Revenge of the theater nerds
The dawning of a new season
The upcoming Portland theater season is chock-a-block full of performances varying between old favorites and new endeavors. Here are several recommendations for the best bets.
Defining bad taste
What do a kid’s program about middle age, an excerpt from Pride and Prejudice and an adventure story about a swollen prostate, angry puppets and a singing lesbian cowgirl all have in common? The only thing I can think of is that all of them are featured in Define Naked, a sketch comedy act currently playing at the Shoe Box Theater.
A bloodlust worth singing about
Maelstrom: The Zombie Opera is one of the most innovative pieces of theater I have seen from PSU, either through the student group TASO or the department itself, in a very long time.
Charlie Brown gets angsty
If the CoHo Theater’s newest production of Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead is any indication of the future of finding quality acting in Portland’s smaller theaters, then the future looks bright indeed.
Sex in a time of technology
In the case of community theater in Portland, subtlety has become a lost art. Well, that is a bit of a generalization, but it is certainly the case for Third Eye’s latest endeavor of Dylan Hillerman’s Grand Guignol (pronounced Grahn Geen-yol).
A tale of two women
Grey Gardens, the last production for the Portland Center Stage this season, is a wonderful, comical musical of decadence and desolation. The story is set in a time when women were still told by their wealthy grandfathers to “marry well” and there was nothing queer about sing-alongs around the piano.
A tale of two women
Grey Gardens, the last production for the Portland Center Stage this season, is a wonderful, comical musical of decadence and desolation.
Grumpy old men
Profile Theatre, a local theater group that chooses one playwright to profile for a season, has been on a roll lately, choosing audience-approved playwrights such as Wendy Wasserstein. And this season is no exception with the theater’s choice of Neil Simon.
Family ties
Walking into the theater to see Hand2Mouth’s newest production, Everyone Who Looks Like You, can be unsettling. A former chapel in Milepost 5, an arts collective on Northeast 81st, Hand2Mouth’s latest performance space is somewhat “off.”
A cold reception
What I enjoy most about Defunkt Theatre—a small theater company based in South East Portland—is that it takes risks. The problem with risks is that they have a tendency to go awry. Thus is the fate of Defunkt’s latest production, the world premiere of Cooler by Gary Winter.