By Bob Hicks
With Mrs. Scatter on the road eating fresh pineapple and downing margaritas with childhood friends, Mr. Scatter and the offspring have been batching it the last few days.
While that’s led to a somewhat more relaxed sense of structure (oh, my goodness: is it midnight already?), the basics have been covered: boys showered, sheets [...]
By Bob Hicks
Hal Holbrook’s back in town on Saturday, riding the horse of his magnificent one-man show Mark Twain Tonight!, and even as Holbrook noses up on 87 years old it’s bound to be a helluva show.
A couple of weeks ago I chatted on the phone for about an hour with him (Holbrook, not Twain, [...]
By Bob Hicks
I’ve just put up this post at Oregon Arts Watch about two extraordinary feats of endurance: Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton’s star-crossed quest in 1914-17 to trek 1,800 miles across the Antarctic continent, and Lawrence Howard’s captivating three-hour solo telling of the tale at Portland Story Theater. Give it a read, and the next [...]
By Bob Hicks
Over at Oregon Arts Watch I’ve posted Ready, aim, fire: on Portland stages, a shot in the dark. It’s an account of my weekend adventures viewing the premieres of Joseph Fisher’s (I Am Still) the Duchess of Malfi at Artists Rep and Jason Wells’s The North Plan at Portland Center Stage, plus Allison [...]
By Bob Hicks
What’s been cooking lately in the Scatter kitchen? Well, a lovely baked dressing made up mostly of mushrooms, celery, onions and leftover bread slices (Mrs. Scatter’s clean-out-the-fridge creation). And another batch of baklazhannia ikra, or “poor man’s caviar,” an addictive eggplant/tomato/onion/pepper relish that William Grimes discovered recently in one of those great old [...]
By Bob Hicks
At OregonLive, Marty Hughley has just posted a terrific interview with Stepan Simek about Vaclav Havel, the philosopher-playwright who became the unlikely leader of the Czech revolution and his nation’s first post-Soviet president. Havel died on Sunday at age 75.
Simek, a native of Prague and chairman of the theater department at Lewis & [...]
By Bob Hicks
A few days ago my friend Barry Johnson, the guy behind the infant but swiftly growing online magazine Oregon Arts Watch, asked me to sit down with him and talk about Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land and actor William Hurt’s starring performance in it at Artists Repertory Theatre. I said sure, and Barry [...]
Blaine Truitt Covert/OBT
By Bob Hicks
Last weekend I went to two dances and a play. The dances were Petrouchka and No Man’s Land. The play was Carmen.
This was odd, because No Man’s Land, a sort-of-comic psychic tussle at Artists Repertory Theatre, is by the revered British playwright Harold Pinter, whose brand of rhythmically menacing theater has [...]
25 candles for First Thursday
BodyVox leans horizontally
William Hurt and Harold Pinter duke it out
Wordstock throws a bookapalooza
Oregon Arts Watch puts on a show (times three)
A double feature at Oregon Ballet Theatre
Portland Open Studios’ peek behind the scenes
By Bob Hicks
Good lord, what a weekend. Used to be, a person who really tried could actually keep up [...]
By Bob Hicks
Over at Oregon Live, my friend Marty Hughley has been engaging in some unfair battle practices: He’s been using wit and logic against a slew of unarmed opponents.
The issue has been his story in The Oregonian about Portland Center Stage’s new black-cast production of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! and the alternately [...]