Roadhouse: you may think that this meme jumped the shark when Family Guy devoted half of an episode to mocking the 1989 Patrick Swayze action flick. Yeah, well, there's still some life left in the dang thing. Road House: The Play proves it.

Uhhhhh.....that totally wasn't a riff on the untimely passing of "The Swayze" last fall, I swear.

The movie transitions to the stage pretty well and the local cast does a great job of capturing the goofy spirit of the source material. It isn't an outright parody, although Portland Mercury editor Wm. Stephen Humphrey does play the part of Carrie, the sex-starved bartendress. And a guitarist on the side of the stage plays "She's Like the Wind" twice. And the actor playing Dalton hams up the tai chi scene. And the narrator gets it on with Wade at one point. And....all right, fine. It's a parody.

Anyway, it's a fantastic production, even if the cast resorts to using a panda bear costume for the *polar* bear scene. Yeah, yeah, we fans can be total asshole sticklers about these sort of details.

Road House: The Play will be back on stage at the Someday Lounge tonight and tomorrow night. Details and more can be found over here.

Labels: Swayze, theater

Sometime in the '90s, my then 13 year-old sister Shanna convinced my parents to let her adopt a kitten. He was a "tuxedo kitty." I'm sure you've seen the type before. Black all over with the exception of a large, white spot across his chest and stomach. Add a red collar and they're ready to go for a night on the town.

Having just seen a touring Broadway production of Cats at the Civic Auditorium, she insisted on naming the kitten "Magical Mr. Mistoffolees." While completely lovable, he never quite managed to live up to his namesake. Instead of being adept at magic and card tricks, his primary skills were limited to jumping on the kitchen counter, gorging himself on Science Diet and making weird, gurgling noises. Within a year, Magical Mr. Mistoffolees weighed over 15 pounds and only Shanna could pronounce his name properly.

ME, CIRCA 1996: "Shanna, Magic Mr. Miserdorfer..."

SHANNA: "MAGICAL MR. MISTOFFOLEES!"

ME: "Yeah, Mystical Senor Magefeline...."

SHANNA: "MAGICAL MR. MISTOFFOLEES!"

ME: "Whatever his name is, he just puked on the bean bag chair. Again."

Why do I bring this up? Well, if only to awkwardly point out that the only people in this country that are psychologically capable of enjoying Cats are women, or males of a certain persuasion, between the ages of 6 and 14 or over the age of 45. For everyone else it's an endurance test. During the intermission at the Keller on Tuesday night, I overheard no less than four different matriarchs contending with a husband or a son that desperately wanted to flee the building.

Is it that bad? Not really, if you're willing to overlook the fact that Cats doesn't really have a describable plotline, has a synthesizer soundtrack heavily cemented in the early '80s and consists entirely of castmembers dressed up as feline versions of David Bowie circa 1972 jumping all over the place. Also: the set is cool and when Mister Mistoffolees rolls out for his number he sends streamers shooting out into the crowd.

Streamers! Just like at a Blazer game! Very exciting!

Cats is playing at the Keller through Sunday, March 28th. Tickets and further info can be found over here.

Labels: theater

When Snow Falling on Cedars first appeared on bookstore shelves in the '90s, for some reason I wrote it off as dumb trade fiction, another in a long line of sappy romance novels. I never bothered to delve into it any further and skipped the film adaptation with Ethan Hawke. While the story does involve a love triangle, there's much more to it than that.

On a foggy night in 1954, fisherman Kabuo Miyamoto's boat pulls up alongside another belonging to a stranded colleague named Carl Heine. Their respective families have been involved in a dispute over a strawberry farm for years. The next day, Carl's corpse will be pulled out of the sea wrapped in his own net.

What follows is a pretty fascinating work of historical fiction that covers the decade following World War 2 and the lingering suspicion and ill-will that festers in the novel's San Juan island community between its residents of European ancestry and those who spent the war trapped in Japanese internment camps. A theatrical adaptation developed by Seattle's Book-It Rep had its world premiere at the Gerding Theater last week and easily rises to the challenge of bringing the story to the stage.

