Spotlight On: The Little Big Broadcast

Now that our SPT seniors have closed Fuddy Meers and fully graduated from our Youth Drama Program, the theater is completely turned over to the rest of the Youth Program participants, for the third week of free theater on Greenlake.

This week's show is The Little Big Broadcast, a collection of classic radio broadcasts such as the comedy routine Who's on first?, Zorro Rides Again, and The Shadow Knows, among other favorites. Directed by SPT regular Carmel Baird, these broadcasts are brought to life by our ensemble of 9-13 year olds.

For this week's Spotlight feature, SPT Marketing Intern Katie Dolan talked to several of the students involved:


After getting some feedback from the actors involved in the show, it sounds like the creative process for this show has been a challenging and enjoyable one. One actress is playing a total of four roles including Jughead from Archie Andrews, Gerald from The Strange Doctor Weird, Tom (Mr. Moonlight) from Mrs. Moonlight, and Costello from Who's on First? She noted that Costello was her favorite role to play. She added, “This is my first year at the Seattle Public Theater but, I hope to keep being in it.”

Many actors in the play must transform to portray very different kinds of characters. One actress, also playing four roles, remarked that one of the challenges with the show is “changing your voice to make the feelings more apparent and entertaining.”

Several actors expressed that their favorite part of the show is the romance broadcast entitled, “Mrs. Moonlight.” Casey Bouldin, stage manager for the show, explained to me that, “Mrs. Moonlight is about a love that transcends time (literally).” In this broadcast Sarah Moonlight is given a "magic" necklace, which grants her wish to not grow older. She then runs away from her husband and infant child, and the rest of the story is about her returning to her family after 17 years, and then again 30 years after that.

The actors involved relayed to me that rehearsals have been productive and entertaining. One actress declared, “Rehearsals have been very fun and very straightforward, I definitely think the show will come together great and be a big hit!”

To come watch and listen to this upcoming big hit, join us at the Bathhouse Theater this weekend!

This weekend at SPT: Fuddy Meers!

This summer, we've got 9 weekends of free theater in a row on the shores of Green Lake! Here comes week 2!

This weekend, our Senior Ensemble closes David Lindsay-Abaire's Fuddy Meers. Don't miss their final performances with the SPT youth program!

Friday 7/9 - 7pm
Saturday 7/10 - 2pm and 7pm

All shows are FREE! Donations to the scholarship fund are gratefully accepted. Tickets are first-come, first-served in person at the theater beginning 30 minutes before showtime.

Spotlight On: Teaching Artists

The youth program here at Seattle Public Theater is nothing if not extensive. It runs year-round, with camps for young children, school residencies, acting workshops for all ages, and full productions for our middle school and high school students. And it explodes during the summer, when we have 10 straight weeks of youth theatre, morning until night, including three middle school productions, two high school productions, and our annual Senior Show!

None of this would be possible without our legion of talented and committed teaching artists. Led by Artistic and Education Director Shana Bestock, Seattle Public Theater has a team of some of the best teaching artists in the Seattle area. For this week’s Spotlight feature, we interviewed Kaya Wynn, one of our newest teaching artists and an alumni of the youth program. Here are some excerpts from that interview.

Backstage at SPT: How did you get started in acting?
Kaya: When I was really little my sister and I used to put on plays for my parents, but my real reason for wanting to act comes from my grandmother, Peggy Webber. She started acting when she was very young. While she is primarily a voice actress, she has also been in films and on the stage. When I was growing up I would listen to the radio plays she both acted in and produced and my mom would tell my sisters and me stories about the different plays she my grandmother was in. I started doing drama camps when I was very little, and musicals in elementary and middle school. In 8th grade, I did my first show at SPT, All in the Timing, and I’ve been here ever since.

Backstage: How did you get started as a teaching artist?
Kaya: One summer, I was performing in Midsummer Night’s Dream with the youth program. I babysat the 6-year old playing the Changeling Child. Shana suggested that I assist teaching artists with camps,- During my senior year, she asked me to do some short workshops at Seattle Children’s Museum. I loved leading my own classes so much that I asked to teach my own camp. I started out with two, taught three last year, and am now teaching five this summer.


