Justin Carrell

This week, we go around our Broadway World to feature the top 10 stories in Norfolk, Cleveland, Austin and more. Check out featured list, which includes a 'chilling' THE PILLOWMAN in Maine, LUNA GALE at Cleveland Play House, and TARZAN at Georgetown Palace Theater, just to name a few.

In any given show you usually have the good guys and the bad guys. The people you identify with as being in the right and those in the wrong. But even when some people are clearly wrong it's possible to see why they react the way they do if the performances are strong enough. Such is the case with Sound Theatre Company's current production of “Parade” as the performances throughout are so clear and so strong that even those doing despicable and abhorrent things can seem reasonable, at least within their own ideologies.

Seattle Musical Theatre's 2015/2016 season roars to life with the high-voltage rock opera JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR, music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice. Seattle superstar Billie Wildrick makes her SMT directorial debut as director and will be joined by SMT Associate Music Consultant Brandon Peck as music director and BroadwayWorld Award-winning Troy Wageman as choreographer.

Seattle / Mainstreet Festival of New Musicals will take over Fremont's West of Lenin Theatre, presenting three brand new musicals, three late-night trivia cabarets, an evening of pitch sessions for fresh, up-and-coming musicals; and a final concert featuring all-Seattle talent performing pieces written by all-Seattle composers!

A New Brain was born when composer William Finn, just three days after winning the Tony Award for Falsettos in 1992, was hospitalized and operated on for a condition called arteriovenous malformation (AVM). It was upon his return home that he began writing songs about the experience; the energetic, sardonic, often comical musical, A New Brain, is the result.

A musical about imprisonment, homosexuality, fascist regimes, revolutionaries, morphine addiction and a movie star; must be Kander and Ebb because only they could pull it off so beautifully. But their "Kiss of the Spider Woman" is not often produced possibly due to its harsh themes but also that it's a very difficult show to stage and perform with its rich nuances. And while the current production at SecondStory Repertory has some wonderful performances, ultimately the choices and in some cases additions to the show made it lack the passion and danger the show needs to up the stakes of its story.

SecondStory Repertory will present Kander and Ebb's rarely produced masterpiece, Kiss of the Spider Woman, a sensual musical set all at once in the brutal reality of a Latin American prison, and in the airily glamorous world of the silver screen that plays endlessly in the mind of long-time prison inmate, Luis Alberto Molina. With a book by Terrence McNally, and based on the Manuel Puig novel 'El Beso de la Mujer Araña', Kiss of the Spider Woman won the 1993 Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Book, and Best Score. Running today, March 28 through April 13, 2014, Kiss of the Spider Woman is directed by Billie Wildrick who recently returned to Seattle after her Broadway debut in Kathy Lee Gifford's Scandalous.

SecondStory Repertory will present Kander and Ebb's rarely produced masterpiece, Kiss of the Spider Woman, a sensual musical set all at once in the brutal reality of a Latin American prison, and in the airily glamorous world of the silver screen that plays endlessly in the mind of long-time prison inmate, Luis Alberto Molina. With a book by Terrence McNally, and based on the Manuel Puig novel 'El Beso de la Mujer Araña', Kiss of the Spider Woman won the 1993 Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Book, and Best Score. Running March 28 through April 13, 2014, Kiss of the Spider Woman is directed by Billie Wildrick who recently returned to Seattle after her Broadway debut in Kathy Lee Gifford's Scandalous.

Sound Theatre Company continues their summer of provocative theatre with the Seattle premiere of Andrew Lippa's sexy and searing THE WILD PARTY, a musical inspired by Joseph Moncure March's banned 1928 poem about the excesses of the Jazz Age. For all who enjoy Rent or Chicago, this dark, erotic descent is a must-see.

Back-to-school is all about the kids, but this September, treat yourself to a grown-up evening out! Suitable strictly for ages 18 and over, The Wild Party is adapted from a book-length poem written during and about the Roaring Twenties. It tells the story of one wild evening in a Manhattan apartment and a party to end all parties.