Fast fade

We've all thought about it. How easy it would be. To just step away. To go out to fetch some Chunky Monkey and just never go home again. Or to head off for work on a Monday morning like any other, but never actually arrive at the office. Or to go out with friends for a Friday night drink, and at some point go to the restroom, never to be seen again.

Naturally everyone's first thought will be that you've come to foul play. But more often than not, says playwright and Londoner Fin Kennedy, a lot of careful planning goes into a disappearing act. If you'd like to know you might go about it yourself -- hypothetically, of course -- of course! -- there's a dramatized primer available to you right now at PCS.

You've got a couple more weeks to see one of my favorite plays produced at PCS during my brief tenure there (i.e., since 9/02): How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, by the ultracool Mr. K, directed by the equally cool Rose Riordan, where you'll learn the fast fade is both harder and easier than you'd suspect.

To further whet your appetite, Patrick Weishampel has just aired an interview with Fin in which the playwright talks about the unsettling experience of researching the modi operandi of the ultimate self-effacers.


Interview with Fin Kennedy from Portland Center Stage on Vimeo.

Yes We Can-Can

At last night's season announcement at the Armory, the event was kicked off, as always, by a video created by the fiercely talented Rose Riordan to commemorate the current season. This leads into Chris Coleman revealing what the upcoming season's going to be, you see, complete with scenes and/or songs from each show. Clever, yes?

In case you missed it or if you'd just like to relive it, here's what Rose gave us this year.

PCS's 09/10 Stimulus Package

A bit about the philosophy here. It's a scary time right now. We're all worried about money, and let's face it, it wasn't all that rosey for non-profits to start with. So whatteryagonnado. Solutions espoused by some theaters have included seasons fashioned totally out of public domain scripts; mounting only small-cast plays (one- and two-handers); and offering only plays they're sure people have heard of.

But is that going to work? If money's tight, do audiences really wanted to be reminded of that when they get to the theater?

When times are hard, you invest in your product. You remind people of why they wanted to come in the first place. And you reflect the world you're living in by showing that now is the time to pull together, not to fall apart.


We think next season is a good balance of the familiar and the new, the gritty and the comforting. Only one world premiere in this season, but several highly theatrical adaptations of significant works. I'm proud of us. Here's the plays:


Ragtime


Book by Terrence McNally, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, and music by Stephen Flaherty
Directed by Chris Coleman
(Main Stage)

E.L. Doctorow’s sweeping novel comes vividly to life in this Tony Award-winning musical, set in one of America’s most volatile gilded ages—the pre-WWI decades of the 20th century. Against the backdrop of the ragtime craze, disparate lives intertwine: a wealthy family; a poor immigrant and his motherless daughter; a black man named Coalhouse Walker. Historical figures like Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan and Emma Goldman also inhabit this stirring epic, but it is American popular music that carries the story, including marches, cakewalks and -- of course – ragtime.


Thurgood

By George Stevens, Jr.
(Ellyn Bye Studio)

One of America’s greatest heroes takes the stage in this powerful new play about Thurgood Marshall, the grandson of a slave who rose from a childhood in the back streets of Baltimore to become our first African-American Supreme Court Justice. Thurgood is an account and a triumph of courage -- not just for one man, but for the nation he bravely challenged and proudly served. Called a “a don’t miss event” by the New York press, Thurgood invites us to meet and, perhaps just a little, understand a man whose life story is a model for what keeps the idea of the American dream alive.


Snow Falling on Cedars

Based on the book by David Guterson, adapted for the stage by Kevin McKeon
(Main Stage)

Northwesterner David Guterson won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction when this novel was published and it quickly went on to become a national best seller and a regional classic. Now adapted for the stage by Seattle’s Book-it Repertory Theatre (the people who brought us Pride and Prejudice), this haunting story takes place in 1954, north of Puget Sound, on an island so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. But when Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with murder, the community’s secrets emerge one by one. Gripping and densely atmospheric, Snow Falling on Cedars is a masterpiece of suspense.




