By Bob Hicks
The big cultural flap out of Washington, now that people have mostly moved on from the Smithsonian chief’s craven caving-in to reactionary blowhards over David Wojnarowicz’s ant-crawling video at the National Portrait Gallery, comes from the flip side of the channel: Rocco Landesman, boss of the National Endowment for the Arts, has been [...]
By Bob Hicks
Word started making the rounds last night about the list of finalists for this year’s Oregon Book Awards. Jeff Baker has the complete list in this morning’s Oregonian, along with the lowdown on how to vote for the special readers’ choice award. The ceremony will be April 25 at the Gerding Theater at [...]
By Bob Hicks
Down the street from my sister’s house, my home town is in the protracted process of acquiring a Folly.
Perhaps you’ve seen some on your travels to England: those little bursts of architectural whimsy sometimes found on the rolling estates of members of the minor nobility, cozy towering playhouses for the eccentrically and unaccountably [...]
By Martha Ullman West
For Mary Oslund, the child’s sense of infinite possibilities has never ended. How else could she have made Childhood Star, her stunningly beautiful new piece, in which she seamlessly mixes every form of movement that has touched her life as a dancer and choreographer?
Commissioned by White Bird, for which we owe [...]
By Bob Hicks
Once again Mr. Scatter has scarpered off to the rainy northlands, abandoning hearth and home and leaving Mrs. Scatter to the unruly task of caring for the Large Smelly Boys. (Two words, Mrs. Scatter: fumigation service.)
The wide world is cold and scary, and yet sometimes one can find one’s self at home in [...]
By Bob Hicks
When you see the killer-good performances in Artists Repertory Theatre’s current hit Superior Donuts, remember this: Tracy Letts is an actor. And when actors write plays, they write them with actors in mind.
Letts, the Steppenwolf Theatre stalwart who won the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize for his 2008 family drama August: Osage County, [...]
By Bob Hicks
And so it came to pass that on the first night, Mr. Scatter went to the opening of Moliere’s comedy The Imaginary Invalid at Portland Center Stage.
And on the second morning he got up, made coffee, and wrote his review, which was subsequently published (the review, not the coffee) in The Oregonian. And [...]
When Hollywood decides to depict a specific trade, dramatic license usually trumps veracity. Think all those cop movies truly depict an average day in the life and thinking of a policeman? How about the hilarious world of newspaper hacks in the likes of The Front Page? Black Swan, the new horror film with a ballet [...]
By Bob Hicks
Mr. Scatter spent his Friday and Saturday nights at the theater — first at Portland Center Stage, for the opening of its version of Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid; then at the little Shoebox Theater, where Twilight Repertory Theatre had just opened its own version of The Doctor Despite Himself. Two utterly different productions, [...]
By Bob Hicks
Two years ago, in this post, we passed along a few quotations from Martin Luther King Jr., whose spirit and birthday we celebrate today. In light of a frayed public discourse that verges on the ridiculous and the obscene, it seems an appropriate time to highlight King’s committed nonviolent approach to doing the [...]