Backstage: Is being a teaching artist your primary career path?
Kaya: I will be attending New York University starting this fall to study Educational Theatre. I have come to appreciate how little theater and the arts are recognized in schools, which is incredibly unfortunate. Children are losing their imaginations because they are being pushed to sit at a desk, and to get ready to for the next step in their education. Many kids don’t realize that learning can be fun and that they don’t need to leave their creativity at the door when they enter a school. My dream is to found my own school where the arts and education go hand-in-hand. I always want to teach.

Backstage: What is one of your favorite memories of teaching at SPT?
Kaya: One aspect of my camps that I am very proud of is the script that I write with my students. We take the stories we’re reading and we come up with a story and characters that they want to play. That evening I write the kids a script using all of their ideas and characters. One little girl loved this experience so much that she has started writing her own plays.

Thanks Kaya! And thank you to all of our brilliant teaching artists. We couldn’t do it without you!

This weekend at SPT: Fuddy Meers!

The youth program has taken over the theater for the summer, and our first performances are already here.

It's the first of 9 weekends of free theater in a row on the shores of Green Lake!

This weekend, our Senior Ensemble presents David Lindsay-Abaire's Fuddy Meers!

Friday (tonight!) 7/2 - Opening Night - 7pm
Saturday 7/3 - 7pm
Sunday 7/4 - 2pm

All shows are FREE! Donations to the scholarship fund are gratefully accepted. Tickets are first-come, first-served in person at the theater beginning 30 minutes before showtime.

Spotlight On: Fuddy Meers

Note: This is the first of our summer-long "Spotlight" series, exploring different aspects of the extensive Seattle Public Theater summer youth program.

Every summer, a group of students from Seattle Public Theater’s youth program reach a significant milestone in their lives: high school graduation. With that, they officially “grow up,” and can no longer participate in the youth program. But before we wave them off to work, college, travel or massage school, they come together for their Senior Show.

Picked by and for the senior ensemble, the Senior Show represents the culmination of years of education and growth at SPT. The seniors involved have generally worked together many times, and the close-knit nature of the ensemble offers them – and Education Director Shana Bestock – the chance to create a truly magical show.

For staff at SPT, the Senior Show is a moment that is both proud and sad. We must let them out from under our wing, and send them off into the wide world. All of our students are incredibly talented, and will go on to do great things, but we will miss their presence at the Bathhouse!

This year’s Senior Show is Fuddy Meers. Written by American playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, Fuddy Meers is both hysterically funny and deeply heartbreaking. The story revolves around Claire, an amnesiac who wakes up every morning with a blank slate ala Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates. One morning Claire is abducted and told her husband is trying to kill her. The mayhem which ensues is seen through Claire’s eyes with an ending proving everything is not always what it seems to be.

Director Shana Bestock said the following about working with the graduating seniors: “Rehearsals are the highlight of my day. It's a joy to work on this rich material with such vibrant, intelligent and powerfully connected young artists. I'm also continually blown away with how much of a shorthand we, as an ensemble, have developed. By the time they are seniors, these actors need very little direction from me.”

SPT Marketing Intern Katie Dolan talked to two of our departing seniors about their experiences:

Xandii Barber (Nova) has been at SPT since last October and says she has never found a place with people so nice and accepting. She estimated that at one point she spent about 25 hours a week at SPT during the school year. Xandii’s experience at SPT has included sound, stage managing, props, and assistant stage managing. She summed up her feelings towards SPT saying, “I get here and everything is okay.” Xandii says her time at SPT has prepared her well for college. She will attend Stephens College in Missouri to complete a 3-year stage management program.

Sasha Kool (University Prep) is another high school student who will leave many memories and friends at SPT. “It’s like a family,” she says. I asked Sasha to recall any standout moments in a performance or rehearsal that she will take with her. She started to laugh and explained how she was once playing an elderly woman in the play Enchanted April. Backstage she was hurrying to put more baby powder in her hair to make it gray. Mid-sprinkle she noticed an awful silence onstage—she had missed her entrance. The group she was supposed to enter with was already on stage. She heard them covering for her, querying about where she could have gone. Out of breath she entered from the wrong side justifying her tardiness by complaining about the hill she had to climb and reminding everyone of her advanced age. The audience was laughing and the improvised revision was a success.

