Performing Arts

A Golden Age in the Oak Room

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in Cultural Notes, Performing Arts, Theatre

Inside the Wilsonville Public Library’s Oak Room, Wilsonville Stage transformed a meeting room into Isabel Hastings Hoyt’s memory-filled New York parlor. The Golden Age became an intimate, funny, and unexpectedly moving encounter with literary history, freedom, and the stories we choose to preserve.
The Afterlife of Violetta’s Paris

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in Cultural Notes, Opera, Performing Arts

Eight years after Portland Opera’s “La Traviata” left the stage, I found pieces of Violetta’s Paris behind glass: elaborate cake props surrounded by a new generation of theatrical creations. What began as an unexpected discovery became a reminder that when a performance disappears, its objects can keep telling stories.
“His Girl Friday”: Saturday Morning at Cinema 21

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in Cultural Notes, Film, Performing Arts

Inside Portland’s century-old Cinema 21, vintage “Prevues,” a “Let’s All Go to the Lobby” reel, and a Saturday morning audience set the stage for His Girl Friday—where Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell turned a newsroom, an escaped prisoner, and one unfortunate desk into 92 minutes of glorious chaos.
The Past Never Fully Leaves the Room

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in Cultural Notes, Performing Arts, Theatre

A Tennessee Williams play revealed itself less as a mystery than as a meditation on memory, testimony, and truth. Performed on Lakewood’s intimate Side Door Stage by Thesmophoria Presents, Suddenly, Last Summer offered an unforgettable afternoon of independent theatre.
A 3,000-Year-Old Story

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in Cultural Notes, Film, Performing Arts

A journey across ancient landscapes becomes something deeper through encounters with Circe, the Sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey reminded me that myths endure not because of their monsters, but because of the questions they continue to ask.
More Than “A Woman’s Piece”

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in Cultural Notes, Performing Arts, Theatre

A wartime assignment, a skeptical journalist, and a household of unforgettable women. “The Cover of Life” uses humor, warmth, and quiet humanity to reveal why some stories cannot be understood until we take the time to truly listen.
Three Minutes Inside the Criterion Mobile Closet

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in Cultural Notes, Performing Arts

I joined the Criterion Mobile Closet line in Portland and waited more than four hours for a three-minute visit. But the real experience wasn’t the truck—it was the conversations around it: film debates, collector rituals, and overheard jokes that turned a queue into a temporary community of cinephiles.
She Swam the Moat

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in Cultural Notes, Performing Arts, Theatre

A soaked princess swims a moat, gets mistaken for a chambermaid, and quietly destabilizes an entire kingdom simply by refusing refinement. Broadway Rose Theatre’s “Once Upon a Mattress” embraced physical comedy, theatrical chaos, and surprising tenderness beneath its fairytale absurdity.
A Mystery That Had Slipped Slightly Out of Reality

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in Cultural Notes, Performing Arts, Theatre, Uncategorized

Inside a purple-blue black box mansion, detective fiction, internet fandom, student theater, and complete absurdity collided into something stranger, warmer, and far funnier than anyone in the audience seemed prepared for.
Before the Chandelier Fell

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in Cultural Notes, Performing Arts, Theatre

For several hours, Keller Auditorium ceased to feel like a theater in downtown Portland and became something suspended between architecture, memory, and illusion. Beneath chandeliers, curtains, and shadow, “The Phantom of the Opera” transformed physical space into a world that seemed temporarily detached from the city surrounding it.
The Cinema Was Still There

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in Cultural Notes, Performing Arts, Places & Spaces

The 5th Avenue Cinema was still there. A student-run repertory theater tucked beside SW Hall, screening “The Juniper Tree” on a warm Portland afternoon while downtown traffic passed by without slowing.
What Anchors the Room

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in Cultural Notes, Museums & Collections, Performing Arts

Inside the museum’s darkened gallery, nothing instructs where to stand or how long to stay. Images shift and dissolve, but the room holds through what remains—books, presence, and the quiet act of returning to them.
Snow White and the Queen: Power in Motion

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in Ballet & Dance, Cultural Notes, Performing Arts

Northwest Dance Theatre’s Snow White begins with the Queen already in command. Through classical pantomime, physical transformation, and a final struggle for control, the ballet turns a familiar fairy tale into a story about power—how it is performed, challenged, and finally broken.
Before the Story: Concerto Vivaldi

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in Ballet & Dance, Cultural Notes, Performing Arts

Before Snow White began, there was only movement. Set to Vivaldi, this brief contemporary ballet unfolded in soft pinks and quiet precision, shifting between the shared shape of the ensemble and the intimacy of two dancers moving in parallel. What began as abstraction became a quiet invitation to watch more closely.
Seeing Clara Bow, Nearly A Century Later

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in Cultural Notes, Film, Performing Arts

Seeing a nearly 100-year-old film in a theater in 2026 creates a quiet contrast: the room is modern, while what unfolds on screen belongs to another century. Within that space, Clara Bow’s presence emerges not as something preserved, but as something that still feels immediate.
Elizabeth Sawyer: The Real Woman Behind ‘Witch’

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in Cultural Notes, Performing Arts, Theatre

A matinee performance of “Witch” at Clackamas Community College led back to the real story of Elizabeth Sawyer, executed for witchcraft in England in 1621. More than four centuries later, her story continues to echo through theatre, raising questions about fear, reputation, and how societies treat those living at the margins.
‘The Mousetrap’: A Trap Built in Plain Sight

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in Cultural Notes, Performing Arts, Theatre

On a 2:30 p.m. matinee in Tigard, I moved confidently through Agatha Christie’s snowbound maze, convinced I was closing in on the answer. I wasn’t wrong about the clues—only about which ones I chose to trust.
‘The Sleeping Beauty’ — A Matinee at Oregon Ballet Theatre

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in Ballet & Dance, Cultural Notes, Performing Arts

At Oregon Ballet Theatre’s The Sleeping Beauty, familiarity shaped the experience as much as performance. Anchored by the Rose Adagio, the Act I waltz, and a live orchestra closely matching a long-known recording, the matinee resolved into a complete and self-contained viewing.
Scene 5, Performed

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in Cultural Notes, Performing Arts, Theatre

Performed without announcement, Scene 5 of ‘Almost, Maine’ shifted into a study of intimacy, panic, and the risk of naming what already makes sense between two women.
‘Chess of the Wind’ — A Film Lost and Found

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in Cultural Notes, Film, Performing Arts

Long believed lost, Chess of the Wind returns as a restored artifact of pre-revolution Iranian cinema. Set within a decaying household shaped by inheritance and control, the film unfolds as a quiet study of power, atmosphere, and a world captured just before its disappearance.