Weekend Review: life in living color
What a great weekend of art in the South Sound. It offered everything at every turn.
There was static art, film premieres, hot theater productions and great music at too many venues to list.
I picked a sleeper hit to attend since it would likely otherwise get buried among the pile of other standouts just so I can have a great time and show the depth of local arts talent.
Paradise Theatre in Gig Harbor is staging “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” a musical telling of the Biblical coat of many colors by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
This show is just plain fun anytime it takes to a stage, and this community theater production is no exception. It has cute kids, strong voices, great music and a straight-forward story.
While I have to say it would have been nice to have a pit orchestra play the music rather than a CD blasting through speakers in this production, I was less distracted by that fact than I normally am about that growing practice. Maybe I am softening my theater snobbishness about such matters.
The clear standout in this show is Maryse Larussa in the role of the narrator. This nursing student at Pacific Lutheran University has a great set of pipes that anchored the show. Her energy and pizzazz in the role were captivating. Theatergoers should expect further great things from this South Sound theater veteran.
The show runs at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and at 3 p.m. on Sundays through July 3. The theater is located at 9911 Burnham Dr NW in Gig Harbor.
On the silver screen was the premiere of “Quiet Shoes,“produced during a four-year period in and around Tacoma by local filmmaking talent Isaac Olsen in conjunction with Kurt Kendall. This fundraiser event showcased “Quiet Shoes,” a film-noir comedy that features members of local rock legends Girl Trouble and various art folks from around T town. The premiere played to a capacity crowd and raised money to showcase the film at film festivals around the nation as a way to find a distributor. That should not be a problem based on the crowd reactions.
It is shows like these that make an arts watcher like me proud to be from the 253.