The adaptation covers nearly 30 years of interwoven history and the performers deftly make swift transitions across time, sometimes within the same scene. Kabuo's wife Hatsue, played wonderfully by Olvia Oguma, and Vince Nappo's Ishmael occasionally jump between court room scenes in the '50s and into their years growing up together on the island decades prior.

As intriguing as the court room drama and the play's racial dynamics are, what really brings it together is the heartbreaking relationship between Hatsue and Ishmael, the events that tear them apart and the decision Ishmael is forced to make in its final scenes. Surprisingly enough, the romantic elements, which chased me away from David Guterson's novel, are what really got to me.

Snow Falling on Cedars makes the trip from page to stage smoothly but the cast relies on pantomime throughout the performance. For the most part, it's never a distraction but there are a few moments when it doesn't work well, most notably in an early scene where authorities discover Carl's body. Still, it's a great show and the best Portland Center Stage production I've seen since last spring's Crazy Enough.

Snow Falling on Cedars continues through February 7th at Portland Center Stage's Gerding Theater. Click here for tickets and further information.

Labels: theater

"This is like children's theater for 40 year-old gay people."

And that's a direct quote from one of the characters.

Also: at one point 27 disco balls appear on stage.

More also: roller skates.

Xanadu continues through Sunday, January 17th at the Keller. Click here for more info.

Labels: theater

Is there a tale that has been staged, filmed, parodied and otherwise adapted as many times as Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol? Even the Muppets have their own full-length version starring Michael Caine. Personally speaking, my favorite is Bill Murray's Scrooged, which easily holds the title for Best Ghost of Christmas Future.

Portland Center Stage's production of A Christmas Carol has become an annual tradition at the Gerding Theater. It's a far more traditional take on the tale than Murray's riff but there are a few deviations that keep things interesting.

Scrooge's back story gets a bit more attention than in other adaptations and the Ghost of Christmas Past is diced into three younger incarnations of his former self. The tormented Jacob Marley is guided by a series of chains that reach up into the rafters over the stage and drag him back to the underworld after he delivers his cautionary prophesy in Scrooge's bed chamber. Also: the Ghost Christmas Present has a really neat magic wand.

The production makes excellent use of the theater's stage with a series of rotating sets, special effects and several cast members that appear in multiple roles, which must make costume changes backstage a challenge. Ebbe Roe Smith's Scrooge is a bit over the top at moments but at no point does he disappear into easy caricature.

Overall, it's a tradition that deserves to become as long-running as the Oregon Ballet's annual production of The Nutcracker.

Labels: theater

Playing chess with Death? Never a good idea. Falling in love with Death? An even worse idea and many relationship advice columnists would no doubt agree. The Portland Opera's production of Philip Glass' take on Orphée, the 1950 Jean Cocteau film, opened over the weekend. It follows a Parisian poet as he struggles with a midlife crisis, career problems and an ill-fated fling with the supernatural.

There's nary a large woman in a Viking hat to be found in this one. The set is eerie, mid-century and cold. It looks like a cross between an office on Mad Men and Spock's coffin from Star Trek II. Performed in French, the production feels like it might have been secretly directed by David Lynch, especially when the characters find themselves plunged into a mirror-image underworld in act II.

Duality and mirrors play a major part in Orphée and they kept the audience on the edge of their seat when I saw it last Friday. At one point, a character repeatedly opens a door with a mirror attached to it, shining stage lights into the eyes of everyone sitting in the orchestra level. During the second act, another character forebodingly wanders the stage with another mirror. I figured, at any second, he was going to turn and hit the audience with a few more bolts.

Not to reveal any spoilers but no one went home that night with a temporary case of blindness.


Orphée continues through November 15th at the Keller. Click here for tickets and further info.

Labels: theater

August: Osage County is one of those stage dramas that centers around a family quickly tearing itself apart. Everyone stomps around a living room while revealing terrible secrets about one another, much in the vein of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Death of a Salesman. After three hours of bickering and venom-filled remarks, one by one, the characters all storm off into the night in separate directions. You know you're in for a grim trip to the theater when a character coughs up a T.S. Elliot quote within the first five minutes and throws themselves in a lake shortly thereafter.

