Upcoming Captioned Performances at Paramount Theatre
Seattle's Paramount Theatre, which pioneered open-captioned performances in the Northwest, will offer three captioned productions in the next six weeks.
This Sunday, Jan. 24, at 6:30 p.m., the captioned production will be Xanadu, a roller-skating pop-rock confection best known as a 1980s movie starring Olivia Newton-John. The music comes from Jeff Lynne, the under-appreciated leader of the Electric Light Orchestra. (You'll recognize the tunes even if you don't recognize the name). Tickets are available on-line at a special price of $38.50.
On Valentine's Day, Sunday Feb. 14, again at 6:30 p.m., the captioned production will be Annie, the musical re-creation of the long-running comic strip about a red-headed moppet and her dog Sandy. It was the longest-running comic strip ever, and one of the longer-running shows on Broadway, logging well over 2,000 performances. Again, tickets are available on-line for $38.50.
Then on Sunday, March 7, at 6:30 p.m., Paramount will do a captioned version of Chicago, a musical originally choreographed by Bob Fosse which was made into an Academy Award-winning movie and which is now back on stage. Here's a link to on-line ticket-purchasing, and the price again is $38.50.
Paramount is offering two other Broadway musicals in the Spring -- Dreamgirls in April and Fiddler on the Roof in May. Dreamgirls, based essentially on the rise to fame of The Supremes, became a critically acclaimed movie starring Beyonce Knowles and Jennifer Hudson, while Fiddler is the much-beloved recreation of life in a Jewish shtetl in the last century. No word yet on whether those productions will have a captioned performance, but assuming Paramount adheres to the pattern of captioning the last Sunday evening performance, the dates would be April 11 for Dreamgirls and May 30 for Fiddler.
For the open-captioned performances, the captions are prepared in advance, and are displayed on a small reader-board placed in front of the stage on the right edge. Tickets purchased through the open-caption links will be in an area where both the captions and the on-stage action can be seen with minimal head-turning. Paramount began offering one captioned performance of each of its Broadway offerings in August of 2008 at the request of the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP). Since then, Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre and Seattle Repertory Theatre have also begun offering captioned performances.
