A host of clowns and colorful performers prepare a pair of shows to support the international aid group. Plus: Shakespeare north & south, “Yohen,” “Nassim,” Laurie Anderson, “Resurrection,” and more.
Bobby Bermea: Promising writer and recent high school grad Evan McCreary gets a weekend of readings at IFCC with talent and a little help from his older friends.
Imago’s playful costumed critters return for a welcome holiday run, this time with some zebras joining the menagerie. Plus Fuse’s “Great White,” Bridgetown’s “Orphan Boy,” a national look at OSF’s leadership switch, last chances & more.
Portland Center Stage sinks its teeth into a “Dracula” with feminist flair. Plus: It’s open (holiday) season with a musical “Wonderful Life,” a visit to Whoville, a comic Christmas tea.
Dmae Lo Roberts talks in her new podcast with Jerry Foster, leader of the Black theater company PassinArt, about staging Langston Hughes’ gospel musical version of the Nativity story.
21ten’s “Taking Care of Animals” is a big show in a small space. Plus: a snowflurry of holiday shows, from Scrooge to Rudolph to “Black Nativity” and more.
“The fundamentals of the economy are getting stronger, but people are still skittish” – and theater companies are suffering for it. Plus: Anonymous Theatre plays Pirate.
Ownership of the longtime Black arts center is transferred, and PassinArt Theatre will become a major decision-maker.
Dmae Lo Roberts talks with the celebrated actress and playwright, who will be in Portland for PassinArt Theatre’s Pacific NW Multicultural Festival Aug. 17-20.
Plus: Washougal Art and Music Festival, PassinArt’s festival of multicultural play readings and films.
Matthew Lopez’ two-part drama reimagines “Howards End” as a gay New York saga. Plus openings, closings, a big theater bash, and a new leader for Oregon Children’s Theatre.
PassinArt dives into the musicality of the great American playwright. Also: Black & blue, Borges & Neruda, Bill Wadhams’ musical memoir, Red Door’s “Evolve.”
Imago’s magical menagerie of costumed critters returns to the stage. Plus Dickens and C.S. Lewis and even Neil Simon.
Holiday shows dominate December’s theater calendar, with good cheer and comedy and a few dark edges to keep you on your toes.
Suddenly it’s time for theatrical good cheer, from Tiny Tim to a Wonderful Life to a PDX musical – plus Corrib’s foray into an intense virtual future.
“King of the Yees” and “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord” headline a week that also includes black comedy, a “Blink,” and a “Zooman.”
In a busy theater week, Artists Rep’s “Hombres” nears the end of a sparkling run and promising productions pop up all over town.
Portland Playhouse opens a comedy set at a funeral in a Black church. But does the play move beyond sitcom platitudes?
When lead actor Richie Stone in Broadway Rose’s musical “The Evolution of Mann” is sidelined by Covid, director Isaac Lamb takes the stage for opening night.
A revival of a sharp and probing solo drama shows another side from “The Princess Bride.” Also: comedy improv, Hammerstein vs. Hart, more.
Rounding up the news from celebrations of life to a theater’s stolen computers to free Beethoven in Washington Park.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Appropriate” spins the word through all of its many meanings, cultural, racial, and personal. Plus openings and closings.
A month to focus on Asian American culture, Betty LaDuke in Grants Pass and Lillian Pitt in Newport, PassinArt and Center Stage party down, legislators join the Cultural Trust.
How should audience members act and react in the theater? Who gets to decide? As the Oregon Shakespeare Festival reopens, the questions rise anew.
Corrib’s “Maz & Bricks” deftly juggles formula and function; young actors go lawless; “Thurgood” heads to the finish line.
Amid a year of cultural clashes over who belongs, artists in Oregon thought big, told untold stories, and spread the creative net wide.
ArtsWatch Weekly: As Covid ebbs and flows, arts & culture find fresh form – and Oregon stories arrive in a rush.
PassinArt’s Pacific Northwest Multi-Cultural Festival serves a virtual feast of stories by and for artists of color.
ArtsWatch Weekly: In praise of the beloved actor and teacher, dead at 67. Plus: Healing art, stage & screen, more.
ArtsWatch Weekly: Storm Large and 3 Leg Torso make a movie, Chamber Music NW goes live, the Joy of words.
ArtsWatch Weekly: Portland Oscar nod; Dawson Carr’s big day; dance dive; laureate speaks; big BRAVO.
ArtsWatch Weekly: A year into shutdown, signs of revival: Stimulus aid for the arts, museums reopening, a theater with an audience of 1 to 5.
Dmae Roberts moves her essential performance podcast to ArtsWatch. Up first: Costumer deluxe Wanda Walden.
With stages shut down, the work’s stopped cold. Performing artists wonder: Can the fire be relighted?
For almost four decades the leaders of PassinArt have forged a strong path for Black theater in Portland.
“Melancholy Play” is a whimsical reminder that sometimes you feel like a nut. Plus: holiday treats and Portland theater Christmas stuffing.
It’s 1949, in the Jim Crow town of Halifax, North Carolina, and a private atrocity that threatens to destroy a close-knit family is going down. It’s 2014, in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, and a white cop shoots and kills
What’s up at the theater? Funny you should ask. Last May a wonderfully peculiar vision flew onto the Portland theater scene, and far too quickly, before all but a few people had had a chance to see it, flew off again. Well,
And lo, on the third day of the New Year, a great clamor fell upon the multitude, and the dread Pealing of the Four Minutes rang out, and the people scurried from line to line, taking their spots in the sun, pitching
Fifty-seven years ago, Langston Hughes, Alvin Ailey and Carmen de Lavallade decided the world needed a celebration of Christmas apart from re-runs of It’s A Wonderful Life and myriad adaptations of A Christmas Carol and The Nutcracker in various mediums. What was
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! If you’re into that sort of thing. Tradition holds that the next few weeks will be dominated by Christmas cheer — and likely by Christmas hype, Christmas stress, and when it comes to the
It’s not quite summer, but it’s festival season – and Wilsonville, just a short skip south of Portland on the freeway, is leading the charge. Coming up Saturday and Sunday, June 2-3, is this year’s Wilsonville Festival of Arts, which will spread
Caroline, or change? Pretend. Play-acting. Make believe. The actor’s art is a curious challenge: Use your heart and mind, body and soul, to appear to be someone else. Fine actors do it often. And yet, something in that seeming contradiction at the
Don’t look now, but the two-ton elephant’s about to plop down in the living room. That’s right: Hamilton, the touring version of the Broadway mega-hit, opens on Tuesday, March 20, in Portland’s Keller Auditorium for 24 performances through April 8, and if
“I want my ham!” a fellow named Hambone shouts as he stands near the entrance of Memphis Lee’s diner in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. He pauses, gathers energy, then shouts again, louder and more intense this time, in a voice that
We’re in the middle of August Wilson Week in Portland, which is a very good place to be. On Friday, PassinArt: A Theatre Company opens the great American playwright’s Two Trains Running at the Interstate Firehouse Center. On Monday evening before a
I’ve been writing some nice things lately about actors. Maybe more than before, but no less truthful. Lest you think me a suckup, let’s settle the scales. Here are a few current and soon-to-open plays that may be great for all the
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