I saw the touring production at the Keller a few nights back. The play follows the bitter squabbles of the Weston family in the days after the death of their professorial patriarch. The mother, played by Estelle Parsons (AKA Roseanne's mom on Roseanne), is addicted to pills and her three daughters are equally troubled. Drug addiction, alcoholism, suicide, dysfunction, sexual harassment, pedophilia, aging, racism, incest, infidelity, loneliness, depression, underage exposure to the Turner Classic Movie channel...there doesn't seem to be a domestic problem the Westons aren't saddled with.

August is good for what it is, and worthy of its Tony award for the sharp-as-a-samurai-sword dialog, but it's nothing new or original. At the very least, I'll never be able to hear Eric Clapton's "Lay Down Sally" again without flashing back to the play.

It should come as no surprise that August ends with another Elliot quote, a particularly nasty one, sung over and over again in a lullaby. The quote smacks the audience upside the head hard and I think it's too vicious to lay on them after an evening of ugliness. I think another quote by a different canonized author would have been more befitting. I would have gone with this age-old chestnut from Kurt Vonnegut....

"There's only one rule that I know of, babies— God damn it, you've got to be kind."


August: Osage County continues through October 25th at the Keller Auditorium. Tickets and further info can be found here.

Labels: theater

One morning while shaving monologist Josh Kornbluth came to the realization that he bore a resemblance to Benjamin Franklin. After a chat with his opportunistic aunt about this, he eventually landed himself a gig playing the founding father in a series of MSNBC commercials. While prepping for the role though, he learned some things about Franklin that hindered his efforts and left him wondering if he might not have been the flawless sage portrayed in uncountable history books.

This is the basis of Ben Franklin: Unplugged, Kornbluth's one man show, which continues through November 22nd at Portland Center Stage's Gerding Theater. How many Americans can tell you much about Franklin beyond his scientific achievements, his involvement in the Revolutionary War and his reputation for being a cantankerous lady's man? That was the extent of Kornbluth's knowledge before he cracked open Franklin's autobiography and discovered that he devoted only a few paragraphs to his involvement in the war and his famous kite experiment.

Kornbluth was fascinated by this and went off looking for an explanation. Along the way he met up with an eccentric Berkeley bookseller, an even weirder Franklin scholar and had the opportunity to cause a ruckus on the Yale campus. The answers he found center around Franklin's illegitimate son William and their estrangement.

One of the central themes of the show is how a person's perspective can mar their memories and opinions, especially when it comes to historical figures. Kornbluth's links all of this to his own relationship with his deceased father and his mother's peculiar idolization of Joseph Stalin.

Kornbluth's a great story-teller and Ben Franklin: Unplugged, despite the cheesy title, doesn't get too marred in historical factoids or familial pathos. It also shines a light on a side of Franklin that further exposes the complex man behind the lovable legend.

Ben Franklin: Unplugged plays in the Ellyn Bye Studio in Portland Center Stage's Gerding Theater through November 22nd. Tickets, info and more can be found here.

Labels: theater

Somewhere in the first act of Rent a character named Maureen resorts to performance art to protest the eviction of her friends from their East Village home. She's overly-earnest, unintentionally hilarious and desperate for approval, so much so that the character actually kicks down the fourth-wall of the Broadway musical to encourage the audience to join in.

Sure enough, hundreds of people in the crowd at the Keller on Tuesday night joined in, defiantly "moo-ing" along with Maureen. If you've been looking for a metaphor for Rent and its 15-year theatrical legacy, I can't think of a better one.

I get it, honestly, I do. Rent was daring when it debuted on Broadway in the mid-90s. It force-fed topics like AIDS, gentrification, class warfare, drug abuse, gay rights, "selling-out" and survivor's guilt down the throats of an audience more accustomed to watching people in cat costumes prance around. Its themes aside, this thing just isn't very good.