The Chosen

Adapted from the Chaim Potok novel by Aaron Posner
Ellyn Bye Studio)

A standing-room-only hit wherever it plays, this award-winning adaptation from the award-winning novel is the coming-of-age story of two boys growing up in two very different Jewish communities—“five blocks and a world apart”—in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the 1940s. Reuven Malter and Danny Saunders are intelligent and inquiring young men who form a unique friendship following a heated baseball game between their rival yeshivas. The boys grow to manhood in very different families, and amid the historic debate about the founding of the state of Israel. As they question both their own destinies and the times in which they live, they learn important lessons about each other, their fathers and themselves. This is a story of friendship, family and difficult choices that we must all make on the path to understanding, respect and reconciliation


Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps

Adapted by Patrick Barlow from the book by John Buchan
(Main Stage)

Newly adapted for the stage and a hit of the 2008 Broadway season, whodunit meets hilarious in this recklessly theatrical riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematic 1935 masterpiece, a hit of the 2008 Broadway season. This blissfully funny story follows the adventures of our handsome hero Richard Hannay, complete with stiff-upper-lip, pencil moustache and British gung-ho attitude, as he encounters dastardly murders, double-crossing secret agents, and, of course, devastatingly beautiful women. A wonderfully inventive and gripping comedy thriller, The 39 Steps features four fearless actors playing 139 roles in an evening of fast-paced fun and thrilling action.


Joe Turner’s Come and Gone

By August Wilson
Directed by Timothy Douglas
(Main Stage)


The year is 1911 and, haunted by seven years on a chain gang, Herald Loomis appears in Pittsburgh to reunite his family. Surrounded by the vibrant tenants of a black boarding house, he fights for his soul and his song in the dawning days of a century without slavery. Often called a spiritual mystery, Joe Turner's Come and Gone is part of August Wilson's ten-play Century Cycle, which depicts the African American experience in each decade of the twentieth century. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone originally opened on Broadway in 1988, where it received a Tony Award nomination for Best Play and won that year's New York Drama Critics Circle Award.


The Best So Far (working title)

By Marcy Heisler and Zina Goldrich
Ellyn Bye Studio)
World premiere!

From one of the hottest team of songwriters in New York (spin some of their most fun credits), comes the premiere of a new musical as saucy, zany and romantic as a carriage ride through Central Park. With a wit and melodic purity reminiscent of Cole Porter or Dorothy Parker, The Best So Far takes a ride through the wilds of modern romantic relationships. Whether the characters are 18 or 80, the terror and thrill of leaping into commitment looms large and keeps them spinning.



The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

Lyrics and Music by William Finn, Book by Rachel Sheinkin
Main Stage)

Six kids face off in the battle of their lives. The competition is intense. The words are outrageous. Let the spelling (and the singing) begin! Three adults adjudicate the proceedings: a nostalgic former spelling bee winner, a mildly insane Vice Principal and The Official Comfort Counselor completing his community service to the State of New York. Both tender and sardonic, this hilarious Tony Award-winning musical of overachievers' angst brings you inside the spelling championship to end them all. From the author of Falsettos and A New Brain.



Special Holiday Offerings!!!

Not part of any subscription package, but subscribers get early ordering privileges

A Christmas Carol

Adapted by Mead Hunter from the novella by Charles Dickens
Directed by Rose Riordan
(Main Stage)

Already a Portland holiday tradition, this original adaptation by PCS’ own Mead Hunter asks the timely and reflective questions: What do you value most? And is it what’s truly important? At the holiday season, renew your answers to these essential questions alongside Tiny Tim, Ebenezer Scrooge and a sleigh full of ghosts and magical creatures as we remount this warm and engaging adaptation of the Dickens classic. In this version, Scrooge’s nephew Fred stands in for the spirit of the season, expressing what we all love about the story when he says to Scrooge; “[This] is a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely.”


The Santaland Diaries

By David Sedaris
Adapted for the stage by Joe Mantello
(Ellyn Bye Studio)

The woman at Macy's asked, "Would you be interested in full-time or evening and weekend elf?"
I said, "Full-time elf." I have an appointment next Wednesday at noon.

Based on the outlandish, and true, chronicles of David Sedaris’ experience as Crumpet the Elf in Macy’s Santaland display, this hilarious cult classic features comic encounters during the height of the holiday crunch. NPR humorist and best-selling author of When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, David Sedaris has become one of America’s pre-eminent humor writers. PCS brings a holiday favorite back to Portland as a special Studio Theater presentation.

“Priceless observations, both outrageous and subtle. Destined to hold a place in the annals of American humor writing.” –New York Times

Fast Times @ PCS

HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY AND NEVER BE FOUND TRAILER from Portland Center Stage on Vimeo.



The Importance of Being Earnest Trailer from Portland Center Stage on Vimeo.

