Our music critics have already chosen the 33 best concerts this week, but now it's our arts critics' turn. Here are their picks for the best events in every genre—from an evening with Rick & Morty executive producer Dan Harmon to A John Waters Christmas, and from the Washington Brewers Guild 2017 Winter Beer Festival to the closing of Clean Rooms. Low Rates. See them all below, and find even more events on our complete Things To Do calendar.
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MONDAY
FOOD & DRINKJim Lahey: 'The Sullivan Street Bakery Cookbook' Talk
Bread wizard Jim Lahey is something of a legend for his 2006 no-knead bread recipe in the New York Times, which at the time galvanized eager home bakers into such a frenzy that they rushed to ransack their supermarket shelves for instant yeast. His method, which produces a crusty, foolproof loaf with minimum effort, ushered in nothing short of a revolution and is the kind of magic that will make you a hero at your next dinner party. More than a decade later, he’s still making a stir with his new book, The Sullivan Street Bakery Cookbook, which enables readers to reproduce his bakery’s sourdough breads in their own kitchens. Lahey will give a talk at the Book Larder and sign copies of the new title.
Pete Souza's Seattle Launch
Pete Souza is the guy who took the picture of Barack Obama leaning over to let the little kid touch his hair, to see if it really was just like his. This is the guy who took the picture of Barack and Michelle Obama hugging on reelection night 2012 that became one of the most retweeted photos ever. This is the guy who took the photo of Obama’s cabinet watching Osama bin Laden’s lead-filled demise—the one with Hillary Clinton’s hand clamped over her mouth. How can you miss this? It’s probably going to sell out. Get on it. CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE
MONDAY-WEDNESDAY
FESTIVALSSeattle Festival of Trees
Admire the gorgeously decorated trees that will be on display in the Fairmont Olympic Hotel lobby.
MONDAY-FRIDAY
ARTAlexander Miller & Alexander Nagy: Spacefiller / Algoplex II
Alex Miller and Alex Nagy's collaborative duo presents an interactive video and digital installation that "creates an algorithmic playground for viewers to explore the transitions between order and chaos in simulations of nature." The installation incorporates a geometrical grid lattice with a video display and a control panel that viewers can play with.
Closing Friday
Youth in Focus
For the past 24 years, low-income city youth have expressed themselves and captured glimpses of their daily lives thanks to Youth In Focus's arts program, which pairs the young photographers with adult mentors.
Opening Monday
MONDAY-SATURDAY
ARTRay Mack: Fundament
Using what she calls a "shoplifting mentality toward making," Ray Mack's paintings play off works by well known male artists, "using humor to insert her own perspective into a male-dominated view of the art historical canon."
Closing Saturday
MONDAY-SUNDAY
FESTIVALSGingerbread Village
This gingerbread village is no joke: Every year, Seattle architecture firms, master builders, and Sheraton Seattle culinary teams come together to build a meticulously planned candy wonderland. The theme of this year's village is "25 Years of Cheer: A Celebration of Seattle." See elements of the city's past and its imagined future in candy form, from skyscrapers to underground tunnels.
Miracle on 2nd Pop-Up
In 2014, Greg Boehm of New York bar Boilermaker temporarily transformed the space for his bar Mace into a kitschy Christmas wonderland replete with gewgaws and tchotchkes galore. This year, the pop-up has expanded to bars in 50 cities worldwide and will be taking up residence in Belltown’s Rob Roy. The specialty cocktails are no ordinary cups of cheer: Beverages are housed in tacky-tastic vessels (a drinking mug resembling Santa’s mug, for example), bedecked with fanciful garnishes like peppers and dried pineapple, and christened with irreverent, pop-culture-referencing names like the “Bad Santa,” the “Yippie Ki Yay Mother F****r,” and the “You’ll Shoot Your Rye Out.”