You know you're in for trouble when a night at the theater involves having to read a flow-chart about the characters in the program. There's so much going on at any one moment during Rent that it's almost impossible to keep up with all the love-triangles, art projects, self-destruction and choreographed dance moves on display. The plot is simple enough. A group of artists living rent free in New York find themselves at odds with a former friend who is about to sell their building out from under them. Still, twenty minutes in, amidst the chaos and all the performers singing over one another I stopped caring about who was lighting who's "candle," how many minutes there are in a year and who was on the brink of dying that my brain turned off.

The second half is a mad-dash to the curtain call, frantically blasting through a year in the lives of its characters. Rent promptly drowns itself in exposition before finally collapsing at the two hour mark. It ends with an anti-climatic whimper when it should have resorted to a bang in order to drive its message of tolerance and carpe-diem home to all of the gray-hairs who have sat through the musical over the years. You would think that a play based on an opera would explode into tragedy-overload at the conclusion. Nope, not here.

Still, for all of the high-school drama kids in the Keller that night and for all of the people that stood outside waiting for $20 rush tickets, Rent is a supreme cultural milestone. While I sat in the audience trying to not to think of the cold-blooded parody in Team America, a teenage girl next to me was dancing in her seat and singing along to the lyrics. Eh, could have been worse. At least she wasn't sitting at home obsessing over Twilight.

Rent closed on Broadway last year. I wonder if it's destined to become another West Side Story that will continue to be performed in high schools and theaters around the world for years to come or if it's destined to sputter out and become a forgotten '90s artifact. Based on the crowd's response, I don't think the musical is going anywhere anytime soon.

Labels: theater

"Toi, toi, toi!"

According to what I learned backstage at the Keller Auditorium on Friday night, opera singers don't wish each other good luck. They use phrases like "toi, toi, toi," which, according to the internet, comes from the custom of spitting three times over someone's shoulder for good luck. Another common expression translates into "in the mouth of the wolf." If someone says these words to you before you head on stage you're supposed to respond with "break the wolf."

In Italian, of course.

Six Portland bloggers, myself included, attended Blogger Night at the Opera. We went on a backstage tour, we walked around the set, we peeked in the green room and the staff kept bringing us complimentary alcohol and chocolate chip cookies. All in all, I think I made the wise decision to head down there instead of staying home to watch the series finale of Dollhouse.

Among the things we learned: operas around the country trade sets, most American opera singers are conversational in Italian, three weeks is considered a long rehearsal period for the average opera, the Portland Opera decides which shows will go into production at least three years in advance, the singers aren't miked, the subtitles that appear over the stage are called "super titles" and they operate on Apple Keynote. A crew member manually hits a button to make each line appear as the performers on stage hit their queues.

Even in the perpetually casual city of Portland, opera attendees wear their finest. I was probably the most poorly dressed human being in the building, although wearing a shirt with any sort of collar is typically what I consider "dressing up." My hair refuses to stay combed for longer than two minutes so, by the time Joe Smith and his cameraman headed over for the Live @ 7 broadcast on KGW, I was looking like I'd just wandered in off the street wearing Homer Simpson's work duds. There's a reason why I don't go around posting photos of myself on the internet and all the free wine did not help matters. Here's the clip, compliments of KGW's website. I start babbling at Joe at the 1:10 mark.

The six of us blogged in the lobby before the performance began, during the two intermissions and after the final curtain dropped. Honestly, it's impossible to type anything semi-coherent with dozens of people dressed in tuxedos and cocktail dresses gawking at you like bored 3rd graders on a trip to the penguin exhibit at the Oregon Zoo. Or least that's how it was for me.

Those attendees that did speak with us were all polite, curious and nothing like the Veruca Salt-esque goblins I was expecting. Most wanted to know what we were typing and if we were saying nasty things about them. The highlight was a dapper older gent dressed in a tuxedo. He couldn't quite grasp the concept of blogs but was completely well versed in the world of computers and discussed at length the wiki he recently created. He ended our conversation by saying he built his first computer in the early 70s. I have no idea who this guy is or to what extent he was screwing with me. I suspect he may be a retired higher-up from Tektronix or Intel. What a character.

