By Bob Hicks Today I posted Theater: Hard Times for big theories on Oregon ArtsWatch – a little theorizing on the failure of theories as expressed by Voltaire in Candide (as adapted in the Leonard Bernstein musical at Portland Opera) and Charles Dickens in Hard Times (as adapted by playwright Stephen Jeffreys and performe

By Bob Hicks The other day I posted this essay, BodyVox cuts to the Hollywood chase, on Oregon ArtsWatch. It’s about BodyVox dance’s cannily amusing ode to the movies, The Cutting Room, which continues through May 19. In the piece, I dive into the pool where film, dance and music swim around in existential, esse

By Bob Hicks Portland, a city at last? It’s just possible that Peter Pan is growing up. Last weekend I saw three plays – the premiere of The Storm in the Barn at Oregon Children’s Theatre; Next to Normal at Artists Rep; and The Bridge, an adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey,

Art Scatter’s chief correspondent, Martha Ullman West, keeps a sharp and steady eye on the dance world for a variety of publications. A week ago she reviewed the opening of Oregon Ballet Theatre’s “Chromatic Quartet” program for The Oregonian. (Art Scatter’s Bob Hicks followed with this take on

Art Scatter regulars will remember essayist Trisha Pancio Mead’s recent struggle with the concept of kale. Her gardening roots run deeper yet: thanks in a roundabout way to Barbara Walters and Keanu Reeves, she’s a budding artist of the side yard plot. Read on to see how the plot thickens – and savor the garde

By Martha Ullman West The School of Oregon Ballet Theatre delivered a promising and rewarding evening of ballet on Thursday night. It repeats on Sunday, and it’s  well worth seeing even if you’ve no little hostage-to-fortune performing on the Newmark stage. The evening began with a clean, musical performance of Bala

Gary Norman By Bob Hicks Today I posted an essay, Serpents, true believers and ‘Holy Ghosts’, on Oregon Arts Watch. It’s about Romulus Linney’s remarkable 1970 old-time religion drama, which is still fresh and vivid in light of the rise of the fundamentalist right, and worth seeing not just because i

Oregon Ballet Theatre opens its newest production, Chromatic Quartet, on Thursday night at the Newmark Theatre, and has sent out a few rehearsal photos by one of our faves, Blaine Truitt Covert. We saw the shot above of Lucas Threefoot and Michael Linsmeier racing through the paces of Matjash Mrozewski’s The Lost Danc

By Bob Hicks Last night I went to White Bird’s opening-night performance by Goteborg Ballet (the Swedish contemporary company performs again tonight and Saturday night in the Newmark Theatre) and discovered a sort of sister-city alternate universe. Three dances, all contemporary and very European, all very different f

By Bob Hicks What do nine short plays about gay marriage and a Gilligan’s Island take on Much Ado About Nothing have in common? What do either or both have to say about that old bugaboo, elitism and the arts? In my essay Gay Marriage, beach-blanket Bard: elitism for the masses over at Oregon Arts Watch, I [...]

People have been cultivating kale for more than 2,000 years, but up until a few months ago hardly anybody bragged about it. Sure, it grows well in winter, and it’s loaded with vitamins. But is that any reason to treat it like the foie gras of the vegetable kingdom? “This is food whose texture screams [...]

By Bob Hicks Just posted this essay, Galileo and the theocrats, like a circle ’round the sun, on Oregon Arts Watch. It’s an odd little rumination on Philip Glass, Portland Opera’s production of his chamber opera Galileo Galilei, and the drift of American and global politics toward rigidity and theocracy. B

By Bob Hicks Breaking the Glass ceiling. Again. This just in from Portland Opera: the Philip Glass connection strikes again. You probably already knew the opera company will open its production of Glass’s 2002 chamber opera Galileo Galilei on Friday night in the Newmark Theatre. And you probably recall that Portland O

By Bob Hicks CJ Jones is 75-odd years old, and although he moves around slowly, he thinks in short sharp bursts, which in Portland writer Charles Deemer’s new novel Sodom, Gomorrah & Jones translate into short sharp chapters. It’s almost more of a novella, really, if the categorizing makes a difference, with a lot o

By Bob Hicks Breaking theater protocol, Mr. Scatter leaned toward the LLSB* as the show was running and whispered: “She’s like Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde.” This nugget of cross-genre enlightenment was met with less than enthusiastic acknowledgement because (a) for the LLSB, who was born in 1994, the 2001 movi