TUESDAY
FILMThe Unknown Sea
See a screening of the 2013 documentary The Unknown Sea: A Voyage on the Salish with Captain Kevin Campion, in which Captain Campion and a crew of teen researchers aboard the historic Orion ship explore the Salish Sea. In addition, hear from SR3’s marine veterinary nurse, Casey Mclean, who will introduce the film and discuss "the importance and deep connection that this iconic waterway and vibrant ecosystem plays in the health and lives of our local marine wildlife."
Cocktail Party with Andy Ricker
Portland- and Brooklyn-based chef Andy Ricker, whose Pok Pok was named the eighth most important American restaurant by Bon Appétit in 2013 and whose empire has since expanded to include drinking vinegars and charcoal logs, specializes in street-style Thai snacks that pair satisfyingly well with tipples, like his shatteringly crispy, habit-forming chicken wings. In The Drinking Food of Thailand, the follow-up to his wildly successful first cookbook, he shares how to make these very kinds of bites alongside vivid recollections of his travels in Thailand. Chef Brandon Pettit of Delancey and Dino’s Tomato Pie will host a conversation between Ricker and Allecia Vermillion of Seattle Met (the first event to be held in Dino’s new event space). Best of all, you’ll get to sample refreshments inspired by Ricker’s Whiskey Soda Lounge and wash them down with cocktails—minus the drive to Portland.
An Evening with Dan Harmon
Join TV Producer Dan Harmon (the creator and executive producer of the NBC comedy series Community, as well as the co-creator and executive producer of Adult Swim’s Rick & Morty) for an evening of conversation and giggles.
Isabel Allende
Those who aren’t going to my birthday party should strongly consider listening to Chilean novelist Isabel Allende read from her new book, In the Midst of Winter. According to press materials, the story “moves from present-day Brooklyn to Guatemala in the recent past to 1970s Chile and Brazil” as it follows an elderly couple who unexpectedly find love in old age. The book has been drawing comparisons to The House of the Spirits, the novel that ushered Allende into the canon of great magical realists, which had been and still kind of is dominated by dudes. RICH SMITH
Loud Mouth Lit
The writer Paul Mullin, winner of a Stranger Genius Award, curates a “fresh, local, organically sourced” monthly literary event called Loud Mouth Lit dedicated to “the amazing writers living in Seattle.” This month, the special guest is erstwhile Stranger staffer Lindy West, who will read “whatever she goddamn pleases.” How can you resist that? Maybe Lindy will read her recent New York Times column about Harvey Weinstein, headlined, amazingly, “Yes, This Is a Witch Hunt. I’m a Witch and I’m Hunting You.” Or maybe she’ll read from the new book she just started writing.
Resist/Recharge: Powerful Voices
The Stranger's next Resist/Recharge event welcomes Powerful Voices, a local nonprofit that provides programs and promotes social justice for young girls to thrive and engage in their communities. Join members of their team (including Cata Catibayan, Metasabia Rigby, Jordan Faralan, Kate Tibone, Kary Kwong-Lee, and Raina Enrique) in a discussion about the messages we send to the young girls in our communities and "how adults are complicit in perpetuating negative associations around girlhood."
Victoria Chang and Kelli Russell Agodon
Local poets Victoria Chang and Kelli Russell Agodon will give a reading in celebration of Chang's fourth collection, Barbie Chang.
TUESDAY-FRIDAY
ARTUnWedged 2017
UnWedged is Pottery Northwest's annual Juried Contemporary Ceramic Exhibition. This time, it will be juried by acclaimed ceramic artist Patti Warashina, who makes figures and objects that are emotional, imaginative, and fearlessly strange.
Closing Friday
TUESDAY-SATURDAY
ARTDavid Hytone
See colorful and vaguely geometric works with a smattering of small representational images by Seattle artist David Hytone.
