South Sound Arts etc. - Alec Clayton

Save The Sun!

2012-02-14T08:55:00.000-08:00

Prodigal Sun Productions, which operates The Midnight Sun Performance Space, is seeking to raise money so that it can continue to provide an all-ages, low-cost, performance venue available to the Olympia community.

The Midnight Sun opened in 1991 and has been host to numerous performances over the years including: rock shows, theater productions, student plays, artwork, readings, vaudeville shows, storytelling concerts, dances and performance art.

On Sunday, Feb. 26, the Sun will kick off the first in a series of fundraisers featuring storyteller Elizabeth Lord and local bands: Hey Girl, Morgan and the Organ Donors, Hungry Heart, Happy Noose, Mongo, plus a special guest to be announced.

In addition, Prodigal Sun is seeking interested parties who would like to join the organization and become a volunteer board member and help shape the future of the Sun. They are also seeking partnerships with other performance organizations who would benefit from having a home venue.

Save the Sun

When: Sunday February 26, 2012
Where: The Brotherhood Lounge, 119 N. Capital Way Olympia WA. 98501
Time: 8:00 PM
Cost: Sliding scale suggested donation: $5.00 - $500.00

Contact: Elizabeth Lord at elizabeth-lord@hotmail.com or by telephone at 360-250-2721 for more information or to learn how you can help.

‘Suite' actors show off their chops

2012-02-11T09:32:00.000-08:00

California Suite
reviewed by Alec Clayton

Published in The News Tribune, Feb. 10, 2012

Top: Kathi Aleman and Paul Duke in Tacoma Little Theatre’s production “California Suite.”
Bottom: from left, Kathi Aleman, Elliot Weiner, Paul Duke and Dana Galagan
Photos by Dean Lapin

Read more here: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/02/10/2020088/cast-generates-controlled-chaos.html#storylink=cpy

The cast of Neil Simon’s “California Suite” at Tacoma Little Theatre is better than the script. Five actors play 11 different characters in four scenes, each scene a different story related only in that each story takes place in rooms 203 and 204 of the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles in 1976.

The actors are Kathi Aleman, Paul Duke, Elliot Weiner, Heidi Walworth-Horn and Dana Galagan.

Walworth-Horn is, to my knowledge, a newcomer to the stage. She is on the TLT board of directors. I’ve never before seen her act and there are no acting credits for her listed in the program, but she does a fine job with a role with no speaking lines. Instead, she is drunk and passed out throughout the entire scene she is in. The other four actors are all seasoned veterans, and their acting chops are on full display as they play a variety of quite different characters.

Most of the jokes are fairly sophisticated and urbane, especially in the scenes with Aleman and Duke, whose characters try too hard to be droll. The various scenes go from witty banter that verges on boring; to slapstick insanity in the second scene; to more urbane wit in the third scene, which devolves into spiteful bickering before ending up in sweetness; and finally a big farce of a final scene with the two couples fighting each other in slapstick mayhem.

In the first scene, Aleman and Duke are a divorced couple arguing over who should have custody of their 17-year-old daughter. Aleman plays the wife as a big phony New Yorker, full of airs and haughtiness. She’s outstanding. Duke plays the husband as a more down-to-earth and honest person who is fed up with his ex’s pretensions.

The second scene opens with Weiner waking up in the hotel room with a hooker passed out in his bed, and his wife on the way up to the room after arriving in Los Angeles. He desperately tries to get the hooker out of bed, but can’t wake her, so he tries to hide her from his wife, carrying her from bed to closet and back like a comatose rag doll. I’ve admired Weiner in quite a few dramatic roles, but never seen him do such physical comedy. It’s like a scene out of a Marx Brothers movie.

The third scene bothered me. The couple from London, Aleman and Duke again, have come to L.A. for the Academy Awards. She’s an actor up for an Oscar. He’s a bisexual antique dealer. It’s never quite clear until the end of the story whether theirs is a marriage of convenience or if they truly love each other. Their sniping at each other is vicious, and I found this scene tedious, although the acting was good and there was some witty dialogue.

The final scene goes back to pure slapstick with the two couples fighting outlandishly. Credit fight coach Mark Peterson and all four actors for a brilliant job of creating controlled chaos.

If you’ve seen Simon’s “Plaza Suite” and liked it, you’ll like this one too. Both Simon plays use almost identical set-ups, and both are entertaining, but not great scripts.

When: 7:30 tonight and 2 p.m. Sunday
Where: Tacoma Little Theatre, 210 N. I St., Tacoma
Tickets: $15-$25
Information: 253-272-2281, tacomalittletheatre.com

A really big show

2012-02-09T13:49:00.000-08:00

Gold we have Spun from Straw at Olympia’s Washington Center for the Performing Arts

The Weekly Volcano, February 8, 2012

Pictured, top: "Field Trip"George Kurzman
bottom: "Stage of Life" by Max Wade

There's a really big show at the Washington Center for the Performing Arts, and it's not on the stage. It's called Art From Scrap and it stretches throughout the Washington Center lobby, mezzanine and the upper balcony. The place is full of art. Really big art.

Especially big is a piece by Bil Fleming and Christine Malek called "Polyethylene Fiend." It's a giant dragon made of used plastic bags and packing materials, bamboo, packing tape, thread, a bath exhaust fan and annealed wire. The piece is also referred to by Fleming in an email as a "Hydrocarbon Leviathan" or a "Petrochemical Problem."

The dragon is huge (45' x 20' x 4') and colorful. It looks like something that should be carried through the streets by a dozen people in costume at a Chinese New Year's celebration or at Olympia's Procession of the Species. The dragon fills the stairwell. Its tail wraps around the railing on the upper balcony and its face almost touches the floor of the ground-level lobby. It is so big that you cannot see the whole thing from any one point of view.

Making "Polyethylene Fiend" must have been a huge undertaking, and it is fun to look at; but sorry, folks, I just can't call it art.

In addition to the big dragon, this show features selected works from Matter Gallery artists. I'm tempted to say Matter owner Jo Gallaugher has picked the cream of the crop, but it may be more accurate to say she has selected the pure art and left out the craft and utilitarian art. No lamps or coat racks or any such, just paintings and sculptures made from, mostly, recycled materials.

It's too big a show to mention even half the works, so I'll comment on the very few that most excited me.

I'll start with George Kurzman's "Field Trip," is a painting of a boy riding a horse. Behind the horse is a bright green truck. The circular swirls on the horse's back resonate beautifully with similar patterning in the sky and the lower ground. This is a nicely executed painting. It reminds me a lot of paintings by Gaylen Hansen.

Max Wade's "Stage of Life" is a shadow box with cut-out figures from magazines posing on a stage made of what appears to be wood or cardboard. The figures are in black and white and look like they come from the 1950s and earlier. The stage setting is clean and stark. I like the nice asymmetrical balance and the way the figures look at each other. The whole piece is very elegant.

Nancy Thorne-Chambers' "Princess" is a cute and haughty little porcelain woman gold leaf with a crown made of found metal objects that look like some kind of nails and fasteners. It's a delightful piece.

"It's All Mine" by Roxanna Groves looks a lot like a Red Grooms painting. It's an assemblage made of found materials. There's a big, black dog wearing a neckerchief in front of two yellow chairs and a throw rug, with a shelf of found objects in front. The drawing and color are excellent and there is an intriguing play back and forth between illusionary space, flatness, and actual three-dimensionality.

This show is absolutely worth seeing.

Fridays 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and by appointment
Washington Center for the Performing Arts, 512 Washington St. SE
Olympia

Something big

2012-02-09T10:02:00.000-08:00

"Hair" at Capital Playhouse

Pictured, clockwise from left: Jeff Barehand, Bruce Haasl, Jacob Hoff and Anjelica Wolf. Photo courtesy Capital Playhouse.

Something big happened in the last years of the 1960s. It wasn’t just sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and it wasn’t just the anti-war movement and civil rights. It was the gestalt of all that and more, an attitude shift that lives on today despite many reactionary set-backs and despite the realization that the dawning of the Age of Aquarius might have been an unattainable pipe dream.

It’s good to be reminded of those days, and nothing does that so effectively and joyfully as the rock musical “Hair,” which was revised on Broadway two years ago. It is now playing in Olympia at Capital Playhouse. “Hair” was groundbreaking in its day, the first ever rock musical and a forerunner to such plays as “The Who’s Tommy,” “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Rent.”

The Capital Playhouse production captures the feel of the era. From the moment you walk into the theater you are drawn back to 1968. Musical Director Troy Arnold Fisher, his hair grown long and wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt sits inside the front door with a couple of musicians playing, drumming, and singing songs from the time. Theater staff and some audience members are there in ’60s garb.

“Hair” is a joyful ode to optimism in the face of war and bigotry, and it does not shy away from some of the harsher aspects of the day such as the macho denigration of women which was still rife at the time and which is exemplified when Berger slaps his girlfriend, Sheila, who takes it in stride because that was what many women did back then.

In traditional theatrical terms the play is weak. The story line is almost non-existent. But it’s not really about the story. It’s about the rebellious and celebratory spirit of the day, band it’s about the music. Oh, and what music it is — beautiful, touching ballads, hand-clapping rock and roll, and lyrics that range from clever and funny to heart-wrenching.

The young cast — none of whom were even alive when “Hair” first burst upon the scene — is excellent. Jacob Hoff is manically intense and energetic as Berger. Bruce Haasl portrays Claude as Christ-like but with a wicked sense of humor and conflicted emotions. Jeff Barehand, an east coast transplant and newcomer to Capital Playhouse, is thoroughly engaging as Woof. Bailey Boyd dances with the energy of a whirling dervish and sings angelically. Anjelica Wolf plays Sheila with sincerity. Her singing on the haunting ballad “Easy to Be Hard” and the beautiful and rousing “Good Morning Starshine” is wonderful. Her voice is clear and mellow. Rochelle Morris sets the tone when she takes the lead on the opening tune, “Aquarius” with a voice like a whole brass section. And Matt Flores is wonderfully funny in drag in a lampoon of Margaret Meade.

The songs in “Hair” have been called a laundry list, and it is true that they contain many lists. “Sodomy” is a list of sexual acts from cunnilingus and fellatio to pederasty, the latter of which should never be included in a song celebrating sexual acts. “Initials” is a list of initials such as LBJ and LSD. And “I Got Life” is a list of body parts: “I got my hair, I got my head, I got my brains, I got my ears…”

The Margaret Meade skit is one of two comical interruptions to the main action. It is entertaining, and Flores does a great job of acting and singing. The other comical interruption is a slog. It’s a very regrettable series of comic skits involving famous historical characters and stick ponies and masks that an overdone psychedelic hallucination scene that is clichéd and overdone. This interlude drags on through numerous songs with Claude, all the while, striking dramatic poses in the background. It’s not funny or particularly entertaining, and I wish it could have been drastically cut or even left out completely, but there’s such a thing as copyright law; you have to play the play the way it was written, with the exception of works in the public domain.

On the up side, each of these comic interludes sets up marvelous songs. The Margaret Meade bit ends with her asking Claude why he’s such a hairy guy, which leads into Haasl’s terrific rendition of the title song, and that other strangely psychedelic interlude sets up the brilliantly written anti-war anthems “Three-Five-Zero-Zero” and “What A Piece of Work is Man.”

Director Heidi Fredericks reminds us in her program essay that many of the lyrics were inspired by great works of literature. The writers and original stars of the show, James Rado and Gerome Ragni, drew from “Hamlet” for “What a Piece of Work is Man,” and “Three-Five-Zero-Zero” is based on an Allen Ginsberg poem. (The number represents the number of North Vietnamese killed each month during the war).

The themes of the show are drugs, sex, love, rebellion against outmoded morality, and perhaps surprisingly, it is very religious and patriotic. All of these themes are handled explicitly and unapologetically.

Parts of “Hair” may be dated and some of the pop culture and political references may be lost on today’s younger generation, but the spirit is intact, the energy is infectious, and the singing is great.

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday through Feb. 18

Where: Capital Playhouse: 612 Fourth Ave. E., Olympia

Tickets: $28-35

More information: 360-943-2744, capitalplayhouse.com

And the award for best drama goes to...

2012-02-07T15:15:00.000-08:00

Jason Haws as Sharky, Christian Doyle as Nicky and Dennis Rolly as Mr. Lockhart

Jason Haws, David Wright as Richard, and Daniel Guttenberg as Ivan.

Daniel Guttenberg, Jason Haws and David Wright.

Photos by Scot Whitney

The Seafarer at Harlequin

“The Seafarer” by Conor McPherson at Harlequin Productions is the best drama I’ve seen so far this year and one of the top two or three I’ve seen since I started reviewing plays nine years ago. If you’re curious, other shows on my top list are August Wilson’s “Radio Golf” at Seattle Rep and Israel Horovitz’s “Sins of the Mother” at Harlequin.

This is top-notch theater. The script is outstanding. McPherson, an Irish playwright, nails the lives of working class Irish drunks, and he reveals through well-scripted dialogue and action the best and the worst in humankind. His characters delve into the depths of remorse and depression and hopelessness but come out rejuvenated and redeemed.

The acting by the ensemble cast of David Wright, Daniel Guttenberg, Jason Haws, Christian Doyle and Dennis Rolly is as good as any troupe of actors anywhere. You’d have to go to Broadway or Hollywood to find comparable actors, and they gel in magical fashion under the direction of Scot Whitney.

The five men in “The Seafarer” are slovenly drunkards, and they can be mean, and they are perhaps not too awfully bright. But in the end most of them are likeable in their own ways.

Richard Harken (Wright) is a crotchety old man who thinks he may not have too long to live. He recently lost his eyesight in a bizarre accident and now he depends on his little brother, Sharky (Haws), to help him out. He treats Sharky more like a slave than like a brother, and Sharky puts up with it. Sharky, who has been away but has come home to take care of Richard, has a troubled past that included time in jail.

The entire play takes place in Richard’s apartment in a community near Dublin. It opens on the morning of Christmas Eve. The place is a mess. There are beer cans everywhere, remnants of the previous evening’s drunkenness. Sharky comes downstairs and starts picking up the beer cans. He startles Richard, who is sleeping on the floor, having been unable to make it upstairs to his bedroom the previous evening. Soon Ivan (Guttenberg) emerges from an upstairs room, groggy and disoriented. He also slept on the floor, and he has lost his glasses and misplaced his car.

It’s not long before the guys start drinking again, and a prodigious amount of beer and whiskey is consumed in the course of the day. But not by Sharky. He has sworn off drinking and has two whole days sober.

Another friend arrives, Nicky (Doyle), who is Richard’s friend but definitely no friend of Sharky’s. And Nicky brings a stranger with him, the very neatly dressed and polite but odd Mr. Lockhart.

There is more than one underlying mystery to this story, and there are supernatural elements that I can’t write about without spoiling the plot. The only other thing I can reveal without spoiling it is that there is a very high stakes poker game. There is mystery and high drama, and a lot of humor. And I can’t praise the acting enough.

Wright is outstanding as Richard. He’s believable as a newly blind man, and his emotional outbursts and sudden changes of mood can be as hilarious as they are painful. We laugh with him and at him. He also provides a lot of physical comedy when he flails about with his walking stick and all the others have to duck out of his way. Doyle in particular does the physical bits with perfect timing. He has taught stage fighting and has choreographed big fight scenes for many area theaters, and he makes it seem easy.

Haws plays Sharky with intense quiet. You can tell that he hates being there, and he hates having to wait on Richard hand and foot, but he doesn’t complain. He holds it all in, and the audience can sense he’s about to explode, which of course he does. Haws’s intensity, bottle-up restraint and range of emotions is evident throughout.

Guttenberg, the only one of the actors who is not a Harlequin veteran, is a natural as the slow-witted, besotted and perpetually confused Ivan. He talks slowly and doesn’t seem to be able to focus, and he does it so naturally that it’s hard to believe he’s really an actor and not some drunken stumblebum they found on the street and told to just be himself.

It’s impossible to describe Rolly’s acting without giving too much away. Suffice it to say he’s been in more plays than most people have ever even watched, and if this is not his best role ever it’s awfully close.

The set by Linda Whitney is marvelous -- wonderfully simple but well designed with two flights of stairs and translucent windows lighted from behind, great textured wall treatments and open-ended ceiling beams. The props are nicely chosen – a light-up Jesus sacred heart, a ratty old couch and easy chair, a woodburning stove, and all those empty bottles and cans. It’s particularly nice that the action never has to be interrupted to change sets and props.

Kudos also to David Nail for excellently subdued lighting design, and to Darren Mills for costumes so perfect they look uncostumed.

The language is earthy and filled with Irish slang. To help the audience along there is a glossary of slang expressions in the printed program. It’s not really needed because everything is clear in context, but it is fun to read. They use a lot of words that would give a movie an R rating. They say fuck a lot – or, considering the brogue, fock. To Richard they’re all focking eejits.

If you only see one play this season this should be the one.

WHEN: Thursdays through Saturdays, 8p.m., Sundays 2 p.m. through Feb. 18

WHERE: State Theater, 202 E. 4^th Ave., Olympia

TICKETS: prices vary, call for details

INFORMATION: 360-786-0151; http://www.harlequinproductions.org/

Random acts of silliness

2012-02-06T11:40:00.000-08:00

“What The Butler Saw” at Centerstage
review By Michael Dresdner

Pictured at top: Alan Bryce, Samie Detzer and Dan Kremer, bottom: Nic Beach, Sally Brady, Alan Bryce.
Photos by Joe Orton

For pure, convoluted lunacy, it’s hard to beat the very funny, and very manic, “What The Butler Saw” at Centerstage. As usual for them, the acting, timing, direction (by Cynthia White), production and choice of property are top notch. But this is a very different sort of play than you might expect.

There’s no real plot, per se, but rather an endless, rapid-fire delivery of genuinely clever and funny set ups and punch lines dressed up with undressing, cross dressing, identity borrowing, misunderstanding, and complete and utter confusion. Think Benny Hill meets Noises Off, but with the snarky, spot-on wit of Oscar Wilde.

First, there’s Dr. Prentice (played by Centerstage artistic director Alan Bryce) who runs the insane asylum where the action is set, though we never see or hear any of the assumed inmates. Though Prentice more or less makes sense, every single thing he says is misunderstood by every single person. Of course, it does not help that his sentences frequently begin with “Take off your clothes…” Oddly enough, they all do, beginning with young Geraldine Barclay (Samie Detzer) who is there to interview as a secretary.

