CULTUREPHILE: PORTLAND ARTS

Review: Alice & Wonderland

Oregon Children’s Theatre version of the Carroll classic begs for less speed, more ’shroom—and more breathing room.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Nov 01, 2010 at 06:00AM 6 Comments

Dave Cole stars as a rockin’ rabbit.

“Is it over yet?” piped a child’s voice as Alice finished exuberantly belting that she was “Bored! Bored! Bored!” But it was far from over; in fact, Alice had yet to even fall down the rabbit hole. Fast, loud, and colorful, this musical played on like a human firework show, while I suppressed a strong urge to sneak the kid out for ice cream, and reappear in an hour.

Imagine the sparse, scaffold-style staging of RENT, combined with costumes the Mickey Mouse Club might wear to Burning Man, and a live band playing a relentless onslaught of fast-paced prog-rock with a few new-country twangs. Imagine there’s no speaking, only singing, and no pausing, only rocking. Older kids are mildly amused, but some little kids are pretty confused, and many of the lovable aspects of musical theater get lost in the frenetic mix. That said, there’s nary a bad performer in the bunch; in fact, there are several standouts:

The White Rabbit (Dave Cole, last heard doing justice to Van Morrison numbers in local rock ballet Find Me Beside You ) has a beautiful husky croon, and is an able live guitarist. He hits the script’s few moods with the perfect timing and tone.

The Tweedles Dee and Dum are charming and memorable, in part because they’re lucky: their scene uses the only representational “set” (a beach-scape for their Walrus & Carpenter recitation), and their song, a Caribbean number, forces a slower pace than some of the others. Dee (Eric Little) hits the production’s penultimate high note, and Dum (Tyler Andrew Jones) has a pretty face and a riveting presence. (Having seen Jones in drag before–as Angel in RENT–I think I’d probably even enjoy him as Alice.)

The Queen’s regal bearing carries her nicely through her brief scene, the Cheshire Cat has an awesome grin, and the Caterpillar choreography—a train-style ensemble number with synchronized arm movement—is awfully cute. Humpty Dumpty and the Mock Turtle make a particularly valiant effort to emote and enunciate, and vie for the title of Mr. Personality.

Sarah Catherine Wheatley’s Alice, while not my taste, echoes strongly of Miley Cyrus’ Hannah Montana, the wildly successful kiddie rock star. So, like it or not, she’s probably doing something right.

Then what’s wrong?

1. Well, on Saturday afternoon, there seemed to be a problem with the sound. Some vox were shorting out, or at least suddenly dropping in volume. I imagine among the hundred switches and sliders, something should be reset: maybe the compression? Maybe merely the relative levels? Or maybe everyone’s headpiece needs to be taped tighter, so it can’t jiggle around? I don’t know. Try everything. These glitches were noticeable.

2. Songs flat-out went too fast. Drummer Dave Muldoon is either a hero for keeping the pace, or a culprit for setting it, on this hurtling speedwagon of a musical. Either way, all the musicians could stand to slow their roll, giving actors more room to ham it up. My guess is, more lyrics would get heard, and the characters would come through stronger. (Think Rocky Horror. Antici…pation.)

3. The most captivating moments were not the wacky ensemble numbers, but whenever a single element was introduced—from the inert paper-lantern moon, to each new character. But these focal points and narrative milestones were too quickly swept along in a hubbub of busy blocking and backup-dancing.

4. Even if star performers were allowed more leeway, there’d still be a lot missing from this version of the story. Alice never changes sizes, never has arguments, never fully delights or despairs. At best, this is an Alice-themed rock concert, and not a play. (More’s the pity that the songwriting isn’t stronger.) I, for one, wished for more of a story arc, and I’m sure a lot of kids will feel the same. To them, I recommend The Little Prince over at Shaking The Tree. But for kids who revel in fast-paced, loud, lighthearted sensory overload, this one may be just the ticket.

The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it. “No room! No room!” they cried out when they saw Alice coming. "There’s plenty of room," said Alice indignantly, and she sat down….

~Lewis Carroll

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Tags: Literature, Theater, music, children,

Review: The Little Prince

Shaking The Tree presents The Little Prince, a delicate allegory that’s never been just for kids.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Oct 25, 2010 at 12:00PM 2 Comments

Annabel Cantor charms as the iconic interstellar wanderer in The Little Prince.

