Eugene Weekly

On its surface, Les Misérables, the operatic adaptation of Victor Hugo’s classic novel, can come across as a maudlin chain-yanker that nabs every low-hanging fruit it can reach, including issues of abject poverty, human degradation and the tragic death of a good-hearted prostitute. The show seems, in a way, beneath common dignity, if only because it strives so hard to achieve it. And because of this, people of high-aspiring intellect (snobs) tend to avoid Les Miz, ranking it on a level with Cats and other shitbird musicals by Andrew Lloyd Weber. Continue reading →

Storm Kennedy and her crew are back with another production of Love, Loss and What I Wore (see “Closet Confession,” EW 2/28). This quirky, insightful play is written by the magical sisters Delia and Nora Ephron and based off the book by Ilene Beckerman. The play looks at the stories of women’s lives through their wardrobes.  Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

“You show up to an audition in Eugene,” actress Emily Hart says, “and the play will have one or two women’s roles. Maybe they’re good, maybe they’re not, but there will be 30 women competing for them.” The toll this competition takes artistically is a serious one. According to Hart, “It becomes not so much about the joy of theater, but about how I beat other people out for roles.”  Continue reading →

She showed up for a night of “sex to change the course of the world.” He locked the door behind her and duct-taped the air vents to save the human race. With a careful calculation of comet speed, fish sleep and personal hunches, biologist Jules has pinpointed the cataclysmic end of the world at about 7 minutes away, setting us up for a comedy that takes us for a philosophical swim through evolution and imagination. Continue reading →

Pieces of a life burst across the stage; the years slip by, 1952, 1939, 1949. The audience picks up the threads of the story, each scene inspiring the viewer to piece the events together, to crack the code to understanding the life of Alan Turing. Continue reading →

The house is packed, and squirming, at the Actors Cabaret of Eugene. Kids are spilling in and out of their seats as parents and grandparents sip cocktails and coffee. Everyone is joyous and easy as the bright lights and brighter costumes of Seussical flood the stage in a musical tribute to the 20th century’s greatest children’s author. Continue reading →

The bawdy, angst-filled puppets have returned. In the style of Sesame Street, but with a whole lot more sex, you can cringe in commiseration as Princeton, a recent college grad, searches for his Purpose. Like most 24-year-olds with delusions of significance he manages to lose a job, bungle relationships and spend his rent money on beer, but with a sincere and open heart. Continue reading →

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 →