The doctor’s wife (Sally Brady), a nymphomaniac with low morals but high dudgeon, interrupts them when she arrives fresh from a tryst with a photo peddling young bell boy, and she, too, joins the clothes brigade. Naturally, the bell boy (Nic Beach) arrives hot on her heels and manages to strip to jockeys in short order. They’ll eventually be joined by Sgt. Match (Robert Alan Barnett), a classic London Bobby who, strangely, also consents to disrobe. Before long the stage is crisscrossed with folks either in underwear or dressing, and cross dressing, in each others’ outfits.

Meanwhile, this literal and figurative madhouse is being visited by Dr. Rance (Dan Kremer), an investigating government mental health director bent on uncovering… well, something nefarious at least. He manages to see perversity in each logical statement, and a strange logic in all the perverse ones. Hot on the trail of sexual aberration, in part as fodder for his dreamed of book, he’ll find it in every action and every word, often when the real circumstances are rather innocent.

They all manage to create so many layers of misunderstanding that everyone gets tied up in one illogical Gordian knot of confusion. Have no fear, though, you who’d prefer neat and happy endings. It’s all cleared up at the finale with a heavily contrived plot mechanism that leaves all the players, and the audience, with wide smiles.

As for the rest of the production support, lighting is excellent and the set is straightforward and completely utile, though the mix of furniture and clothing styles makes one wonder precisely when the action is taking place. I’d have to guess the sixties or seventies, based largely on clothes, which, at best, are challenging. After all, each dress and uniform gets worn by at least two characters, often of different gender and body types. Still, it all works, in part because they’re mere trappings for the barely controlled idiocy unfolding onstage.

Incidentally, the title, What the Butler Saw, has nothing whatever to do with the play. Why a title that seems to have been chosen randomly? Perhaps that’s what fits.

What The Butler Saw
Feb. 3rd to 26th, 2012
Centerstage

3200 SW Dash Point Road
Federal Way, WA 98003 253-661-1444

Ursula Stocke

2012-02-04T08:40:00.000-08:00

Ursula Stocke is an artist who lives and works in Everett, Washington. She was recently diagnosed with stage four colon cancer at the young age of 42. She is showing her artwork at Wisedesignz framing and gallery in Everett this month, where she also works as a framer. All of the proceeds go to her fight with cancer.

There will be an artist's reception Saturday, Feb. 18 during the Everett Art Walk from 4-7 p.m.

WiseDesignz
Custom Framing & Fine Art Gallery
2908 Wetmore Avenue
Everett, WA 98201
425-259-2361
www.wisedesignz.com
www.everettartwalk.org
www.giveforward.com/ursulastocke

Thanks to Tacoma artist Juliette Ricci for this information.

"Dawn of 2012" impresses at Fulcrum Gallery

2012-02-03T08:25:00.000-08:00

Tacoma's emerging artists hang on Tacoma's Hilltop

The Weekly Volcano, February 1, 2012

Pictured, top: "Venus Garden" by Kelsi Fillo-Finney and, bottom: “I’m as lonesome as you are and feel more empty every day” by Kirsten Marie Pisto

There's quite a range of imagery and styles in the new show at Fulcrum Gallery, Dawn of 2012. The show features emerging artists - a loosely defined and often over-used term that generally means artists who have not yet received the recognition they deserve. Some of us are emerging all of our lives.

But in this case the artists truly are emerging. Some of these artists have never before had gallery shows. They're young, innovative and exciting. Surrealistic and pop imagery abounds, and there is an interesting variety of media, including repurposed materials.

One of the most exciting works is Gabriel Brown's "Floating Islands Estates," a surrealistic city of floating houses suspended from fluffy clouds. This amazing otherworldly creation hangs from the ceiling and occupies most of the air in the front room. It's definitely the first thing you notice upon entering. Hanging beneath cotton-ball clouds from monofilament lines are what look like upside-down cliffs or stalactites made of dirt with flat, grassy tops. Sitting on top of each is a little matchbook-size house made of cardboard. The cardboard is cut from packages with the advertising intact. It's easy to spot the commercial logos or parts of logos from such brand products as Arm & Hammer baking soda and Scotch-Brite.

One of the more intriguing things about this work is that the houses and the stalactite-like pieces of ground they sit on look very much like paintings by Jeremy Mangan - so much so that I wonder if they are an intentional homage.

Other remarkable works in the show include a series of fantasy images in gouache, watercolor and colored pencil by Kelsi Fillo-Finney, all in tones of yellowish brown on white. These include a self-portrait with a cascade of strawberries in her hair, the head of a deer wearing a man's suit, a man with mushrooms growing out of his head, and - best of all in a very macabre way - one called "Venus Garden," that pictures a naked woman on the floor with her back to the viewer, something like veins growing out of her body connected to a giant floating valve or organ, with a huge fly and a hanging man in the sky.

Meghan Mitchell has a group of five graphic drawings in the show that are very sensitively and delicately executed. The finest of these is a silhouetted woman's hand hovering over a softly textured cloud-like shape, described in the wall text as a "night sky or placid nighttime ocean." There's a lovely interplay of positive and negative space in this one.

Also showing are paintings by Branden Urban that remind me of early 20th century political posters and some very large and ambitious surrealistic pop paintings by Julian Pena. And paintings and sculpture by Kirsten Marie Pisto also left an impression, most notably the strange oil painting "I'm as lonesome as you are and feel more empty every day," which ranks with Brown's "Floating Islands Estates," as one of the best thing in the show. Pisto's bizarre painting is like a modern suburban myth in beautifully watery paint.

Not all of these artists are technically sophisticated. I'm sure each has some growing to do in order to find themselves as artists. But there is admirable honesty and inventiveness in all of these works of art.
Dawn of 2012

Through March 10, noon to 6 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and by appointment,
Fulcrum Gallery, 1308 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Tacoma
253.250.0520

South Sound arts guide

2012-01-30T07:33:00.000-08:00

This might be worth looking into:

Writer Ken Miller and artists Chris Sharp and Sean Alexander are collaborating on the South Sound Users Guide, which has just launched on kickstarter.com, and already has 15 per cent of its budget pledged by 46 backers.

A recent article in The News Tribune said the guide will feature well-known and out-of-the-way cool places in Pierce, Thurston and Mason counties.

Read more at http://blog.thenewstribune.com/arts/2012/01/25/artist-based-guide-book-to-the-south-sound-is-on-the-way-via-kickstarter-com/#storylink=cpy

Hilarious antics keep laughs coming during Lakewood Playhouse production

2012-01-27T16:51:00.000-08:00

Top: Alison Monda as Linda Christie and Alex Smith as Allan Felix star in “Play It Again, Sam” from Lakewood Playhouse.
Bottom: Alison Monda, Alex Smith and Matt Garry as Bogey.
Photos courtesy Lakewood Playhouse

The New Tribune, January 27, 2012

“Play It Again, Sam” at Lakewood Playhouse is in many respects a typical Woody Allen tale, full of urban angst and featuring a frustrated and bumbling Woody Allen avatar. It’s a small comedy of romantic absurdity filled with hyperbole and wittily pseudo-sophisticated dialogue.

Allan Felix is a neurotic writer who is recently divorced and on the hunt for romance, but he’s a bumbling sack of nerves who falls apart in the presence of women. If only he could be as cool as his hero, Humphrey Bogart. On disastrous dates and in his fertile imagination, he asks himself what Bogey would do, and Bogey materializes to goad him like a devil on his shoulder, whispering, “Make your move. Kiss her.”

With over-the-top slapstick and situations that stretch reality beyond imagination, this is a play that could easily fall into the abyss of stupidity. It skirts the edge of enough’s enough, but it’s saved by outstanding acting by the two major characters, Alex Smith as Allan and Alison Monda as Linda Christie, Allan’s confidant and the wife of his best friend.

Smith is a master of physical comedy. His pratfalls are worthy of Dick Van Dyke and his facial contortions are in the mold of Jerry Lewis and Jim Carrey (but not quite that rubbery). From the opening scene when he flops on his couch to watch “Casablanca” on television, we see the entirety of his personality in the way he moves his body. His comedy is very much in his body, the sometimes shockingly unexpected wild moves and perfect timing. There are moments, however, when he pushes the edge of overacting, especially when he shouts, which he does a lot. But just when you’re ready to say, “Come on, enough’s enough,” he goes even further over the top with insanely hilarious moves, and it works.

Monda also can go all out. Throughout the first act and halfway into the second, she is calm and controlled. She plays her part with understatement, and projects sincerity and genuine empathy. She seems so natural in the role that she appears not to be acting at all. Watching her you feel that at last here is a character who is real and sensible, and anchor for all the ridiculousness of the other characters. Then there’s a fantasy love scene between Linda and Allan that shatters that illusion, in which Monda lets loose her considerably wild comedic acting skills. What a wonderful scene.

Matt Garry pops in and out as the imaginary Humphrey Bogart. OK, he’s no Bogey. In fact, Smith does a better take on Bogey when he quotes a line from “Casablanca.” So Garry turns Bogey into a straight man setting up Smith’s comic antics.

Jacob Tice plays Allan’s best friend, Dick – a not very enviable role, since most of what he does is make stupid telephone calls. Dick is not a likable character. He’s blustery and self-important and he ignores his wife, and Tice rushes through his lines with very little inflection – which is the way the character was written, so it’s not bad acting so much as a boring character who finally, near the end of the play, drops his guard and becomes human.

Ronee Collins is enjoyably sassy as Allan’s ex-wife, Nancy. The remaining characters are Allan’s dates and fantasy lovers (Portia Stacy and Katelyn Hoffman). They are funny when they’re vamping, but otherwise rather flat characters.

The set, lighting and sound are all underplayed with the only lighting effect being a dull red glow for the fantasy sequences. The best thing about the set is the inclusion of two gigantic movie posters – Bogart movies, of course. There’s a third poster in the lobby and all three will be auctioned off as a fundraiser for the theater. The highest bidders will get to take home a unique memento.

“Play It Again, Sam” is short for a two-act play, zipping by at about 90 minutes and seeming even shorter, so hang onto your seats and enjoy the ride. It is a lot of fun.

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through Feb. 12
Where: Lakewood Playhouse, 5729 Lakewood Towne Center Blvd., Lakewood
Tickets: $23, $20 seniors and military, $17 students younger than 25
Information: 253-588-0042, lakewoodplayhouse.org

Regional identity

2012-01-26T08:21:00.000-08:00

The 10th Annual Biennial at Tacoma Art Museum

The Weekly Volcano, January 26, 2012

Pictured
top: Paul Kuniholm Pauper: "Cardboard Commandments, 2010." Single-channel video with coin mechanism, 4 minutes, 5 seconds, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
bottom: Susie J. Lee "Still Lives: Helen," 2010. Single-channel high definition video portrait. Courtesy Lawrimore Project, Seattle, and the artist. Artwork supported by funding from 4Culture Site Specific.

The theme of the 10th Annual Biennial at Tacoma Art Museum is identity, described by the museum as "a vision of regional identity that revolves around how communities interact, intersect and overlap."

These interactions, intersections and overlaps extend in intriguing ways to resonances between the works of art, many of which are coincidental or are byproducts of similar interests and concerns by artists working in the same region and in the same time. Such resonances are highlighted by strategic placement in the gallery. For instance, images of redacted government documents face photos of censored writing in a book and of a redacted tattoo on a man's arm. The image from the book is an enlarged photo. Near it is the actual book displayed in a glass case, which sits in front of a series of photos of the edges of abandoned and empty commercial signs which, coincidentally, repeat the angular forms of Jeff Jahn's sculpture, "Canopy II" that hangs on an adjacent wall. Such juxtapositions can be seen throughout the show. They are the result of happy accidents and the keen eye of curator Rock Hushka.

The show leans heavily toward installation art, photography and video with very little traditional painting or sculpture. Among the painters represented are Tacoma-area artists Jeremy Mangan and Juliette Ricci.

Mangan, a Foundation of Art Award winner, is represented by two paintings, "Tent City" and "Trojan Horse." The former is a small acrylic painting of a circle of multi-colored tents surrounding a campfire. The latter is a gigantic painting of the Trojan horse, his hide painted in such a way as to look like hundreds of photos of old buildings stapled onto his side. People who are familiar with Mangan's work will recognize these buildings as typical of the ancient and weathered buildings that show up in many of his paintings (this painting or version of it was shown at Fulcrum Gallery in 2010). The scale is impressive and the brittle surface quality is mesmerizing.

Ricci is represented by three works: "Hustler," "No Rest for the Weary" and "We Are Our Brothers Keeper." All are paintings on panel with photo-collage and writing. The writing is moving and poetic and the painting is juicy.

Among the more fascinating works are a series of videos by Susie J. Lee called "Still Lives" with subtitles indicating the subject, such as "Still Lives: Helen," a portrait of an elderly woman named Helen who doesn't speak and barely moves. This and similar videos by Lee are like Renaissance portrait paintings but with contemporary subjects and high-definition digital imagery.

Another very fascinating piece is Sean M. Johnson's "Family Portrait," an old couch suspended high on a wall and held there, literally, by Scotch tape. This thing defies gravity and represents the most archetypal of family images, the family gathered on the couch to watch TV. And one must wonder: is the family held together by nothing more substantial than Scotch tape?

This biennial exhibition is highly conceptual in nature. It's not just pretty pictures; it's a collection of thought-provoking interdisciplinary works that require long and careful study. For your own enlightenment and enrichment, please do not rush through this exhibition. Read the wall labels and take the time to really look at the work.
10th Annual Biennial

Through May 20, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday
10 a.m. to 8 p.m. third Thursday
admission $10, student/senior/military $8, children 5 and younger free
Third Thursdays free from 5-8 p.m.
Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma
253.272.4258

Wish you were here

2012-01-26T08:02:00.000-08:00

Here are some more images from the Postcard show at South Puget Sound Community College. You can scroll down to find my review for the Weekly Volcano.

Pictured top to bottom are postcards by Steven Suski, Linda Eitel, Gail Ramsey Wharton, and another Steven Suski.

So busy I want to stop everything and write about being busy

2012-01-21T16:46:00.001-08:00

After next week you might as well take me out behind the barn and shoot me. If I survive the week.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week I had nothing to do and couldn’t do it anyway. I was snowed in and with no Internet connection. So I read a lot. I read half of the newest anthology of Barry Hannah stories. Damn that man could write. It’s a shame he died young.

Now that I have my connection back and can actually get out of the driveway, work is piling up as deep as the snow.

Today I went to a press preview for the Northwest Biennial at Tacoma Art Museum. My review will be in the Weekly Volcano next week. Tonight we’re going to the opening of “Play It Again, Sam” at Lakewood Playhouse. My review will be in The News Tribune next Friday. Tomorrow I’m going to a rehearsal for “Seafarer” at Harlequin to write it up for thurstontalk.com, and next week I need to go to a rehearsal of “Hair” for another thurstontalk article, and Monday I hope to attend a meeting on a community art project (details hopefully to come in yet another TT article).

Wednesday is a PFLAG board meeting. Thursday Steve Schalchlin arrives prior to his performance with The Righteous Mothers, and he will be staying at our house. Naturally we’ll be going to the Steve S and RM show Friday and Saturday nights.

That kind of wraps up the week, except I forgot to mention I just got asked to write an article for GLASS Quarterly, an international glass art magazine. My deadline is early next week.

Maybe we could have another snow storm after next week.

Wish you were here

2012-01-21T08:46:00.000-08:00

The postcard show

"Wish You Were Here" at the Minnaert Center

By Alec Clayton

The Weekly Volcano, January 18, 2012

This untitled piece by Gail Ramsey Wharton is part of the "Wish You Were Here" exhibit.

There are a lot of artist-made postcards in the Wish You Were Here postcard exhibit at the Kenneth J. Minnaert Center for the Arts Gallery at South Puget Sound Community College. More than 75 local and regional artists submitted more than 250 works. Sorry, I didn't count how many made the cut, but there are a lot of them and they run the gamut, from sweet and sentimental to corny, wise, clever, beautiful, stupid and amateurish. The postcards include paintings, prints, photography, drawing, ceramics, sculpture and mixed media. (There are no wall labels to indicate media, so if I say it's a watercolor or a photo-collage or whatever, that's my best guess.)

A few of the postcards in this show are clichéd, and there are some that are badly done; but for the most part the works are very inventive and skillfully executed. Since there are so many, I'll just mention a few of my favorites to give you a taste of what to expect.

Steven Suski brings back the '60s with a series of brightly colored photo collages, some with images viewers will recognize from famous album covers (such as the Hair cast album), and some with recognizable rock icons like Ringo Starr and George Harrison. These cards are dynamic and expressive.
Patricia McLain has done cards with images of Olympia scenes that are dark as night with brightly colored contours that glow like neon. Very beautiful. I suspect they are night photos manipulated with a computer. My paint program has a similar effect that can be done with the click of the mouse, but being that simple doesn't lessen the effect.

Frank Frazee has done a number of collages and drawings on brown cardboard with a strong graphic appeal. I particular like the one with the cartoon rabbit saying "Wish You Were Hare," and the very sensitive drawing of a moody woman resting her chin on her hand.

Linda Eitel has some very nice works with drawing and collage. One of the strongest images in the show is one of hers that shows a cut-out image of a face with huge, green cat eyes hovering in a bright blue sky over a desert scene. And I really like another one of Eitel's that pictures a frantic little man with a bright orange shirt standing amidst a bunch of socks scattered on the floor, perhaps desperately searching for a mated pair.

Some of the most inventive cards in the show are by Gail Ramsey Wharton, most of which include clever plays on the "Wish You Were Here" theme - many of the artists in this show use variations of those words on their cards. Wharton's include one with a reference to the Occupy Olympia movement and another bizarre little image of the old hangman's spelling game.

Amanda Miller has one very stylish card with a two figures, one a featureless silhouette and the other a simple outline in white on a textured background, and a nicely executed studio nude in what looks like graphite.

I like Robin Ewing's face with a cat, a line drawing with simple washes of flat color. It looks like possibly a silk-screen print.

Jane Stone has a group of painted and scratched images on clay stone that look like archeological finds from Egypt. Very nicely done.

Finally, I really like Karen LaGrave's painted photo collages. I particularly like the heavy impasto look of her brushstrokes, which is highly exaggerated due to scale and contrast with the glossy-print photographic images. My favorite of hers is a yellow house with a blue van parked in front.