During the second intermission, a tenor stopped by to answer questions and shake hands. He'll be performing in a series of productions when the Portland Opera begins its next season in the fall. I had to think of questions on the spot. The first that sprang to mind was how he got into this businesses (he began acting in high school productions and went on to perform theater at Yale) and how many calories the average opera singer burns during a 3-hour show (plenty and some of them insist on going on stage with a full stomach).

There was also the opera itself, a stunning production of Rigoletto, which follows the tragedy of a cursed court jester and the perils of unrequited love in Renaissance-era Italy. Mark Rucker did a bang up job in the title role and it was surprising to learn that Sarah Coburn, who played Gilda, performed while six months pregnant. Not to give anything away, but Gilda spends much of the third act getting dragged across the stage in a burlap sack.

It was great to see Dieselboi's truly impressive sideburns up close and to meet several local bloggers who's stuff I've been reading for years but who I had never met in person. Mike Russell not only live-blogged the event, he also live-illustrated it. I hope he posts the contents of his sketchpad over at Culture Pulp sometime soon. In the meantime, several of the pages are viewable on his Twitter account.

A thanks and a tip of the hat go out to the Portland Opera and Publicity and Publications Manager Julia Sheridan for organizing the event. It truly was a wonderful evening. Thanks, everybody.

Rigoletto continues through May 16th at the Keller Auditorium. Tickets, info and more can be found here.

Labels: alcohol, opera, theater

"While all the other girls were putting Ken dolls on top of their Barbies I was having fantasies about bestiality and cannibalism."

"After being awake for four days straight and once the shadow demons started showing up I decided it was time to go."

Storm Large's one woman show Crazy Enough is filled with dark bon mots like these and they all sound like they were drilled out of the mouth of a Chuck Palahniuk character. Is it a coincidence that the show includes a cover of the Pixies' "Where is My Mind," a song that has become synonymous with the film version of Fight Club?

Probably, but Large's autobiographical hell ride through heroin addiction, mental illness and subsequent redemption sure sounds like the stuff of fiction. Here is a woman who was told at a young age that she was biological predestined to spend her adult life mired in the depths of crippling clinical depression. Her childhood is filled with stories like the time she was served chicken casserole mixed with household cleansers by her schizophrenic mother. Large has been a teenage sex addict, a San Francisco junkie plagued by halluciations, a lead singer, a reality show star and a rock n' roll goddess in a city without one to call its own.

Large's music career is filled with music industry cliches you can find in any biography in the music section of Powell's. Sex, drugs, poverty, gaining fame, losing fame but how many other lead singers, successful and otherwise, can say they once found themselves in an abortion clinic the day after 9/11? Or have a song like "Eight Miles Wide" in their catalog?

Crazy Enough is a show that might make you wonder if it's exploiting the traumas of its star and if Large might be better off telling all of this to a psychiatrist instead of a packed theater in the basement of a renovated armory. As she reveals in the second half of Crazy Enough though, Large once tried going to a therapist. When ghosts started showing up in the corner of the room during sessions she decided to bag it.

For those of us who have never attended a show this frank and confessional, it's fairly intense to watch someone pour their heart out like this. I was sitting a few feet from the stage and had a hard time watching the show at times, especially when Large reenacted the depths of heroin withdrawal while rolling around the stage a few feet from my seat.

From that vantage I could look across the stage at the audience on the other side of the room. One middle-aged couple caught my eye. They looked like they had driven down from Lake Oswego on the recommendation of one of the wife's more cosmopolitan friends. Throughout the performance, she had a hard time fighting back tears and laughter while her husband spent the entire time visibly cringing at every single one of Large's f-bombs.

The band and Large took a short break after a sing-along that sent her into the audience encouraging all the guys in the theater to join in the chorus of "Eight Miles Wide." I didn't think the couple was going to return from the intermission but they did. The theater was filled with husbands that night, some of them rolling with it, others just blushing and rolling their eyes. All the women in the theater though? They enjoyed the hell of everything, possibly even more so than that time they snuck a bottle of merlot into a showing of the Sex and the City movie.