Closing Saturday
Robert E. Marx: Another Time, Another Place
A fish-belly-white face with craters for eyes stares out over a chain-mail-like dress that barely hints at the presence of a body beneath. The figure's white-gray hair starts as a thin wave and dissipates into dim black squiggles in the flat dun background. The title of the painting is We Have Become Mean, and it's one of the 11 new paintings in Robert E. Marx's final show at the Davidson Galleries, a space that has hung his work since 1973. The other 10 portraits also seem to coalesce out of the abstract color-washed backgrounds, but some of the blurred eyes seem warmer and the faces more sympathetic, as in The Pretender, which depicts a white-haired person on a rust-colored background and something on her head that resembles a bow or some sort of sea creature. All of the portraits hold your gaze, engaging your humanity even as you search for theirs.
Closing Saturday
SĹŤsaku-Hanga
SĹŤsaku-hanga was a Japanese art movement from the turn of last century that differed from previous forms of printing by emphasizing the role of the individual artist (rather than a division of labor). This exhibit, fittingly, displays the poetic idiosyncrasies of artists from the last century in works like Kiyoshi Saito's Beauty Facing Left (a color-block portrait of a woman, with parts of her kimono and the background revealing the grain of the wood), Yoshitoshi Mori's Witch Retrieving Her Arm in rich black and blue, Jun'ichiro Sekino's expressionist Bungoro Onstage (revealing a puppet master flanked by blank-faced musicians), and Rikio Takahashi's mellow abstract Garden in Kyoto (A). The diversity of styles and subjects, all rendered in rich, stark colors, makes this exhibition seem like a gorgeous condensation of 20th-century art.
Closing Saturday
TUESDAY-SUNDAY
ARTLoyal Opposition: The Protest Photos of George P. Hickey
See a collection of prints and negatives of protests in the US from local photojournalist George P. Hickey, including the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and LGBTQ equality, animal rights, and anti-war rallies.
Closing Sunday
WildLights
See the zoo in a new light—500,000 energy-efficient LEDs, in fact! See luminous animal-themed designs, have an indoor snowball fight, meet Santa and his very real reindeer and some nocturnal animals, listen to carolers, and enjoy the holiday beer garden.
A Christmas Carol
ACT Theatre's production of A Christmas Carol is a dependable, simple pleasure, with just enough variation to warrant returning year after year.
The Humans
Stephen Karam's The Humans, which won a 2016 Tony Award for best play, gets plaudits for its expert characterization, its subtle but gut-busting humor, and its clear-eyed view on contemporary family relations despite the fact that it's a play about a dysfunctional family spending a dysfunctional Thanksgiving together in Chinatown dysfunctionally. This is the official Broadway tour, directed by Joe Mantello. RICH SMITH
Irving Berlin's Holiday Inn
A musical based on the film by Gordon Greenburg and Chad Hodge, it features songs by Irving Berlin such as "White Christmas" and "Easter Parade." It's going to be the 5th's holiday show, directed by David Armstrong and choreographed by James Rocco. CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE
Monstrosity
Lucy Thurber's play Monstrosity is a dark and creative play about a pair of siblings trapped in a teenage fascist training camp. The press release describes it as "a retelling of the hero's tale where girls are the heroes, youth are the powerful, and a pair of magical, bicycle-riding twins whisper at our deepest, darkest impulses."
No performance on Wednesday
WEDNESDAY
FOOD & DRINKWild Flavors
Seattle's culinary luminaries (like chef Matt Dillon, who once worked as a professional forager) love using mushrooms and other food found in the wild. Let this class with local foraging expert Jeremy Puma teach you how to get the most out of wild foods you can find in your own backyard. You'll sip cocktails made from wild plants and try infused oils, vinegars, seasoning salts, bitters, and other ingredients that you'll learn how to make at home, and come home with your very own homemade Pacific Northwest seasoned salt to use in your cooking.
Bill Murray, Jan Vogler & Friends: New Worlds
This concert was born of a friendship between the actor Bill Murray and the cellist Jan Vogler. This show pays tribute to the American classical music and writing, from Twain and Hemingway to Bernstein and Gershwin. The duo will be accompanied by Mira Wang on violin and Vanessa Perez on piano.
