David Cooper/OSF
By Bob Hicks
The central problem for modern audiences in Shakespeare’s “problem play” Measure for Measure is this: Why doesn’t Isabella just give up her virginity to save her brother’s life? Offensive and transgressive as it would be — what the power-abusing Angelo essentially proposes is mercy at the price of rape — how, in [...]
By Bob Hicks
Many of you will remember Hans Holbein’s exquisite 1528 painting Madonna with Basel Mayer Jakob Meyer and His Family, often known as the Darmstadt Madonna, which was the centerpiece of the Portland Art Museum’s blockbuster exhibition Hesse: A Princely German Collection in 2005.
Judith H. Dobrzynski passes along the news on her blog Real [...]
Jenny Graham/OSF
By Bob Hicks
Sunday was one of those days when Ashland repays all its debts and reminds you why you make the pilgrimage in the first place. The Scatters did a two-fer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival: an enthralling Julius Caesar in the round at the compact New Theatre in the afternoon, a warm and [...]
T. Charles Erickson/OSF
By Bob Hicks
All right, now, enough is enough. Not to get all Bardic on your heads, but this truly seems to be the summer of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s discontent.
Yesterday we told you about the storm that sapped the power all over the festival’s hometown of Ashland, and the emergency-tent performance that was [...]
T. Charles Erickson/OSF
By Bob Hicks
Mr. Noah, will this downpour never end?
The Scatters have disembarked in Ashland, Oregon, hometown of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Ashland is in the foothills of the Siskiyou Mountains, a prodigious distance from Mount Ararat, and also a fair trot from the creeping trees of Birnam Wood. Yet the festival must be [...]
Today would have been Irby Hicks’s 95th birthday. He made it just five days shy, dying in the wee morning hours of Saturday, July 9, four days after a massive brain hemorrhage essentially shut him down.
We pause for a long moment of reflection, love, and respect. Without Irby Hicks there would be no Art Scatter, [...]