If this sounds like your cup of black tar tea, I can't recommend Crazy Enough, er, enough. From now on I'll think of Storm Large's dark day on a beach near San Fran instead of Fight Club every time I hear "Where is My Mind?" on KNRK. Her cover can be heard here.


Crazy Enough plays in the Ellyn Bye Studio at Portland Center Stage through June 7th. Tickets, info and more can be found here.

Labels: music, theater

I woke up on Saturday with no idea that I'd be spending the bulk of the evening in Keizer. I'd never been there before and really had no reason to pay a visit. Then along came two colleagues who are absolutely convinced that the city offers some of the best Mexican food in the state.

The menu at La Hacienda Real is huge and has to be at least the size of the one you'll find in a Cheesecake Factory. More impressive is the decor. The Keizer location of the three restaurant chain is tucked away in an unassuming strip mall. The inside resembles a cartoon village. Cactus lamps hang from the ceiling and a "tortilla lady" cranks out shells in a kitchen built inside a facade that looks like a guest house.

The portions are huge but the Iron Horse in Milwaukie still gets my vote for "Best Mexican Restaurant in Oregon."

Near the front door we spotted this sign for a local high school's production of The Taming of the Shrew: The Yee Haw Version. None of us had heard of this twist on the Bard's anti-feminist screed. It was closing night and curiosity got the better of us. We'd never get another shot at something like this.

We arrived at McNary High School with time to kill so we wandered the darkened halls. All in all, it seemed fairly normal. Trophy case by the gym, student-made posters about The Great Gatsby outside an English class...

...and then we found the pornographic modern art sculpture made out of bubble wrap up on the second floor.

I broke out my iPhone if only to later prove that the sculpture wasn't the product of group hypnosis. If you think you can handle a few blurry NSFW cell phone photos, click here and here. I can only assume it was an art student's senior prank.

Kids these days...

We made it through the entirety of Shrew's nearly three hour running time. The girl who played Kate was great and the cast spent a good portion of the play running around with prop guns. Kate had a real whip and swung it over the heads of the audience and her cast mates. I was once a teenage drama geek in the PPS district and I was never once allowed to wield an actual weapon on stage (dammit). I guess they just do things differently in high schools further down the I-5 corridor.

Labels: restaurants, theater

Gather around children and I'll tell you about a period in American history when people actually considered Richard Nixon to be the most contemptuous president to ever inhabit the White House. I don't quite understand it myself. Could his mistakes compete with those of Warren G. Harding or James Buchanan? Say what you will about Watergate and Vietnam, at least Nixon's screw-ups didn't lead to the Civil War. Regardless, everyone still despised the guy. Now we're all living in the post-GW era where a single bungled war effort and spying on your political opponents seem like good ol' days worthy of a dozen Thomas Kincaid paintings.

While watching Frost/Nixon at Portland Center Stage I found myself wondering how many members of the mostly Boomer-aged audience still consider Nixon an irredeemable, sweat-spewing monster. The play's script offers plenty of context for the era and the man's misdeeds but it's ultimately more interested in presenting a portrait of his doomed efforts at a political comeback post-Watergate. Here Nixon is a fallen political warrior desperate to redeem himself and get back into the game. His hopes all rest on the shoulders of fading talk show host David Frost, who lured the ex-president into a series of televised interviews in 1977.

PCS' production doesn't quite capture the gravitas of Ron Howard's recent film adaptation but it does an excellent job of staging their battle of the wills. During breaks in the interviews, the cast darts to opposites sides of the stage to discuss strategy. The show opens with a backdrop of video monitors pounding out historical footage. During the interviews, they're used to pan in close on actor Bill Christ's Nixon as he finally crashes and burns. The pace is fast and the show breezes by in a mere hour and forty-five minutes.