Civic Cocktail: The Boys in the Boat + New Seattle Mayor
Join two prominent Seattle folks, author of the sports history bestseller The Boys in the Boat Daniel James Brown and mayor-elect Jenny Durkan, for a conversation moderated by KUOW's Amy Radil and KING5's Natalie Brand.
Dr. John Vidale: A Tale of Three Pacific Northwest Temblors
This event is ideal for anyone who's petrified of the coming Pacific Northwest mega-quake, anyone's who's living in denial, and/or anyone who has no idea what we're talking about right now. Dr. John Vidale is a seismologist at UW’s College of the Environment and leader of the M9 Project, which seeks to find ways to mitigate the consequences of a seismic event. He'll offer expertise on the probability of such a disaster, the need for disaster preparedness, and possible early warning technologies.
WEDNESDAY-FRIDAY
ARTEllen Ziegler & Kim Van Someren: Adjunct Appendages
Ellen Ziegler is an artist, designer, curator, and teacher whose works use the material to address the immaterial. Kim Van Someren is a visual artist with a practice rooted in printmaking and drawing. For Adjunct Appendages, a group show curated by Bridge Productions for Hoedemeker Pfieffer Gallery, both artists are using drawing, intaglio, and collage to give form to the precarious, often absurd physicality of bodies, structures, machinery, and limbs. Extraneous limbs and strange polyps burst forth from figures, extending their flesh and suggesting uses beyond the limits of imagination. EMILY POTHAST
Closing Friday
WEDNESDAY-SATURDAY
ARTTerry Leness and Marion Post Wolcott
Alongside historical images by the renowned Farm Security Administration photographer Marion Post Wolcott, who captured the geometry of farmland, small towns, kitsch motels, and country roads in the 1940s, you'll see photorealist architectural paintings by contemporary Terry Leness. Leness's sunny colors vs. Wolcott's somber black-and-white notwithstanding, the juxtaposition evokes a feeling of eternal wandering among melancholy, unpeopled landscapes. We are looking at the same world from two different periods—but we're lost somewhere between the deprivation and segregation of the Roosevelt era and our own gaudy times.
Closing Saturday
Building the Wall
With this production of Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony Award-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan’s Building the Wall, the theater world has officially moved on from indirect criticisms of the worst president in the history of the US to direct criticism of the worst president in the history of the US. In the play, which Schenkkan reportedly wrote in a “white heat” after the 2016 election, ICE rounds up immigrants following a terrorist attack in Times Square. As everyone waits to hear what will be done with the incarcerated, a history professor grills the supervisor of the private prison, who is in charge of administering the horrifying punishment they expect to come down the pike. Desdemona Chiang, who’s fresh off a pretty solid production of The World of Extreme Happiness at Seattle Public Theater, will direct. RICH SMITH
WEDNESDAY-SUNDAY
PERFORMANCELove, Chaos, and Dinner
Beloved circus/cabaret/comedy institution Teatro ZinZanni will return to Seattle for a dinner theater production of Love, Chaos, and Dinner. They promise "the same stunning, velvet-laden, and iconic Belgian spiegeltent Seattleites will remember from Teatro ZinZanni’s former location on lower Queen Anne." The cast is led by first-time "Madame ZinZanni" Ariana Savalas, and will feature a duo on aerial trapeze, a magician, a "contortionist-puppet," a yodeling dominatrix, a hoop aerialist, and a Parisian acrobat.
Wonderland
Wonderland returns! Can Can will transform its venue into a snowy chalet and populate it with teasing beauties. VIP tickets get you champagne and a meal as well. There's also a brunch show that's safe for kids.
THURSDAY
ARTWyeth's Black Paintings with Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw
Art historian Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw will delve into Andrew Wyeth's depictions of African Americans, in conjunction with Andrew Wyeth: A Retrospect.
