Almost a year ago, I posted how some diligent artistic-minded people made Garfield funny by tampering with the horrendously unfunny comic strip.

Recently—and I forget how it happened—I came across this website, which has a theater group's re-enactments of a month's worth of 1998 Mary Worth strips. For those of you who don't know, Mary Worth is a soap opera cartoon, published locally by the Seattle P.I. Here (from here) is a Mary Worth strip with the dialogue improved by Fergie:

Most Mary Worth strips are notable for their glacial pace, awkward dialogue, and the bad artwork, which is most obviously represented by the strange contortions that the characters have to do in order to stay in the panel. But these five live reenactments, with the weird wind sound effects whistling through the background, are weirdly compelling. They feel like a Guy Maddin movie. They seem beautiful to me. That's not really something that I ever expected to find from Mary Worth. I hope they do Mark Trail, next.

Always be closing:

In Ohio.

Akron, Ohio — The final curtain falls on Carousel Dinner Theatre Saturday night when the Rubber City institution closes after 35 years of serving musicals and prime rib to hundreds of thousands of Northeast Ohioans hungry for live entertainment.

The Carousel, the Cleveland-area's only dinner theater —a combination restaurant, bar and Broadway musical palace that seats 800 — announced on Friday that it will go out of business after tonight.

Which means hundreds, if not thousands, of patrons who already signed up for the 2009 season of six shows — which had been scheduled to begin Wednesday — will be owed refunds. Season tickets for prime seats cost $309.

Carousel owner Joseph E. Palmer and marketing director Sarah Lance did not return telephone calls and email inquiries Friday, the day the Beacon Journal reported the closure had been announced to the Carousel's 150 staff members on New Year's Eve.

On Broadway.

For those susceptible to the romantic allure of attending the last performance of a Broadway show, January will be one for the history books. The annual post-holiday doldrums in the theater district are proving particularly doleful in 2009, as more than a dozen plays and musicals — almost half of the current lineup, incredible though it may seem — get ready to close by the end of the month.

What's still kicking: Vancouver's PuSh Festival (Jan 20 to Feb 8), Portland's Fertile Ground Festival (all new works; Jan 23 to Feb 1), and NYC's Under the Radar Festival (Jan 7 to Jan 18), with shows by Mabou Mines, Holcombe Waller, Tim Etchells, Tim Crouch (with England, which he performed at the Henry a few months ago), and sometime locals Tommy Smith and Reggie Watts.

Because, in the New Economy, fringe theater is not as fucked as big theater.

We hope.

Taproot is doing what many other theaters should be doing—selling its entire season for $20.

SEATTLE — December 30, 2008 — Taproot Theatre Company is kicking off its 33rd season with a 2-day walk-up sale this January 2 and 3, when its entire available inventory of Wednesday and Thursday night performances during the 2009 season are available for the special sale price of $20 (excludes preview and pay-what-you-can performances). Tickets are available in person at Taproot Theatre’s box office at 204 N. 85th St. in Seattle from noon to 5 p.m. on January 2 and 3; phone orders will not be accepted. All sales are final and any future exchanges include a $5 fee per ticket. This offer is not valid with any other discounts.

Taproot Theatre’s 2009 season features Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder’s critically-acclaimed Gee’s Bend; Tuesdays With Morrie, a play by Jeffrey Hatcher and Mitch Albom, based on Albom’s bestselling book; Around the World in 80 Days by Mark Brown, based on Jules Verne’s classic novel; Smoke on the Mountain Homecoming, written by Connie Ray and conceived by Alan Bailey with musical arrangements by Mike Craver; and Enchanted April, Matthew Barber’s adaptation of Elizabeth von Arnim’s 1922 novel. More details, including dates, are available online at www.taproottheatre.org.

It's standard curtain-speech boilerplate: "The price of your seat only covers a small fraction of the production." The big money comes from grants and donations, just the way advertising, not subscriptions, pay for newspapers.

And, like newspapers, theaters everywhere should be lowering the barrier to entry, since traditional ticket sales are grinding down to a nub.

His funeral was yesterday.

Leading figures from the worlds of theatre and the arts offered their own tributes to Harold Pinter yesterday, describing him as "the last great playwright", an inspirational hero and a dear friend who had inspired successive generations of dramatists and producers.

"Yesterday when you talked about Britain's greatest living playwright, everyone knew who you meant," the playwright David Hare told the Guardian. "Today they don't. That's all I can say."

His fellow playwright Joe Penhall called Pinter "my alpha and my beta". "Shakespeare and Chekhov had their moments, but for me The Caretaker is the greatest play of all time. He was the most inspirational playwright of the twentieth century. For young playwrights, discovering his plays for the first time was explosively exciting - you immediately wanted to copy him, be him, be like him, anything ... Nobody wrote better lines for actors: clean, hard, intoxicating. Projected in a theatre they expand with elegant, violent effectiveness, like a grenade going off in a Rolls. He was the last great playwright and I will miss him and mourn him like there's no tomorrow."