There will be a special opening reception Friday, Jan. 20 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. The opening reception kicks off the six-week silent auction, with all proceeds from benefiting the Kenneth J. Minnaert Center for the Arts Gallery. A "People's Choice" award will also be announced at the closing reception.

Wish You Were Here

Through March 2, noon-4 p.m., and by appointment
South Puget Sound Community College
2011 Mottman Rd. SW, Olympia
60.596.5527, artgallery@spscc.ctc.edu

Love in the Northwoods

2012-01-17T08:54:00.000-08:00

Almost Maine, a review

by Alec Clayton

Pictured from top: Ken Luce and Priscilla Zal, Jason Downer and McKenzie Clifford, Logan Cheyne and Korja Giles, Steve Vocke and Brittni Reinertsen. Photos courtesy Olympia Little Theatre.

For starters I must say I enjoyed “Almost Maine” at Olympia Little Theatre as much as I had hoped and far more than I had expected.

I would have expected even less had I discovered this little tidbit of information from a New York Times article: “It closed a month after it opened Off Broadway. Entertainment Weekly selected it as one of the worst shows of 2006.” And then it became a phenomenal success in schools community theaters across the country. If I had read that before braving a snowy night to see it at OLT I probably wouldn’t have gone. I probably would have expected something like “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” which everyone else seems to love but which I hated.

But “Almost Maine” is nothing like that. It is funny. Really, really funny. And touching and sad and poignant. It was cleverly written by John Cariani of “Law and Order” fame (Google him if you don’t know who he is.)

Tim Shute does a fine job in his directorial debut with a cast of actors that is new to me. The only one of these actors I’ve seen before is Ken Luce, whom I saw in “Love, Sex and the IRS.” A lot of the others were in “Welfarewell” and “A Few Good Men,” neither of which I was able to review. (Shute was also in “A Few Good Men.”)

It’s an ensemble piece and it is difficult to single out any single actor. They were uniformly outstanding. From a back-woodsy couple trying to sample the joy of kissing to a pair of dumb jock types questioning relationships to a hippie-dippy chick carrying her heart in a bag and traveling to the primitive Northwest to say goodbye to her recently dead husband whose spirit is being carried away by the northern lights — every one of these actors inhabit their roles with expressiveness and a sense of naturalism that is convincing and delightful. Never mind that some of the things they do are absolutely absurd, magical, stupid or unbelievable — and in some of scenes all of those combined — these actors make their characters totally believable.

“Almost Maine” is a series of eight short stories of vignettes with eight actors playing 18 different characters - plus stage manager Vanessa Postil, who appears briefly as a bartender but is not credited in the program and did not take a curtain call. The actors are: Logan Cheyne, McKenzie Cifford, Jason Downer, Korja Giles, Ken Luce, Brittni Reinertsen, Steve Bocke, and Priscilla Zal. There are no connections between the different scenes other than they all take place at approximately the same time on a cold winter night in the fictitious little town of Almost Maine, and each of the stories is about love.

One of the most interesting and delightful things about Cariani’s writing is that many of his vignettes are based on the clever idea of taking metaphorical statements literally. When people fall in love they fall on the floor, when hearts are broken they’re… well, you’ll see; and if you’re waiting for the other shoe, well, you’ll see.

“Almost Maine” is sweet without being cloying. It is absurdist, yet underlying the absurdities are truths about the workings of the human heart. I highly recommend it.

WHEN: 7:55 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 1:55 p.m. Sunday through Feb. 5

WHERE: Olympia Little Theatre, 1925 Miller Ave., NE, Olympia

TICKETS: $10-$14, available at Yenney Music Company on Harrison Avenue (360-943-7500) or http://www.brownpapertickets.com/producer/2313

INFORMATION: 360-786-9484, http://olympialittletheater.org/

2012-01-12T14:30:00.000-08:00

Nostalgia at Tacoma Art Museum

"At Home Across America: Scenes from the 1930s to 1950s"

The Weekly Volcano, January 12, 2012

"Tobacco Farms," an original color serigraph by Robert Gwathmey Courtesy Tacoma Art Museum

At the risk of sounding snarky, I have a hard time imagining why anyone would want to see At Home Across America: Scenes from the 1930s to 1950s in Prints at Tacoma Art Museum. Unless they're writing an art history thesis. Or very nostalgic for the 1940s.

On the other hand, people who are going to TAM for the Mexican folk art show or the Chihuly show or the Northwest Biennial (opening Jan. 21) should stop in anyway just to see what American art was like between the beginnings of modernism (which happened in Europe and kind of missed America) and the advent of Abstract Expressionism (which changed the whole world of art).

Nostalgia is the key word now, and it was then too. America was recovering from the Great Depression and was engaged in a World War. People were moving from the bucolic countryside to the hectic cities, and it seemed like everyone was seeking reminders of quieter and less threatening times; artists obliged them with images of an America that never really was. The art of the day glorified country life and working men and women - a romantic and unrealistic view of the world.

There are more than 80 prints in this show - all from Associated American Artists, a gallery that marketed to average Americans rather than wealthy collectors, meaning they catered to popular taste. Nearly all are in black and white, and most can be described as regionalism or American Scene art. Other than Thomas Hart Benton, Howard Cook, John Stuart Curry and Robert Gwathmey, there are hardly any recognizable names in this show.

The show isn't completely comprised of American Scene prints. There are a couple that are modernistic or Cubist-inspired, most notably Alexander Archipenko's "Bathers" and Donald E. Thompson's "Space and the Structure of Sorrow," not to mention Gwathmey's "Tobacco Farmers," which forecasted works by Romare Beardon and Jacob Lawrence. The wall text for "Bathers" talks about the influence of European moderns on American art. Both Thompson's and Archpenko's art are heroically abstract in the tradition of Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler. They're nicely designed, but the silly-sad faces in Thompson's print are too corny, even for 1949.

The one thing I have to salute these artists for is their strong sense of design, even if it is, in many instances, too obvious. They mastered the art of using line and direction to lead the eye and of using strong dark and light contrasts for dramatic effect, even if they had to distort natural forms in unnatural ways to create such effects. Storm clouds swirl about and human figures bend and stretch in dramatic but contrived ways.

It's amazing how many of these artists seem to have been influenced by Benton. He may have had a stronger impact on his generation of artists than I ever realized. Jackson Pollock studied with Benton and later said he was a model of what not to do. The images in this show may well be the models against which a whole generation of American artists rebelled. Most of the artists in this show were contemporaries of Stuart Davis and John Sloan, and the later ones contemporaries of Motherwell and Pollock. They do not stand up well in comparison.

These were not the giants of the time, but viewing these prints is an interesting look at history.

At Home Across America: Scenes From the 1930s to 1950s

Through Feb. 26, Wed.–Sun. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Third Thursdays 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., $8-$10, Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma

2011-12-30T10:13:00.000-08:00

"ART LESSON": oil on linen by Todd Clark. Courtesy B2 Fine Art

"Cold Fusion"

These cold paintings are hot

The Weekly Volcano, December 29, 2011

“HALF MOON”: Oil and encaustic by Judy Hintz Cox, currently on display at B2 Fine Art. Courtesy B2 Fine Art

Cold Fusion at B2 Fine Art is the second part of a two-part exhibition. The first part, Hot Fusion, was last summer. Hot summer, cold winter, and a few of the same artists: Scott J. Morgan, Judy Hintz Cox, Todd Clark and photographer Jeff. G. Mitchell.

All of the work is abstract in the classically modern style that epitomized American art in the 1940s and '50s. Don't look for anything radically new here, but you can expect to see fine art by fine artists who thoroughly understand the elements of painting.

Cox and Clark dominate the show with their large, exuberant paintings.

Cox is showing works in three distinct styles. There is a group of highly gestural abstractions with loosely brushed strokes on a stark white background; a series in a variation of this with slightly more controlled forms and a similar white background; and a third series that is also similar but much more highly controlled and almost minimal, with more solid shapes which formulate recognizable subject matter. There is one called "Practicing Leaving," for instance, that has a contour drawing of a penguin in it, one that has a few shapes that look like boulders stacked on a precipice, and yet another that has an animal shape and a box drawn in perspective as if hurling through space. These paintings are the least conventional works in the show. I appreciate their originality and their smart use of space and balance, but they're not as exciting as Cox's more painterly abstractions.

In terms of pure painterly energy the best of Cox's works are the ones with reddish-brown and ochre shapes on chalky white. The tenuous balance of open and closed spaces and the excitement of a variety of transparencies, drawing, dense layering and texture within closed shapes is very exciting. I'm tempted to say these are the best paintings in the show, but that would discount Clark's work, which is also excellent.

Clark is as eclectic as can be. He has mined the best of Abstract Expressionist art, stealing from the likes of Pollock, de Kooning, Mark Toby and Joan Mitchell and others. His "Solo" is like a Pollock in black and white but with brushstrokes instead of dripping. "Art Lesson" is a Joan Mitchell in tones of gray with accents in pink, blue and orange. Toby's famous "white painting" comes into play in his large painting called "Small Todd Meets Big Todd." The top two-thirds of this painting is a field of squiggles of paint in tones of gray with Toby-like white on top, and the bottom one-third is infused with some of the hottest reds and pinks I've ever seen. It's on fire!

Morgan's paintings are mostly small abstractions with organic shapes in muted colors. His one large painting, "VA" (65-inches square) is his best, due to its controlled push and pull between shapes.
Mitchell's photographs are close-ups of parts of buildings and airplanes that twist and soar through space. The forms look like they've been distorted as in a funhouse mirror, but they have not been manipulated in any way. These are strong industrial images.

Overall this is a warm and inviting show for cold winter days.

B2 Fine Art, Cold Fusion, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, until 8 p.m. Third Thursdays, through Feb. 4, 711 St. Helens Ave., Tacoma, 253.238.5065

Foundation Award

2011-12-15T15:55:00.000-08:00

Big deal in Tacoma

The Weekly Volcano, December 14, 2011

"Ingrained," a print on handmade paper by Jessica Spring
"Pin a Dorito on an American" by Lynn Di Nino

The Greater Tacoma Community Foundation Award is a big deal. Being nominated is an honor bestowed by one's peers, and being chosen as the award recipient is an even greater honor. The choices are made by a committee including Tacoma Arts Administrator Amy McBride; Jeremy Mangan, recipient of last year's award; Rock Hushka of the Tacoma Art Museum; local artist Susie Russell Hall and others. It's just about the biggest award granted to local artists. As such, it's a shame that it doesn't merit a major gallery or museum showing such as what used to be given to the Neddy Award nominees. As a matter of fact, since the Neddy has taken its show away from Tacoma Art Museum in favor of a Seattle venue, maybe the Foundation Award show could replace the Neddy at TAM.

Instead, it's a window show in the Chamber of Commerce building at Pacific and 11th. Not exactly the best way to show such honored work.

The nominees this year were: Jennifer Adams, Sean Alexander, Nick Butler, Lynn Di Nino, Oliver Dorris, Kristin Giordano, Ellen Ito, Matt Johnson, Rick Lawson, Nicholas Nyland, Elise Richman, Peter Serko and this year's winner, Jessica Spring.

Spring is the founder of locally-based Springtide Press. Her piece for the Foundation Award, titled "Ingrained," is an art book created on handmade paper made from ancient Western red cedar logs and printed with poetry written by Spring. The pages hang from a display rack similar to those used by stores to display flooring.

Spring explains: "I found the original cedar shingle sales kit on antique row in Tacoma. I had seen it long before our trip to Yakima, and it came to mind pretty quickly after my idea and on a return visit I was really relieved to find it still there. I was determined to make my own paper for the piece, and had experimented a little with eastern arbor vitae. After some strange phone calls to local mills, I found Darwin. He's been working in the timber industry since he was a kid (and has less than 10 fingers to prove it). Darwin had some huge Western red cedar logs with bark - nearly two feet across. He pronounced these behemoths "adolescents" and used a huge scraping tool to peel off several sections I could load in the car. After soaking (them) I could remove the inner bark in strips, cook it for most of a day, then process in a blender. The resulting fiber made beautiful paper - some I used straight, some I mixed with abaca or recycled cotton paper - all of it dried pasted on my studio windows."

Spring wrote all the text except the W.B. Yates quote on the back of the piece. Unfortunately, in its present setting it is impossible to see all of the pages. I have seen only enough to get the impression that the text has to do with metaphors for our relationship with the forests and includes some clever word play.

Similar in content is Peter Serko's photograph "Only the Trees Remember," a beautiful, misty photo of almost invisible leafless trees and houses printed on aluminum with a strange green patina. It sweetly captures the essence of the land of the Pacific Northwest.

By contrast, Lynn Di Nino's "Pin a Dorito on an American" is a delightfully playful sculpture of five obese characters standing on the food they devour. It's like a tongue-in-cheek monument to the glories of junk food.

Also very enjoyable is Ellen Ito's take on a poster from the movie "Cool Hand Luke" printed in soft gray washes with bright red paint on a long scroll.

This show includes representative works from some of Tacoma's best artists. You owe it to yourself to see it, even if it means standing out in the rain and the cold. The window display is supposed to remain for an indefinite period of time. I was told it would be about three months.

Foundation Award, Chamber of Commerce building, 11th and Pacific Ave., 24/7 for nonspecific time

2011-12-08T15:37:00.000-08:00

Pastels by invitation

Seventy-seven artists from United States and Canada show in Tacoma

The Weekly Volcano, December 7, 2011

“Suspended Flora”: A pastel piece by Marcel Schwarb. Courtesy American Art Company

American Art Company is now hosting the Northwest Pastel Society's 25th Annual International Open Exhibition.

Pastels have a bad rep, often deserved, but not always. The name is associated with soft and pretty colors, and pastel as a media has long been thought of as a media of sweet grandmothers who take it up as a hobby - despite the example of Edgar Degas, who revolutionized pastel art with layered and heavily textured works as far back as 1880. That influence is still very evident in the current pastel exhibit at American Art Company. There are some marvelous landscapes and urban scenes with rich colors that are worth long and serious contemplation.

I like many of the Degas-influenced pastels, but what this show proves is that there have been no advancements in the art of pastel since about 1886. This exhibit, while beautiful in rich textures and luminous colors, is filled with trite imagery. There is not a single abstract painting in the show, although Diana Sanford's "Portals #4" is an almost-abstract street scene with a strong composition and some wonderfully muted colors. There is one painting of a skull and a hammer called "Signs of Life" by Trish Harding that verges on abstraction and Surrealism. There is also a handful of figures including one nice one of a girl playing the piano, "Playing Her Piece" by Jane Mayer, which is very lovely and has some wonderful green and yellow tones in her cast shadow. And there is a single nude, Paul Barton's "Resting Dancer," that is nicely done but rather clichéd. Everything else is landscape or cityscape. Or animals. And the show would have been much better if every single animal picture had been rejected.
And now for comments on a few of the best works.

Marcel Schwarb's "Suspended Flora" has the strong heavy forms and diagonals and slanted light of an Edward Hopper cityscape, but without Hopper's sense of pathos and alienation. The colors are terrific, especially the blue of the sky that shows through an opening in the top of the building in such a way as to turn negative space into a positive. And I like the way Schwarb cropped the scene and made it look like a slightly tilted camera shot.

Kari Tirrell's "Venice" is a marvel of technique. It's a scene of two gondolas in Venice seen from a bridge. The clarity and realism is amazing. The water looks like a photograph printed on slick photo paper. I've never been one to admire art for technique alone, but I do admire this painting.
Lawrence Barone's "Black River" (which is green) captured the award for "Best in Show." It is a very simple scene of a single tree on a river bank with a skrim of trees in the background. Everything is nicely harmonized and unified.

Also impressive are "Rocklyn Summer" by Ladonna Kruger and Barbara Benedetti Newton's "Spellbound" and Deborah Matlock's "Thirteen," a painting of a girl in a fencing outfit resting with sword in hand.

Northwest Pastel Society’s 25th Annual International Open Exhibition
Through Dec. 31, Tuesday-Friday 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Third Thursday until 8 p.m., American Art Company, 1126 Broadway Plaza, Tacoma, 253.272.4327

Scrooged again!

2011-12-05T11:13:00.000-08:00

Capital Playhouse trots out another seasonal favorite

Photos: from top, Michael E. Self as Ebenezer Scrooge, Nicholas Hayes as Tiny Tim with Scrooge and Geoffery Simmons as the Ghost of Christmas Presence, Tim and Scrooge, Ghost of Scrooge.

I swore I was not going to see any more Christmas shows this year. Especially not yet another version of “A Christmas Carol,” and yet I saw “Scrooge” at Capital Playhouse. And I’m glad I did.

This production of “Scrooge” is thoroughly professional in every aspect, from the sets, lighting and costumes to the directing and the music, both by Troy Arnold Fisher, and of course the performance by the entire cast from lead actor Michael E. Self as Ebenezer Scrooge to ensemble actors such as Nicholas Main and Jake Hoff who appear as Peter Cratchit, an urchin, and undertaker and “boy with sled.” It is theatrical in the extreme, with powerful special effects and exuberant performances. Even the wigs and the fake beards and moustaches some of the men wear are outstanding in a couple of ways: they reflect the styles of the times, and they help to transform actors such as Jerod Nace and Geoffery Simmons into a multiplicity of believable and sometimes hilariously absurd characters (witness the outsized moustache Simmons sports in the opening scene). It’s a rare thing when wig designs are credited in a performance program, but Michael Costain deserves the recognition.

More on costumes, sets, etc. later, but now on to the performances.
Nace – a veteran of many shows at Capital Playhouse, Tacoma Musical Playhouse, Lakewood Playhouse and others – turns in one of his finer performances in this show. He’s in fine voice on “I Hate People” and “Thank You Very Much.” He’s loveable as Tom Jenkins and switches to three other characters with ease.

Simmons, the only Equity actor in the cast, is a fabulous Ghost of Christmas Present. I haven’t seen him on a South Sound stage since his fabulous performance in “Sideshow” three years ago and “Ain’t Misbehavin’” in 2005, and it was great seeing him again. In this role he doesn’t get a chance to solo much, which is a shame, but he does get to strut his stuff with broad gestures and a marvelously booming laugh, and he imparts a brilliantly regal personality to the ghost.

Diane Lee Bozzo is great as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Her singing with Scrooge and others on the song “Happiness” is potent and lovely.