Cicelia Ross-Gotta: I Love You Are You Okay Closing
A recent graduate of the UW's MFA program, Cicelia Ross-Gotta uses fibers and sculpture to encode the intricacies of emotional states. I Love You Are You Okay is an installation consisting of six chairs and two large artificial plants. The leaves of these plants are embroidered with text messages between the artist and her father, documenting the contours of a strained familial relationship. The use of waiting-room chairs and plants recalls the hospital waiting room installation in The Idea & the Thing Itself, Jennifer Zwick's recent exhibition at Gallery 4Culture. It would be interesting to see these two artists play off each other in the context of a group show. EMILY POTHAST
Clean Rooms. Low Rates. Closing
This exhibition by Marina Fini (installation) with Jeff Parker and Brendan Barry (photo-text art book) explores a quintessentially American locus: the motel. Promising a "private-turned-public and mundane-turned-psychedelic space," this work will bring to light the aesthetic, economic, sociological, and poetic aspects of the roadside inn. Today, there'll be an "artist-hosted birthday party" with special surprise performances by guests from Los Angeles.
Here Comes the Night: 40th Film Noir Series
As Charles Mudede says, “If you love cinema, then you must love film noir”—a category he describes as full of “spiderlike women, lots of long knives, lots of rooms with dark curtains, lots of faces of the fallen, and lots of existential twists and turns.” This week, watch Pretty Poison.
A John Waters Christmas
Legendary cult director/noted Baltimore resident/moustache-haver John Waters regales the Neptune with filthy Christmas jokes, monologic shenanigans, and gripes about holiday traditions.
Andy Weir in Conversation with Neal Stephenson
Andy Weir wrote The Martian, which Ridley Scott turned into a successful Matt Damon vehicle about a guy who eats poop potatoes in order to survive life on the red planet. I’m sure it was about other stuff, too, but once you have poop potatoes on the mind, it’s hard to follow the other threads about the genuine trials facing human beings as we consider planetary colonization. Anyway, Weir is one of the great contemporary writers of brainy sci-fi, and he’ll be reading from his new novel, Artemis, alongside our very own great contemporary writer of brainy sci-fi, Neal Stephenson. The story centers on a smuggler named Jazz Bashara, who gets into some trouble when she tries to sneak “contraband” into the solar system’s first and only moon colony. RICH SMITH
Hinge: Kevin Young
Author and poet Kevin Young, whose nonfiction book The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Award and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book for 2012, was called "one of the most talented poets in the United States" by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Martha Nussbaum: The Philosophy of Thoughtful Aging
Famous ethicist and University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum's book Aging Thoughtfully: Conversations about Retirement, Romance, Wrinkles, and Regret takes a philosophical, cultural, and social view of growing old, from issues relating to the elderly poor to retirement to cosmetic surgery.
THURSDAY-FRIDAY
PERFORMANCENPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!
Comedians, journalists, celebrities, and listeners vie to win "a custom-recorded greeting by scorekeeper emeritus Carl Kasell for their voicemail" by answering current-events questions on NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!. Get in on the lighthearted news fun (if there can be such a thing these days) and celebrate the 20th season of the comedy show.
THURSDAY-SATURDAY
ARTCathy McClure: Dispossessed
Betty Bowen Award-winning Cathy McClure has created cute/disturbing deconstructed toys to interrogate our visions of the future, our current reality, mass production, and inequality.
Opening Thursday
Emily Gherard: It All Burns
Stranger Genius Award nominee Emily Gherard's new paintings "continue her pursuit of abstraction evoking the figure"—ghostly monochromes that seem like humped shapes, doorways, or even coffins, depending on how you look at them. This new exhibition, It All Burns, also includes scored graphite works on rubber by the Seattle-based artist. Contemplate her works and discover her meticulous use of layers, and how they reveal a buried, almost monolithic structure despite their ethereality.
