By Martha Ullman West
At Mississippi Pizza a week ago last Friday, I saw one of the most musical dance performances I’ve seen in years, delivered with all her heart by a dancer named Sadie (last name unknown), age about five, as she was propelled to her feet by the equally heartfelt music [...]
By Bob Hicks
Twenty-six years after she first impersonated the fabulous Sophie Tucker onstage, the big-talented Portland singer and comedian Wendy Westerwelle’s return to Soph: An Evening with the Last of the Red-Hot Mamas is a revival in more than one way. It marks Westerwelle’s own continuing return to the spotlight following her bravura turn earlier [...]
By Bob Hicks
I remember Sergiu Luca in the steamy July heat of a makeshift concert hall at Reed College, sweating with the audience and instrumentalists through a little gem of a summer music festival he’d begun in 1971 called Chamber Music Northwest.
I remember him beaming above the breakwaters at Cascade Head on the Oregon Coast, [...]
By Bob Hicks
HARD NUT: It’s been a lot of years since I’ve seen The Hard Nut, Mark Morris’s pared-down version of The Nutcracker, but I’ve always more than liked it. It’s lean yet lush, beautifully framed, and intensely musical.
You still occasionally hear people refer to it as Morris’s winking bad-boy spoof of the ubiquitous holiday [...]
By Bob Hicks
It’s true. Mr. Scatter, in his semi-official capacity as regional chronicler of the wintry festivities, has published a pair of guides to holiday concerts and shows in this morning’s A&E section of The Oregonian.
Three weeks before Thanksgiving. But not, in Mr. Scatter’s defense, before Halloween. (And in that regard, ask Mrs. Scatter sometime [...]
By Bob Hicks
If the theater is truly the Fabulous Invalid, is any subsection of it any more fabulously ailing than the Broadway musical — and more of a fabulously unlikely survivor?
Before last night’s opening of the eagerly anticipated touring production of In the Heights at Portland’s Keller Auditorium, the last musical Mr. Scatter had seen [...]
By Laura Grimes
“It’s three hours long!” the Small Large Smelly Boy repeated what he had overheard in a low, urgent voice.
It was minutes before curtain at Portland Opera’s Pagliacci/Carmina Burana on Thursday night. I immediately shuffled the pages in the program to confirm it. He was dead right.
This was no small matter, and I could [...]
By Laura Grimes
The pickles as social vehicle experiment is working! (Read what it’s all about here.) So far, the bartering offers include (some serious, some not so much):
Sauerkraut
Pesto plus a 2009 WillaKenzie pinot gris
Elk meat
Cream cheese braid
$57.32 (perhaps not so serious, but I know the intent is true, because we split one of these jars [...]
By Bob Hicks
Hard to believe, but here it is late September and already Portland’s fall arts season is in full swing. Somehow things snuck up on Mr. Scatter (he knows he should say “sneaked up,” except he prefers the ancient and slightly disreputable “snuck”), and now he must do some serious catching up.
Some cool-looking things [...]
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 [...]