📅 Saturday, September 23rd
⏰ 7:30 pm
📍 Town Hall Seattle: 1119 8th Ave, Seattle
Bushwick Book Club Seattle is a stable of songwriters and composers who all approach one book at a time from different angles and styles, creating a unique collection of literary songs at each performance. (The original Bushwick Book Club started in the Brooklyn neighborhood of the same name; there are chapters all over the place now.) They’re kicking off an all-animal 2023-2024 season with Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White and “musical meditations on change and humanity.”
In case you’re somehow unfamiliar, Charlotte’s Web is the tale of a runt piglet named Wilbur who is saved from slaughter and bottle-raised by a young girl only to grow up and end up on a farm where he might get slaughtered anyway. He befriends a genius, literate spider named Charlotte, who uses a series of apparent miracles to inspire humans to spare him one day at a time.
There’s a lot of really heavy fodder here for a child’s chapter book: the constant threat of violent death for the main protagonist, sticky questions about what makes a life worth preserving, and a close confrontation of our place in the food chain. The first line is “where’s papa going with that ax,” for chrissakes. The performance is not specifically made for children, but not not for children.
Relatedly: Like many Town Hall events, it’s free for attendees age 22 and under.