Closing Saturday
THURSDAY-SUNDAY
PERFORMANCEHowl’s Moving Castle
Everything about this musical adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle looks good. Hayao Miyazaki’s anime, which was based on Diana Wynne Jones’s novel, is a wondrous fairy tale about the perils of wondrous fairy tales, and it’s beloved by all—or at least by all who harbor no particular fondness for the Iraq war. Book-It’s all-star cast features Sara Porkalob, whose solo show, Dragon Lady, floored me in all of its iterations. Expect top-notch performances from Randall Scott Carpenter, Kate Jaeger, and Opal Peachey, too. Justin Huertas will compose the songs and write the lyrics. His widely acclaimed musical Lizard Boy debuted at Seattle Repertory Theatre a couple years back, he’s been a touring cellist with the Broadway show Spring Awakening, and he displayed solid comedic chops during Book-It’s production of Welcome to Braggsville. He’ll likely draw out as much humor as he can from the story while still maintaining the magic. RICH SMITH
FRIDAY
COMEDYWayne Brady
Magically funny Wayne Brady of sweet-natured reputation will perform chez nous.
Alternate Endings, Radical Beginnings
For World AIDS Day this year, the Frye Art Museum is partnering with Visual AIDS to present ALTERNATIVE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS, a collaborative video project featuring seven short videos on the HIV/AIDS crisis. The videos, created by a notable group of contemporary luminaries including rapper Mykki Blanco, focus on the impact of HIV/AIDS within Black communities. Blanco's involvement is enough to recommend this project, but the inclusion of voguer Kia Labeija and filmmaker Cheryl Dunye makes this a don't-miss event. CHASE BURNS
Puget Soundtrack: Corey J. Brewer Presents The Shining Forward & Backward
If you love horror or movies or both, no doubt you've already seen Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, in which an evil hotel slowly awakens the psychotic murderousness in the soul of Jack Nicholson. Chances are, though, you haven't seen it screened backwards and forwards and superimposed over itself—an experiment apparently first conducted by John Fell Ryan. It's mesmerizing, a glimpse into the symmetry and synchronicity of the film. The Northwest Film Forum will repeat the experience for a Seattle audience, with Corey J. Brewer providing a live score that will "lean into [...] premonitions of a dreadful fate, illuminate subtext and amplify the nightmares echoing backward down the long halls of the Overlook Hotel."
Jade Chang
Jade Chang, author of the 2016 novel The Wangs Vs. the World, will lead a conversation on "immigrant stories, the art world, road trips," and more.
FRIDAY-SATURDAY
ARTJulia Freeman: The Will to Synchronize
Once again, Julia Freeman interrogates systemic influences over everyday interactions. The Will to Synchronize unfolds in three acts in an exploration of online relationships and the forces controlling them, expressed in "3D printed objects of vocal recordings, choreographed performance, and installation."
Opening Friday
Trevor Noah
South African TV personality, writer, and comedian Trevor Noah is known mainly for being the host of Comedy Central's The Daily Show (he attracted tons of media attention for his controversial interview with young Republican Tomi Lahren). He also published a book last year titled Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood.
Uncle Mike Ruins Christmas
Mike Murphy (Uncle Mike) or Graham Downing (Cousin Graham) and Jet City cast members re-enact and trample over your fond Christmas memories in a happily vulgar performance. Not necessarily for squeamish types.
Washington Brewers Guild 2017 Winter Beer Festival
The bright side to long, gray, wet winters is all the time you get to savor the seasonal offerings from local craft breweries—"dark malty stouts, robust winter warmers, and barrel-aged gems." This event features beers from over 50 Washington Brewers Guild member breweries.
Saci - A Brazilian Folktale & The Greater Trumps
This double feature pairs a piece by local Latin jazz celebrity and "three-time Latin Grammy nominee" Jovino Santos Neto called Saci - A Brazilian Folktale with an adaptation of Igor Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale entitled The Greater Trumps. It has a new libretto by Doug Thorpe, adapting the musical play to our time.
