THURSDAY /2/3
First Run Features
Miss Indigo Blue helps celebrate a local burlesque centennial.
Library of Congress
The chameleon.
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Burlesque: Take Most of It Off!
Overbearing mothers skank up their preteen daughters for beauty pageants while we watch in horror. But is this anything new? Not according to Karen Abbott, author of American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (Random House, $26), whose subject was born in Seattle 100 years ago. In Abbott's telling, the money-lusting Mama Rose—played by Ethel Merman in the landmark 1959 Broadway musical Gypsy, based on Lee's memoirs—cared more about her two daughters' early vaudeville fame than their well-being. Lee and her sister, future actress June Havoc, were ruled by the whims of a near-madwoman. And while Lee became a striptease star by the '30s, she still struggled for the love of an unforgiving, finicky public. Yet by the '50s, she had developed a confident, comic, almost intellectual persona that has much to do with the current burlesque revival. Appropriately, Abbott's presentation will be accompanied tonight by performers including Miss Indigo Blue and The Swedish Housewife. Oddfellows Hall, 915 E. Pike St., 478-9475, academyofburlesque.com. $5. 7 p.m. LAURA EASLEY
FRIDAY 2/4
Dance: Sweet Confections
December may be forever dedicated to holiday shows, but February has its own holiday juggernaut. Valentine's Day demands art, and dance, about romance. PNB's Cinderella fills that bill nicely, with just enough angst from the motherless daughter before the prince and the happy ending arrive. Choreographer Kent Stowell spent more time with the Charles Perrault tale than the Disney movie did—no singing mice here. (Prokofiev supplies the score.) Modeling his work on the great 19th-century ballets, collaborating with scenic designer Tony Straiges and costumer Martin Pakledinaz, Stowell created an expansive version of the story (first performed in 1994). The lavish ballroom scene featues gowns as scarlet as the best box of chocolates, which you may crave after the show. (Through Feb. 13.) McCaw Hall, 301 Mercer St. (Seattle Center), 441-2424, pnb.org. $27–$165. 7:30 p.m.SANDRA KURTZ
Dance: Site Specific
When Merce Cunningham first started presenting his work in art galleries, pulling apart dances and scrambling their sections, it was a radical thing to do to dance qua dance. But in the early postwar era, it wasn't so apparent what a significant change Cunningham (1919–2009) was making in the where of dance—the venues where his choreography was performed. Galleries offered more than walls for paintings and pedestals for sculpture—they were series of spaces that could hold dancing or watching or both. For a series called The Merce Cunningham minEvent Project, the student company from Cornish College (Cunningham's alma mater) has been mixing and matching his kinetic material with various locations. This morning, the dancers will offer a tour of the Paramount, whose grand old stairs, balconies, and lobby will provide stately backdrops for excerpts from Cunningham's Roara-torio, Fabrications, and Enter. Other venues include ACT (tonight and Saturday), SAM, and the Olympic Sculpture Park. (Through April 21.) Paramount Theatre, 911 Pine St., 877-784-4849, cornish.edu/merce. Free. 10 a.m.SANDRA KURTZ
SATURDAY 2/5
Stage: He Is American Music
Never was "musical training" more irrelevant than in the case of Irving Berlin. Aside from being the son of a cantor, he had none (is it true he could only play on the black keys of the piano?)—only the inexplicable, almost frightening ability, again and again, to pull sounds from his head and insert them in yours. Growing up, archetypally, on the Lower East Side, in a single-parent family more than usually impoverished even for that 'hood, Berlin went to work early as a Tin Pan Alley song-plugger, soaking up everything there was to soak about pop music and wringing it back out in a seemingly effortless and endless series of hits. Of all the Great American Songbook composers, he was surely the most chameleonic. He could come up with a rouser as square, in all senses, as "God Bless America," or something as intricately sophisticated as "Puttin' On the Ritz"—in which he divides 16 beats, four bars of four, into 7 + 7 + 2, securing the off-kilter sevens with a rhyme ("If you're blue and you don't know where/To go to, why don't you go where"). Then there's the white-mink suavity of "Let's Face the Music and Dance" vs. the elegiac "White Christmas" and the klieg-lit anthem "There's No Business Like Show Business" and a dozen or a billion more tunes with nothing in common but their unbudgeableness from the national psyche. Tonight's revue, starring Shelly Burch, Louis Hobson, and many more, celebrates his legacy. (Also 2 p.m. Sun.) Moore Theatre, 1932 Second Ave., 877-784-4849, stgpresents.org. $24. 8 p.m. GAVIN BORCHERT
Books: T Is for Trenches
"Trying to write about love is ultimately like trying to have a dictionary represent life," says the narrator of David Levithan's new novel, The Lover's Dictionary (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18). "No matter how many words there are, there will never be enough." Be that as it may, Levithan still has a go at it, telling a love story through a series of alphabetical definitions. Thus, under "brash," his narrator relates a first night together. Under "grimace," he describes the girl's morning breath. The story is wonderfully scattershot, skipping back and forth in time from sweet beginnings to painful degradation. (Anybody seen Blue Valentine?) And the definitions are sometimes bracingly, horribly honest and sometimes fleet and witty ("antsy, adj., I swore I would never take you to the opera again"; "celibacy, n., n/a.") Levithan is known for his young-adult fiction—most notably, the super-twee Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist—and The Lover's Dictionary is his first adult novel. Some of his Dictionary exhibits the super-dramatic, breathless style of teen lit. But its exuberance mostly rings true for us old people, too. At a key turning point in the relationship, the narrator recognizes that "We have fallen through the surface of want and are deep in the trenches of need." Elliott Bay Book Co., 1521 10th Ave., 624-6600, elliottbaybook.com. Free. 7 p.m.ERIN K. THOMPSON
