Watching As If Theatre’s Escaped Alone feels like being hugged and being throttled all at once. It’s both comforting to see the intimacy of others’ lives amidst their struggles and terrifying to be reminded of our own complacency to the world falling apart around us. If you’re looking for a show that asks the tough questions while allowing you to assemble the answers, a strong all-female ensemble, and thoughtful direction and design, it’s worth making the trek to Kenmore before this one closes.

What are our roles supposed to be in life within the framing of the gender binary? Why do we perform those roles and how can we move beyond them? Is performance a means of escaping the roles we’ve been put into, or is performance itself a trap? Screaming Butterflies Theatre’s latest production asks these and many more thoughtful, urgent questions about identity, community, and performance, both on stage and in reality. Their rendition of The Prince is a philosophically urgent show that – thanks to direction that choregraphs its chaos, actors who inhabit nuanced roles, and exciting production design – also manages to be one heck of a nonstop fun ride.

Through an inventive combination of performance art, design, music, and deeply personal storytelling, eSe Teatro has created a piece that doesn't merely ask us to observe someone else's grief, but invites us to recognize something of our own within it. It's an experience that can be funny, confusing, heartbreaking, and ultimately transformative, much like grief itself. And while the title insists that we shouldn't call it a journey, what Julieta Vitullo and Iveliz Martel have created is a powerful reminder that grief isn't defined by where it takes us, but by how profoundly it changes us along the way.

Anyone looking for page-by-page fidelity to Bram Stoker’s novel has wandered into the wrong version of Dracula. But anyone willing to watch a bunch of good actors take a series of increasingly silly turns at one of literature’s most familiar horror stories should find plenty to sink their teeth into. Farce, melodrama, parody, whatever label one chooses, Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors is a wonderfully unserious and thoroughly fun way to spend a few hours with the world’s most famous vampire.

Sound Theatre Company’s References to Salvador Dalí Make Me Hot may tell its story through talking animals, a guitar-playing Moon, and the surreal landscape of José Rivera’s imagination, but its greatest strength is how deeply human Colin Hovde and his cast make it all feel. It combines a cast who, through humor and sensuality, give the fantasy life, while also providing the emotional weight that brings everything back to earth, and a design team that makes the shifts between reality and magical realism feel natural. This is an imaginative, beautifully acted production that understands the strange world Rivera creates is ultimately just another way of exploring something very real, what happens when two people who have both changed must decide whether there is still a life they can share.

The ultimate trick of this play is that the worse Nothing’s On becomes, the better Noises Off has to be performed. Renton Civic Theatre has assembled an ensemble capable of making chaos look spontaneous while keeping enough control underneath it to land the joke. By the time the final act arrives and everything has completely fallen apart, there is little point trying to decide who is funniest. The whole thing has gone off the rails…and everyone aboard is hilarious.

Linda Vista doesn't ask anyone to excuse Wheeler, rather it asks that he be understood, which is considerably more difficult. And for those of us who recognize a little of our own generation in him, perhaps a little more uncomfortable as well. The set is funny enough to make us drop our guard. The spike lands because of it.

Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the Seattle Rep production of Eureka Day is that it never makes its characters easy to categorize. They are funny, occasionally ridiculous, sometimes infuriating, and ultimately recognizable. Even when the play appears to be setting someone up as the obvious target, it eventually finds a way to complicate that judgment. That’s important because Eureka Day isn’t really a play about whether vaccines work. It’s about what happens to a community when the people within it no longer share an agreed-upon way of determining what is true.

Witch is a genre-bending triumph that manages to be simultaneously hilarious, heartbreaking, and deeply unsettling. By breathing vital new life into a forgotten Jacobean classic, Jen Silverman has crafted a dark comedy that refuses to offer easy answers about morality, choice, or redemption. It is a production that lingers in the mind long after the final blackout, challenging us to look closely at our own modern compromises. PACP players do a wonderful job conveying this message loud and clear.