By Bob Hicks Betty Feves (1918-1985) was a pioneering American ceramic artist who lived most of her working life in the Oregon desert town of Pendleton but gained a national representation as a thorough modernist in a tradition-bound medium, and not coincidentally shattered a few glass ceilings as she went about her work. P

By Bob Hicks For Portland’s scrappy Northwest Dance Project, putting on a program of three world premieres is just another day at the office. It’s how they roll. I went to the company’s Spring Premieres a few nights ago and posted this piece, Spring awakening: NDP’s torrent of new dance, at Oregon Ar

By Bob Hicks Today I posted this essay, Doing the Locomotion with kids’ theater, at Oregon Arts Watch. It’s about Oregon Children’s Theatre’s terrific production of Locomotion, Jacqueline Woodson’s stage adaptation of her National Book Award-finalist children’s book, which is something of

By Bob Hicks Mr. Scatter spent a good share of his weekend with the sons and daughters of Terpsichore, watching and thinking as they sliced through space. The performances he took in were 4 Men Only at Conduit and Troika Ranch’s Enter Comma Prepare at Reed College’s Kaul Auditorium. He then posted his thoughts o

“We could do with a regiment of Wilis to haunt the halls of Congress,” Martha Ullman West declares, and then she tells us why. Art Scatter’s chief correspondent, who reviewed Oregon Ballet Theatre’s current production of “Giselle” here for The Oregonian, expands on her ideas for us, movin

By Bob Hicks Seeking to rise above the weather under which he’s been submerged these past several days, Mr. Scatter elevated to the balcony of Keller Auditorium on Saturday evening so he could take in the grand sweep of Oregon Ballet Theatre’s new Giselle. The air was a little giddy up there – or maybe it [...]

By Bob Hicks I just posted this story, Pander transported: memories of a time of war, on Oregon Arts Watch. It’s a look at Dutch-born Portland artist Henk Pander’s remarkable series of paintings and drawings at the Oregon Jewish Museum based on his childhood memories of World War II in his hometown of Haarlem. A

By Bob Hicks Through a series of  coincidences too complicated to describe, Mr. and Mrs. Scatter spent Valentine’s Day evening at the opening performance of the latest touring version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Mr. Scatter then wrote his impressions of the production for The Oregonian; you can read them

By Bob Hicks I’ve posted Teen to twilight: a theater weekend for the ages at Oregon Arts Watch. It recounts my adventures at the theater over the weekend, when I caught the Jason Robert Brown teen musical 13 at Staged! Musical Theatre, the theater-games comedy Circle Mirror Transformation at Artists Rep, and Jose Rive

By Bob Hicks Today I posted this story, Song of the warhorses: charge of the Butterfly brigade, on Oregon Arts Watch. Somehow, it seemed, a disconnect was going on. Audiences and critics alike were loving Portland Opera’s current production of Madame Butterfly. Yet there were grumblings in the land: Why this steady di

By Bob Hicks I’ve just posted this story at Oregon Arts Watch on last night’s opening show of Skinner/Kirk Dance Ensemble’s run at BodyVox Dance Center. Four good dances, including Josie Moseley’s splendid new Flying Over Emptiness. Pictured above: Eric Skinner and Daniel Kirk in Moseley’s new

By Bob Hicks With Mrs. Scatter on the road eating fresh pineapple and downing margaritas with childhood friends, Mr. Scatter and the offspring have been batching it the last few days. While that’s led to a somewhat more relaxed sense of structure (oh, my goodness: is it midnight already?), the basics have been covered: bo

By Bob Hicks When we talk about culture here at Art Scatter, we like to think it’s almost as wide as life. It could be historical, or political, or social, or personal, or purely aesthetic. It might be Madame Butterfly, Puccini’s opera about a fatal clash of moral sensibilities, which returns to the Portland Opera stage

By Bob Hicks Hal Holbrook’s back in town on Saturday, riding the horse of his magnificent one-man show Mark Twain Tonight!, and even as Holbrook noses up on 87 years old it’s bound to be a helluva show. A couple of weeks ago I chatted on the phone for about an hour with him (Holbrook, not Twain, [...]

Thomas Nast/1871 By Bob Hicks The national political season is getting good and nasty these days, and we here at Art Scatter World Headquarters are pretty pumped about it: blood sports do that to us. We’re especially excited about the literary possibilities. In  recent days we’ve added some astute veteran polit