9 Ounces: A One-Woman Show by Anastacia-Reneé
In this one-woman play, Anastacia-Renee embodies three multigenerational characters—Luna, Alice, and Saraphina—whose stories intertwine to provide social commentary on "class, race, culture, oppression, depression, survival, and epiphany."
FRIDAY-SUNDAY
ARTGazelle Samizay: My shadow is a word writing itself across time
This exhibition by Gazelle Samizay embodies the fear of oppression that still haunts ethnic minorities in the United States. The Kabul-born artist journeyed to Manzanar, California, the site of the biggest Japanese internet camp, and her photo exhibit explores the space, its history of exploitation and cruelty, and its natural geography, which to Samizay is reminiscent of that of her native Afghanistan.
Opening Friday
Holiday Afternoon Tea
Coyle's Bakeshop, the brick-and-mortar location of the business that began as Rachel Coyle's irresistible pastry pop-up in Fremont's Book Larder, churns out marvelous baked goods. For this holiday tea, their space will be festively decorated and they'll be serving a tasting menu with a winter champagne cocktail (or non-alcoholic beverage) and eight courses of savories, pastries, and desserts with tea pairings.
Annie
Family-friendly musical Annie offers spunky orphans, a benevolent millionaire, and a very smart dog. Come for musical theater classics like "Hard Knock Life," "Easy Street," and "We'd Like to Thank You Herbert Hoover."
Dina Martina Christmas Show
Do you appreciate irony? Do you enjoy joy? Are you a sucker for horrifying stories told as if they’re heartwarming, the spectacle of beastly narcissism among the untalented, and pop songs with the lyrics rewritten because the singer seems to have undergone some kind of brain scramble? The Seattle holiday tradition of the drag-gone-wrong Dina Martina Christmas Show is upon us. All we know for sure is that that one song she sings every year will be in it. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE
George Balanchine's The Nutcracker
If you haven't seen this Christmas classic since you were a kid, give it a go this year. In 2015, PNB replaced its beloved Maurice Sendak set with one by Ian Falconer, who did the Olivia the Pig books, and I'm glad that they did. The new set is gorgeous in a Wes Anderson-y way, and it reflects the genuine weirdness and beauty in the story. I mean, the last 45 minutes of this thing is a Katy Perry video starring dancing desserts and a glittery peacock that moves like a sexy broken river. Bring a pot lozenge. RICH SMITH
Next Fest NW: Disruption
Velocity's annual Next Fest NW is often the place to go to see Seattle's best up-and-coming performers and choreographers push the bounds of modern dance.
No Strings Attached
An older woman, bereaved of her cheating husband, plunges into the underground swinger scene in this sexy comedy about "personal responsibility and the right to happiness."
quick bright things
Dacha Theatre's quick bright things is an energetic black-box retelling of the oft-produced Shakespearean comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream. It recasts the fairies "as the echoes and shadows that inhabit the theater."
SATURDAY
ART(DIS)FIGURATIONS: A Performative Lecture by lauren woods
Dallas-based lauren woods presents herself as a kind of anti-ethnographer, combining installations, site-specific interventions, lectures, and performances to connect her own subjective history as a black woman and artist to the larger, tortured story of racist cruelty in the United States—which lingers in the spaces we inhabit. One example: Drinking Fountain #1 memorializes the civil rights movement on a spot where a "whites-only" sign was recently unearthed. In this talk at the Henry, in conjunction with her video piece (S)Port of San Francisco, she will address the path of her own work in a "letter to herself" as she deconstructs white conceptions of race. Her intellectual self-awareness and her interest in how language limits experience invite the audience to examine their own subjectivities.
Inscape Open Studios
Discover work by artist-in-residence Sofia Babaeva, shop work by more than 50 artists, grab food truck goodies, and watch C. Davida Ingram's video projected on the high wall.