And, according to the Telegraph, directed his own funeral, with a reading from one of his own plays:

Addressing the mourners, Sir Michael recited the passage from No Man's Land, which includes the lines: "Allow the love of the good ghost. They possess all that emotion trapped. Bow to it. It will assuredly never release them, but who knows what relief it may give to them, who knows how they may quicken in their chains, in their glass jars?"

There were no eulogies to Pinter, just a brief invitation at the end by Lady Antonia to join her for a drink.

Slowly departing, the mourners said goodbye to a man who had risen from his lowly East End origins to be regarded as one of the most important playwrights of the post-war era, a man who turned down a knighthood and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005.

As the last one left, a team of grave diggers piled earth on to his coffin, soon leaving it icy and silent.

Noted fuckhead Jeremy Piven backed out of a New York production of Speed-the-Plow two months early, claiming he was suffering from elevated mercury levels due to eating too much sushi. Not to doubt the perennially douchey star, but people have witnessed Piven pulling his classic all-night partying routine before and after his claims of mercury poisoning, and he also complained very loudly about being bored all during the show.

Plow playwright David Mamet said, of Piven's leaving the show early, "So my understanding is that he is leaving show business to pursue a career as a thermometer." One of the investors in the play said "We didn't have star insurance, but we should have had asshole insurance." And yesterday, one of Piven's costars directly addressed the audience about the matter as soon as the play ended, and an audience member reported to Defamer:

’He said, I’m sure you’ve read the headlines about the silliness in our show.’ Then he said, Today was the first time I really enjoyed playing this show.’ I hope you weren’t expecting a big TV star.” It was pretty emotional.

Turns out, maybe he's not acting at all:

Terry Teachout, over at the Wall Street Journal, talks some sense about whether Bart Sher can and should direct August Wilson's Joe Turner in NYC:

Lincoln Center Theater's production of "Joe Turner" is already raising a ruckus of the wrong sort. Marion McClinton, a black director who has staged two Wilson plays on Broadway, recently told a reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press that the decision to hire Mr. Sher, who is white, was "straight-up institutional racism."

[But] if Wilson is a major playwright, then surely part of the proof of his stature lies in the ability of his work to speak to all men in all conditions.

From one angle, as I've mentioned before, that argument runs the risk of sounding like callous appropriationism.

From The Souls of Black Folk:

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

Wilson probably would've resisted Sher directing Joe Turner—he described his cultural project as building a repertoire by and for black Americans, a repertoire that would shelter black American actors and directors from the double-consciousness of making token black plays for white regional theaters.

Wilson achieved that and then some—he transcended his cultural context and, therefore, his own project. He wrote a repertoire of plays that a huge, broad audience wants to see and direct and be part of. Wilson's work will be performed everywhere, in dozens of languages, for decades to come. Sher's just the beginning—just you wait until the Osaka production of 2154.

There's still plenty of institutional bigotry to go around and kick back against (the very phenomenon of token black/Asian/gay/feminist plays in regional-theater seasons is evidence of that). But it doesn't do anyone any favors to argue that a Tony Award magnet like Bart Sher isn't allowed to direct August Wilson.

(Whether there's a suspicious dearth of black directors who are Tony Award magnets is another argument—and one worth having. Also: Weird that this national-profile debate about race and theater has its roots in Seattle.)

More locally, you should see Pat Graney's new dance piece, House of Mind, this weekend:

(She got those chairs from the Canterbury.)

From a preview of the piece that ran in the paper a few weeks ago:

House of Mind deploys the same combination of structure and surrealism [that she admires in writers like Gertrude Stein and Julio Cortázar]. It begins with one dancer—in a short skirt and kneesocks—walking complicated patterns across the floor, with quick turns like she's tracing the perimeter of an irregularly shaped star. Then another, upstage, doing the same thing. Then another, walking down stairs from a catwalk, and another, opening and closing doors in a small room built high over the stage. The sound clips come from Graney's mother, Stars Wars, Dune, and snippets of music from her childhood ("Crimson and Clover," "White Rabbit," "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"). The scenes are fundamentally domestic: dancers read, play house on an Oriental carpet, bake a cake, take off their pants and eat a snack of cheese and tomato. But they are fundamentally fractured, like the complicated geometry the dancers follow when walking from one side of the floor to another.

Nobody took off her pants and ate cheese last night, but everything else was there—it's a mesmerizing piece with a beautiful score of composition and sampling by Amy Denio.

