By Bob Hicks
With PICA’s TBA new-arts fest, Music Fest NW and the kickoff of the regular fall arts season, it was a hectic weekend in Puddletown. So Marty Hughley, The Oregonian’s ace theater and dance guy, asked me to pitch in and review God of Carnage, Yasmina Reza’s little free-for-all at Artists Rep. Not a [...]
By Bob Hicks
You out there, you poor wayfaring strangers stranded at the offramp of the Information Superhighway with a flat tire or a blown gasket or a speeding ticket from a Washington State Trooper who had his radar gun pointed the wrong way but also had a quota to fill and liked the looks of [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
By Bob Hicks
Bless me, reader, for I have sinned.
For 40 years Moses wandered in the wilderness. And for roughly the same amount of time I have stumbled through the landmines of contemporary culture, wearing the sackcloth of the most extreme form of penitent journalist.
I have been a critic.
Well, apparently I have. That’s what everyone tells [...]
THE MORNING AFTER — It’s a rare and wonderful thing to be in a room filled with love the way that Lincoln Performance Hall was last night for the celebration of Jim Caputo’s life. The hall was filled to overflowing, which must have meant about 700 people were on hand for a night of music, [...]
By Bob Hicks
One night after the Tony Awards (hurrah for The Normal Heart) Portland’s own celebration of the year’s best stuff onstage, the Drammy Awards, happens tonight at the Crystal Ballroom just off West Burnside.
In a season of roughly 125 eligible shows, plenty of good work has hit the stage, from Profile’s Great Falls way [...]
Marty Hughley writes in The Oregonian that friends and family of Jim Caputo, the veteran Portland actor who died May 12 of a heart attack, have set his memorial service for Tuesday, June 14. It’ll be at Lincoln Performance Hall on the campus of Portland State University.
That’ll be the evening after the Drammy Awards, Portland’s [...]