“Seattle Vice: Strippers, Prostitution, Dirty Money, and Crooked Cops in the Emerald City.”
Playwright and producer Mark Siano updates Rick Anderson’s book to set the stage show in 1970s Seattle, running now at Triple Door
“Seattle Vice: Strippers, Prostitution, Dirty Money, and Crooked Cops in the Emerald City.”
Playwright and producer Mark Siano updates Rick Anderson’s book to set the stage show in 1970s Seattle, running now at Triple Door
“Seattle Vice: Strippers, Prostitution, Dirty Money, and Crooked Cops in the Emerald City.” Now that I have your attention, let me turn the attention to the stage adaptation of the book of the same name by the late journalist Rick Anderson.
Local director, playwright, and performer Mark Siano is reprising the stage adaptation of the book in Seattle Vice, running through this Saturday at Triple Door. Siano first adapted and produced the show in 2015 at ACT Theatre (now Union Arts Center) when the show was set in 1960s Seattle. The latest version is produced down Union Street in downtown Seattle and is set in the 1970s.
The show centers around strip club impresario Frank Colacurcio and Seattle’s sex industry. Siano cast local actors, including Opal Peachey as Rose Marie Williams (aka Madame Washington) and Ray Tagavilla as Colacurcio. Siano himself plays Gil Conte, a sometime lounge singer and Colacurcio’s driver and bagman. Katy Tabb directs and choreographs the show.
Madame Washington operated a brothel from her suburban home. Colacurcio operated clubs such as Rick’s in Lake City, the Firelite Room in Belltown, and Sugars in Shoreline. The show centers on Rick’s and the Firelite Room, along with Roger Forbes’s New Paris Theater in Pioneer Square.
Much of the sex industry in Seattle centered around 1st Avenue from Pike Street to Pioneer Square, including the shuttered Lusty Lady. This summer, the Lusty Lady building (aka the Seven Seas Building) will be open for private tours. The building has been closed to the public since 2010. (Editor’s note: The Lusty Lady and PublicDisplay.Art are both funded by the Conru Art Foundation.)
“You are now allowed to see nudity and have drinks. That was forbidden in Seattle until two years ago,” Siano explained. “We wanted to play with that. Why did Seattle not have that ability to drink alcohol and show partial nudity or full nudity?”
Siano was the public relations manager at ACT Theatre in 2014 when then-ACT Theatre artistic director Kurt Beattie recommended that Siano produce Anderson’s book for the stage.
“Beattie dropped the book on my desk and told me, 'I think you will enjoy adapting it to the stage,’” Siano said. “I pitched it to ACT Theatre, then I went to Rick and told him we want to adapt the book, and I asked him, ‘Do we have your blessings? Do you want some money for the rights?’
“He gave us his blessings. He also knew we didn't have any real money. He didn’t really want to be paid. We took different scenes from the book and adapted them for the stage. He sadly passed away a few years back, so now we’re taking the chapters of the book we didn’t touch and making a new show around them. These are all real clubs, real people who lived in our city, before the tech industry took over.”
