Short Stories Live

Annette Toutonghi is delighted to return to Town Hall to perform with Short Stories Live. She is a Northwest-based actor and performer. Some past credits include the films Thin Skin, Brand Upon the Brain, Lane 1974, The Paper Tigers, and Little Potato Dreams of America, and HBO’s Three Busy Debras. She has performed with The Seattle Repertory Theatre, ACT Theatre, On the Boards, The Seattle Children’s Theatre, and many other theatres in the area. Voice-over credits include the title character from the award-winning Freddi Fish series.

Ian Bell is an actor, director, and producer. Ian created and hosted the series Seattle Confidential, which shared anonymously penned essays and monologues about the life experiences that unite us. Ian is the director and producer of the Brown Derby Series (soon to resume), presenting satirical staged readings of pop-culture screenplays with a counter-culture sensibility inspired by the Theatre of the Ridiculous. Ian directed Hedwig and the Angry Inch starring Jinkx Monsoon at the Moore Theatre in 2013. His decades-long career in Seattle theatre includes several shows at the Seattle Repertory Theatre, Re-bar, and Empty Space Theatre (where he earned a Garland Award from Backstage West for his portrayal of Mugsy in Patrick Maber’s Dealer’s Choice). Ian is a graduate of Bennington College.

From a very young age, Jose Gonzales had a creative curiosity. It all started with the piano where he cultivated a relationship with Bach, Chopin, Beethoven, and Joplin. Theater caught his attention in high school and after a summer session studying acting at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, he was inspired to get his BFA in Acting from Cornish College of the Arts, eventually performing as Franz Kaka in the Philip Glass opera In the Penal Colony at ACT and across the country. His jazz trio has become a Northwest favorite with their performance of Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas. While he has cultivated the creative soil in theater and music, he also cultivates the actual soil as a master gardener currently at the Seattle Japanese Garden in the Arboretum. Jose loves his piano, his wife Lisa, and his two kitties—not necessarily in that order.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle.