arts&culture» » FROM PAGE 18 FRIDAY, FEB. 21
For such a fragrantly enchanting musical, this 1973 Tony winner displays a near-Schoenbergian attention to subcutaneous structure; the sophistication of Stephen Sondheim’s music and lyrics acts as a bittersweet metaphor for game-playing artifice in matters of the heart. The dramatic personae form a neatly interlocking pattern of romantic triangles, which resolve at a Swedish country estate during the long, long twilight of Midsummer’s Night, and the score is a dance suite of variations on triple time: waltz, gigue, mazurka, sarabande, polonaise, even the rippling harp triplets underlying the show’s most popular number, “Send In the Clowns.” This last is sung by Desirée Armfeldt, one of musical theater’s greatest roles for actresses past ingenue age—and she even gets the hero at the end. (Through March 9.) SecondStory Repertory, 16587 N.E.
74th St. (Redmond), 425-881-6777, second storyrep.org. $27. 8 p.m. GAVIN BORCHERT
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In the long run, we’ll all be dead. That’s just one of the takeaways from Kolbert’s latest ecodisaster tome, mostly adapted from her reporting in The New Yorker, where she’s assigned to what I call the-Earth-is-going-to-hell beat. And yet she’ll find a receptive, well-scienced Seattle audience for The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt, $28), no creationists or climate-change deniers in the crowd. The double appeal to her globe-trotting dispatches—in which she follows field scientists from Iceland to Peru—allows us both the vicarious pleasure of traveling with her and the grim confirmation that, yes, we’re heating up the planet enough to ensure our own future demise. None of us will personally be here to experience it, of course, only the heirs to our selfish genome. Extinction, Kolbert reports, is cyclical: Species diversity has peaked and crashed five times before, according to the fossil record, with causes including ice ages and meteor strikes. Our present peril is man-made, of course, as Kolbert also explored in her 2006 Field Notes From a Catastrophe. (Again: She, and we, just can’t get enough of the disaster stuff.) Whether human civilization finally ends with a bang or a whimper ultimately doesn’t matter so much as the diagnosis here. What makes Kolbert’s latest book—and its recent companions, like Guns, Germs, and Steel and The
Hootenanny! Saturday, March 1 at Noon an all-ages sing-along
Tribute to Pete Seeger FREE for kids. $5 for adults.
Tammy Sundquist Grading in Nemec’s Ferrari Dino Girl.
WWW.TOWNHALLSEATTLE.ORG series support provided by:
Lucky Seven Foundation Fales Foundation Trust
NWFF
SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 19 — 25, 2014
Elizabeth Kolbert
NICHOLAS WHITMAN
A Little Night Music
Kolbert was recently featured on the Colbert Report.
World Without Us—so fascinating to us morbid rationalists isn’t exactly schadenfreude; it’s more like attending our own funerals. This is how it will all end, says Kolbert, as we clever humans systematically engineer our own erasure—along with most other species—and leave the Earth in the capable paws of rats, ants, fungi, and other more-deserving survivors. Town Hall, 1119 Eighth
Ave., 652-4255, townhallseattle.org. $5. 7:30 p.m. BRIAN MILLER
Independent of Reality
One of the pioneers of the Czechoslovak New Wave, Jan Němec’s reputation fell in the shadow of the more internationally celebrated Milos Forman, Ivan Passer, Věra Chytilová, and Jiří Menzel. His poetic, impressionistic style defied the state dictates of social realism, and his 1966 satire A Report on the Party and the Guests—not in this six-film series but available on DVD— incurred the wrath of the authorities. Forbidden from making films, Němec went into a 15-year exile that ended only after the Iron Curtain fell. This retrospective begins tonight with his debut feature, Diamonds of the Night (1964), a Holocaust drama about the nightmarish ordeal of two young men who escape a transport train en route to a concentration camp. His contribution to the 1966 anthology film Pearls of the Deep (7 p.m. Sun.), a showcase for young Czechoslovak filmmakers, is gentler, a bittersweet portrait of old age and the harmless lies of an adventurous life. The series also includes his 2009 Ferrari Dino Girl (7 p.m. Tues.), which incorporates documentary footage of the 1968 Soviet invasion that Němec shot at great personal risk, then smuggled out of the country; 40 years later, he returned to retrace his escape route, interpolating old and new footage of that perilous journey. (Through Wed.) Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave.,
267-5380, nwfilmforum.org. $6–$11. 7 & 9 p.m. SEAN AXMAKER E