Demetri Martin: Let's Get Awkward Tour
Rare is the comic who can make meta-comedy hilarious, analyzing humor as it’s tumbling from the brain in real time. Like medium-energy humorist Todd Barry, Demetri Martin excels at this, delivering ingenious self-reflexiveness in precise, calm tones. And similar to Steven Wright, but more elaborative, Martin applies a warped microscope to reassess everyday situations, clichés, and conventional wisdom, nailing their targets and quickly moving on to the next witty, skewed point. “Why is spinning the way a corpse shows disapproval?” Martin reasonably asks. His bit on prune juice is the shit, too. DAVE SEGAL
Champagne Showcase
Sample a symphony of sparklers at this tasting, which will feature over 60 different kinds of champagne, crémant, prosecco, cava and sekt from all over the globe—including "high-end labels from the world’s most renowned Champagne houses."
Winter Farm Dinner
Eating oysters at the very farm that they were harvested, in the peak of their season? It doesn't get much fresher than that. Dine on the beach at low tide at Hama Hama's oyster farm beside roaring bonfires, with a five-course family-style meal prepared by Chef Luke Reyes, wine pairings by Elk Cove, and local beer and cider. After you've stuffed yourself with all the oysters you can shuck, make like Lewis Carroll's Walrus and the Carpenter and go for "a pleasant walk, a pleasant talk, along the briny beach" beneath the light of the full moon.
ART HAUS 4.0: Ho-Ho-Ho Down
Miss Texas 1988 will host an outrageous, probably disconcerting "Anti-Christmas" drag show aimed at "ALL GRINCHES, PAGANS MAD ABOUT CHRISTMAS TREES, AND ANTI-CAPITALIST EX-CAROLERS," though there's even room for you Yuletide nerds. The House of Luna will take on the Grief Girls; see Strawberry Shartcake, Jenna St Croix, and Bubba in action alongside special guest Londyn Bradshaw.
Open Studio #34
Witness works in progress by performers Gigi Rosenberg, Eli Steffen, Shontina Vernon, and the pair of Tatiana Pavela and Taigé Lauren. Meet the artists and give them your most constructive feedback.
Elizabeth Beier: The Big Book of Bisexual Trials and Errors
Join author and artist Elizabeth Beier as she signs copies of her new comic book, The Big Book of Bisexual Trials and Errors.
SUNDAY
FOOD & DRINKSpeed Rack Season 7 Northwest
Prepare to witness Cocktail-like feats of shaking and stirring at a breakneck pace at this all-female speed bartending competition, which will award one swift mixologist the title of Miss Speed Rack North West. Your ticket buys you samples of punch and grub from local eateries. All proceeds will go to breast cancer research, education, and prevention.
Joe Biden: American Promise Tour
Joe Biden is welcome to bring himself and his new memoir, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose, to Seattle so long as he promises not to run for president in 2020. He did a great job as #2 despite tremendous personal hardship (if you didn’t have the TV on last year, his son died of a malignant brain tumor, and it was heartbreaking), as he details in the book, but we need new blood at the top of the ticket. That said, Uncle Joe is an honest and moving storyteller, and any advice he gives on keeping your head up through tough times is worth listening to. RICH SMITH
Workshop with Dr. Daudi Abe
Hiphop scholar and historian Dr. Daudi Abe will lead a free interactive workshop inspired by Dr. Beverly Tatum's book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Participants will explore their own experiences in school and reflect on what has and has not changed in our education system since Tatum first published the book 10 years ago. Dr. Abe will also share resources and strategies for supporting students.
Youth Poet Laureate Reading
Celebrate young literary talent in Seattle at this Youth Poet Laureate reading, featuring the 2017/2018 laureate: Lily Baumgart of Garfield High. (You might also hear from the Youth Poet Laureate Ambassador, Namaka Auwae-Dekker.)