NOW HEAR THIS returns, starring Patrick Wohlmut

PCS has been fortunate indeed to benefit from not one but two commissions made possible by the fruitful marriage of minds between San Francisco's Magic Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Sloan's original impetus was to stimulate writing about science and scientists, with the idea of humanizing the field -- putting a human face on it, as it were.

The Sloan had just two stipulations: that the science at the commissioned play's center had to be a "hard" science (no parapsychology, for example) and it couldn't be science fiction.

Our first Sloan went to Nancy Keystone, who's remarkable verfremdungseffekt Apollo starts previews at PCS on January 13! How fitting, therefore, that our second outing will have its public reading within Apollo's powerful nimbus.

PlayGroup member Patrick Wohlmut's commissioned play, Continuum, concerns a researcher's cock-up over an cosmic theory he believes is revolutionary but that mainstream astronomy considers crackpot. He enlists support from an unconventional source, and unwittingly creates a hall of mirrors in which even he is not always sure what is real and what is surreal. The play is, at its heart, a mystery -- one in which the inexplicable cosmos mirrors the endless surprises of the human psyche.

Patrick was aided in his own research by Reed College Professor of Astrophysics Robert Reynolds, who we hope will be on hand to witness the birth of a brand new play. You're invited, too. Here's the 411:

-----------------------

Portland Center Stage’s
NOW HEAR THIS

invites you to a rehearsed concert reading of

CONTINUUM
a new play by Patrick Wohlmut

written with the support of a playwriting commission from
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
directed by
Stan Foote

*
Monday, January 5, 2009
7:00 pm
@ Portland Center Stage
128 NW Eleventh Avenue (between Couch & Davis)
on the Main Stage

*

Our outstanding cast includes:
Paul Glazier, Michael O’Connell and Amaya Villazan

*

Admission is free and all are welcome

A discussion will follow the reading

-----------------------------

In the abstruse world of astrophysical research, Peter -- whose promise in the field is dubious -- needs all the help he can get. But he gets more than he bargained for from a brilliant but erratic collaborator he rescues the streets. In the course of their cat and mouse game, roles reverse and shift, stars and planets collide, and both men find that the universe is not as quantifiable as they expected.

Patrick Wohlmut
Patrick is an actor and playwright. His most recent stage role was as Harry Berlin in Mt. Hood Repertory’s production of Luv, where he also played Colm in Sea Marks. Other favorite roles include Vaughn in In Apparati, for Defunkt Theater; Faust in Faust. Us., for Stark Raving Theater; Peter Austin in It’s Only a Play, for Profile Theater; Sebastian in Twelfth Night, for Portland Actors Ensemble; Ted in Three Plays Five Lives, for Liminal Performance Group; Miles in The Drawer Boy, for Artists Repertory Theater, which also starred William Hurt; and Todd in Earth Stories, for VERB: Literature in Performance, a role that earned him a Portland Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role. As a writer, two of his short plays – The Surrogate Mothers and K-PAN – were featured in Portland State University’s New Plays Festival in 2002. He was also a featured writer for Bump in the Road Theater’s 2004 original production, (Old Age Ain’t) No Place for Sissies. In addition to being the recipient of a Sloan Foundation New Science Initiative commission, Patrick is also working on a play titled The Chain and the Gear, about the effect of the hit-and-run death of a cyclist on a southeast Portland community; and a novel, Putting Woody to Rest, about two teenagers who are haunted by the ghost of Woody Guthrie. He lives with his wife and two children in Portland.

Preview of Coming Attraction

Nancy Keystone's multimedia epic Apollo opens in exactly 60 days and I can't wait. But now, thanks to the cool new banner at the top of PCS's site, I can literally count the seconds -- check it out here.

Meanwhile, let me tantalize you with this image from the workshop Nancy just finished in Los Angeles.

You can get there from here

Check it out: fab graphic designer Michael Buchino has riffed on the famous New Yorker cover to display how the universe looks from our end of it. I find it especially endearing that the only two places in his cartography between here and Boston are Chicago and Louisville.



PS Having now failed several times to upload a photo you can actually see, I'm now making the illegal move of just linking directly to where the image lives: right here.

Enjoy.

Memento mori

Autumn has arrived in a big way here in the Pacific Northwest. All I love about living here – the gentle showers, the bruise-colored skies, the ways colors become saturated from the soft light – it has all returned, after only the briefest of summer hiatuses. Hiati? Intermissions.

