World City Guide

Culture

Despite the economic downturn, Seattle has more cultural construction projects underway than any other urban area in the USA, including a controversially designed, new downtown central library – the work of architect Rem Koolhaas. The city’s average arts events attendance tops five million and it has the highest per-capita dance attendance in the country. Seattle boasts 29 professional theatre companies, 56 fringe theatre companies and seven theatre schools, more than 80 live music clubs, 15 symphony orchestras, ten major art and cultural heritage museums and 190 private art galleries.

Although Seattle’s theatre scene is considered one of the most dynamic in the USA, natives notably prefer homegrown culture to that from outside the state and a look through the city’s listing and review tabloids will not, in all likelihood, produce names that most visitors will have heard of. Exceptions are the internationally acclaimed Pacific Northwest Ballet, glass art’s Dale Chihuly, maestro Gerard Schwarz, Kurt Cobain’s widow Courtney Love of Hole, sax man Kenny G, actor Tom Skerritt and writers Ann Rule and Tom Robbins. British author Michael Dibdin has made Seattle his home and travel writer Jonathan Raban also lives in the Pacific Northwest.

The Seattle Opera’s season runs from August to May and both the Pacific Northwest Ballet and the Seattle Repertory Theatre run from October to May. All three perform at the Seattle Center. The Seattle Symphony Orchestra plays from September to June, at Benaroya Hall.

Ticketmaster (tel: (206) 628 0888; website: www.ticketmaster.com) sells tickets to all cultural events in Seattle, as does Pacific Northwest Ticket Service (tel: (800) 281 0753; website: www.nwtix.com), while Ticket Window (tel: (206) 325 6500; website: www.ticketwindowonline.com) sells half-price, day-of-show tickets to theatre, music, comedy and dance events. Listings can be found in the free tabloids, The Weekly and The Stranger.

Music: The Northwest Chamber Orchestra (tel: (206) 343 0445; website: www.nwco.org) performs everything from Beethoven and Mozart to Debussy, at various venues and locations in the city, some of them open parks. Philharmonia Northwest (tel: (206) 675 9727; website: www.philharmonianw.org) performs at its downtown venue, the Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Avenue, as well as St Stephen’s Episcopal Church, 4805 NE 45th Street (tel: (206) 522 7144; fax: (206) 524 4209; website: http://st.stephens-seattle.org). The Seattle Choral Company (tel: (206) 363 1100; website: www.seattlechoralcompany.org) performs seasonal music events in various venues throughout the city, while the Seattle Opera Company (tel: (206) 389 7600; website: www.seattleopera.org) performs at the Seattle Center Opera House, 321 Mercer Street, in the Seattle Center (tel: (206) 389 7676; e-mail: tickets@seattleopera.org). The Seattle Symphony Orchestra (tel: (206) 215 4700; fax: (206) 215 4701; e-mail: info@seattlesymphony.org; website: www.seattlesymphony.org) offers a wide range of musical events at Benaroya Hall, 200 University Street, Downtown (tel: (206) 215 4747; website: www.benaroyahall.com).

Theatre: Performances of popular Broadway hits are on offer at the Paramount Theatre, 907 Pine Street (tel: (206) 682 1414; website: www.theparamount.com), all year round. Other classics can be caught at the Fifth Avenue Musical Theatre, 1308 Fifth Avenue (tel: (206) 625 1900; website: www.5thavenuetheatre.org). More contemporary work can be seen at The Empty Space Theatre, 3509 Fremont Avenue North (tel: (206) 547 7500; website: www.emptyspace.org), Theater Schmeater, 1500 Summit Avenue (tel: (206) 325 6500; website: www.schmeater.org), and the Intiman Theatre, 201 Mercer Street (tel: (206) 269 1900; website: www.intiman.org), at the Seattle Center. The biggest theatre company, the Seattle Repertory Theatre (tel: (206) 443 2222; website: www.seattlerep.org), plays at the Bagley Wright Theater, 155 Mercer Street, in the Seattle Center. The Seattle Children’s Theatre is at Second Avenue North and Thomas Street (tel: (206) 441 3322; website: www.sct.org), in the Charlotte Martin Theatre, Seattle Center.

Dance: The Century Ballroom, 915 East Pine Street (tel: (206) 324 7263; website: www.centuryballroom.com), specialises in salsa and swing dancing. The world-renowned Pacific Northwest Ballet (tel: (206) 441 2424; website: www.pnb.org) is based at the Seattle Center Opera House, 301 Mercer Street, in the Seattle Center.

Film: Cinerama, 2100 Fourth Avenue (tel: (206) 441 3080 or (206) 441 3653), a retro, restored theatre with state-of-the-art sound, shows mainstream American films and is also a major venue during the Seattle Film Festival. Pacific Place, Sixth Avenue and Pine Street (tel: (206) 652 2404), is another mainstream multiplex. Foreign and alternative cinemas tend to be screened in Capitol Hill venues, such as the Harvard Exit, 807 East Roy Street (tel: (206) 323 8986), and the Landmark Egyptian, 801 East Pine Street (tel: (206) 323 4978). The best-known Seattle-based film, Sleepless in Seattle (1993), starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, was set in a Lake Union houseboat.

Cultural events: The Folklife Festival (tel: (206) 684 7300; website: www.nwfolklife.org) is an international cultural celebration of note, taking place in various venues of the Seattle Center, over Memorial Day weekend, at the end of May. There are roughly 1000 performances, representing 100 countries and presenting traditional and ethnic dance, music and storytelling. Visual arts and folklore exhibits highlight the work of many Northwest communities, in particular the Native American. Seattle also has an International Film Festival (tel: (206) 324 9996; website: www.seattlefilm.com), which takes at various cinemas around the city, in May and June.

Literary Notes
As part of the Wild West and the Alaskan Gold Rush and the subsequent lack of intellectual investment, Seattle is not known for its literary history until the Beat generation of the 1950s onwards. Writer Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) lived here briefly, while Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) passed through after a three-month stint as a fire-watcher in the Cascades, in 1956. Poet Theodore Roethke taught at the University of Washington, along with native Seattle writer Richard Hugo and the more famous Raymond Carver, who once lived on the Olympic Peninsula.

The best-known Seattle-based popular novelist is Tom Robbins, author of Another Roadside Attraction (1971) and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976). British travel writer and novelist Jonathan Raban lives in the Pacific Northwest and has written extensively about the area, as well as Seattle itself, particularly in Passage to Juneau (1999), where he makes wry observations on the ‘Scandinavian rectitude’ of the natives. This Boy’s Life (1989) was Tobias Wolff’s story of his childhood in a small town north of Seattle, which was made into a movie starring Ellen Barkin and Robert De Niro in 1993. David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars (1994) was set in the misty San Juan Islands and was recently made into a film. Annie Dillard wrote The Living (1992), a romantic tale of the Pacific Northwest, set in the late 19th century.

There are an increasing number of crime writers using Seattle as a setting. Best known is Native American writer Sherman Alexie, whose book, Indian Killer (1996), concerns the serial murder of scalped white men in the city, contrasted against the trendy coffee bars and misty scenery. Curiously, the Seattle area has also launched internationally known, offbeat contemporary cartoonists, such as Lynda Barry (Ernie Pook’s Comeek), Matt Groenig (originator of The Simpsons), and Gary Larson.