By Bob Hicks
Art Scatter’s ramble through the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 75th anniversary season is closer to its end than its beginning, and it strikes us once again how much this thicket of theater interconnects. A lot of that has to do with the nature of rotating repertory, which gives audiences the chance to see the [...]
By Bob Hicks
Lanky and improbably lean-headed, with a cliffside of forehead pierced by a widow’s peak of bristling orange hair, Dan Donohue looks a little like the late-night television host Conan O’Brien — or maybe an O’Brien sired by Loki, the god of mischief.
As Hamlet in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s current production of the Danish [...]
By Bob Hicks
Art Scatter, despite its name, is mostly about pulling things together. We examine the daunting scatter of incident that is contemporary culture — this endlessly broad turmoil of emotions, beliefs and events — and gather them together, looking for patterns, similarities, fragments of coalescence. Out of chaos, we seek structure and story. We [...]
By Bob Hicks
Ah, the adventures of the road. The brain trust at Art Scatter World Headquarters has packed up and squeezed itself temporarily into the Scattermobile, partaking of adventures large and small. We’ve ingested the oyster and the clam, descended into Devil’s Churn, gazed upon the gathered elk, spied osprey and eagle and hawk, felt [...]
By Bob Hicks
It was a long, long night, and by daylight its shadows were still playing tricks.
Saturday night’s opening of the eagerly anticipated Long Day’s Journey Into Night was more than a social event, although it was that. The Newmark Theatre was packed to its two-balcony gills. A post-show spread of food and drink sprawled [...]
By Bob Hicks
It’s pretty grim, according to Steve Law’s report, Historical Society may ask voters for tax levy, in The Portland Tribune, and Sarah Mirk’s followup, State History Museum Will Run Out of Cash in 2011, Pitches Tax To Stay Afloat, in The Mercury’s Blogtown.
Things are skeletal right now. Oregon Historical Society boss George Vogt [...]
By Bob Hicks
Actors have a parlor trick they like to pull out to amaze and amuse their non-thespian friends. I’m not sure if it has an accepted given name, but I sometimes call it the “laugh-cry game.” It’s simple, really: They cover their faces, start making an odd guttural sound, and challenge you to tell [...]
By Bob Hicks
A few nights ago, as I watched the premiere of Find Me Beside You, Jessica Wallenfels’ “rock story ballet” stage adaptation of Van Morrison’s 1968 concept album Astral Weeks, three things crossed my mind.
The first was the tradition of the minimally staged Broadway musical — in essence, concert versions of full-blown theater pieces [...]
By Bob Hicks
At a certain age, cranking up Queen on the stereo is an inalienable right. But who knew “stereo” meant “stereoscopic,” as in those cool old double-image photos that you look at through a viewfinder?
Jesse Kornbluth, editor of Head Butler, has the lowdown via The Huffington Post. Brian May, legendary (and now 63-year-old) guitarist [...]
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the world is overflowing with causes deserving of our support. It is a truth personally declared that Mr. Scatter, on occasion, will spotlight certain of these causes in the hope that his friends and readers will give them a second look.
Two such possibilities have presented themselves of late.
The [...]