The other women in the cast – Christie Murphy, Rachelle Riehl, Erin Snodgrass and Gwen Haw – are all excellent, but the plum roles belong to the men: to Self, Simmons and Nace; to Patrick Wigren as Marley, young Scrooge and others; and to Nicholas Hayes as Tiny Tim.

Wigren, whom I took special note of in his fabulous performance as Rooster in “Annie” last year, is captivating as the ghost of Jacob Marley with his weird sideways walk while weighted down with chains, and he is convincing as the young Scrooge. My only regret is his amplified voice when playing Marley was too loud. The effect was great, but the volume was deafening. (I have been complaining for at least eight years that Capital Playhouse overdoes the volume. It’s not Wigren’s fault; it’s the fault of a theater that is too small to have the volume so loud.)

Hayes, a third grader in his first main stage performance at Capital Playhouse following performances with the company’s Kids at Play and Kids in Koncert, is charming as Tiny Tim, and his voice on the haunting “The Beautiful Day” is crystal clear.

Finally, there is Scrooge. Self is a consummate actor who brings the character to life and makes us hate his stinginess yet still enjoy his personality even before his famous transformation takes place. And his singing is really great. He has a strong voice that is deep and mellow with a hint of gravel and resonance. Self owns every scene he is in.

Now back to a few words about the designers and the tech crew. The set designed by Bruce Haasl and built by Haasl and technical director Dennis Kurtz beautifully captures the feel of mid-19th century London. The shop windows and the massive wrought iron gate and the huge clock that hovers over it are impressive. Three separate parts of the set revolve to change from street scenes to interior scenes and Scrooge’s heavy four-poster bed moves on and off stage and revolves and shakes, and there is lots of fog and dramatic lighting and sound (lighting by Matt Lawrence and sound by Tom Dakan). The costumes by Asa B. Thornton are outstanding. Marley’s costume and that of the Ghost of Christmas Present are deliciously elaborate and pretty much indescribable.

It’s a story that never gets old, and it is presented with panache and dramatic flair. I definitely recommend “Scrooge.”

When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday through Dec. 30, extra 2 p.m. matinee Sat., Dec. 24 (tentatively scheduled performances Dec. 26 and Dec. 28-30)
Where: Capital Playhouse: 612 Fourth Ave. E., Olympia
Tickets: $28-$35
More information: 360-943-2744, capitalplayhouse.com

Watch ‘Peter Pan,' at Tacoma Musical Playhouse and you will believe

2011-12-02T10:09:00.000-08:00

Bailey Boyd is Wendy and Erica Zabelle is Peter in

"Peter Pan" at Tacoma Musical Playhouse.

Mark Rake-Marona as Hook and John Miller as Smee.

Photos by Kat Dollarhide.

Published in The News Trivune, Dec. 2, 2011

The musical “Peter Pan” appeals to children of all ages and to adults who want to recapture the wonder of childhood, if only for a couple of hours. Tacoma Musical Playhouse caters to that targeted audience by selling Tinkerbell fairy wings and pirate hats and hooks that light up – and the kids are encouraged to light them up and shout out “I believe in fairies” to restore Tinkerbell to life when her light is dying out in the second act.

Offering “Peter Pan” as a holiday show was a wise choice on the part of TMP because it captures the spirit of the season without referencing Christmas – a nice break from an endless spate of Christmas shows.

Since Mary Martin played Peter Pan on Broadway in 1954, the part has mostly been played by women. TMP’s production is no exception, and Erika Zabelle was a good choice for the role. She has the pixie look generations of audiences have come to expect of the magical boy who never wants to grow up. She also has the grace and rhythm needed to strut and fly and crow with boyish arrogance.

In the other major role, that of Wendy, Bailey Boyd is convincing as a young girl on the cusp of adulthood, and she sings beautifully with a clear voice that is whispery on the low notes and rings out with resonance on the high notes. Boyd may not be familiar to Tacoma audiences, but she is an audience favorite in Olympia, where she has performed in many shows at Capital Playhouse. Her duets with Zabelle on “What Happens (When You’re Grown Up)” and later on “Don’t Say Goodbye,” with backup by Sarah Samuelson as Mrs. Darling, are the most powerful and beautiful songs in the show. Zabelle and Boyd harmonize as a single voice.

Kellen O’Brien as John Darling and Caleb Haalstrup as little brother Michael have the right look for their parts, but could be more exuberant. Mark Rake-Marona, a veteran of countless TMP shows, is inconsistent in the double role of Mr. Darling and Captain Hook. I particularly like the way he captures Mr. Darling’s ambivalence and discomfort in the role of father and titular head of a household that is really run by the mother and the pet dog, Nana (Garrett Young), but his interpretation of Hook is somewhat lifeless until the second act when he sings “Goodbye, Peter Pan.” From that moment on he nails the role and demonstrates his versatility as a singer and actor.

Lexi Scamehorn is majestic as Tiger Lily, and I love her costume (by Janet English). Interestingly, the Indians are costumed not as American Indians but as Aztecs or Mayans. However, their singing and dancing is squarely in the American Indian mold.

I don’t know the ages of the actors playing the Lost Boys, but they look older than they should be, and they’re not all boys. The advantage to choosing older actors to play the Lost Boys is they can handle the dance moves and the complicated blocking better. And a couple of the young women playing boy roles are particularly charming.

With characters flying, Tinkerbell’s moving light and many set changes, “Peter Pan” is a technically challenging show to produce, and the TMP tech crew pulls it off well. John Chenault’s lighting is particularly effective.

The set by Will Abrahamse is not his best work. Some of the set pieces look cheap, and the parts actors have to climb on are slightly wobbly, but the painted backdrops are great. Moving great crowds of pirates and Indians and Lost Boys through these set pieces also proves to be awkward at times – too many people having to exit through too-small spaces, most notably when the pirates capture all the Indians and Lost Boys.

Not credited in the program is the actor in the crocodile suit, but I was told it is stage manager Bethany Bevier. She drew great applause every time she crawled on stage and she got to take off her crocodile head and take a bow at curtain call – a much-deserved bow because stage managers are unseen and unsung heroes of theater, appreciated by cast and crew but seldom properly acknowledged by audiences.

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Saturdays through Dec. 18, with added matinees at 2 p.m. this Sunday and Dec. 18.
Where: Tacoma Musical Playhouse at The Narrows Theatre, 7116 Sixth Ave., Tacoma
Tickets: $20-$27
Information: 253-565-6867, tmp.org

Fast, funny and fantastic

2011-12-01T15:52:00.000-08:00

"Pinocchio" at Centerstage

reviewed by Michael Dresdner

My biggest worry writing this review is that I’ll run out of superlatives. That’s because there’s not a single element of "Pinocchio" at Centerstage that isn’t exemplary. It’s a big, blustery, joyous, musical olio chock full of outstanding singing, dancing and acting, delightful characters, superb music, great direction and choreography, brilliantly creative props and sets… See what I mean? Not enough superlatives.

This production, adroitly directed by Vanessa Miller, is not a true musical or play, but a British style Panto, a traditional entertainment generally presented in mid-winter, though not Christmas themed. It combines a familiar fairy tale, in this case "Pinocchio", with song, dance, outrageous costumes, props and sets, vaudeville style acts, comedy, contemporary and local humor, and lots of audience participation. You’ll be encouraged to comment, boo, cheer, and give advice and warnings to the various characters, and a handful of children get to go onstage to help out with a comic follow-the-bouncing-ball type sing-along. The result is a non-stop rush of giddiness for both the cast and the audience.

Pinocchio (Daniel Goodman) is no less than a rubber-jointed, singing, dancing, acrobatic marvel, reminiscent of Dick Van Dyke at his best. His love object is the beautiful Princess Brittany (Sonya Meyer), who does for Ms. Spears what Tina Fey did for Sarah Palin. Meyer, who started in children’s theatre and established herself as a vocal sensation before leaving the area for college, is back and better than ever. A true triple threat, her magnificent voice is amplified by great dancing as well as acting. She’s attended by a rhymed troupe of talented BFFs named Addison, Madison, Chelsea and Kelsey (Fiona Webber, Olivia Barry, Hannah Shreaves, Celeste Barry.)

No less a triple threat talent is the Blue Fairy (Meg McLynn), another powerful vocalist and dancer who arrives on roller skates to talk to the audience at the head of the show. She later tap dances, glides on in an office chair, and generally covers the bases as an outrageous integral character cum narrator.

One of the Panto conventions is to have a female lead played by a man in drag. In this case it is Geppetta (Bob De Dea,) the female version of the famed puppet maker. His ample height is intensified by a Marge Simpson size wig, and his witty banter made the funnier by his outrageous appearance. Also traditional to Panto is a lead boy played by a female. Here it’s Lampwick (Hannah Mootz), who, like the rest of the cast, has it all together; singing, dancing, comedy and acting.

Rounding out the cast is a gaggle of other equally talented folks, often playing multiple parts. They include the delightfully evil and slightly addled Stromboli (Daniel Wood), King Frank (Sam Barber), a police officer, baker, prime minister and a governess (Jeremy Adams, Kip Brookbank, CJ Conrad, Megan Ann Jones) .

The redoubtable David Duvall, easily the best in the west, handles the superb musical direction and anchors a four piece band (with John VanZanten, Andrew Carson and Mark Malcolm) that pushes the pace, swinging effortlessly through a wealth of musical styles and sound effects, all done to perfection. Costume designer Ron Leamon, along with wig stylist Johnni Whitby, runs the gamut through an amazingly rendered puppet costume with animatronic growing nose, a stunning Princess Brittany, the outsized and outrageous Geppetta, and an over-the-top blue fairy, replete with matching blue wig and outfit enhanced by light-emitting rings and hair adornments. Sarah Sugarbaker’s clean set is further graced with stunning add-ons, like a gobbling whale by Steffon Moody, and amplified with lighting effects by Amy Silveria. I can’t name them all, but the entire production support group deserves to take a bow.

If you’ve been reading my reviews lately you might have noticed that this is the third of three praising Centerstage productions, a record that might make the wise man associate “Centerstage” with “season tickets.” Whatever artistic director Alan Bryce is doing, he ought to bottle it and send a case to the other theatres in the area. It would be, as they say in Yiddish, a real mitzvah.

In any case, don’t miss this night of mood-elevating jollity. It will be gone before you know it, and at this time of year, this is exactly what we all need.

"Pinocchio "
through Dec. 23, 2011
Centerstage

3200 SW Dash Point Road
Federal Way, WA 98003
253-661-1444

Photos:
Daniel Goodman as PINOCCHIO; Meg McLynn as THE BLUE FAIRY
Daniel Goodman as PINOCCHIO; Daniel Wood as STROMBOLI; Hannah Mootz as LAMPWICK

Bob DeDea as GEPETTA; Daniel Goodman as PINOCCHIO, Sonya Meyer as Princess Brittany
Sam Barker as KING FRANK and others
Photos by MICHELLE SMITH LEWIS

Flow gallery presents "Remix +"

2011-12-01T15:29:00.001-08:00

Old favorites in a new gallery

The Weekly Volcano, November 30, 2011

"Winter Solstice." Collage, sumi ink and handmade papers by Andrea Erickson

You'd think a gallery that's been open only a few months would not be able to mount a show featuring favorite artists from previous shows. But Flow (formerly Mineral) has done just that with a show called Remix + featuring prints, collages and sumi painting by Mary Bottomley, Bill Colby, Fumiko Kimura, Andrea Erickson, Ellen Miffitt, Selinda Sheridan and Nola Tresslar, plus jewelry by Lisa Von Wendel.

It's a nice little show, and although I didn't pay any attention to the prices - I seldom do - I suspect a lot of these works are reasonably priced and would make for nice Christmas gifts. (I heard a rumor that Erickson is going to use her "Winter Solstice" as a Christmas card this year, so if you buy it you'll have the original of the image all your friends have on a card. Score!)

A few words about selected works from the show:

Bill Colby's "Autumn Sun" is a warm and mystical abstract landscape in a style reminiscent of Adolph Gottlieb, but softer and more delicate. The sun, concentric circles of yellow and reddish orange shrouded in a gray sky and streaked with silvery icicles, hovers over a floating oval within which is a tangle of tree limbs seen at sunset. This little print brings warmth to dreary days.

There is quiet strength and sureness of brushstroke in Erickson's "Sumi Mountain." Five soft vertical brushstrokes create craggy mountain spires on the white paper and atop these spires are evergreen trees created by very delicate strokes of the brush. Also by Erickson is "Zen Petals," a simple expression of pure energy with a single circular stroke in light gray with five red blobs of ink and black splatters, and the previously mentioned "Winter Solstice," the essence of winter captured in collage, sumi ink and handmade paper. Depending on your point of view it's a snow-covered field with a mountain range in the background and a dark sky, or a scene from high on a snowy peak looking down on a molten brown river. The coldness and brightness of the white field at the bottom is intensified because it is layered over darker and duller colors and accentuated by bright patches of red and orange. The sky or the molten river is a marbled brown color that looks like a volcanic eruption. This is a strong little painting.

Bottomley is showing works in very different styles. Her "Evening Mist" is delicate and airy, and reminds me a lot of Whistler's "Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket." A few simple strokes of ink float on a glimmering gray ground like feathers in an updraft. Bottomley's "Random Poem (Kana)" is a heavily structured collage of Japanese writing on pieces of paper with a variety of textures and colors. It is classically balanced and somber.

Similar to Bottomley's collage is Tresslar's "In the Flow." The wall labels don't list media, so I'm guessing here. It appears to be a collage of various papers with thread and little bits of glass and gold leaf. It is very dense and heavily textured with a subtle combination of red, purple and gold colors.

Finally, what may be the strongest piece in the show - actually two pieces hung together as one - is (are) Tresslar's "Know Thyself I" and "Know Thyself II." These are simple abstract painted collages on convex-curved panels with simple shapes, strong, dark colors and speckles of sparkling gold.

These are but a few of the many nice works on display. It's a small show, but with a lot to see. Stop by for the next Third Thursday Art Walk.
Remix +

Through Jan. 5, Third Thursdays and by appointment
Flow, 301 Puyallup Ave., Tacoma
253.255.4675

The good, the sad, and the ugly.

2011-11-30T06:34:00.000-08:00

"Oliver" at Lakewood Playhouse

reviewed by Michael Dresdner

With outstanding production values and a big, energetic cast, “Oliver” at Lakewood Playhouse equips itself very nicely, all in all. Thanks in large part to an upbeat treatment by director/choreographer Casi Wilkerson, the musical manages to be a more lighthearted experience than you might expect. After all, it is a dark and depressing story, replete with hunger, homeless children, orphans, kidnapping, arrests, and four deaths, two of them killings.

Based on Dickens’ story “Oliver Twist,” it’s the tale of a thirteen year old boy sold by a cruel orphanage operator to an undertaker, then adopted by a gang of young pickpockets led by the avuncular Fagin. Oliver eventually gets arrested and ends up in the care of a rich man who we later discover is actually… Never mind. Go see it if you don’t already know the happy ending.

I’ve commented before about musicals with casts chosen for their singing ability in spite of weak acting chops. This one, if anything, is just the opposite with excellent actors whose singing prowess pales by comparison. That, and a few casting weaknesses, were the flaws in an otherwise well executed production.

Fortunately, weak lead vocals were, with few exceptions, less of a problem than you might imagine. The rousing and popular “Food, glorious food,” “Oom-Pah-Pah” and “Consider Yourself” are ensemble numbers. Thanks to musical direction by Deborah Armstrong Evans, choreography by Wilkerson, and a wonderful support cast laced with better vocalists than most of the leads, these pieces were all delightful. That’s no small feat, as the logistics of such production numbers can be daunting.

Most of leads were strong actors playing slightly exaggerated characters drawn with broad strokes. Luckily, their various lead songs and duets were mostly rough hewn numbers that came off just fine without operatic voices behind them.

Mr. Bumble (Jeffery T. Weaver) and Widow Corner (Jen Aylsworth) as the orphanage adults pulled off a blustery, bawdy duet that was just perfectly shy of over the top. Ditto for the undertaker couple, Mr. and Mrs. Sowerberry (Alexander Smith and Kaelyn Langer). Smith, who later neatly morphs into the old, stooped Mr. Brownlow, was, as he always is, hysterical, endearing and a joy to watch. Langer adroitly matched him in talent, character and style, which I assure you is nothing to sneeze at.

Fagin was played by veteran Steve Tarry, who turned in yet another excellent performance, something we’ve come to expect from him lately. Bill Sykes (John Munn) was the quintessential dark and dangerous villain, underplayed just enough to be even more menacing. Paired with lover Nancy (Deya Ozburn), their scenes, culminating with his murdering her onstage, were the most intense of the evening.

What was arguably the best overall performance, though, and certainly the most surprising for a young actor, was by Coleman Hagerman playing The Artful Dodger. Another surprise tucked away in the ensemble was Bianca Ponnekanti, a young woman with enough éclat to have caught my eye repeatedly while otherwise buried in large production numbers.

The titular lead, played by Mason Lahd, was sadly weak, if only by comparison to the rest of the adult cast. Such a role, like that of Annie in “that other” orphan musical, cries out for a singer and actor with talents well beyond his apparent age. Mason may get there, but at least the night I saw him, he was not there yet.

The other disappointment was “As Long As He Needs Me,” easily the most famous song that came out of “Oliver.” Like a rose growing amidst a garbage heap, this hauntingly beautiful torch song provides a welcome counterpoint to an otherwise dark setting. It wants a Susan Boyle treatment, delivered with a soaring, sweet, powerful voice. Instead, whether by actor’s or director’s choice, it was done with more angst and less heart wrenching beauty than I would have liked.

As for the production support, it was excellent across the board. The set by Blake York was one of the best and cleverest of a long line of remarkable Lakewood sets, expertly painted by a team led by James Venturini. The costumes, in spite of the enormous cast, were universally superb, thanks to Diane Runkel. Nic Olsen’s lighting design not only worked beautifully, but contained some subtle delights, like a gobo that made Fagin’s chair, with him in it, look like he was perpetually behind prison bars.

On the whole, though it has its less than perfect moments, it is a musical worthy of your time and attention, and one of those classics that everyone should see at least once.

“Oliver”

Nov. 25 through Dec. 23, 2011

Lakewood Playhouse www.lakewoodplayhouse.org

Photos by Dean Lapin

Top photo: Nancy (Deya Ozburn) on the right, The Artful Dodger (Coleman Hagerman) on the left

Center photo: Fagin (Steve Tarry) in the chair, Nancy (Deya Ozburn) standing

Bottom photo: Mr. Bumble (Jeffery T. Weaver) on the right and Widow Corner (Jen Aylsworth) on the left.