Ah, but my staycation is nearly over, too, such as it is/was. Basically I worked at home for a week, preparing for juggernaut projects coming up. That’s not as pitiful as it sounds. As my friend Matt puts it so well, basically I’ve lowered my overall stress level by parsing it out over a longer period.

Perversely, considering that I feel most myself during the fall season, during this transition into it I’ve been coping with a major case of wist. Can’t seem to shake it. Maybe it’s because come Tuesday the PCS season will be full upon me, which means embarking on 10-month emergency. Maybe it’s an ingrained pattern from childhood, when falls always meant another galling year of school was starting (I was a bully magnet.) Or maybe it’s because Mac, my absolutely fabulous Kerry Blue Terrier, has also been going through something, which reminds me that he won’t be with us forever.

Well, who will, right? And autumn invites us to mull that over that sad fact yet again.

Here’s a confession. For years I’ve had this game I play with myself, as I squire Mac around Irvington. I look at this house or that one and think: hmm, maybe that would be a good place to live alone, when Mac and James are both gone. It would be easy to keep up…it’s just the right size……etc., in that vein. And also for years, I’d catch myself doing that and think: how odd. Because it sounds like wish fulfillment, when I know for dead certain I don’t want to be without my two guys a second sooner than I have to.

Then just last night, walking past all these haunted houses, I realize what I’ve been doing all along. Not fantasizing at all – rehearsing. In anticipation of the unthinkable, when they’re both gone forever.

Indicative of my mood these days is a line I remembered from an old Rickie Lee Jones song: “years may go by….” From “On Saturday Afternoons in 1963.” Know it? Well, here it is, in all its elegiac beauty.

The most as you'll ever go
Is back where you used to know
If grown-ups could laugh this slow
Where as you watch the hour snow
Years may go by

So hold on to your special friend
Here, you'll need something to keep her in:
"Now you stay inside this foolish grin ... "
Though any day your secrets end
Then again
Years may go by

You saved your own special friend
'Cuz here you need something to hide her in
And you stay inside that foolish grin
When everyday now secrets end
Oh and then again
Years may go by

How to eat your cake and have it too

********************************************************************************************************* At right is the famous cake created for JAW’s 10th anniversary poster by The Great Society. Check out the video below to see how it was photographed by the brilliant David Emmite at his studio, and subsequently destroyed by voracious PCS staffers. Can you believe I passed up the chance to be a hand model for this shoot?

Kudos to us

Last night The Drammy Awards reverted to a format I hadn't seen in a few years: semi-controlled chaos, a healthy mix of the outrageous and the emotional, and a delicious sense that anything could happen at any moment.

In other words, it was like Thanksgiving dinner with your entire extended family.

The O'Briens, mother and daughter, were terrific hosts -- genial and easygoing and off-the-cuff, clearing having a ball -- and though no turkey got served, Mother O'Brien did bring her home-baked brownies, which were dispensed to the award winners along with their trophies.

Of course I knew in advance which artists were getting awards, but during the actual ceremony, I felt keenly certain nominations that didn't quite make it to the award stage -- Storm Large's Sally Bowles, for example, and Rick Lewis' extraordinary musical direction for Cabaret. But it happens....a large majority of Committee members (80%) have to ratify each nomination, which sometimes means that worthy nominations just miss the cut. On the other hand, though, this system makes it almost impossible to pass any noms that are quixotic or misguided.

ANYHOW. I don't mean to complain, because PCS did every well, with 11 wins. And I was especially gladdened at the chorus of approval over Sojourn Theatre's win of Outstanding Production for its footloose adaptation of Brecht, entitled Good, which was among the most memorable and affecting plays I've see EVER.

Favorite moment of the evening: Chris Murray's Poem to the Anonymous Followspot Poster. It was en garde and touche all in one fell poop.

DOUBT

Tonight Doubt opens at PCS, and I can't wait for magic time, as Moss Hart described it -- you know, that moment when the lights go down and you know the play is about to begin. I've seen the play several times now, between run-throughs and previews, and I still eagerly anticipate tonight's performance. Yes, the cast is that good, for one thing, and Rose Riordan's direction is taut, yet surprisingly wry. This is John Patrick Shanley's masterpiece.

