Sketching ‘Volcano!’ at the museum
ArtsWatch Weekly: Big crowds & small artists at the big boom, new art & dance, a fresh film fest.
ArtsWatch Weekly: Big crowds & small artists at the big boom, new art & dance, a fresh film fest.
Two women, in love — kissing even! “Indecent,” “Pipeline,” measuring “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”
Following up on Portland Art Museum’s $10 million Rothko Pavilion gift; a fond farewell to Vision 2020.
Stuck in an impeachment funk? Liberace, Liza, and a whole lot of holiday shows to reset the mood.
“Melancholy Play” is a whimsical reminder that sometimes you feel like a nut. Plus: holiday treats and Portland theater Christmas stuffing.
Frankenstein, Día de Muertos, tribute bands, dinosaurs, warps & wefts, a Dope Elf: Welcome to the art week.
“Women of Will,” a season-highlight at Portland Playhouse, charts Shakespeare’s growth through his female characters.
Same old story? Brash new wave? In Oregon this week, old and new and always mix it up.
“The Wolves” highlights a theater week that also includes the Mueller Report on stage and a Vertigo dark comedy.
The mirror crack’d: Art ripped from the anxieties and tensions of an unruly world at large.
Tigard’s Broadway Rose launches a $3 million expansion. Portland theater artists throw a party to buy a house.
Ex-“Live Wire” star Sean McGrath puts some sketch in his comedy. Plus “Hair” and other openings.
How are you feeling? Been to the doctor lately? How’s your health insurance? Uncovered emergency bills draining your wallet and shooting your blood pressure through the stratosphere? Go to the closest hospital instead of the in-network hospital for that medical emergency, and
A good play ought to grab its audience from the very top and take it for a ride. The way it grabs an audience can be as varied as a cowboy crooning from the wings about a beautiful morning (Oklahoma!) or a
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,
“Conceived and organized by the Portland Area Theater Alliance, Fertile Ground is a new, 10-day, city-wide festival dedicated to the creation and promotion of original works for the theater. Home-grown and wide-ranging, it both reflects and nurtures the creativity, aesthetic diversity and
When we say “hit parade,” that’s what we mean. In the first of a series of stories looking back on the highlights of 2018, these 25 tales were ArtsWatch’s most popular of the year, by the numbers: the most read, or the
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 an English teacher’s remit to analyse language, but pick apart every word of Shakespeare and you’ve dissected the butterfly – pretty in parts but a nonsensical whole and certainly unable to fly.” — Mark Powell, associate director of Salisbury Playhouse, in
With the premiere of A Midsummer Night at the Savoy, Rejoice! Diaspora Dance Theater has created something that feels both timely—touching on race and migration, two issues at the forefront of America’s collective consciousness—and timeless, in that it hopscotches across countries and
Someone is born, and someone dies. We know this, of course, as the essential arc of any human life. But we also tend to take particular note of these events when they occur to those around us, as part of the cyclical
“People talk about matters of Life and Death. But it’s really just Life, isn’t it. When you think about it.” So says Guy, the main character in the Will Eno play Wakey, Wakey, which on Saturday opens the 2018-’19 Portland Playhouse season.
There are those among us who — brace yourself for this — dislike musicals. Perhaps they hate them, with an active, withering passion, but more likely they simply dismiss the form altogether as sentimental or soapy or sappy or just stupid. Theater
The 2018 PAMTA awards, Portland’s annual celebration of its year in musical theater, swept into the Dolores Winningstad Theatre in downtown Portland Monday night like a showstopper tune. Big winners in the award ceremony, hosted by actor Darius Pierce, included outstanding original
Gabriel, blow your horn! Portland’s theater makers are a supportive lot, so it was no surprise that several prominent actors were in the audience at Portland Playhouse on the night last week that I went to see the current production of Fences.
“Let me tell you somethin’, boy. You never know what’s comin’ … and the sooner you learn that, the better off you be!” * A few years ago, when playwright Rich Rubin approached Damaris Webb about directing some of his work, she chose
“When Third Rail first came on the scene,” says Maureen Porter, “there was little else happening. It was a different scene and a different city.” So it was, back in 2005 when Third Rail Repertory Theatre — already a couple of years
America always struggles to reckon with its racist history. There’s a resistance to bringing up the past. As if history has no bearing on where we are today. As if those who suffered under slavery, or the Trail of Tears, or the
Portland Playhouse has emerged over the past decade as one of the city’s top theaters for a variety of reasons: energetic young leadership, an invitingly casual atmosphere, and early sponsorship that resulted in free beer. But you might think of it as
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
For YEARS, at multiple publications, I used to compile an overview of Fertile Ground titled “Fertile Ground Speaks for Itself,” wherein quips from the scripts submitted by their authors comprised the entire story, and I just formatted it. It is, after all,
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