Women in 40s dresses move around a giant warehouse that Graney and architect David Traylor have turned into a through-the-looking-glass installation of Graney's childhood memories—floors made of sand, her father's study wallpapered with his old police reports, a wall of white buttons with cascading water, a working stove and fridge (the dancers make brownies), a closet full of enormous dresses, a monster's tail unfurled from beneath a bed, a towering wall made of little compartments to store miniatures from Graney's private collection, etc.

After this weekend, it will tour to Houston. And there's an added late show tonight at 10 pm. Step out of the snow and into the sand.

Intiman is offering a special this weekend for Black Nativity: free hot chocolate for all patrons at all performances, and all available tickets will be sold at half-price 15 minutes before curtain. (This does not apply to previously purchased tickets and seating is not guaranteed.) Performances are tonight at 8 pm, Saturday at 2 and 8 pm and Sunday at 2 and 7:30 pm.

As you might deduce from the above picture, Black Nativity sometimes prances its way into Goofsville.

But I'm surprised by my own pliability to its emotional manipulations and pitch-perfect cajoling to get the Jesus joy. Or some kind of joy—you can be joyful for Kwanzaa or Hanukkah or a cold, godless universe, but you'd better damn well be joyful about something.

I don't care who you are—the Pajama Men are funnier.

Quoth Lindy West:

Oh, this is just delightful. Just the best. The Pajama Men—Albuquerque duo Shenoah Allen and Mark Chavez, barefoot, clad in pajamas—make my very favorite kind of comedy:

It's conceptual and weird ("You have any siblings?" "Yeah, I got one. Half brother. Half sister"), silly and creepy ("Some people say beauty's only skin deep. But if that's true, you must be made totally out of skin"), lowbrow and highbrow and smart and dirty and sometimes sweet—all whipped up into a froth somewhere between sketch and improv.

I hesitate to quote anything, because you should experience it as it happens. The pair (accompanied by a handsome and kind-faced musician with a tiny mandolin thing who has got to be the most-getting-laidest dude of all time) whip from scene to scene, as newscasters, as knights-errant, as awkward teens, as gigantic thumbs—characters that begin infinite distances apart, eventually and naturally crossing paths in the surreal wilderness of the Pajama Men.

I once drove to Canada and rented a hotel room, just to see them. Like the Cody Rivers Show, the Pajama Men don't perform comedy: they use comedy as a magic flying carpet (with jet-propellers) to shoot them into a new kind of theater. (They will deny this. But artists don't always understand their own significance. Or insignificance.)

They used to be called Sabotage. Sabotage came to Seattle for the final year of the Seattle Fringe Festival, which crashed and didn't pay many, many performers their rightful box-office earnings. Which, understandably, pissed a lot of out-of-towners right off. That's it, I thought. They got burned their first time in Seattle. We'll never see them again.

But they're here. They're weird. And they can't be stopped.

All this snow we're having? They live in Chicago—they don't give a fuck.

They're performing tonight at Annex Theater, up on Capitol Hill at 1100 E Pike St.

Walk there. With a flask of whiskey. And bask in their genius.

Remember when the Rep was going to co-produce a pre-Broadway version of Waiting for Godot will Bill Irwin? Here was our brief, anticipatory listing from the All Farts calendar back in September:

'Waiting for Godot'

Bill Irwin is a great American clown, and his vaudevillian interpretations of Samuel Beckett are changing the way people watch—and even read—the cranky Irishman's most exhaustively analyzed plays. This is a pre-Broadway production. Jan 15–Feb 14, Seattle Repertory Theatre, 155 Mercer St, 443-2222, $15–$59.

Then the project fell through. Rumor had it that certain stars didn't want to rehearse in Seattle because they were afraid of the sailors and the Chinamen, the Guzmans and the clap. Who could it be? we all wondered. Who's too good for us?

Turns out, everybody. The relocated Godot has been cast:

You think Roundabout's spring revival of Waiting For Godot, featuring Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin, was already starry enough? Not by half. The rest of the cast has just been announced, and they're even MORE exciting. Pozzo will be played by Emmy winner John Goodman (Roseanne, O Brother Where Art Thou), and recent Oscar nominee David Strathairn (Good Night and Good Luck) is taking on the part of Lucky. Even in a great depression, I'd pay to see that.

Lane and Irwin will be grand, of course, but Goodman as Pozzo is a stroke of goddamned genius.

Fawk.

(Thanks for the downer, Modern Fabulosity.)

From Slog tipper kb:

Received a letter yesterday from Seattle Theatre Group informing me that Degenerate Art Ensemble's Mar. 7 production at The Moore has been cancelled "due to challenges they are experiencing through this tough economic period." I'd bought the tix as part of a subscription package - refunds are being automatically issued.