There's also the tart, pointed wit of the central character, Sister Aloysius, played by Jayne Taini, who has morphed her lovely features into an apple doll of a figure. But she is an apple doll with teeth. Don't miss this suspenseful drama. You don't have to be Catholic to appreciate the play, but if you are or ever were, you'll be treated to an extra dash of schadenfreude just watching the clergy square off.

SAGN backstage

Whatever happened to Mr Mead, you ax?

PCS is keeping me so frantic these days that there hasn’t been time to blog, so … while you’re waiting for my next Epic of Massive Impact, check out these two amusingly droll promos for our two shows that just opened in rep: Amy Freed’s sweetly salacious The Beard of Avon and the Bard of Avon’s immortal Twelfth Night, both created by Patrick “Fun” Weishampel.

More Naughty Theater!

Once again this is short notice, but I’m inviting you personally to a Now Hear This reading of David Grimm’s hilarious, bawdy and -- ultimately – surprisingly affecting comedy Measure for Pleasure. As the title suggests, the humor is wryly macaronic, with Restoration-style pomp and studied refinement cheek by jowl with, um, coarser Anglo-Saxon sentiments. The Michal Daniel photo above (of Emily Swallow, left, and Euan Morton in the Public Theater production of Measure for Pleasure) gives you a clear picture of what to expect. In spirit, I mean -- we don't actually costume these readings!

Just FYI, this monthly PCS reading series exists to invite our friends and patrons to participate in our play consideration process just by being there. Your reaction to these plays is the best possible barometer of how they may work in full production. So come if you can this Saturday; you’ll help us out, you'll see some fabulous acting and you’ll laugh your powdered wig off.

Plus this time you’ll be seated in the comfortable mainstage space, with the sets for The Beard of Avon and Twelfth Night as a background. Here’s your engraved invite:

--------------------


Portland Center Stage’s
NOW HEAR THIS

invites you to a concert reading of

Measure for Pleasure

A play by David Grimm

*

January 26, 2008
Noon to approximately 2 pm

@ Portland Center Stage
128 NW Eleventh Avenue (between Couch & Davis)
in the comfy mainstage space

Admission is free, but RSVPs are appreciated
Please call Megan Ward at (503) 445-3845 or e-mail meganw@pcs.org
to reserve your seat

-----------------------------

Set in the 18th Century, this romantic comedy sex romp (involving disguises, mistaken identities, gender bending, and gay marriage) examines the nature of happiness. Can human beings be genuinely happy, or is that an unattainable goal? Measure for Pleasure is a saucy, silly, foul and filthy treat.

David Grimm is an award-winning New York-based playwright and screenwriter. His plays include The Learned Ladies of Park Avenue; Kit Marlowe (cited by the NY Post in its list of the “10 Best Plays of 2000”); and Sheridan, or Schooled in Scandal. David is the recipient of an NEA/TCG Residency Grant and has developed work at the Sundance Theatre Lab in Utah, the Sundance Writer’s Retreat at Ucross, Wyoming, New York Stage & Film and The Old Vic. David holds an MFA from NYU, a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, and has been a lecturer in Playwriting at the Yale School of Drama and Columbia University.

Our outstanding cast includes:

Ben Plont, Todd Van Voris, Spencer Conway, Kurt Conroyd, Maureen Porter,
Laura Faye Smith and Paige Jones

“Epiphany!”

Wild night this past Friday, as the storm that slammed into North California and Southern Oregon arrived in Portland. What we had up here was nothing like the apocalyptic weather they had down there, and of course in Portlandia you rarely notice the rain anyway. But this was eerie, with winds tearing at your face and shrieking like banshees. I was on my way to an art opening at Studio 2507, and for a large swathe of the city’s southeast quarter, the power was out. My headlights were the only source of illumination, and visibility was low anyway because the rain was racing this way and that, like a colossal, sodden will-o-the-wisp. But I made it to the opening, where Alec Egan presided calmly over the opening of enthused, wall-to-wall art patrons admiring his latest work.

Alec’s famous parents were there, too: Robert Egan, from Los Angeles, who recently had a huge success with The Word Begins, a spoken word piece he developed and directed, and the glamorous Kate Mulgrew, here from New York for the occasion. Bob and I talked about L.A. and what an exciting, infinite, unknowable megalopolis it is. “But you,” Bob said, “get to participate in all this,” and he indicated the Friday night Clinton Street scene going on outside the gallery. I looked outside at the restaurants and the bars and social swim happening in the middle of this riotous rainstorm, and I thought: yeah, he’s right. I do feel fortunate to be here in Portland, where there is street life, where there are public spaces, where people are still curious about other people.