The final Stardust

2011-11-26T10:55:00.000-08:00

Alicia Mendez as Bonnie Kent kisses NYPD Police Officer Owen Duvall (Michael Lengel) as Kate Gallagher (Alison Monda), Ginger Hart (Megan Tyrrell) and Charlie (Christian Doyle) watch.

Matt Posner as W.C. Fields, Christian Doyle as Charlie,

and Megan Tyrrell as Mae West.

From left, Alison Monda, Matt Posner,

Alicia Mendez and Ryan Holmberg as Lt. Joey Malloy.

Coffee with Charlie (Christian Doyle)

and IRS Agent Hobson Bierce (Scott C. Brown)

Jack Steiner as Jimmy Sutton, second from left,

with the cast of "Stardust Serenade."

Harlequin Production’s “Stardust Serenade” is the 17^th and final show in a holiday tradition of rollicking 1940s-style musicals written by Harlowe Reed and directed by Linda Whitney -- all set either on Christmas Eve or within days of Christmas and all but one set in the Stardust Club in Manhattan during World War II. This is the seventh show in the series I have reviewed, and it is the most innovative and entertaining of those. Credit that to clever writing by Whitney (Harlowe Reed is her pen name for this series), to a great cast, lush and swinging music, and to an inspired and magical Charlie Chaplin impersonation by Christian Doyle. It is Doyle’s character and his running battle with IRS agent Hobson Bierce (Scott C. Brown) that makes this show so entertainingly different from others in the series.

In a risky move that paid off handsomely, Whitney chose for two of the major characters dramatic actors who have never before performed in a musical: Ryan Holmberg, who was outstanding in Harlequin’s recent “The Love List,” is the romantic lead, Army Air Corps Lt. Joey Malloy; and Brown, who played notable roles in “Sins of the Mother,” “End Days” and “The Last Swartz,” is Agent Bierce. Holmberg nicely underplays Lt. Malloy whose love for bargirl Bonnie Kent (Alicia Mendez) is very touching, and as a singer and dancer he holds his own with the much more experienced musical performers in the show.

Brown plays the uptight but likeable tax man as a kind of swaggering bully with a big heart, and as a foil to Charlie Chaplin’s playful antics he does pratfalls and double takes with skill and excellent timing. (How many times have we seen people “accidentally” bump butts, and we see it coming a mile away? But Brown and Alison Monda make it look truly comical.)

Doyle’s character Charlie is never specifically identified as Chaplin, but his dress and makeup emulate Chaplin’s Little Tramp character, and as a silent film character he does the entire play in pantomime. And what inspired pantomime it is! There is a drawn-out scene with Brown in which Charlie keeps stealing the tax man’s briefcase and making him fall that is so funny I was crying with laughter. Brown and Doyle have magnificent timing in this that brings to mind great comic actors such as Chaplin and Buster Keaton, not to mention pratfall masters such as Dick Van Dyke and Chevy Chase.

Another skit that brought tears of laughter to my eyes was when Doyle imitated every instrument in the band on his violin, a skit that should be played on television and go viral on YouTube.

It is just before Christmas, 1942. The people who run the Stardust Club are going to throw a party for Lt. Malloy. The entertainers at the club plan on impersonating a host of celebrity guests -- Mae West (Megan Tyrrell), W.C. Fields (Matt Posner), Marlene Dietrich and Lena Horne (Monda), Judy Garland dressed as Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz,” (Mendez), John Wayne (Brown), Edith Piaf (Mendez), and Errol Flynn (Posner) – all of whom either serenade Malloy or perform stand-up comedy routines. And Errol Flynn and Charlie Chaplin have a swashbuckling sword and cane fight.

Just before the party is scheduled to start the IRS agent shows up with the intention of closing the club and charging the owner with tax evasion.

Posner plays club owner Harry Hamilton, and Alison Monda plays Harry’s assistant, Kate Gallagher. Posner and Monda are two of the best musical theater performers ever to grace South Sound stages. Together and separately they have wowed audiences at Tacoma Musical Theater, Centerstage in Federal Way and Harlequin in shows such as “Summer in the Sixties,” “Sixties Kicks,” “I’m Into Something Good,” “Rent,” “Hello Dolly” and countless others. They are both brilliant singers and actors who give every performance their all, and Posner is a natural dancer who obviously feels the rhythm and lights up the stage with his moves.

The other two women in the cast -- Mendez and Tyrrell -- are strong singers. Mendez does a beautiful version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and Tyrrell does a great Mae West impersonation and sings beautifully on “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” which holds special meaning for her because when she was a little girl she saw her mother, Jana Tyrrell, perform the same song in the first show in the Stardust series.

Other entertainers in the club are Michael Lengel as police officer Owen Duvall, and 14-year-old Jack Steiner as Jimmy Sutton. Lengel is a crooner with a soft and engaging voice, and Steiner holds his own on stage with the more seasoned performers, plus he’s a great dancer.

Hit songs in the show include “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “The Lady is a Tramp,” “Stormy Weather” (a knockout performance by Monda impersonating Lena Horne), “Over the Rainbow ” a surprise rendition of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and a big song-and-dance number on “I’ve Got Rhythm” with the whole cast led by Steiner.

Music is provided by Harlequin’s regular house band, with some of the South Sound’s leading jazz and rock musicians led by Bruce Whitney. Band members are: Keith Anderson on drums, Dan Blunck on sax, Andy Omdahl on trumpet, Daven Tillinghast on guitar, and Whitney as Nikolai Feodorov on piano and clarinet.

If you want to make your holidays bright, go see “Stardust Serenade.”

WHEN: Thursdays through Saturdays, 8p.m., Sundays 2 p.m. through Dec. 31

WHERE: State Theater, 202 E. 4^th Ave., Olympia

TICKETS: prices vary, call for details

INFORMATION: 360-786-0151; http://www.harlequinproductions.org/

For more about this show see Thurston Talk.

Hybrids and Colorbandz™ The artist currently known as Troy Gua

2011-11-25T09:10:00.000-08:00

The Weekly Volcano, November 22, 2011

Troy Gua's work is worth the drive to Joe’s Bar in Seattle.

Head north to Seattle or go to the Internet to see Troy Gua. You'll be glad you did.

I was impressed when I first discovered Gua's work in a show at Fulcrum Gallery back in January of 2010. But there should have been a little voice in my head whispering, "You ain't seen nothing yet."

The Fulcrum show featured two extremely different types of work: a haunting memorial to war dead and portraits of historical and pop culture icons in which two or more faces were overlapped, such as Elton John and John Wayne, Martin Luther King and the King of rock ‘n' roll, or the King of Pop and King Tut.

With this show I started to get intrigued by Gua ... even friended him on Facebook. Then I mentioned him in the Volcano's Best of Tacoma issue as one of the "best Seattle artists who sometimes goes slumming in Tacoma."

And then I started seeing posts of paintings Gua called ColorbandzTM, which were minimalist abstract paintings that he called portraits. For example: "Portrait of Ernie and Bert as Colorbandz" and "Portrait of Lady Gaga as ColorbandzTM." They were purely abstract paintings in bands of various colors.

It would be a stretch of think of the ColorbandzTM in anything other than purely formal terms. Why call them portraits? There are no visible heads or eyes or hair, nothing to relate them to any person living or dead, and yet Gua's friends on Facebook started trying to guess whose portraits he was posting, and some of them seemed to be able to figure it out based on the number of bands or the particular colors and combinations. In some very personal and enigmatic way, Gua was distilling the essence of known personalities into beautiful bands of color.

Getting more and more intrigued, I began to see humorous and profound works such as the "Pissing Contest," which consisted of sculptural forms that, like the ColorbandzTM, appear to be formal and abstract but carried more profound meaning, reflecting Andres Serrano's infamous "Piss Christ" and pitting giant egos against one another in a royal battle. And then Gua wrapped a house in clear plastic in a kind of homage to Christo. In a statement about the project he says that Christo always denies any meaning beyond the purely aesthetic, but that his own work does have greater meanings. You just have to ferret those meanings out.

Gua's art is both conceptual and formally aesthetic. It is filled with humor (except when it is deadly serious such as in the war memorial show at Fulcrum) and with art world references. It is smart and skillfully executed. I urge readers to check out his website at troygua.com.

Gua's pop hybrid images are currently showing at Joe Bar, 810 E. Roy St. in Seattle. He will also in a couple of group shows in December: a video works show at Interstitial Theatre in Seattle and ‘Matryoshka' at Ghost Gallery. And in January Gua will have a show at SOIL Gallery.

Gathering'

2011-11-17T16:16:00.000-08:00

John Miller and Friends at Museum of Glass

The Weekly Volcano, November 16, 2011

“QUATRO HOMBRES AZUL”: A work of blown, painted and hot-sculpted glass by John Miller and Therman Statom Photo courtesy MOG

This exhibition of collaborative work by John Miller and a dozen or so friends is cute and well crafted. Some of the pieces - all giant goblets - are beautiful, most are inventive, and a lot of them are funny. The exhibit, Gathering: John Miller and Friends, combines traditional glass art with a wide variety of art genres such as Pop Art and Color Field painting and Surrealism.

The sheer size is impressive. I'm told most of the pieces are around four to five feet tall, which is an astounding feat for glass blowing. But for all it has going for it, I have a hard time thinking of this show as serious art.

Nevertheless. Does art have to be serious? Can't it just be fun? It's also hard to take seriously the work of artists such as Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms and Jeff Koons, yet they're all respected artists. So let's give a little respect to Miller and his friends.

Each piece in the show is a goblet. Miller created a few on his own, perhaps with a team of hot shop helpers. But most were done in collaboration with other artists, many of whom are already familiar to Museum of Glass patrons. Martin Blank, for instance, who did the huge outdoor installation "Fluent Steps" in the plaza pool. And Rik Allen and the brothers Jamex and Einar de la Torre and Paul Stankard, who has his own solo show, The Beauty Beyond Nature, which just opened in another of the museum's gallery.

In most of the pieces traditional goblets sit on top of stems that are glass sculptural forms that can range from abstract to figures to hamburgers and rocket ships. The wall labels do not explain it, but it seems obvious from looking at them that Miller did the vessel parts and the other artists did the stems. In most of the pieces the primary visual device is the contrast between the two parts, but in some, such as "Quiver Cup," done in collaboration with Blank, and "Quartro Hombres Azul" by Therman Statom and Miller, the art is in the beautiful blending of contrasting styles.

Statom's piece is a simple, classical goblet with surface drawing in a roughly expressionistic style with soft colors and expressive line work. It looks like pastel, but it's obviously not. This is a truly beautiful piece and perhaps my favorite in the whole show.

The piece done with Blank features a contrast between a minimalist goblet in clear glass and maximalist crinkled, bubbled, twisted, translucent stem by Blank that is clearly similar in style to the forms in his "Fluent Steps."

Rik Allen has shown his blown glass space ships in other MOG shows. They look like a 1950s idea of what the space ships of the future might look like. Think Jules Verne and Lost in Space. The forms are bulky with a darkly metallic, opaque surface. In this one a blue goblet sits on top of the rocket, and the coloring and surface quality the goblet matches that of the rocket ship.

Another favorite is "Cupping Elegant" with Ross Richmond. It is a smoothly sensual figure with a single arm and hand not connected at the shoulder but extended outward from the side of the figure's chest. Very strange yet lovely in a dark red color that is almost black.

This is a fun show, and you can see it and the new Paul Stankard show in a single visit. What a bonus!
[Museum of Glass, Gathering: John Miller and Friends at Museum of Glass, through June 10, 2012, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, $5-$12, 1801 Dock St. Tacoma, 866.4MUSEUM]

Rebirth of a city

2011-11-17T16:13:00.000-08:00

Howard Ben Tre’s “Water Forest,”

photographed by Peter Serko

Peter Serko documents how art has helped build Tacoma

Cover story in the Weekly Volcano, November 16, 2011
Peter Serko's photography exhibition at the Museum of Glass artistically documents the brief history of the museum since 2006. It also shows different aspects of the building, and of the adjacent Chihuly Bridge of Glass, taken during different times of day throughout the seasons. Plus there's a video montage featuring pictures by other local photographers.

While putting the exhibition together, Serko discovered some interesting facts about the museum.

"Former Tacoma mayor Karen Vialle told me how controversial the purchase of the land where MOG sits was and how it subsequently led to her reelection defeat," Serko says. "I discovered that at various stages many different groups and individuals came forward to put all the pieces together, often with great difficulty and considerable controversy." Among those people was Dayton Knipher, a longtime local artist who at the time was known by the name Karen Knipher.

Vialle, now running for the Tacoma School Board, says that while supporting the Museum of Glass may not have single-handedly caused her defeat when seeking reelection as Tacoma's mayor in 1993, but it was certainly a major contributing factor.

Burlington Northern owned the land the museum sits on, and Vialle recalls purchasing the land for the museum was very controversial.

"People thought it was a waste of money," Vialle says. "The crime rate was really high at the time and people thought the money should be spent on hiring law enforcement, but the money used to purchase the land was capital bond funds that could not be used to hire police."

Vialle says she spearheaded the move to purchase the land "and would do it again."

"History has proven it was a wise thing to do," she says. "Any city that has a beautiful waterfront like that, it's a real asset."

Vialle says the museum has been "a great tourism draw for the city."

Locating MOG on that waterfront property also contributed to the renovation of the old Albert Mills building, which houses the very successful William Traver Gallery. New apartment complexes and retail outlets on the other side of MOG have also contributed to the city.

"A major thrust during my term was the impact of the arts on the economy," she says. "We saw arts as a major form of economic development."

As further evidence, Vialle points to the renovated Theater District.

Serko says he hopes his show will prove to be an acknowledgement that art really has changed the city, and that the people, such as Vialle and Knipher, who stuck their necks out were right. He hopes the exhibit will show that "this has been a wonderful thing for Tacoma. The Museum District has changed Tacoma for the good and in time I am certain it will be a thriving area for artists of all levels."

A stroll along Dock Street, through the Theater District or along the section of Pacific Avenue that's home to Tacoma Art Museum, the University of Washington Tacoma, Washington State History Museum and Union Station should be enough to convince any skeptic that the arts are vital, not only to economic development but to the very life of the city.

Knipher recalls that directly prior to MOG's opening (1998-2002 particularly), "There was a lot of focus on bringing folks back downtown and there was a grassroots effort on the part of a lot of people to make that happen."

She was part of that effort. Knipher was also secretary of The Tacoma Architectural Foundation, which focused efforts on saving historic buildings. "One of the strategies to revitalize downtown Tacoma was to use art," she recalls.

One of The Tacoma Architectural Foundation first projects on this front was bringing in artist Iole Alessandrini to create a light installation called "Winter, Season of Light." Knipher points out that the installation "was an amazing and miraculous success" and it ultimately inspired the renovation of that whole part of town.

"Truth be known, it was both art and historic preservation that truly turned things around," Knipher says.

Serko says that while researching for his show he got to look at lots of old images of Tacoma and realized how important art has been to the changes in the area. Hopefully the evidence of all this development will convince those with their hands on the money that the arts are vital to the economic health of the city.

Serko's exhibition at MOG is called Transformation: Art Changes a City. It runs through Jan. 8.

Represent South Sound

2011-11-09T12:25:00.000-08:00

Maybe South Sound artists just aren’t good enough for the Tacoma Art Museum. In many ways TAM is a wonderful institution, and I’ve been overjoyed at the many wonderful shows they’ve brought to Tacoma throughout the years. But wouldn’t you think that once in a while they could represent South Sound?

The only time TAM shows works by contemporary regional artists is during their every-other-year biennial, which is always heavy on Seattle and Portland artists. It’s easy to say that those are bigger cities with more vibrant art markets and therefore more deserving artists. It’s easy, but it just ain’t so. We have plenty of outstanding artists in Tacoma and Olympia whose work is every bit as good as the best in those bigger cities, but they are seldom given a chance to show their stuff. A local artist recently told me that most Tacoma artists no longer even bother to enter the Northwest Biennial because they know they haven’t a chance of being selected.

Here’s what I wrote in my 2007 review of the 8^th Northwest Biennial:

I think it’s a wonderful show featuring an all-star lineup of the best contemporary artists in the Pacific Northwest. It’s just not what I think a regional juried show should be -- the key word being juried.

If it were an invitational, well that would be a horse I could saddle up and ride with pleasure. But I had always been led to believe a regional juried exhibition was an opportunity for and an introduction to emerging artists in the area.

Traditionally this show has been an opportunity for little known but deserving artists to rise to the next level. But this show features artists such as Michael Spafford, Juan Alonzo, Chris Bruch, Joe Feddersen and Robert Yoder. We’re talking well established artists including Neddy Award winners and artists whose work is owned by the museum. Spafford is a Northwest icon.

Almost 900 artists sent in their $20 entry fee in hopes of getting their moment in the spotlight, and most of them never had a chance. Curator and co-juror Rock Hushka said, “The goal of the biennial is to revisit accomplished bodies of work. We wanted to offer the opportunity to explore the powerful images that have shaped contemporary dialogues about the region’s art.” I don’t believe that many, if any, of the artists who entered the competition had any idea that was the goal of the exhibition. Had they known, most of them would not have entered.

In my 2009 review of the 9^th annual I was a little more succinct. I wrote, “…there’s too much photography, and it would be nice if there were at least one South Sound artist in the show.”

And now we get the announcement of the selections for the 10^th annual biennial, which is slated to open Jan. 21. There are 10 artists from Portland, six from Seattle, and only one from Tacoma. Juliette Ricci. The only other South Sound artist is Jeremy Mangan from Fife. Congratulations to Ricci and Mangan.

To Rock Hushka, curator, and Stephanie Stebich, director: Isn’t it about time that TAM represents South Sound artists? Please, you’ve got to do better by us. I’m just about ready to call on area artists to occupy TAM.

Nothing Like a Local Soap Opera

2011-11-07T10:19:00.000-08:00

Jeri and Kate (Samantha Camp and Betzy Miller) get nasty with the dead guy (Demetrick Louis) in Perky's Coffee House (top). From left: Customer, Bert (Mick Flaaen), Jeri, Linda (Aya Hashiguchi), and Kate. Photos by Jason Ganwich.

