines two or three times just to make it look like I didn't get it right the first time!

Xavier: That's very interesting! So what does imperfection mean to you? It seems to be a very powerful tool in your arsenal--does that ring true?

Curtis Ashby: it's very true, actually. I'm really inspired by nature and vintage architecture. Two very different things, but just seeing the way that they exist in the world are very interesting to me. I really like combining organic and geometric shapes together. To me, its a way to show the relationship of man and nature.

Xavier: When you say the relationship between man and nature--do you have any theories that you operate from?

Curtis Ashby: I think a lot of it is just the way a drastic difference between two things can make for a good match. It's kinda based on the "opposites attract" theory, but with me it involves the environment and my surroundings, so maybe to me, seeing opposites is attractive to my eye! HaHa!

Xavier: Nice! You mentioned that your work uses abstraction--but at the same time you never lose track of the object--the figure, birds or creatures. Could you describe some of these interesting monsters you create--where do they come from?

Curtis Ashby: Definitely! In a sense, the character, or subject is the opposite to the abstract background. I really enjoy watching cartoons, and I like to bring that sort of bright, harmless, yet emotional feeling into the creatures I create.

Lately, I've been painting a lot of birds with an impressionistic feel, but I have also been creating monster type characters. I like to give my characters a sense of curiosity, like there is something in their world worth discovering.

Xavier: I think that sense of curiosity definitely comes through in the work! What things do you have going now and in the new year?

Curtis Ashby: My most recent piece will be in the "12 Days of Christmas" show at Twilight Artist Collective. The painting combines birds and a large character with a tree growing inside of it. Kinda taking that man/nature relationship to an extreme!

Xavier: Awesome!

Curtis Ashby: For the new year, I am already hard at work on a new series, and I am looking forward to hopefully getting in more group shows. I am also part of a mural project in West Seattle that we will start on soon!

Xavier: Cool, tell me a bit about the Mural--anybody else involved?

Curtis Ashby: Yeah, I'll be painting the mural with John Osgood, and Erin Staffeld from Twilight. We're doing a 5 story mural inside the new Link apartments. The theme is bird, and nature. I'm really excited about it!

Xavier: Can't wait to see what you guys make! That's an excellent crew!
Do you have a website that people can go to if they want to see more of your work?

Curtis Ashby: You can check out more work at www.paperdiamondsclothing.tumblr.com
thats my blog!

Xavier: Cool, so just a few quick questions! Who are your favorite artists?

Curtis Ashby: Rauschenberg, Pollock, and John James Audubon are my three all time fav's

Xavier: Cool! Where do you see yourself in five years?

Curtis Ashby: Well, I aspire to be more comfortable as a full time artist. I'd like to be painting murals and doing shows all over the country. I think it's really cool that artists like Alex Pardee and Jeremy Fish travel all over the country exhibiting their art

Xavier: Very true! Well good luck to you! This has been an extreme pleasure!

I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me.