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Caryl Churchill’s new play Love and Information is simultaneously the worst and the best first-date idea ever. In the intimate horseshoe shape of UO’s Hope Theatre, the play’s litany of 57 scenes and 100-plus characters was so relentless that it never occurred to me to shift so that my date could grab my hand. Continue reading
When the community loses an artist, it’s first felt acutely in his mortal absence, and then in the slow, aching realization that he will never again be there to sing another song or paint another picture — or dance just one more dance. Continue reading
Just a few hours south on I-5 exists a dulcet community that my family has re-named “The Magical Twinkly Fairyland.” For the uninitiated, the village I’m referring to is Ashland, where good restaurants abound, creeks babble, deer wander and, from February through November, some of the finest theater glimmers across the stages of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Celebrating its 80th year, OSF’s 2015 season features three world premieres: Continue reading
In the iconic 1980 movie 9 to 5, workaday heroines Doralee Rhodes, Judy Bernly and Violet Newstead (played by Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin) suffer under — and ultimately triumph over — their “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” boss, Mr. Hart (rendered to oily perfection by Dabney Coleman). It’s a classic film, with a title song that’s been scientifically proven to be the foremost go-to karaoke anthem of all time. Continue reading
No American playwright — and perhaps no playwright ever — was as adept as Tennessee Williams at pulling apart the icky, sticky tangle of hurt that one furiously guarded secret can exact on a family. In the humid atmosphere of a Williams play, a single skeleton in the closet can level an entire clan for generations down the line, by way of recrimination, jealousy, resentment, obsession, addiction and, most of all, fear. Shit gets ugly when we tamp down the truth. Continue reading
Ah, yes — when God finally arrives in all his glory to destroy the wicked and raise up the true believers in a dazzling city of eternal happiness, how beautiful it all will be! Right? Right? Continue reading
All across town, dance is lighting up the New Year. A chapter in the local dance scene has closed, as Geni Morrow, who has served as the director of The Reach Center and its dance company The EDGE, also serving as the impresario behind the 20-year-running performance fundraiser Dance for a Reason, announced that there would be no Dance for a Reason this year. Continue reading
Bob, Phil and Larry are in the existential hell that is the 26th-floor suite of a Holiday Inn overlooking Wichita, Kansas. Their JCPenney grey suits and their hopes of selling industrial lubricant set the prosaic scene for this morality tale. Continue reading
It’s a timeless literary trope, from Ecclesiastes to Groundhog Day: A cynical man, mired in despair and the funk of worldly resentments, is confronted with the error of his ways to such an extent that he undergoes an immediate and permanent transformation, emerging from darkness into light. Such victories of the spirit are the epitome of happily ever after, and we never tire of their telling. Continue reading
Carly Aquilino has been doing standup for less than three years and she’s already got a hit show — millennial favorite Girl Code, a comedy series where women in entertainment “weigh in on the sisterhood that all girls share” — and a cult following: In a recent episode, a fan gets Aquilino’s face tattooed on her thigh (another fan shaved her face into his back…). EW caught up with Aquilino over the phone from her New York apartment. She brings her act to Eugene for the first time Dec. 6 at McDonald Theatre. Continue reading