Christ looks more like Tony Soprano than Richard Nixon but his portrayal nicely captures the ex-pres' crumbling spirit. The play's final scene is enough, but not quite enough, to make you feel sorry for Nixon. The dialog during this bit is great. "You have no idea how fortunate that makes you, liking people. Being liked. Having that facility. That lightness, that charm. I don't have it, I never did."

*sniff*

Poor, ol' Mr. Nixon. Maybe all he needed was a hug. Where's my time machine? I wanna go hug Nixon in 1977 and maybe give him some hot cocoa!

I saw Frost/Nixon on opening night and I never worked up the gumption to pull aside someone from the crowd to ask them if they still hate Tricky Dick or if their thoughts have cooled in light of the Bush administration's numerous fumbles. I can only assume that, had I done this, they would have said something along the lines of "a villain is still a villain, regardless of their misdeeds or their fictionalized late-night cheeseburger chats with British talk show hosts."

So he's still a crook.

Frost/Nixon continues through May 10th in Portland Center Stage's Gerding Theater

Labels: politics, theater

I got a chance to play theater critic again at Portland Center Stage last week. A production of The Importance of Being Earnest is currently running through March 29th in the Gerding Theater. It's a far cry from the last show that appeared on the theater's main stage, the lavish but dense and overlong Apollo. I was in a production of Earnest back in high school and, despite having once spent two months listening to the dialog over and over again, I still have a hard time keeping up with Oscar Wilde's century-old wit.

Earnest is a snide satire of Victorian England's idle upper-classes and the playwright's last work before he found himself immersed in a nasty scandal that led to his death. Some critics claim the play contains plenty of gay subtext but PCS shies away from all of that....or does it? James Knight's performance as Algernon is a bit over-the-top but here all the "Bunburying" is bound by the standard interpretation of the phrase.

If you've never seen it, Earnest centers around the exploits of two 19th-century playboys, Jack and Algernon, who spend their days embedding themselves (yeah, pun intended) in various affairs, deceits and aliases. Their efforts to juggle their gal-pals all come crashing down during a trip to Jack's country estate when the identity of both of them are called into question.

The dialog can be tough to keep up with but Earnest really does have some great one-liners. Director Chris Coleman keeps the pace fast and furious and the performances are all spot on but PCS' Earnest remains a perfectly standard production of the play. It's great for what it is but I wonder what Earnest would be like if it were tweaked ala those Shakespearean productions down in Ashland. What would the play look like if it were set in Nazi-era Germany or given a steam punk theme? Ok, ok, it would never work and Wilde's wit doesn't need to get suited up in such gimmickry.

One other thing and a quick SPOILER warning for those who have never seen or read Earnest. I did the math afterward and, if I'm correct here, the last few lines of the play reveal that Jack's fiancee Gwendolen is also his first cousin.

Oh, those naughty, naughty aristocrats.

Labels: theater

I think it was around the time that an actress dressed as Hitler came out on stage to dry hump a German scientist and wave around a plastic rocket/phallus that I realized that not inviting my sister to go with me to Apollo had been a good idea. The production left me feeling like the Dude in The Big Lebowski when he makes the mistake of attending his landlord's "dance cycle" at a community theater. I felt perplexed, uneasy and craving an In-N-Out burger. The person I wound up going with may never speak to me again and I don't know if I can blame her.

Apollo, which runs through February 8th at Portland Center Stage, is full of overly-earnest imagery like this as it struggles to make connections between America's Space Race, Nazi rocket scientists and the Civil Rights Movement. During its nearly four-hour running time, actors pantomime floating in zero gravity, lust after the personification of the moon, recreate the darkest moments of US history and dance to Frank Sinatra tunes. A Mickey Mouse puppet even shows up to discuss the unlimited possibilities of using the medium of television as a propaganda tool.

The production rolls like an old episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy mashed together with an avant garde student movie and a Sociology 101 lecture. Character development and any real sense of plot are chucked aside in favor of endless sermonizing and dialogue that sounds like it was Xeroxed straight off random Wikipedia pages. Actors dive out at random to loudly announce they're Oliver L. Brown or LBJ before speed-rushing through random historical tidbits.

