To paraphrase Robert Wuhl as the wacky minor-league coach in the fabulous baseball movie Bull Durham (he was actually talking about working at Sears):  Theories suck, man. Sell Lady Kenmores. At least, that’s my theory after a weekend of theatergoing that included Candide at Portland Opera and Stephen Jeffreys’ adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times [...]

By Patrick Collier Editor’s Note: On his travels around Portland’s galleries and museum, Patrick Collier often sees a narrative or a common theme develop between individual pieces of work from different exhibits. “Spot On” is a new feature that will explore these stories and notions. In her book, “A World of Fragile Things,” Mari Ruti writes, [...]

      As Alexander Lingas beheld the shattered remains of San Francisco’s Annunciation Cathedral, devastated in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake a few months earlier, he wanted to help. The singer had moved to the city in June 1990 with his new wife, Ann, a violinist who was studying at the Conservatory of Music. [...]

What the Beach Boys’ never-quite-realized Smile album was to the 1960s, Candide was to the preceding decade. Notoriously burdened since its 1956 birth by a clunky book — actually books, since it was revised so many times that most of Lillian Hellman’s original material vanished, depending on which version is staged — Candide seems to [...]

Portland Opera revives its 2002 production of Leonard Bernstein’s 1957 operetta Candide at Keller Auditorium Friday and Sunday, and the run continues next Thursday and Saturday. It contains some of Bernstein’s — which is to say some of America’s – greatest music. However, the book has always presented problems, and the show has gone through a bewildering [...]

What in modern life is more deeply and thrillingly superficial than the movies, which seem so realistic and profound yet are merely light and shadow dancing on a flat surface? They transfix us, transport us, edify and irritate us with their virtual nothingness. Movies are dream-extensions of our imaginations, realer than reality yet always also [...]

The weekend is upon us, and it’s promising to be a relative sizzler, and not just because Imago is opening a weird, erotic thriller by Yukio Mishima, either. Oh no. There’s that little matter of “Candide” at the opera, too, a delightful bit of satire and musical razzmatazz (which Ron Chan captured above during a [...]

Ever since I saw that Imago’s Jerry Mouawad was going to take on Yukio Mishima’s The Black Lizard, I’ve been curious. Mouawad has spent the past few years exploring wordless but theatrical movement, and he’s breaking his silence for Mishima’s detective play, itself an adaptation of an earlier novel. Mishima being Mishima, The Black Lizard [...]

Avant cellist Zoe Keating performs at the Shedd in Eugene and the Aladdin Theater in Portland this weekend. This weekend is so packed with terrific music that when OAW’s James McQuillen and I compared notes on the eight Portland concerts we’re covering this weekend, we discovered that there was no overlap — and that, sadly, [...]

  Last month, we broke the news about the retirement of Portland Columbia Symphony Orchestra music director Huw Edwards and the death of Oregon Chamber Players and Junior Symphony of Vancouver founder Timoteus Racz. Now comes news that Willamette Week performance editor Ben Waterhouse, who has anchored the paper’s theater criticism for the past six [...]