Author: Rick Levin

Grease is (still) the word

Phoinix Players bring ’50s musical to the boards

Theater

Steeped in nostalgia and soaked in the nicest kind of naughty, the hit musical Grease has become a cultural artifact of the first order. The songs are a peach. The dialogue is funny, sexy and harmlessly rebellious (the original 1971 version, which was reputedly vulgar and pretty gnarly, has been watered down), and the book — the simplest of boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl stories, set in 1959 — gives it a lean, sleek structure. Continue reading →

Rebels with a Cause, Sort Of

Singing the soda-fountain blues in VLT’s Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean

Theater

Over the course of his long and storied career, maverick American director Robert Altman reeled off a handful of cinematic corkers: Nashville, M*A*S*H, Gosford Park. Among Altman’s lesser films, sandwiched between Popeye (yes, Popeye!) and Streamers, is an adapted play with the sesquipedalian title of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. Folks of a certain age probably recall Cher in that one. And, like me, you may also remember it, vaguely, as a musical along the lines of Hairspray. But it wasn’t, and isn’t. Continue reading →

A Very Modern Prometheus

Film

Director Baz Luhrmann’s risky, gamboling Romeo + Juliet (1996) proved, once again, that Shakespeare’s best stuff can withstand any infringement of time and run with it — including gang warfare, palm trees and the wowzers of an acid trip. Recall, if you dare, the raw but playful sexuality of this scene: Claire Danes as Juliet, spying through a massive fish tank and catching her first aquamarine glimpse of Romeo, as the gaunt, slightly extra-terrestrial face of a young Leonardo DiCaprio seems to swim through the coral. It’s an exquisite moment. Continue reading →

It’s a Wilde World

UO makes frivolous fun with The Importance of Being Earnest

Theater

Pithy, witty and wise, Oscar Wilde remains the toast of the sniff set. Though dead all these long and tedious post-industrial years, Wilde, the foremost icon of soft-soap Victorian sabotage, is always good for a sharp, stinging rebuke to the narcissistic pretensions of the bourgeoisie or some feisty fillip about sexual hypocrisy of the straight crowd. His aphorisms, with their subtle swish and sting, trip oh-so trippingly off the tongues of would-be wags everywhere. Morrissey, Truman Capote and Paul Lynde, Wilde’s closest modern kin, ain’t got nothing on the master. Continue reading →

No Weeds in this Garden

The Secret Garden at the Cottage Theatre is a hit

Theater

There is this sublime passage near the end of Cottage Theatre’s current production of The Secret Garden when Kyra Siegel, in the lead role of Mary Lennox, bows low to the stage and then rises in hypnotic fits and starts, as her character commences a healing dance for her invalid cousin Colin (George Schroeder); seeming possessed, Siegel’s lanky body jumps and arcs and shivers through space, and the complicated grace of her movements defies the mundane laws of gravity. It’s beautiful to behold. So beautiful, in fact, that I found myself tearing up. Continue reading →

At the End of Imagination

Film

As my old Seattle friend Big Gay Bob once told me years ago over gin fizzes: “Honey, nobody has more fun than the gays.” It’s true: Not only do gay people tend to earn more, dress better and screw more often than straight folk, but they really do know how to cut a rug, if you know what I mean. I’d even take this one step further and argue that were it not for the gays, this would be one bleak, narrow existence.  Continue reading →

Gettin’ Clean in Eugene

The Growing crisis of opiate abuse in the Northwest

HealthNews

Opium has, and has always had, this country by the short hairs. But for myriad reasons, the dope epidemic in the U.S. tends to elude detection as the massive health crisis it is — reasons that are intricate and complex and interpenetrating, deriving almost in equal parts from public-policy myopia, bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, political opportunism, inadequate social welfare, incompetent or absent education, rampant drug hysteria and the inexorable nature of addiction itself. Continue reading →

The Kids Are Not Alright

Film

Yes, yes, yes: Spring Breakers, the latest film by aging wunderkind Harmony Korine, is a veritable fiesta of tits and ass. And we’re not talking about your daddy’s Mousketeer variety of bikini-and-tramp-crack-clad tits and ass, a’la Annette Funicello, but the sort of gone-wild nekkid tits and ass that shake and undulate in drunken slow motion, so that even on the most toned collegiate body you can see ripples of cellulose motoring around under the burnt umber of tanned skin. Continue reading →

One More Shot of Whiskey

Music

The emotional barometer of bluegrass registers somewhere between hilarity and sorrow, like a hee-haw hiccup after an epic night of breakup drinking. Bluegrass laughs at funerals and cries at birthdays. Likely the antic mood of bluegrass, part comedy and part tragedy, derives from all that steamy choo-choo chugging on the snare and washboard, the hard, syncopated strumming of the strings and the mournful Appalachian moon-calls that scratch harmonic tattoos into the clouds. Continue reading →

Science vs. Religion

How the World Began explores the Earth’s origins in rural Kansas

Theater

When you inherit the wind, hold onto your hat: You never know where you might end up. Or do you? I’m speaking, of course, about the 1955 play Inherit the Wind, written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee and dramatizing the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, which pitted prosecutor William Jennings Bryan against defense attorney Clarence Darrow in a Tennessee court case that questioned whether evolution could be taught in public schools up against the supreme word of God. Continue reading →