Dukesbay Productions’ Java Tacoma: Episode 38

“Java Tacoma: Episode 38” is a laughable light confection live soap opera set in Tacoma replete with local digs. You may have seen Episode 37, but if you didn’t it doesn’t matter. In the tradition of all good TV drama they start off with a recap of the last installment. The audience is informed that in the previous episode Jeri accidentally put her dead husband’s ashes in the coffee at Perky’s Coffee House and it turned out to be the best coffee anyone had ever tasted. Bert and Linda are going to have to close the coffee house. In this episode we find out that they’re not going out of business after all; they’re just moving to dreaded Federal Way, where children are born without souls.

That’s the premise. It’s a simple and ludicrous story with imaginative plot twists and loaded with double entendre and other word play, well written by local playwright Curtis B. Swanson and nicely directed by Randy Clark.

The cast is outstanding. Betzy Miller plays Kate, a crazy, outspoken local character who is convinced that she drives men wild with her sexual allure. Samantha Camp plays Jeri, a real estate agent who easily matches Kate in the appeal department. With sly facial expressions and posture she manages to make the simple act of giving out her business cards seem like an indecent proposal – with the running joke “I buy and sell. I go both ways.” The coffee house owners, Bert and Linda, are played by Mick Flaaen and Aya Hashiguchi. They serve as the (somewhat) straight characters (i.e., second bananas) off of whom the comics bounce their jokes. But they break out of their roles for one briefly insane scene when they appear as a Latin lover and an Asian woman. This strange interlude is totally out of context and seems to be not real but perhaps Jeri’s hallucination. It borders on offensive ethnic stereotyping but is more of a jab at the stereotypes than at the characters. Furthermore, the jabs at Asian women are softened because Hashiguchi is Japanese.

The final cast member, Demetrick Louis, plays an unnamed customer and a dead man. The previous sentence is not true, but it is necessary in order to describe Louis’s acting without giving away a major element in the story. As the dead man he does ‘nothing’ hilariously and we cannot but admire his ability to remain motionless without bursting into laughter as Kate and Jeri try out their sexual allure on him. As the mysterious customer he makes wild statements with astounding deadpan dramatic flair.

Kudos to Allan Loucks, composer of the original theme song and original score.

Subtitled “Friends, Neighbors and Siblings,” “Java Tacoma: Episode 38” is a one-act play that runs just about an hour and is over far too soon. It’s pure, inspired silliness, that does not aspire to anything greater than light fun, and while it may be a little too far out for some people, I found it totally enjoyable.

Tickets are $15, and that includes your choice of coffee (decaf or regular), tea and an assortment of baked goods. If I had the time and didn’t have to commute from Olympia, I’d go back to see Episode 38 again, and I hope there will be an Episode 39.

JAVA TACOMA: Episode 38
"Friends, Neighbors and Siblings"
November 4,5, 11,12, 18,19,2011
Trinity Presbyterian Church Fellowship Hall
1619 6th Ave.
Tacoma, WA 98405
Show starts at 7:30pm.

For reservations: By phone (253) 267-0869, By email: info@dukesbay.org
Reservations are recommended. Tickets payable at the door, cash or checks only.

Mexican Folk At

2011-11-04T08:17:00.000-07:00

Miguel Linares, Skeleton Street Vendor, mid 1970s.

Papier-mache, paint, wire, cord, 39 x 14 x 12 inches.

San Antonio Museum of Art,

The Nelson A. Rockefeller Mexican Folk Art Collection.

David Villafanez, The Ascension of Christ, ca. 1975.

Wood and paint, 34 x 22 x 6 5/8 inches.

San Antonio Museum of Art,

The Nelson A. Rockefeller Mexican Folk Art Collection.

A fiesta of Mexican culture at the Tacoma Art Museum

The Weekly Volcano, November 2, 2011

What a fun show! Folk Art Treasures of Mexico at Tacoma Art Museum, I mean. Nelson A. Rockefeller, former Governor of New York and former Vice President of the United States, owned one of the world's largest collections of Mexican folk art, which was given to the San Antonio Museum of Art and The Mexican Museum in San Francisco after his death. The San Antonio museum has loaned TAM some 80 major pieces from its collection for this comprehensive survey of Mexican folk art.

There are paintings, tapestries, toys, miniatures, painted wooden chests, water bottles and much more featured in this show - including many pieces that were made for Day of the Dead celebrations.

Almost overwhelming in their size and bright color are two eight-foot-tall paper-mache devils that hang high on the wall and a painted backdrop of the Virgin of Guadalupe measuring 11-by-13 feet. This colorful painting has elements similar to surrealistic landscapes, with distortions in size and perspective that almost create vertigo in the viewer. The image of the virgin, as large as the buildings, hovers over the city like a guardian angel. This is a beautiful painting. Interestingly, it was never intended as "art" as North Americans think of art - nothing in this exhibition was. It was painted to use as a backdrop for professional photographers. The work was transported all over Mexico and people posed in front of it for family photos. It was often used as a backdrop for photos documenting religious pilgrimages.

Many of the artists represented in this show are unknown, and none of them were professionally trained. Most of the pieces featured in the show were made for storing or carrying things, for wearing, for play and entertainment or for religious sacrament or celebration. Although made for practical purposes and not for show, the artists display amazing inventiveness and aesthetic sensibility, and in many instances a bizarre sense of humor balanced by reverence for tradition and sacrament.

All pieces are made by hand, often with meticulous detail, and most are made from cheap materials. Nothing in this show was created with the hope that it would someday end up in a museum, but we can be grateful to Rockefeller and the participating museums that they are here now and suitably preserved (many of them are very fragile).

There are beautifully decorated spurs and a meticulously carved saddle and machete case, playful children's push toys, and a number of miniature figures in a glass case that are so small you almost need a magnifying glass to see the intricate detail. One of my favorite pieces is "Huichol Indian Portrait," made of broom straw and wax. I thought it was painted until I got very close and then read the label.

The wall labels are instructive, and I wish there had been more of them, because I wanted to know a lot more about the culture and history and how some of these works of art were made. There is a comprehensive catalog for sale in the museum store, available in both English and Spanish.
Folk Art Treasures of Mexico

Through Feb. 19, 2012, Wed.–Sun., 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Third Thursdays 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
$10, student/senior/military $8, children 5 and younger free
Third Thursdays free from 5-8 p.m.
Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma
253.272.4258

Imagine I’m a writer

2011-11-01T11:31:00.000-07:00

Part four – Avoiding screw-ups

The pages of a novel offer the novelist countless opportunities to screw up.

In my first novel, Until the Dawn, I wrote a scene about Marybelle going home after Chuck and Janet’s wedding reception. She was secretly in love with Chuck but was trying very hard to be happy for the newlyweds. This was a scene leading up to when she met the man she was going to marry. She had caught a ride with some friends, and to lend the story verisimilitude I wanted a popular song of the day to be playing on the car radio. I thought the Marilyn Monroe song “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” because it seemed to resonate with what was in Marybelle’s heart. But for some reason – I can’t remember why – I changed it to a Hank Williams song. After the book was published, my friend Larry Johnson informed me that the song had not yet been published when the scene was set. Oops! I screwed up. I wonder how many people caught that mistake.

In a second edition I changed it to Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow,” which I don’t think had the same kind of resonance.

In The Backside of Nowhere I looked back at the history of the Lawrence family to when Pop Lawrence’s great grandfather, Jedadiah Lawrence, founded the family store in 1856. Nice little back story. The only problem was I had said the town was founded by former slaves right after the Civil War. Check the dates. I screwed up. Fortunately I caught that one.

Such mistakes are easy to make because the people and events in a novel aren’t real. The writer makes them up as he goes along, and it’s very easy on page 230 to say somebody was overweight while forgetting that on page 12 you said he was skinny. Mistakes like that are why God made editors. Unfortunately she didn’t make them flawless.

I’ve learned from my many mistakes to keep notes on each character, what they look like, how they dress, what kind of car they drive and so forth, and to keep a timeline of what happens when. I even draw maps of fictional towns such as Freedom, Mississippi and Wetside, Washington, and floor plans of houses, because I don’t want someone looking out across the deck when playing the piano that was not on the deck side of the house in earlier chapters or catching the bus to go home from Barney’s Pub when they live only two blocks away.

See? You thought writing a novel was easy.

A novel may have a dozens or more characters, each with his or her personal quirks and speech patterns, etc., and the story has to take place in a specific time and place, and if you don’t get it all right you can rest assured that somebody is going to call you out on your screw-ups. There are two things I’ve done to, if not eliminate embarrassing errors, at least keep them to a minimum. One is to have major characters be my age so that at any point in their lives they will be listening to the same popular music and watching the same movies and wearing the same fashions as my friends and I did at the same time (although for the life of me I can’t remember what kinds of dresses my mother wore in 1954). Since my memory of those things can be faulty, there’s always Google. Thank you, Google. I don’t know how writers managed to write without you. The second thing I’ve done that makes it a little easier is that in my last two novels and the one I’m working on now, I’ve set the stories in fictional towns. Since the towns don’t really exist, they can have floods and hurricanes and riots whenever I want them to. But I still have to maintain internal consistency, and that ain’t easy.

Now I’m working on a sequel to Backside, and that presents a whole new set of problems. I have to keep going back and re-reading the first book in the series to avoid stupid inconsistencies. For example, at the end of Backside I said that Beulah discovered she was a lesbian – oops, I gave something away – and that she broke up with her longtime boyfriend, Abdul, and fell in love with another woman (never identified by name). Well, in the new book Beulah and Abdul got married and he was a rookie linebacker for the New Orleans Saints, and then they got divorced, and finally met the new love of her life, Marcia – a street performer who showed up one morning at Little Don’s Diner riding a unicycle. I wrote big scenes with these characters and then went back and re-read parts of Backside and discovered things I had written and forgotten. Such as, Abdul turned down the offer to play for the Saints and Beulah’s new lover was an old friend from high school. In the new book Beulah and Marcia had never met before that morning when Marcia came riding up to Little Dons. So I had to rewrite big sections of the book. Yikes. Sometimes this crap can be very frustrating.

Jekyll and Hyde

2011-10-29T09:50:00.000-07:00

Mark Peterson, Micheal O'Hara, Blake R. York,

and in background Niclas R. Olson in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"

at Tacoma Little Theatre. Photo by Dean Lapin.

This is the last weekend for “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” at Tacoma Little Theatre. If you’ve not seen it before, know at least this much: horror can be beautiful.

This adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s horror classic bears little resemblance to the novel and even less resemblance to any of the many cheesy film versions. Adapted for the stage by Jeffrey Hatcher (“Murderers,” “Tuesdays With Morrie”) it’s Jekyll and Hyde updated for the 21^st century. It’s stylish and macabre, with an emphasis on the complex psychology of the good doctor (no longer so good) and his evil other self.

Brett Carr’s set and lighting are essential to the uniqueness of this production. The set blends an abstract evocation of London in 1883 with beautiful and realistic details of a Victorian era drawing room with rich and velvety browns and greens on the walls and in the furnishings. Jekyll’s elegant home transforms itself into a starkly industrial looking surgical dissecting theatre and other sets. The lighting is moody and dramatic. All set pieces are on wheels and they roll around in smoothly choreographed fashion as actors enter and exit the stage. I have often said that set changes can make or break a play - there is nothing so irritating as long and cumbersome set changes to destroy the mood and flow of the action. In this play the set changes are like a highly stylized ballet that enhances the mood. Only once was there any noticeable disruption in the flow. It was in the opening scene opening night when a door is broken and then the broken panel is replace in the dark during the transition to the next scene. There was a little noise and a delay of a few seconds.

Another unique thing about this show is that there is not one Hyde but four distinctly different Hydes played by four different actors, one of whom is a woman. They are: Mark Peterson, Blake R. York, Niclas R. Olson and Jennie Jenks. Each of the actors playing Hyde also plays multiple other characters. Without any appreciable changes of costume or makeup other than the addition of capes, top hats and a cane, all of these Hydes convincingly become various other characters such as a doctor and a police inspector and a house servant. And as an ensemble they collectively become an eerie kind of Greek Chorus as two or three Hydes stand behind the other Hyde and mimic his actions with quiet hisses and growls and threatening gestures. It is in these scenes that the Hydes are most menacing – especially York and Jenks whose faces almost become Halloween masks at times. I’ve seen both of these actors in other plays, but I’ve never seen them transform themselves so effectively.

Olson looks too young for the characters he plays, Hyde, Lanyon and others, although I must temper that by saying the age of these characters is never explicit. Olson is outstanding as Lanyon, but less effective as Hyde. His Hyde is more a parody of a Simon Legree-type than the complicated and truly evil Hyde played by the others three (dignified, proud and evil in the case of Peterson’s Hyde 1).

Nicole Lockett succeeds in making it believable that a drab charwoman could fall in love with a monster and continue to love him even when she knows he had committed brutal murder, but I wish there could have been something a little quirkier or more exciting in her personality.

Micheal O’Hara is an excellent Dr. Jekyll. He plays the good doctor with dignity and passion – and righteous indignation in his heated confrontation with Dr. Carew (York) in one of the most powerful and well-acted scenes in the play.

Background music provided onstage by pianist Leslie Foley added to the oddly romantic mood of the play.

This play is intelligent, dark and disturbing, with a dabbling of macabre humorous relief; and it is beautifully directed by Elliot Weiner, who clearly grasped the depth of Hatcher’s script and does a great job of blocking the continuous flow of actors, props and set pieces.

WHEN: 7:30 p.m.Friday and Saturday and 2:00 p.m. Sunday, through Nov. 6

WHERE: Tacoma Little Theatre, 210 N “I” St., Tacoma

TICKETS: $15 - $25

INFORMATION: 253-272-2281, www.tacomalittletheatre.com.

2011-10-26T10:56:00.000-07:00

Pretty stuff

Large group show at Childhood's End Gallery

The Weekly Volcano, October 25, 2011

Beth Brooks' "Market Day" pastel

Barbara Noonan's "Small Town Bliss" pastel

The latest show at Childhood's End Gallery seems to be geared toward gift buying - a prequel to the holiday season and a celebration of the gallery's 40^th year in Olympia. Everything is decorative, colorful and safe almost to the point of blandness, but very well done. It's a group show, and all of the artists display well-honed skills. But for the most part it is all too conventional for my taste and, in a couple of instances, too gimmicky.

Not that there's not a lot to like in this show.

The first works I noticed were a group of etched copper wall pieces by Shelly Carr. Each consists of square and rectangular copper plates etched with drawings (or perhaps photographs that have been etched into the surface) of things like street signs, random words, parts of buildings and bicycles put together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The arrangement of the pieces and subtle variations in color and texture are visually pleasing, but the imagery seems superfluous. When the overall affect is an abstract arrangement of colors, shapes and textures that is pleasing to the eye, which these are, the imposition of recognizable imagery becomes a distracting gimmick. These pieces work best when seen from enough distance to appreciate the overall patterns.

The same can be said for Lucia Harrison's paintings on the back wall. They are small works in Prismacolor mounted on board. Each is in two parts. From across the gallery they look like dense and intricately patterned paintings with great depth of overlapping forms, but they lose some of their impact when seen up close, even though a closer inspection reveals that they are paintings of grasses and birds and twigs. It's the nature of colored pencils to be somewhat insipid; these would have been much better if painted in oil or acrylic.

Some of the more enjoyable pictures in the show are in a group of pastels by Marianne Partlow. They are flower pictures in rich tones of deep blue and purple with accents in orange and a soft yellow-green. The drawing is loose and free, and the colors are very nice.

I also particularly enjoyed some of Barbara Noonan's pastels, most especially "Small Town Bliss," which may well be the best work of art in the show. It's a very gestural drawing of a country road in tones of peachy orange with a few lonely houses perched on the horizon. It's nicely drawn, and the layering of the peach color with a dull blue-gray is excellent.

Beth Brooks' impressionistic pastels are also nicely done. Her best work is one called "Market Day," which pictures a dense crowd of shoppers in a market. It had the cropped and textured feel of a Degas pastel.

I was disappointed in Susan Aurand's three paintings with oil and found objects on wood panels - disappointed primarily because I had been so highly impressed by the last works of hers seen in this same gallery. Aurand's current works are similar, but they come off as too hokey and tricky. In each of her paintings an object assembled from found materials sits in the middle of a sky that is either stormy or on fire with sunset colors. In one the object is a door with a ladder propped in it, in another it's a window, and in a third it is a shelf with odd objects a la Joseph Cornell. They are beautifully painted and constructed, but too contrived.

Also included in the show are works by Alfred Currier, Mary Denning, Keith Lazelle, Ross Matteson, Ron Hinton and others.

[Childhood's End Gallery, through Nov. 13, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday, 222 Fourth Ave. W, Olympia, 360.943.3724]

A farcical Shirlock Holmes

2011-10-24T16:56:00.000-07:00

TAO presents “The Hound of the Baskervilles”

Olympia’s most outlandish theater troop, Theater Artists Olympia, in co-production with The Oufit from Tacoma is doing Steven Canny and John Nicholson’s spoof of the classic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story “The Hound of the Baskervilles” in the basement of the Eagles Club in Olympia.

Everything about this play but the script and the acting is cheap and tawdry. Come to think of it, the script and the acting are too, but intentionally so and with a comic effect that is for the most part right on the mark – the mark being your funny bone.

The venue itself is cheesy and cheap, through an unmarked and barely lighted door and down steep stairs into a large, clean typical basement space where hard metal folding chairs have been lined up to face a makeshift stage. The set – a door on rollers that is turned around to change from indoor to outdoor settings and a few folding panels on wheels that are moved about to represent different settings such as the Baskerville manor and the moors – looks cheap and, with the exception of the door, are totally unnecessary. It’s a pet peeve of mine, and maybe it doesn’t bother others as much as it does me, but I hate it when stage hands constantly move set pieces around in full view of the audience. In most plays it destroys the flow of the action and takes the audience out of the play. It may be argued, however, that in this play it becomes part of the comic set-up that plays right into the manner in which the actors repeatedly break the fourth wall to argue with each other and with the audience. It’s funny when the actors step out of character; it’s not funny when stage hands move walls around (the exception opening night being when stage manager Eric Mark couldn’t get part of a wall to stand still and ad-libbed a comment).

Beau M. K. Prichard as Watson and Christian Doyle as Sherlock Holmes in “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (top); Prichard, Doyle and Brian Lewis as Sir Henry Baskerville (bottom).