The popular 1942 illustrated French book The Little Prince must be familiar to many Portlanders—heck, it must have inspired a dozen local tattoos. But though much beloved, it’s not a narrative that seeks to satisfy. Instead, it’s the kind of tale that strikes a tuning fork in the hollows of the heart, letting its echoes explore the empty space. Ah, l’ennui. The most prized French export beside champagne.

Philosophy

From the Little Prince, we learn:

The king’s perspective is pointless; he deludes himself about his dominion. The businessman’s perspective is pointless; he numbers among his assets things that he can neither use, nor caretake. The workman has become an unquestioning slave to ever-hastening external demands, and can never rest.

The main item of good news is that these are all “grown up” problems, and becoming a grownup, the text asserts, is preventable. One needs to carefully maintain a child’s mind, to see beyond the BS. “What is essential,” we’re told, “is invisible to the eye.”

To oversimplify this content for children’s theater, is probably a big temptation—but would also ultimately be a shame. Thank goodness Shaking The Tree has made the effort to get it right.

Cast

As the Little Prince, Annabel Cantor strikes several nice balances. Her stage presence is completely gender-neutral, and her body language easily slips between playful and proud, as befits a little prince. Her excellent delivery of the material itself, and her undeniable cuteness in a curly wig, prove she’s primed for her next role as Annie at Northwest Children’s Theater. Unable to be fazed, she even corrected a dialogue slip-up by costar Erich England on Sunday, without missing a beat.

As the Aviator, England serves as narrator, and worldly straight-man to the Little Prince’s otherworldly mystique. But you don’t get the sense (as you might from the script alone) that he’s fighting very hard to be a rational adult, “concerned with matters of importance.” While trying to decide whether the word “amateur” would ring too harsh for England, I scoped his bio. Looks like this is his second production, and his main avocation is rock climbing—so, “amateur” is apt. He coasts through the role in a dreamlike languor, but he’s a believable dreamer, and brings warmth and sensitivity to the role.

Phillip Cuomo, in contrast, is a veteran, (Artists Rep, Third Rail Rep, Imago and more) and the production heaps demands upon him accordingly. Cuomo plays all the characters the prince meets on his interstellar journey, and then resurfaces as the fox the prince tames on earth. While the former four roles seem like they could be making a philosophical point (“all grownups are the same”), seeing him emerge yet again as a fox strains the suspension of even a small child’s disbelief. Fortunately, he effects each role with a different voice and with a slightly clownish, child-favoring flair, giving little ones something to enjoy, whether or not they’re catching the philosophical point.

Megan Sky Hale (Imago/Theater Vertigo alum) plays two roles, rose and snake, with grace, but she brings the most convincing carriage to the latter. She wears menacing and hypnotic, better than coquettish. (And from this reviewer, that is a compliment.)

Tech

This play comes with major staging challenges, most notably: how do you show space travel? The single stationary set with varied lighting actually does a pretty admirable job of showing both a planetary, and a terrestrial desert landscape. And costumes which ingeniously come with their own “planets” attached, help sell the story.

Costumer Rachelle Waldie (of AEQUANIMITAS) wisely chose to bring Exupery’s illustrations to life, outfitting the Little Prince in bright colors and crisp dandy details like brass buttons, broad collars, and fitted darts. Fans of the drawings will be delighted by the faithful reproduction. Other characters are dressed suitably for their various roles; some looks are cartoonish, and others workaday. An additional bugaboo, talking flowers and plants, has been deftly dispatched with unique designs, such as the snake costume, which frees the actress’s arms to serve as graceful, slithering snake-puppets, even as her whole body is also attired as a hooded cobra.

Shaking The Tree doesn’t mind trusting tikes with big tasks, as evidenced by the production’s lighting tech, eleven-year-old Jasper Jenkins. As far as Culturephile could tell, he was riding the sliders for the whole show, and he delivered the best kind of lighting performance: the kind you can take for granted.