A bit of an epiphany, for me.

Now tonight is the historical Epiphany – the fabled Twelfth Night. The last evening of Christmastide, when traditionally the three wise men are supposed to have arrived in Bethlehem and inaugurated our custom of gift-giving. As a child, the story always puzzled me – what was the Baby Jesus supposed to do with a box full of myrrh? – but it did make a nice story.

At Portland Center Stage, we are about to tech our rep productions of Amy Freed’s The Beard of Avon and the Bard of Avon’s Twelfth Night. Which reminds me that traditionally Twelfth Night was often a wild time – the end of a holiday season that began with the Feast of All Hallows and extended through the Church-sanctioned Epiphany. Notwithstanding the Catholic Church’s efforts to realign the pagan origins of all this was Christian mythology, sometimes the evening was turned into a saturnalia, of sorts. In some communities it merged with the medieval Feast of Fools holiday, where the Lord of Misrule reigned and the normal order of things was topsy-turvy.

You can read about this on the marvelous blog Upstart Dramaturg, where production dramaturg extraordinaire Kim Crow investigates the party-like atmosphere of Shakespeare’s play that his original audiences would have expected from its title alone.

So even though it’s Sunday night and tomorrow morning means the “holiday season” is officially over, light a candle against the retrenchment of normalcy. We still have two more months of dark, dank nights. Make the most.

More about Cabaret, old chum

In preparation for all the Prologues, Q&A sessions and everything else associated with the Portland Center Stage production of Cabaret, this summer I finally broke down and read The Berlin Stories, by Christopher Isherwood. These remarkable, mostly autobiographical accounts of Berlin partying while Hitler rises to power are harrowing, funny, revealing and absorbing. I should have read them decades ago; it’s the sort of book that can show a young writer there’s a middle ground between confessional diarism and fiction.


Don't do as I did, though, and take the book on vacation with you. Imagine me avidly and anxiously rushing through these stories, as “Cliff Bradshaw” (Isherwood’s nom de guerre) traipses through Berlin’s seedier spider traps with the Nazis growing ever more menacing and numerous….and all while I’m sunning myself at the edge of the world in emerald green Kaua’i. Embodying a new definition of cognitive dissonance. I hardly needed to be transported away from Hanalei, but it was a journey worth taking nevertheless.

Since then, in my follow-up research, it touched me to learn that there’s now a plaque on the front of the house where much of The Berlin Stories unfolded, acknowledging the building’s historical and literary importance. It makes Cabaret all the more poignant knowing that most of its characters – Fraulein Schneider, Ernst, Fraulein Kost, Bobby, and of course Sally Bowles herself – actually lived, and lived in that very residence. I hope to visit it myself someday.


Meanwhile, here’s a some fun spots for you: Storm Large’s promo for the production, done in character; same for Wade McCollum; and also a brief introduction by the play’s director and my boss, Chris Coleman. Cheers.

A Cabaret Indeed.

So Cabaret opened tonight at Portland Center Stage, marking the official start of season #2 in the Gerding Theater at the Armory. And it was a triumph -- a fabulous, thrilling, affecting production.

Long before opening, a continual buzz was in the air about it because of its two stars, Wade McCollum and Storm Large -- both of them Portland performing arts royalty that have fan bases well beyond Stumptown.
Wade excels at tour de force roles in plays like Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Rocky Horror and Bat Boy the Musical; Cabaret's sexually and politically dangerous EmCee is a natural role for him. And Storm as Sally Bowles! She doesn't have to look far for her character's objectives; in an incarnation not so long ago, Storm was living the cabaret life to the absolute max.

By the way, the photos I've included here, all by photographer par excellence Owen Carey, give you a good peek at what tonight looked like. If you are interested, there are many more photographs and good insights into what it was like to build this ambitious production at Chris Coleman's own blog.

Tour the Armory

No doubt you've heard that Portland Center Stage moved into its glam new home last September, an historic reconstruction of the city's original armory. Recently the building received a Platinum LEED rating (Leadership in Energy and Efficient Design) for constructing the theater in accordance with green standards.

Now you don't have to be in Portland to tour the new facilities, thanks to the wizardy of Josh Oakhurst, our lovely and talented videographer.



While you're at it, check out all of Josh's YouTube videos. They're as quick-witted and quirky and startling as ...as Josh himself.