Mr. Scatter anticipates an evening of answering doorbells and dispensing mass quantities of solidified high fructose corn syrup when the lights go down tonight. But there are other, possibly better, ways to celebrate Fright Night. A visual selection, not one of which has to do with overturning outhouses:
Miracle Theatre Group’s original Day of the Dead [...]
My younger Large Smelly Boy plans birthday parties with the frightening precision of an engineer. Felix Unger? Meet Martha Stewart.
He begins months in advance, poring over magazines and listing all the activities he wants to do and all the recipes he wants to make. He redoes his lists. He designs his invitations. He insists it [...]
Sartre’s “No Exit” on the tilt, at Imago Theatre. Photo: Jerry Mouawad
Who wrote that play?
I don’t mean, did the modestly talented actor Will Shakespeare really write all those great stageworks, or was he just a convenient front man for Edward de Vere or some other dandy of the ruling class?
I mean, is the production you [...]
Haiqiong Deng, zheng (but not Dungeons & Dragons) virtuoso.
While my brain has been on sizzle in other realms of the arts world, apparently a blog has been going on in my own house. The entire world can check in on what my current first husband has been up to, but I’m afraid to say I’ve [...]
Art Scatter’s indefatigable chief dance correspondent Martha Ullman West, fresh from a sojourn in the Big Apple, hit the ground running on her return to Portland. In a week and a half she took in the Northwest Dance Project’s fall show, White Bird’s presentation of the Hofesh Shechter Company, Jim McGinn and Carla Mann’s “Exquisite [...]
For every now, there is a then. China, of course, has many thens, but two are on my mind right now: the then of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which might have outdone Stalin in its attempt to eradicate culture and replace it with ideology; and the then of the big melt, which began with Mao’s death [...]
A moment, please, to remember comedian Soupy Sales, who is with us no more, although the image of whipped cream cascading thickly from some passing celebrity’s pie-toss’d kisser remains vivid in our mind’s eye.
Sales, born Milton Supman on Jan. 8, 1926, in Franklinton, North Carolina, reportedly tossed 20,000 pies into the pusses of willing victims [...]
This morning I discovered that the venerable (blogospherically speaking) PDX Writer Daily has closed shop and many of its perpetrators have begun a magazine, Propeller.
A project of the Portland State University Writing Center, PDX Writer Daily had taken a long summer sabbatical that stretched into fall, and so I hadn’t checked it in a while.
The [...]
UPDATE: The Oregonian’s Marty Hughley has posted a terrific, insightful review of of “August: Osage County” on Oregon Live. Give it a read.
There are many wonderful things about Steppenwolf Theatre’s touring production of Tracy Letts‘ August: Osage County, which opened Tuesday night at Keller Auditorium as part of Portland Opera’s Broadway Across America series. One [...]
UPDATE: Also read David Stabler’s feature on Stephen Marc Beaudoin’s adaptation of “The Beggar’s Opera” in Tuesday’s Oregonian. David digs a little more deeply into the social politics of the adaptation. See his story here on Oregon Live, or with bigger versions of Brian Lee’s rehearsal photos in The O’s dead-tree edition.
ABOVE: William Hogarth, “The [...]