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The 2010 Senior Show is Fuddy Meers by David Lindsay Abaire, directed by Shana Bestock.

The 2010 Senior Ensemble is Luke Greenway, Audrey Howell, Sasha Kool, Jessa Lowe, Kaitie Marshall, Rachel Warren, and Stage Manager Xandii Barber. The cast of Fuddy Meers also includes SPT alumni Miranda Sieg, a 2009 graduate.

Fuddy Meers opens Friday, July 2^nd at 7pm, and plays July 3^rd at 7pm, July 4^th at 2pm, July 9^th at 7pm, and July 10^th at 2pm and 7pm. Admission is free, with donations to the scholarship fund gratefully accepted. Tickets are first-come, first-served, beginning 30 minutes before showtime, with festival seating.

From the Managing Director: Looking back at 2009-2010

Another season of professional theater at the Historic Bathhouse Theater is over, and it ended pretty well. This was actually Seattle Public Theater’s tenth year at the Bathhouse. SPT took over the management and became the resident company of the Bathhouse in October of 2000. This is the end of our tenth season. And we’re still here!

We started our fiscal year in July of 2009 with an amazing summer of youth programming, including productions of Hay Fever, Romeo & Juliet Alive Again and Together at Last!, The Jungle Book, A Vampire Story, and lots of others. Every weekend in July and August, there was a free show at the air conditioned Bathhouse. And it’s the same this coming summer.

Our first show of the Mainstage season was Tryst, which was a thriller with a twist ending that the Seattle Times said was “genuinely unsettling” and “good grist for after-show conversations.” Which is exactly what we’re trying to do, especially the last phrase.

The holidays were joyful this year with our annual productions of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever and The Santaland Diaries. That was the last year we’re going to produce The Santaland Diaries, at least for a while. We’re going to give it a rest, and move on to other holiday shows, beginning with this coming year’s Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol. But never fear: we’re keeping The Best Christmas Pageant Ever!

The fascinating The Violet Hour was a stylish and thought-provoking piece which SeattleActor.com called “one of the most surprising, intriguing, and ultimately satisfying new plays I’ve seen in some time.” It was a difficult birth, as the piece has some tricky special effects ( an off-stage machine blowing paper onstage, piles and piles of manuscripts) and set design (a 14th floor windowed loft in 1922 NYC) that was a challenge in the rather tight confines of the Bathhouse Theater, yet our terrific design and production team pulled it off.

Shana Bestock, Seattle Public Theater’s Artistic and Education Director, stepped onto the stage for a difficult role in Dying City. Despite the challenge of performing in a two-person play (a difficult task under any situation) as well as continuing to perform her considerable duties at SPT (we laugh at those people who work mere 40-hour weeks!), the Seattle Time said the performances were “exemplary” and that Shana did “not waste a gesture, a sigh.”

The 13th of Paris was the runaway hit of our season. Joyful, romantic, funny, with a cast of talented actors to die for, it got better with each performance. The Seattle Weekly said “SPT understands the difference between schmaltzy and winsome, and goes for the latter.” It was a lovely little piece, and a great capper to our mainstage season.

And all this happened while we continued our youth education program, sending teaching artists to local elementary schools, holding acting camps during school breaks, and producing high school and middle school shows at the Bathhouse like Lebensraum, 12 Angry Jurors, You Never Can Tell, Around the World in 80 Days, Room Service, and Future Files.

Thanks for your support.

-Keith Dahlgren, Managing Director

The reviews are in!

We've only got four more performances of our hottest show of the season. Get your tickets now before they sell out!

"SPT understands the difference between schmaltzy and winsome, and goes squarely for the latter" - Seattle Weekly

"Director Shana Bestock has pulled together a little gem of a play" - Seattle Gay News

"A charming play ... very fast-paced, amusing and inventive" - SeattleActor.com

"[An] elegant production ... simply honest and sincere" - Seattle Times reader comment

"A look at love's familiar travails ... a petite soufflé of a play" - The Seattle Times