Assassins is funny until suddenly it isn’t, which is precisely why it resonates. Red Curtain Foundation’s production understands that Steven Sondheim and John Weidman aren’t simply presenting a collection of disturbed people from American history. They are examining the anger, entitlement, loneliness and desperation that allow people to convince themselves that an extraordinary act of violence might somehow fix an ordinary life. Director Scott Randall wraps that idea in carnival lights, games and music, inviting us onto the midway before gradually revealing what the prizes actually cost.

The American Dream runs throughout Ragtime, but the musical is less interested in whether that dream exists than in who gets to pursue it, who gets to define it and who controls the door. Village Theatre’s production understands that question. It also understands that history isn’t something done to ordinary people by the names that eventually appear in textbooks. It is created by ordinary people, one choice, one prejudice, one act of courage and one generation at a time. And perhaps that is why, 250 years into the American experiment, Ragtime feels less like a history lesson than a mirror.

Ballyhoo Theatre set out to avoid giving audiences just another Cabaret, and it has certainly accomplished that. Its Black Box approach is both the production’s defining idea and its most significant obstacle, sometimes sacrificing the immersive world necessary to feel fascism gradually tightening its grip. But there is also a great deal here that works, the individual musical performances, inventive choreography, strong design work and an exceptional orchestra. And when the production reaches its final moments, imagination is no longer required. The message, and the terrible human cost behind it, could not be clearer.

Underneath the sequins and stage names, this Much Ado makes a quietly urgent argument about the spaces we build to survive. It reminds us that the people who fight hardest out in the world need somewhere to come home to, and that a community's real test lies in how it repairs the harm done within its own walls. As Jo Jo Stiletto writes in the program, "let's always remember that we are the only love gods."

I went in to the show expecting something unserious and while it was, the professional passion that lies within the playwriting met with how the artistic team poured into this production, “Fallen Angels” at the Jewel Box Theatre is a smashing success! Catch them in their final weekend before they close this Sunday, September 27th, 2026.

What makes Conscience so unsettlingly effective in 2026 is that it’s not simply a play about McCarthyism or a courageous senator from Maine who chose to challenge it. It is about how easily fear can overwhelm fact, how quickly political self-preservation can replace principle, and how much courage it can take for one person to finally say enough. Karen and her cast don’t need to manufacture contemporary relevance for DiPietro’s play. History, unfortunately, has taken care of that for them. Conscience may take place more than seven decades ago, but sitting in the Jewell Mainstage today, it can feel uncomfortably like watching the evening news.

“A Chorus Line” at the Fifth Avenue Theatre is a must not miss as usual. The dancing, professional standard and caliber of talent will leave you in awe. Chasse your way over and don’t miss it before it closes this Sunday!

The Chinese Lady is funny, intimate, and increasingly hard to watch, not because the production falters, but because it becomes more honest as it proceeds. Afong Moy begins by displaying herself to the audience, but by the end, it is the audience that has been placed on display. The reflection offered by this production may span nearly two centuries, but what looks back at us remains unmistakably contemporary.

First published in 1950, this story comes from “the Queen of crime” Agatha Christie, and anyone familiar with her work knows they are in for an evening of lies, deceit, and more than likely a dead body (or two). As a longtime Christie fan, I knew we would be in for a great story, but what the audience got on opening night was a crisp and efficient staging of a clever murder mystery.

Les Misérables asks whether compassion can overcome injustice and whether love can transform a life. Tacoma Musical Playhouse’s production understands that those questions matter only when the audience believes completely in the people asking them. This cast and creative team accomplish that through exceptional voices, fully committed acting and a production in which every technical and artistic element works toward the same purpose. If this was Jon Douglas Rake’s final selection for the theatre he founded, it is difficult to imagine a more fitting tribute. This Les Misérables is not merely one of Tacoma Musical Playhouse’s strongest productions; it is the finest work I have seen on its stage.

Vashon Repertory Theatre’s production understands that the most effective way to make that argument isn’t by overwhelming the audience with theatricality. Directors Charlotte Tiencken and Lisa Peretti keep the storytelling direct, allowing the actors to make something written about constitutional amendments feel distinctly human. In doing so, the production returns repeatedly to the question contained in the title. What the Constitution means isn’t necessarily the same thing to everyone, and perhaps the most important part of the question is continuing to ask it.