The essentials of Doyle’s famous story, have not been changed, but it is retold by Canny and Nicholson in a style reminiscent of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)” – even down to the speeded-up retelling of the complete first act at the beginning of the second act, which is done to make a point because actor Christian Doyle is pissed off at the audience. (Not really, it's an act.)

Doyle (not related to Arthur Conan as far as I know) plays Sherlock Holmes and many other characters, including a very ugly woman with whom Sir Henry Baskerville (Brian Lewis) falls in love, and the ugly woman’s Egor-like brother. Lewis also plays multiple characters, and Beau M. K. Prichard plays a funny and rather ineptly dignified Doctor Watson. TAO promotes the show as featuring “Three actors, 30 accents, 50 quick changes and one bloody great time.” I didn’t keep count of the number of characters or quick changes, but there were quite a few, including at least two times when Lewis loses his pants and counting a couple of stuffed rag dolls as characters.

“The Hound of the Baskervilles” is hilarious throughout, but it did begin to drag a bit toward the end. (Perhaps it was the hard metal chair – I recommend bringing a pillow to sit on.) All three of the actors are outstanding. Their timing is great. Lewis and Doyle in particular display great skill in quickly changing characters, and all three are able to strike outlandish poses and hold them for the many, many times they pretend to be still images – Lewis playing a one-man photo gallery of everyone in the Baskerville family, and the trio striking crazy poses as lights go on and off in a train. These sequences alone are worth the price of admission and amply display the acting skills of Lewis, Doyle and Prichard, and the directing skill of Mark Alford, a recent Evergreen State College graduate and founder of the student production company Riot To Follow Theater Productions. The show marks Alford’s excellent community theater directorial debut.

For an evening of Halloween hilarity I recommend this farcical version of “The Hound of the Baskervilles.”

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday through Nov. 6.
Where: The Eagles Club Underground, 805 Fourth Ave. E., Olympia
Tickets: $12
More information: olytheater.com or brownpapertickets.com

Beyond Crayons

2011-10-21T13:04:00.000-07:00

Worldwide youth art show at B² Fine Art

The Weekly Volcano, Oct. 20, 2011

“Beyond Crayons & Finger Painting 2.0,” the second annual art project at B² Fine Art features 75 works of art from Africa, Canada, China and the United States, all created by youth ages seven to 19. The overall inventiveness and technical quality of the work puts to shame work I’ve seen in student art exhibits at area colleges.

Pictured from top" “The Hidden” by Rebekah Slusher’s, "Serafina" by Nathaniel Santa, both from Tacoma, and and untitled drawing by Abongle Makwenkwe from George, South Africa

All of the American artists in the show hail from Western Washington, most from Tacoma and a handful from Seattle and Bellingham. The works from Africa come from George, South Africa, and because of some kind of conflict in George there were no identifying wall labels on any of the African art, but gallery owner Gary Boone said they expect to remedy that soon.

Boone pointed out an interesting difference between the art from South Africa and that from China. The Chinese art was all up-beat, colorful and joyful in outlook. Most of it was Animé influenced. There was no regional look to it. No recognizable Chinese people or culture or architecture.

The Chinese entries were all happy fantasy pictures such as “Partner” by Li, Linghan, a delightfully sweet picture of a man with a camera and backpack rowing an alligator as if it were a boat, while on shore a man with binoculars rested in a hammock strung between two giraffes and a women rode a basket carried by a stork. Very fun. But this and the other Chinese drawings had no connection with their culture. It’s as if they’ve been programmed to put forth a happy face.

The African art, on the other hand, presented a more realistic picture of their culture and was much more varied in style and content. There are paintings and drawings of animals, scenes from the city of George, and other works that show the strifes and aspirations of the people of South Africa. One of my favorites is a piece by Abongle Makwenkwe that shows a group of children on a stoop in the city and seems to present a true feel of what it must be like to grow up there. Interestingly, the artist employs the device of using spots of color in a black and white composition, a device also used by two Tacoma artists, Rebekah Slusher and Lydia Fordice.

I don’t want to start chanting “U.S.A, U.S.A,” like some crazy nationalistic sports fan, but I must call attention to the hometown work. It was uniformly excellent despite a certain amount of clichéd imagery, which I think we can chalk up to youth and inexperience.

I was amazed at 11-year-old Maleah Bishop’s “Native American Winter Rug.” Her technique and material was something I’ve never before seen: photography kaleidoscope collage on faux suede textile.

One of the most dramatic works in the show is Rebekah Slusher’s acrylic painting “The Hidden.” It is a street scene in tones of gray with the only color being two yellow taxi cabs. It looks like a photograph taken from a strange angle that condenses a large scene into a tightly cramped space.

Lydia Fordice’s surrealistic pencil drawings are imaginative and technically superb. Like Slusher (I was told they are friends, and I suspect they influence each other) she uses spots of color within tones of gray to heighten the dramatic effect. In this case slashes of bright red and splatters of a duller red like dried blood. These drawings are dark and disturbing, but beautifully executed.

Also very impressive were a group of three drawings by Nathaniel Santa, all taken from Renaissance art. His portrait of “Beatrice Portinari” is taken from a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and there’s a skillful copy Da Vinci’s “Battle of Anghiari” and another portrait of a woman named “Serafina,” which is a piece derived from a photograph of a statue in Italy. All three are skillfully drawn. Now I just hope we can look forward to the day this young artist starts applying his amazing skill to his own original compositions.

[B2 Fine Art Gallery, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, till 8 p.m. Third Thursdays, through Nov. 30, 711 St. Helens Avenue, Tacoma, 253.238.5065]

March 12th - April 19th

Imagine I’m a writer - Part 3

2011-10-18T10:29:00.000-07:00

Getting Personal

I was 19, idealistic and romantic. I met a girl and fell in love. It was like every romantic cliché ever spoken. We had a whirlwind romance and got married within a couple of months.

Funny, we never really knew each other. I never knew, for instance, whether she was religious or not or if she even liked art (I had been an art major prior to dropping out of college and joining the Navy when we got married), and I can’t remember ever seeing her read a book. If we had any common interests or beliefs, I wasn’t aware of them. But we loved each other passionately. It was burning puppy love.

And then she broke it off. As I said, I was in the Navy. My ship went on a Mediterranean cruise. When we pulled into port in Gibraltar two weeks after leaving the states and got our first mail call there was a letter to me from my wife saying she didn’t love me, she never had, she didn’t believe I loved her either, and she wanted a divorce. To say I was knocked for a loop would be a huge understatement.

I'll spare you most of the details. In a nutshell: she was pregnant at the time and gave birth to a baby boy, we got back together and tried to make it work (it lasted a week), and then she ran off to some place in Texas and I didn’t hear from her again for two years.

Our separation and divorce was what set me on the road to becoming a writer. Whether seeking closure or cathartic healing or just wallowing in my misery, I tried to write our story in the form of a novel. I worked on it off and on for two years and finally threw the manuscript in the trash. It was terrible.

In college I took one English Lit course and one Creative Writing class. All I can remember about them was that in the writing class I wrote a story about walking along a railroad track and that in the English class I was the only student in class who could answer to the teacher’s satisfaction the question “What was the beast in Henry James’ story ‘The Beast in the Jungle’?” Oh, and I also had a huge crush on the teacher.

I got married again. My second marriage was four years of a bad soap opera. I never attempted to write anything about my second marriage because I knew nobody would believe it.

Three years later I married my current wife. I was 31 years old and she was 21. We’ve been happily married for 38 years. I never wrote stories about any of my three marriages, but I did combine aspects of all three wives and events from our life together into the structure of my third novel, The Wives of Marty Winters. Marty’s first wife was patterned after my first wife, only I made her Puerto Rican and made her one evil little bitch, which my first was not. Marty’s second wife went through a transformation. She started out conniving and manipulative but responded to tragedy in her life in ways that radically changed her. She became strong and loving and a warrior for equal rights. She was based, before her transformation, on wife number two, and after her transformation on a combination of my current wife and one of her best friends – Carolyn Wagner, a hero in the struggle for GLBT equality.

Carolyn successfully sued the Fayetteville, Arkansas school board in a precedent setting case when her gay son was attacked on the school grounds, and she was a vice president of PFLAG National and co-founder of Families United Against Hate.

Like my first two novels, The Wives of Marty Winters starts in the present and then flashes back to tell the stories leading up to current events. Admittedly I was in a rut. It seemed the only way I could tell a story was to base it loosely on people and events I know and to go back in time to examine the history leading up to whatever is happening in the present.

The story begins at a Gay Pride festival in Seattle. Marty’s wife, a GLBT activist, is giving a speech at the rally in Volunteer Park (set at a time before they moved Pride downtown). A crazed gunman in the crowd shoots her. She is rushed to the hospital and put on life support. Her family and friends gather to be close by her side while waiting to see if she is going to live or die. While they wait they begin to reminisce, and their memories become the story that begins when Marty was a senior in high school and danced for the first time with the girl who was soon to become his wife. It’s a high school dance in the Chalet that once stood in Priest Point Park in Olympia. From there we follow Marty to Norfolk, Virginia (his time in the Navy) and then to Nashville, Tennessee, where he lives in a hippie commune and meets his second wife – a hippie religious fanatic who goes by the name Marigold. They return to Olympia, time passes, their son comes out as gay and is harassed and beaten up, and Marty’s wife – who now goes by her real name, Selena – becomes a gay rights activist.

Meanwhile, there are two parallel stories. First is the persistent reappearance of Marty’s first wife who he can’t seem to get out of his mind, and second is the coming out and transition of friend who is transsexual but not identified as such until near the end of the novel – so I won’t spoil it by revealing his or her identity here.

Diane de la Paz wrote in The Weekly Volcano: "The Wives of Marty Winters opens with a stunning description of the Seattle Pride Day rally, where we meet Marty and Selena and move with them through a harrowing scene. (it is)... a saga about how the past haunts a man and how homophobia affects his family.”

Some of my writer friends have said it is not as good as my earlier novels. Others have said it is powerful and moving. I, frankly, am not as proud of it as I am of some of my other works, but I’m confident that it is better than most of the popular novels on the market today. I hope you will read it and see for yourself.

For reviews and an excerpt to go http://www.claytonworkspublishing.com/wivesofmartywinters.html

Éclat

2011-10-14T15:45:00.000-07:00

"The Zoo Story" at Toy Boat Theatre

reviewed by Michael Dresdner

One dictionary definition of éclat is “brilliant show,” and that, in a nutshell, describes “The Zoo Story” at Toy Boat Theatre.

I don’t use that term loosely, but here it fits. Everything about this performance – in fact, about the total evening’s experience – was superb; brilliant acting and directing, thoroughly appropriate costumes, and a stage setting that made it all the more real.

And that’s just the play. Included in your modest ticket price is food and drink (hot dogs, chips and soda) before the play, and a live band afterwards, in case you’re not ready to go home yet. Still, the heart of the evening is the play.

Scott Campbell as Peter, left, and Luke Amundson as Jerry, right, in Toy Boat Theatre's production of Edward Albee’s “The Zoo Story”

It would be easy to mess up a play like “Zoo Story;” easy to play it too dark and lose the humor, too ham-handed and lose the startling nuance, too abrupt and lose the slow, imperceptible morphing of the characters. Instead, what director Brie Yost brought us through the absolutely flawless acting of Scott Campbell and Luke Amundson was a realistic, visceral experience; the finest aspiration of what live theatre hopes to be.

Both actors fulfill the ultimate dream of stage craft; to so become the character that you can’t possibly imagine anyone else playing the part. I’ve seen “Zoo Story” before, and I can assure you I’ve never seen it done so perfectly.

Yost chose to do the play in traverse, a stage setting where the acting takes place in a strip of space between rows of audience seats facing one another. That works best in intimate theatres, like the 40-seat black box Toy Boat inhabits. The audience gets to clearly see action and facial expressions while the actors realistically face and address not an unseen audience, but one another.

“Zoo Story” is a fairly short (approximately 50 minute) one-act play with just two characters. It opens with neatly dressed, coifed, bespectacled Peter (Scott Campbell) sitting and reading on a secluded park bench in NYC’s Central Park. He’s soon intruded upon by Jerry (Luke Amundson), a somewhat disheveled transient who insists on both questioning Peter and telling him long and darkly funny stories about his sordid life.

Under Jerry’s questioning, we learn that Peter is an upper middle class publisher with the perfect life: a wife, two children, one cat and two parakeets. Through his rants we discover that Jerry is one of those rootless, grubby, marginal denizens who adds to the charismatic panoply of the big city.

Jerry’s tales, though a chronicle of a pathetic existence, are genuinely laugh-out-loud funny, at least for a while. Soon, though, the stories and his demeanor turn darker. Eventually he pushes the tightly wound Peter, and the audience with him, out of his comfort zone and past the breaking point.

Campbell plays the mild mannered Peter, a completely familiar upstanding citizen, with total realism. Eventually, Jerry pushes him too far, but he tips over believably, slowly, fighting it all the way, his better nature striving to endure until it is just too much.

Amundson’s Jerry exudes character and, yes, charm, as he shares his long winded but delightfully sardonic observations of the absurd and gritty world he inhabits. The stories are not happy, but he somehow makes them damned funny. Once we’re comfortable laughing at his dark tales, an almost imperceptible change occurs.

Real schizophrenics often sound completely plausible, right up to the point that we realize they’ve somehow gone off the deep end, though we’re never sure just when that was. Amundson creates that perfectly. He adroitly slides into something frighteningly off, changing so subtly that we never notice it happening. We only realize, at some point, that it has.

The result is a theater experience that starts us out chuckling, draws us in, then hurls us through a true emotional upheaval. It’s a magnificently executed theater event, and the director, actors and all the others who created it deserve the highest praise.

Toy Boat Theatre itself deserves some explanation. It’s part of Spaceworks Tacoma, an initiative that gets owners of vacant buildings to allow arts groups to use them rent free for a short period of time. For now, and until December, Toy Boat inhabits a humble, charming space on MLK Way.

They do little or no advertising, which contributes to why you’ve probably not heard of them. Now that you have, make your way there. In fact, do it very soon, because trust me, you do not want to miss “Zoo Story.”

The Zoo Story

Oct. 13, 14, 15, 20, 21, 22

Toy Boat Theatre

http://sites.google.com/site/toyboattheatreco/home/in-the-works

Annual Juried Show a mixed bag

2011-10-13T11:19:00.000-07:00

Top: "The Couple"acrylic painting by Barlow Palminteri

Bottom: "Table Top," painting by Alain Clerc. Photos courtesy the gallery at TCC

9th Annual Juried Exhibition at Tacoma Community College

The Weekly Volcano, Oct. 12, 2011

Juried shows are always a mixed bag, with some outstanding art and some stuff that makes you wonder why it was included. This week reviewing the 9th Annual Juried Exhibition at Tacoma Community College, I'll briefly talk about the "wonder why" stuff first, and then get on to the outstanding art.

Traditional landscapes that offer nothing new or exciting have no reason for being. Fortunately, there are fewer of these in this show than usual. One example is Helena Victoria Olson's oil painting "Summer Fun on Hood Canal." It's a nice painting, but why would anybody want to do in oil on canvas what is essentially a candid shot of someone wearing a life preserver with water and mountains in the background? And I don't get why paintings such as Mike Ferguson's "Picking Something Up" and Lorraine Toler's "Sarangheya Halmoni (Grandmother's Love)" were included. Both look sketchy and amateurish, although Ferguson's painting of a person in a store has a nice little rhythmical march of impressionistic color blobs representing items on the shelves, and Toler's picture has some sentimental appeal.

It's also a shame that there's such a dearth of sculpture, but many more sculptural pieces would have made the gallery too crowded.

On the upside there are exciting pieces by Ron Hinson and Barlow Palminteri, whose two-man show at South Puget Sound Community College last year was probably the best of the year outside of major museum exhibitions. In this show, Palminteri has a painting called "The Couple," which is a cluttered studio scene with chairs stacked in front of easels and a barely seen artist dressed all in blue with paint brush in hand. The couple of the title is hinted at but not actually shown. Other than the artist, who is shown only from chest down, the only human presence is in the painting-within-a- painting of an artist's hand. There are two versions of this little painting, both stacked on chairs in the studio. At first glance this painting looked far more chaotic than the carefully composed pictures I've come to expect from Palminteri, but on closer inspection it becomes clear that a composition centered on the blue pants and shirt of the artist brings order to the chaos.

Hinson is well known for complex and colorful painted constructions that can be startling in their variety of shapes and textures. In his untitled piece in this show he has added a new element - found objects: a wagon wheel, a strip of fur, and a large shape covered with a cloth printed with a design featuring the Pony Express. These added collage elements - not totally new, but pushed further than I've seen before - add a new level of interpretation. In addition to the pure abstract form, viewers can now ponder these added elements, which to me seem to reflect back on a long ago childhood.

Hinson's wife, June-Kerseg Hinson, is also represented with a nice, semi-abstract pastel with some marvelous colors and a good use of illusory space.

The best pure abstract painting in the show is Alain Clerc's "Table Top." The colors and shapes are solidly designed, and there's a great gritty-soft surface quality.

Also very striking is a small photo by Peter Serko called "Man in Retro," which is kind of a dark and moody picture of a man in a restaurant seen through a big picture window. The similarities to Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" are undeniable.

My newly discovered favorite local painter, Becky Knold, is also represented in this show with an acrylic painting called "Green Beginnings." Unfortunately, it's not one of her best works. Many of her paintings have a marvelous surface quality that reminds me somewhat of pastels by Degas (and also the surface of Clerc's painting mentioned above). This one lacks that nicely layered and scumbled look.

Finally, there are two strong prints by Bill Colby from the "Helix" series recently featured in his show at Flow. If you missed that show, here's your chance to see two of these prints which are a spiral burst of pure energy.

Through Oct. 21, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday-Friday
Tacoma Community College, Building 5A
entrance off South 12th Street between Pearl and Mildred, Tacoma

Last night on TV

2011-10-12T09:11:00.001-07:00

I woke up this morning thinking about a TV show I’d watched the night before and comparing the writing of television dramas to my writing of novels. It was like going one-on-one with Lebron James.

Berating television is a popular pastime, even among many who watch it obsessively. But the best of scripted TV shows compares favorably with the best works on stage and screen or between the pages of books. A TV drama takes only an hour of your time, and with DVRs and TiVo you can watch at your convenience. A book, on the other hand, is something you read in bed and fall asleep after two pages. So how can we novelists compete with that?

