Paul Havas, the formidable painter of Skagit Valley landscapes, has a seminal show this month at the Woodside/Braseth Gallery. The new paintings show a calmer, more confident artist, no longer shrouding his scenery in mists and fog but giving them stronger light, cleaner lines and evanescent reflections of sheds and cabins on the ponds and backwaters of the valley floor and coastal estuaries.

Havas graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University in 1962 and earned a Master's from the University of Washington in 1965. He lives in Madrona and paints urban scenes as well: shaded staircases and dappled passageways. But his new landscapes, flecked with birds and distant human figures, show a new focus on light and shadow, form and reflection.

"I actively look for painting sites, for places or subjects that might trigger my interest," Havas says. "Sometimes it seems they find me, the unplanned glimpse through piers of a bridge or the reflections of a window on a black piano. If I see a hint of color from some electric light, I just take off." Still, his most profound inspriation seems to come from minutely observed elements--a cannery, an oyster shed, a barn, a flight of gulls--beneath the great cloudscapes of northwestern Washington. In tender greens and opaque whites, Havas creates an idealized world of stillness and peace.

Woodside/Braseth Gallery, 2101 9th Ave., 206-622-7243, 11 am-6 pm Tuesday-Saturday.

Terry Avenue Building. Photo courtesy of Vulcan Real Estate

The shoe has dropped: Seattle restaurant entrepreneur Tom Douglas has finally confirmed what everyone suspected for months: his next restaurant(s) will be in South Lake Union. Cornichon anticipated the news in a report on the neighborhood back in January.

Douglas is going to open at least one restaurant in the historic Terry Avenue Building, a former truck factory from the early 1900s between Thomas and Harrison, surrounded by the rising concrete bookends that Vulcan Real Estate is building for Amazon.com's headquarters campus, around the corner from the new.Flying Fish location.

"It's an exciting area full of new opporutnities for us that we couldn't pass up," Douglas says. No names announced yet for the restaurants to be housed in the two-story building, which will be completely renovated inside but maintain its landmark brick exterior and connect to an outdoor plaza and streetscape.

The new Amazon.com campus includes 11 buildings (totalling 1.7 million square feet) on 6 blocks in the heart of South Lake Union. The first space will open next month with full occupancy by 2013.

"South Lake Union has become a true extension of downtown with lively shops and restaurants, a diversity of housing, vibrant parks and world-class employers who call the area home," says Vulcan's Robert Arron, adding that the Tom Douglas restaurants "will further activate the exciting retail landscape...attracting even more new amenities and visitors to the area."

The City's "Terry Avenue Street Design Guidelines" [PDF] draw on the rich historic character of Terry Avenue to create a new type of street where pedestrians have priority on 31-foot sidewalks enhanced with benches, trees, and bike racks. Vulcan sees similarities to Portland's Pearl District and Vancouver's Yaletown, and hopes that the pedestrian-friendly elements being incorporated along Terry Avenue will create "a lively retail corridor that accommodates pedestrians, bicyclists, cars...and the streetcar line."

As for the restaurants, whatever they turn out to be, Vulcan is delighted. "We're positively thrilled to welcome Tom Douglas to South Lake Union, and his new restaurants will contribute greatly to the neighborhood's growing retail district.," said Vulcan VP Ada Healey.

Giuseppe Verdi's final opera, Falstaff, composed when he was 80, has no great melodic lines, triumphal marches or consumptive heroines; at its center there is only a drunken old man who imagines himself a seducer. Falstaff's lack of self-awareness permeates the opera and gives it broad brushes of comedy. Handsome once, he has grown grotesque and fat, yet not without wit ("I am in the waist two yards about; but I am now about no waste; I am about thrift"--and "If Falstaff were thin, no one would love him"). He behaves like a boor; oblivious to his own hypocriscy, and lectures his servants about "honor."

It's Verdi's only comic opera, based on Shakespeare (mostly The Merry Wives of Windsor, with bits of Falstaff's character adapted from the Henry plays), and it uses sprightly.language and brilliant orchestration to tell the story or Falstaff's comeuppance.

The current Seattle Opera production is homegrown. Originally designed by Peter Kazaras three years ago for the company's Young Artists program, it migrated to Los Angeles and Cleveland before returning to Seattle, where the set needed only a slight stretch to span the proscenium at McCaw. It's a stylized version of the Globe in London, with a raked stage bordered by bleachers, where the singers retreat when they're not performing. In the third act, a cantilevered cloud of chairs descends to create a stylized forest.

As always Jonathan Dean's supratitles capture the essence of the Italian libretto, often returning to Shakespeare's original language for the perfect couplet. Under Riccardo Frizza's deft baton, the orchestra sounds like they're playing Mozart. Indeed Kazaras directed Seattle's staging of Marriage of Figaro last year with several similar scenes of letter-reading and singing at cross-purpose.

Peter Rose, whose previous appearance at McCaw was as a randy Baron Ochs in Rosenkavalier, triumphs in the title role, a sympathetic character despite his considerable flaws, surely not deserving of "death by a volley of turnips" but saved from drowning by his own swollen belly.

There's no curtain; the performers arrive in street clothes and change into costume in full view of the audience. Stephanie Blythe waves to her fans; Doug Jones is on a cellphone, Peter Rose puts on a preposterous fat suit (shades of Pagliacci's "Vesti la giuba"). And when all is said and sung (Falstaff properly humiliated and chastened, "I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass"), he leads them all in a cheerful chorus, "Tutti gabbati," Hah-hah, it was all a put-on! He who laughs last, laughs best.

It's the perfect opera for self-doubting Seattle in these angst-ridden times, full of linguistic curlicues and wink-&-nod references that we're all in on the joke.

Seattle Opera presents Falstaff at McCaw Hall through March 13, For tickets ($25-$168), call 206-623-0800 or go online..

Seattle Opera photos © Rosarii Lynch.