In a couple spots, Culturephile wished for more. A pair of ears, or a snout, or both, would’ve been a welcome addition to the fox character, to disguise a face we’d seen already. Some sort of lines on the page of the aviator’s sketchpad, would have sold the illusion better than total blanks. And while quieter sound is generally preferred for an all-ages crowd, a tad more volume for ostensibly noisy elements (like the airplane) and some sort of whooshing sound effect for the Prince’s simulated space flight, would have sounded more convincing.

Lasting Impressions

This story wins the day because it makes the heaviest and most complex emotions feel playful and accessible. It says profound and humbling things about the nature of intimacy (“If you tame me, we shall need each other” [said the fox] “To me, you will be unique in all the world…. First you must sit down at a little distance from me…but you will sit a little closer to me every day.”) It echoes ancient beliefs about death and afterlife (“I cannot carry this body with me…it will be like an old abandoned shell…there’s nothing sad about old shells.”) And, in a surprise twist that jerks the most parental tears, it offers a stunning insight: the little prince has tamed the big aviator, and not the other way ’round.

For a more comprehensive list of upcoming events, visit the Arts & Entertainment Calendar anytime!

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Tags: Art, children, comics, book, book, Review, Theater, Literature, Portland Art, outer space

Mary Roach Visits Portland!

The author of Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, fittingly appears the same evening as the Perseid Meteor Shower.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Aug 12, 2010 at 06:00AM 0 Comments

Author Mary Roach took on the role of amateur space cadet, to research her latest book.

Astronauts, it seems, are misunderstood. While lionized and romanticized for their heroic turns of space-flight, the men and women who do the job are actually beset on all sides by petty annoyance and mind-numbing minutiae. Before and between the fleeting moments of floating and waving, astronauts are basically lab animals, poked and prodded, goaded and guiled by scientists. “What can we feed them?” “How might we strap them down?” “How many weeks can they endure the same underclothes?” are just a few of the myriad questions that can only be answered through a battery of NASA trials—and comically cringe-worthy errors.

Insatiably curious and hilarious nonfiction writer Mary Roach, already known for such titles as Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, pokes her nose into the most mundane aspects of space-travel prep in her latest offering, Packing For Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. Fresh from shilling on The Daily Show, she hits Bagdad Theater (37th & SE Hawthorne) tonight at 7pm. This, incidentally, is mere hours before optimal Perseid Meteor Shower viewing, which should kick off at twilight. After catching Ms. Roach, you might rush over to one of OMSI’s Star Parties (at Rooster Rock or Stub Stewart State Parks, 9pm)—or just wander out of the Bagdad and up nearby Mount Tabor for a great sky-view, and most likely an informal neighborhood soirree. Either way, tonight offers plenty of opportunity for space exploration.

For a more comprehensive list of upcoming events, visit the Arts & Entertainment Calendar!

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Tags: Literature, book, author, writer, outer space

New York School Poet Bill Berkson in Portland

two readings and a conversation

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Feb 20, 2010 at 10:22AM 0 Comments

It’s the Berkson Difference Engine, hitting on the level of the syllable, illuminating arrays, pure products of daily utterance, mining one of the deepest veins of living vocabulary ever. — Clark Coolidge

In a remarkable and rare Northwest visit from important New York School poet and art critic, Bill Berkson, he will be doing two readings and a conversation at the Spare Room Poetry series Sunday night, at Reed College Monday night, and then returning on March 6 for a Back Room in conversation with Rob Slifkin “About Philip Guston.” It’s huge. (Details below.)

He’s here to celebrate several recent publications: Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press); Ted Berrigan (a collaboration with painter George Schneeman) and Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981-2006 (both from Cuneiform Press).

Spare Room reading series
Sunday, February 21, 7:30 pm
Concordia Coffee House (2909 NE Alberta)
$5.00 suggested donation

Reed College
Monday, February 22, 6:30 pm
Eliot Hall, Room 314
Free admission

Back Room PDX
“About Philip Guston” — a conversation with Rob Slifkin
Saturday, March 6, 6:30 pm
Cooley Art Gallery, Reed College
Free admission

Born in New York in 1939, Bill Berkson is a poet, critic, teacher and sometime curator, who has been active in the art and literary worlds since his early twenties. Director of Letters and Science at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1993 to 1998, he taught art history, critical writing, and poetry and directed the public lectures program there from 1984 to 2008. He studied at Trinity School, The Lawrenceville School, Brown University, Columbia, the New School for Social Research, and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

He is the author of eighteen books and pamphlets of poetry — including, recently, Gloria, a portfolio of poems with etchings by Alex Katz (Arion Press), Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently (The Owl Press), Goods and Services (Blue Press), and most recently, Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems (Coffee House Press).