That's not to say it's a complete wash. With some heavy-editing, at least one part of the play might be salvageable. Apollo is almost redeemed by the second act, which slows down long enough to focus on a Justice Department investigation into one scientist's involvement in the deaths of thousands during World War 2. For around thirty minutes, Apollo dives into a mostly-forgotten bit of American history and elegantly exposes a bleak morale quagmire deserving of a better play to call its own. It's a shame that the rest of Nancy Keystone's script feels like a C- essay from a high school history class. The production is elaborately well-staged and the actors do the best they can with what could be the most scattershot material I think I've ever seen performed live. And this is coming from someone who once sat through an entire Phil Collins concert.

At one point, the cast stops in their tracks to answer their cell phones before sneering disdainfully at the audience. How meta! How bold! How daring! How cheeky! How very much like a pre-movie "turn off your phones, please!" ad at Regal Cinemas! The joke received groans from the crowd up in the balcony who had been invited to live-blog and tweet Saturday night's performance as it unfurled. I did the best I could with my iPhone but more or less gave up somewhere in the first act. I decided I'd rather watch the play than stare at my phone while struggling to come up with snarky comments. The other members of Portland's "new media" who showed up were much more game. Click here for The Mercury's write-up.

Labels: theater

Given the economy, changing trends, rapidly evolving technology and shifts in socioculturalvaluesdemographicalsomethings it's not hard to understand why theaters and orchestras all over the world are having a hard time pulling in crowds under the age of, oh, say, 65. Locally, Portland Center Stage has recently come up with a slew of events designed to, let's be honest here, slowly replace their aging customer base with a younger audience.

Over the past year, PCS has hosted indie bands and has released $10 rush tickets to their productions. Now for Saturday's performance of Apollo (check out the trailer below) they've reserved the balcony for Twitter users to report on and critique the performance online as it unfolds. Because, as we all know, everyone under the age of 30 in this country can't go anywhere without keeping their Twitter/Facebook/Blogger/MySpace followers constantly informed of their thoughts, actions, whereabouts, bowel movements and every funny thing they've seen on the internet in the last five minutes.

*ahem*

It's a bold experiment and one that, all things considered, I can't see going over very well. The limitations of live theater demand silence and a respectful audience. A while back I caught a production of Macbeth in London. A bored husband sitting somewhere behind me had the gall to sneak in a large bag of Doritos. The sound of crunching chips and slurping was enough to irritate half of the balcony and, while a brawl didn't break out, enough sighing and glaring erupted to rival the lobby of a couples counseling center. The actions of one completely indifferent and oblivious individual just about ruined the evening for a hundred theater-goers.

Now imagine what it's going to be like up in the balcony at PCS on Saturday night. Dozens of bloggers, Twitter users and tech-head narcissists with short attention spans will be packed up there running amuck with their Blackberries, laptops and iPhones. The light of a single cell phone is enough to distract several rows of viewers in your average movie theater. The collective glow coming off of all of those electrical devices will inevitably drive the cast crazy and the bluehairs on the main floor up a wall.

Some of the tickets to this event were comped, others were discounted. What sort of Twitter user would show up for something like this anyway?

Well, a Twitter user like me, for starters. I'll be there on Saturday night with my iPhone and a friend. I'm told that we members of the Twitter crowd will begin the evening with a lecture from the staff on how to best avoid annoying the bejeezus out of the entire theater. The two of us will no doubt be on our best behavior (honest!) but what about everyone else? Maybe I should bring along some Doritos if things get interesting.

I do sincerely hope I'm wrong about all of this but, given how most of the Twitter users I follow aren't accustomed to pulling their punches, the odds aren't in PCS' favor. Given how self-important the production looks based on the trailer, I'm expecting an all-out debacle on Saturday night, especially if everyone starts acting like the sort of crowd that turns out for free movie screenings. This event could become the theater-management equivalent of smearing oneself in tuna guts and running into the Sea Lion Caves.

Labels: theater