Performance “Puccini is stupid,” wrote Ezra Pound. He’s right, of course, but only in a certain regard. Puccini is stupid in the way that rock ’n’ roll is stupid: It is purely viscer ...   More

Performance With the economic and political Depression of ’09 hammering the arts world, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival decided to make some lemonade out of today’s sour reality, turning to a great vo ...   More

Performance Long ago, in a damp and dreary principality on the edge of a chilly estuary, lived a sexually ravenous ruler who never ended a sentence with a period, speaking only in endlessly digressive manic jags ...   More

Performance This fascinating project has more names than a ’50s jazzbo had euphemisms for Benzedrine. The third in an ongoing series of jazz-accompanied readings derived from Robert Briggs’ evocative ...   More

Performance There is a gun onstage. At some point, it will be fired. In this new play, New York playwright Steven Drukman marries Chekhov’s infamous dictum with Arthur Schnitzler’s bed-hopping La Rond ...   More

Performance Musical theater is war. Most musicals are created by teams of artists—composers, lyricists, playwrights—who tend to leave behind problems for producing companies to solve: boring music, a ...   More

Performance Resa is the Swedish word for “journey,” and RESA, a new show from Rumpus Room Dance, uses journeys as its creative springboard. “Geographic, non-geographic, personal…” b ...   More

Performance Mandolinist Chris Thile’s splendid work with his prog-bluegrass trio, Nickel Creek, hardly prepared us for the ingenuity and ambition of his Punch Brothers project with classically trained, blue ...   More

Performance When did Portland musicians become such drama queens? The city’s two biggest bands are both dabbling in stagecraft (the Decemberists with their rock opera, The Hazards of Love, and Pink Martini ...   More

Performance Even now, 40 years after the sexual revolution declared victory and settled down to munch antibiotics and watch Deep Throat, it’s rare to see women speaking frankly and openly about sex. With th ...   More