A collection of his criticism, The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings, appeared from Qua Books in 2004, and Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981-2006 from Cuneiform Press, in 2007. A new volume of his art writings and interviews, The Ordinary Artist, will follow soon.

Other recent books are What’s Your Idea of a Good Time: Letters & Interviews 1977-1985 with Bernadette Mayer (Tuumba Press); BILL with drawings by Colter Jacobsen (Gallery 16 Editions); and Ted Berrigan with George Schneeman (Cuneiform Press).

During the 1960s he was an editorial associate at Art News, a regular contributor to Arts, guest editor at the Museum of Modern Art, an associate producer of a program on art for public television, and taught literature and writing workshops at the New School and Yale University.

After moving to Northern California in 1970, he began editing and publishing a series of poetry books and magazines under the Big Sky imprint. Before coming to the Art Institute, he taught regularly in the California Poets in the Schools program.

In the mid-1980s he resumed writing art criticism on a regular basis, contributing monthly reviews and articles to Artforum from 1985 to 1991; he became a corresponding editor for Art in America in 1988 and also writes frequently for such magazines as Aperture, Modern Painters, Art on Paper, and others.

As a curator he has organized or co-curated such exhibitions as “Ronald Bladen: Early and Late” (SFMoMA), “Albert York” (Mills College), “Why Painting I & II” (Susan Cummins Gallery), “Homage to George Herriman” (Campbell-Thiebaud Gallery), and “Facing Eden: 100 Years of Northern California Landscape Art” (De Young Museum).

Past recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artspace, Yaddo, the Briarcombe Foundation, the Fund for Poetry, the Poets Foundation, and the American Academy in Rome, he was Distinguished Paul Mellon Lecturer for 2006 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, and was awarded the 2008 Goldie for Literature from the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

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Tags: Literature, Events

Research Club + Publication Fair=!

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Dec 23, 2009 at 10:00PM 2 Comments

Research Club at Tribute Gallery. photo: Brian Wilson

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Research Club at Tribute Gallery. photo: Brian Wilson

Sunday in Portland was a most hopeful day. So hopeful that precipitation was taken to mean future daffodil rather than hair mess as I walked here and there downtown.

“Here” was Research Club at Tribute Gallery. With the event scheduled to start at 11, I snuck in around 12:30 to find the gallery full to the brim with folks eating brunch and chatting with the formal proceedings not to begin until 1. Score. This iteration of Research Club was a mashup of salon and Pecha Kucha/Ignite/Interesting Portland lecture. (See also: the Lecture Series.) According to RC’s Nim Wunnan, Research Club sometimes means dinner, sometimes synesthetic events and/or football games. The website says, “The point of Research Club is to help inquisitive people and their ideas meet other inquisitive people and their ideas,” which is right up my alley.

Sunday’s highlight for me was finally hearing Amber Case do an abbreviated intro of her ideas on Cyborg Anthropology, as well as Kawandeep Virdee talking about Pattern Language and a love letter to Portland, and Rafael of Eggy Records talking about his cassette tape-only label and distro. Christine Taylor of Igloo Gallery talked about their new artist’s residency project in 2010, first hosting Colin Mathes, and Mike Merrill talked about his project as a publicly traded individual.

“There” was <a href=‘http://acehotel.com/portland/events/cleaners">The Cleaners at the Ace Hotel where Publication Studio (Matthew Stadler and Patricia No) hosted the Publication Fair with lots of small presses as well as purveyors of great printed matter. The place was packed, and according to No had been all day! I finally picked up a full set of poet/editor Sam Lohmann’s superb lit. ’zine Peaches & Bats, had a great talk with designer/author Mark Searcy (see his beautiful visual blog), caught up a bit with Diana Kim of Stand Up Comedy (loved the Scott Ponik-designed poster series for SUC), and thumbed through a couple of copies of Veneer. Also, renewed love of IPRC.

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Tags: Art, Galleries, Literature, Publishing