Last night I watched a re-run of “Law and Order Special Victims Unit” and an episode of the family drama “Parenthood.” The “Law and Order” episode had all the elements of the best of crime novels: complex and compelling characters and a well-structured plot, plus the bonus of an ending that tugged at the heart strings. My only criticism was that the main character was obviously based on Lisbeth Salander from Stieg Larsson’s "Millennium series." The Law and Order franchise routinely lifts plots and characters from the latest headlines. As soon as some major crime story hits the airways L&A writers start crafting their version. But I guess we can forgive them that; writers have to get their inspiration somewhere, and maybe going to literature for inspiration is better than the usual “ripped from the headlines” story. I just wish they weren’t quite so obvious about it.

“Parenthood” was much better. It centered around a family conflict between two brothers, Adam and Crosby, who have gone into business together as record producers, much to the chagrin of Adam’s wife, Kristina, who is very, very pregnant and has more than ample reason to be pissed off at Crosby, the family’s number one screw-up. The confrontation between Crosby and Kristina, coupled with Adam’s ridiculous attempts to “hip it up” in order to impress a potential hip-hop client, presents a blend of high drama and great comedy. The story builds to heightened tension that is suddenly broken when Kristina’s water breaks and Crosby has to rush her to the hospital and stand in for her husband who is blithely trying to impress the hip-hop client and unaware that his wife is going into labor. The whole thing ends with a wonderfully joyful get-together of the extended Braverman family in Kristina’s hospital room where they welcome the latest addition to the family. And as if that weren’t enough, there are at least two equally dramatic parallel stories of other family members – one story involving a kid with Asperger’s who has to balance his need to stand up for what he thinks is right with the need to maintain his friendship with his young cousin, and another story about the alcoholic ex-husband of another family member who tries to worm his way back into his ex-wife’s life just as she is beginning to build a relationship with a new love. Structuring all of that into a one-hour drama is damn good writing, even if the drunken ex-husband was a bit of a cliché and an obvious ploy to set up future episodes. Watch out, writers. Don’t let this become a jump the shark moment.

Lakewood Playhouse's ‘Wicked' little sci-fi classic missing spark

2011-10-07T10:06:00.000-07:00

Photo by Dean Lapin, courtesy of Lakewood Playhouse

Coleman Hagerman is Will Halloway, left, Jefri Allen Peters plays The Dust Witch, and Phil Olson, right, is Jim Nightshade in “Something Wicked This Way Comes” at Lakewood Playhouse.

The News Tribune, Oct. 7, 2011

“Something Wicked This Way Comes,” now playing at Lakewood Playhouse, is a complex story that requires more skillful directing and acting, and complicated lighting and staging effects than many community theaters can handle.

But director David Domkoski and his cast and crew are up to the challenge, for the most part.

Despite some outstanding acting and sophisticated lighting and sound effects, something doesn’t quite mesh in this production. It’s fascinating, eerie and haunting in all its pieces, but the whole doesn’t gel.

The problem lies primarily in the episodic nature of the script, which is adapted from Ray Bradbury’s novel. Things happen in one scene, and then the next and the next, and they’re loosely connected to a dramatic thread, but the scenes do not flow together.

There is a disturbing staccato effect to the transitions, which might add to the horror but was a drag on the overall production. Characters and scenes are not fully developed. There is not a single sustained scene until a long dialogue between Will (Coleman Hagerman) and his father (Michael Griswold) in the second act.

Bradbury’s classic sci-fi/horror tale is a coming of age story about two Midwestern boys, Will and Jim (Phillip Olson), who are intrigued and horrified by the circus run by the mysterious Mr. Dark (Damian Gennette), who starts to take over the town and seize the souls of its innocent inhabitants. Only Will seems to understand what lies beneath the facade of the haunted merry-go-round.

The principal actors are very good. Olson, a senior at Gig Harbor High School, and Hagerman, a 15-year-old student at Covenant High School in Tacoma, are experienced actors despite their youth, and they are very believable and engaging as the two protagonists. (Don’t believe that convincingly playing teenagers comes naturally to teenagers; good acting is good acting at any age.)

Some of the best acting in this production comes from Griswold and Susan T. Beers as Miss Foley. Griswold plays Mr. Halloway as likeable, despite obvious weaknesses. Beers plays Miss Foley with intensity. You feel her constant tension.

Meanwhile, Gennette practically makes the audience shrivel with his laser-like stare. He excretes creepiness with his posture and expressions.

Other actors who stand out in smaller roles are Jenifer Rifenbery as Mrs. Nightshade and Cherilyn Williams who plays Miss Foley as a young girl.

In Rifenbery’s one extended scene, a dialogue between Jim and his mother, she plays the mother with such heart that the audience feels her love and fear for her son. Williams, a child actor with experience at Manestage in Sumner and Seattle Children’s Theatre, makes her Lakewood Playhouse debut in this production.

The sound and lighting effects were powerful but almost overwhelming in places (lighting by Kristin Zetterstrom, sound design by Rory Shackles, and digital effects by Christopher Domkoski). In some scenes, actors could not be heard over the sound effects.

All but the principal actors doubled as ensemble actors playing townspeople and various freaks and monsters with choreographed dance-like movements and elaborate costumes by Sarah Gibson, with imaginative carousel animals created by Otto Youngers and freak masks by Maria Pontillas.

The movements by the ensemble were fascinating early on, but became repetitious and could have been improved by a sprinkling of professional dancers in the ensemble.

This show is not appropriate for small children. There is gunfire, non-harmful chemical smoke, strobe lighting and frightening clowns and other monsters.

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through Oct. 23.
Where: Lakewood Playhouse, 5729 Lakewood Towne Center Blvd.
Tickets: $23, $20 seniors and military, $17 students younger than 25.
Information: 253-588-0042, lakewoodplayhouse.org

Eat, Play, Groove!

2011-10-06T11:50:00.000-07:00

Scott Campbell as Peter is pressed by Luke Amundson as Jerry

in rehearsal for "The Zoo Story" at TBT

Toy Boat Theatre presents Edward Albee's "The Zoo Story"

Tacoma’s newest and perhaps most innovative theater company, Toy Boat Theatre, is staging a modern American classic, Edward Albee’s “The Zoo Story” starting October 13. As if it weren’t enough to do a great play with two of the area’s most popular actors (Luke Amundson and Scott Campbell) – TBT is turning it into a “3-in-one; eat, play, groove!” with a “zoo-themed dinner (think hot dog cart, popcorn stand, standard day-at-the-park fare)” and ending with live music. At the time of this writing not all participating musicians had been announced, but they include Seattle's Country Lips Oct. 21, and Leanne Trevalyan of Junk Yard Jane Oct. 22.

“The idea is to have a party centered around a powerful theatrical experience each night of the run,” Campbell said.

“The Zoo Story” is a one-act, two-person play, which won a Drama Desk award. The two characters are Peter (Campbell) and Jerry (Amundson). It is directed by Brie Yost.

Peter is a middle-class publishing executive with a wife and two daughters. He meets Jerry on a park bench in New York City's Central Park and is desperate to have a meaningful conversation with another human being. So he forces Peter to listen to his story about a visit to a zoo. On the face of it that might sound innocent enough, but nothing is innocent when written by Albee. This encounter ends with one of the men stabbed and bleeding and the audience caught up in unrelenting drama. It is fast-paced, witty, dark and humorous.

Artistic Director Marilyn Bennett said, “Scott brought the idea of doing this antique prize winner because it's issues of disenfranchisement, dehumanization, and calling to question one's adherence to social norms feels so relevant to the slippery slope we're on as a nation, and are feeling so acutely as individuals today.”

Amundson said, “This has been a wonderful experience. Getting to sink my teeth into an Albee script has been something I've been looking forward to since seeing a performance of ‘Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf?’ in Ashland years ago. It’s an incredibly well written play filled with Albee's trademark wit and quick pacing.”

Yost said, “Zoo Story is a play that profoundly affects its audience, the kind of theatre that I love to get my hands on. It is rich with beautiful language, atypical characters, intelligent and witty wordplay, and a surge of violence. It is comedy and tragedy, and it is shocking. Martin Esslin wrote about this play as being an attack on ‘the very foundations of American Optimism.’ This and the themes of isolation are what make this nearly 55-year-old play timeless in its relevance to modern audiences, and particularly interesting in light of the Wall Street protests that are currently happening. We totally didn't plan that.”

Yost also said, “It is exciting for me to work with such great friends and colleagues in the Toy Boat space, through Spaceworks Tacoma, an incredible initiative for artists and the City of Tacoma. Luke and Scott have performances that are not to be missed, especially when combined with good eats and good grooves. Food before the show, music after. All in all a kick ass night! (can I say kick ass?)”

Yes, you can say kick ass.

Campbell had temporarily dropped out of the South Sound theater scene after very productive stints as Assistant Artistic Director at Lakewood Playhouse and Artistic Director at Tacoma Little Theatre. It will be great to see him back on stage. Of this project Campbell said, “Collaborating with Marilyn Bennett and Toy Boat Theatre is very exciting. Marilyn's vision for ‘good acting in a humble house’ provides fertile artistic ground. I believe that Albee's powerful exploration of human alienation has increasingly become more relevant over the past 50 years.”

Where: Toy Boat Theatre, 1314 M L King, Jr. Way, in the Hilltop neighborhood
When: Oct. 13, 14, 15 and 20, 21, 22. Light dinner served in the lobby and theatre at 7 p.m. Show starts at 8 p.m. followed by live music 9-10 p.m.
Admission: $20 for the entire evening; reservations can be made in advance at www.brownpapertickets.com.

Late Picasso

2011-10-05T08:46:00.000-07:00

A friend gave me the book Late Picasso: Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints 1953-1972, and I’ve been pouring over it for a couple of weeks, going back to look again and again at the drawings and paintings.

The book was a catalog for a show at the Tate Museum in London covering his work during the last two decades of his life. Unfortunately, amazon.com lists it as out of print and unavailable. They do, however, list Picasso: The Late Drawings
-- used, two copies available, and Picasso at Ninety – one new at $178.80 and 11 used from $17.99 and up, and two other books on his late work.

Critics universally damned Picasso’s late works. The conventional wisdom was that he just repeated himself, that he lost his touch – literally, meaning that he could no longer make those sure and delicate strokes for which he was famous – and that he had degenerated into a dirty old man obsessed with sex whose so-called erotic drawings and paintings were more like bad pornography.

The contributors to this book dispute those claims, and their arguments make a lot of sense.

Picasso certainly did repeat himself. The theme of the artist in his studio or the artist and his model was virtually the only thing he painted for the last 20 years of his life, albeit in thousands of variations. But painting variations on a theme is a far different thing than repeating oneself. In his countless variations he investigated and experimented with forms, shapes and meanings. He didn’t just paint the artist and his model, but he made visual commentary on the complex relationship between the two, and he investigated in its myriad forms the nature of art and reality. What is real and what is illusion? Does the artist make the art or does the art make the artist? And in the process he paid homage to, criticized and competed with the artists he most admired: Velasquez, Rembrandt, Goya, Manet, Matisse. The man had a giant ego. He was convinced he was the greatest artist in the world and he set out to methodically outdo all of the other greats by one-upping their own greatest works.

And did he lose his touch? The contributors to this book say he purposely tried to hide his facile touch. He drew badly in order to force the viewer to look deeper. Many other artists had done the same thing to various degrees, most notably, perhaps, Matisse. Even Picasso in his earlier works had striven for a cruder and more childlike look, but the smoothness, delicacy and sureness of his stroke showed through. In these later works he succeeded in obliterating facile beauty. But to what effect? I guess that’s up to the viewer to decide. Personally, I do not love every picture in this book, but I like a hell of a lot more than I dislike.

The cover illustration is a very crude looking painting of a woman’s face. She has a gargantuan nose that cannot in any way be considered attractive, and the odd black shape under her nose looks slap-dash at best, as if Picasso didn’t care what it looked like. But the whole thing is very compelling, and I don’t think it would have been if the drawing had been “prettier.” And by the way, the cover illustration is not a complete painting; it is the face cropped from a full-figure painting called “Woman Pissing,” which is a variation on Rembrandt’s “Woman Bathing." The crude drawing matches the crudity of the subject and title. Love it or hate it, there is harsh realism here that reflects well on Rembrandt , whose own brand of realism was, for his day, as dark and unflattering as Picasso’s.

Picasso depicted graphic and uncompromising sexuality in many of his late drawings and paintings. And they were not pretty. They were humorous in a biting way, often making fun of men and their sometimes inadequate and clumsy attempts at love. The man in these drawings and paintings is typically Picasso himself, and the humor is at his own expense. They’re like drawings made on bathroom walls by naughty boys, graphic but never really sexy, with sophisticated humor and often with multiple meanings. Some critics said he had denigrated into a dirty old man drawing dirty pictures because he had become impotent. In fact, he was in his art courageously telling the world that yes, he was a dirty old man who could no longer perform. And in these drawings sex was a metaphor for art. The two were synonymous for Picasso.

Overall these late works may not be as good as some of his earlier works. There was certainly no “Guernica” among these works nothing so revolutionary as “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.” But what do you expect of an artist in his 70s and 80s who had already accomplished more than any other artist in history? He worked right up to his death at 91 and never ceased to be creative and provocative.

Imagine I’m a writer

2011-10-03T09:21:00.000-07:00

Part 2 - Imprudent Zeal

For almost five years Gabi and I lived in and worked for an organization in New York called Everything for Everybody. We met there, and we got married there. I was 31 and she was 21. EFE was in an industrial building in the heart of the meat market district in Manhattan. If we went outside early in the morning we had to duck swinging carcasses going in and out our door.

We fed street people, housed the homeless, accepted and gave away donated clothing, toys and household items. We helped people find jobs and apartments and friends. We published a newspaper and threw parties, and Gabi and I slept on a loft bed in the back of the “store.” EFE was open 24/7 and worked in shifts with a staff that varied from half a dozen to a dozen people at any given time.

The guy who ran the place was a recovered alcoholic and a former seminarian who had been kicked out of the seminary for what the fathers called Imprudent Zeal – the final straw being when he pamphleteered against Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt.

For years after we left I wanted to write the story of Everything for Everybody, but when I attempted to write about it, it didn’t ring true.

When Gabi studied film and video in college she had to write a pilot for a TV series, and the idea she came up with was based on Jack Scully, the founder of EFE. Her twist on the real story was the main character was Jack’s daughter. He never actually had a daughter. She suggested I take that idea and use it for a novel.

I created a character named Scully McDonald based on Jack. I made up an imaginary childhood for him growing up in Albany, where he was a Golden Gloves boxer (Jack had never boxed, but I had, and I patterned the one boxing scene in the book on a match that I lost embarrassingly.) I made up stories about him joining the army and fighting in the Korean War and coming back home emotionally shattered after seeing his best buddy get blown to bits by a land mine. He became an alcoholic and fathered a child with a prostitute named Becca, but he never knew Becca was pregnant. She left New York and hitch-hiked cross country, eventually settling in Seattle, where her daughter grew up to be an art dealer.

In a parallel story, a young man named Lane grows up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where I lived from the age of 12 until after graduating college. Lane moves to New York where he stumbles upon Everything for Everybody and goes to work there, and there he meets Scully’s daughter, McKenzie, who has found her father after many years and is visiting him from Seattle, where she runs an art gallery.

This book has some complicated plotting with people from all over the country being brought together by coincident – something that is questionable in a novel but which happens all the time in real life. It’s also the closest I’ve come to writing an autobiographical novel. Way too much of Lane’s life is based on my life, and the chapters dealing with EFE are absolutely true. Only the names have been changed. On the other hand, Becca and McKenzie are completely made-up characters, and Scully’s life up until the founding of EFE is completely imaginary.

I have to thank my old friend Margaret Ward for her help on this book. I sent her the manuscript chapter by chapter and she went through it line-by-line correcting my grammar and suggesting changes here and there.

Here’s a quote from Lew Hamburg’s review in The Olympian: “This book is the great circus train wreck that was America from the 1950s to the 1990s. It moves not only in time, but also in space, from the Deep South to New York City and Seattle. This landscape is populated by artists, art gallery owners, possible saints and a prostitute redeemed by the love of a good man… More coincidences than a Dickens novel, but smoother and more believable.”

For more reviews and an excerpt go tohttp://www.claytonworkspublishing.com/imprudentzeal.html.

Watch what you ask for

2011-09-30T13:04:00.000-07:00

Top: Ryan Holmberg and Gerald B. Browning;

bottom: Alison Monda and Gerald B. Browning.

Photos courtesy Harlequin Productions

Review "The Love List"

Harlequin Productions’ “The Love List." is one of the most insanely funny plays I’ve seen in a long time, Jill Carter’s set is outstanding as usual, the script by Norman Foster was witty and inventive, and each member of the three-person cast was phenomenal.

I don’t want to spoil any of the surprises in the story by outlining the plot – and there are plenty of surprises, although once you figure out the basic (crazy) premise, it’s easy to predict things before they happen which is great fun, because it’s so rewarding to be proven right and everything you suspect after the first act does happen, but always with a surprising little twist you didn’t expect. One little twist after another.

"The Love List" offers comedic proof of the truism: be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

Bill (Gerald B. Browning) is a statistical analyst, a profession he admits is about as exciting as “an Amish keg party.” He’s just turned 50 and he’s divorced and lonely. His best buddy, Leon (Ryan Holmberg) is a cad and a womanizer who hates to admit he’s over the hill and no longer attractive to women. For his birthday, Leon signs Bill up for a dating service run by an old gypsy woman, the first step in which is to fill out a “love list” enumerating, in order of importance, the 10 most desirable qualities in a mate. As expected, they have entirely different ideas about what should be on the list, but they at least agree on number four. They keep changing some of the other items, but number four is sacrosanct. Hint: it has something to do with sex.

After Bill finishes filling out the list, Justine (Alison Monda) appears. She’s his dream woman, the woman who loves him unconditionally and has all 10 of the qualities he most desires – and she is the woman who soon turns both Bill and Leon’s lives upside-down.

This show is Browning’s Harlequin debut, and it is the first time I’ve seen him perform, even though he’s done work on area stages ranging from Centerstage in Federal Way to Burien Little Theatre and Seattle’s Second Story Rep and Public Theatre and has appeared in numerous film and television projects. He seems born for this role. He fits the character so well that I’m tempted to say he’s typecast even though I have no idea what he is like outside this role. He plays Bill as a man who is nervous, highly excitable and unsure of himself.

Holmberg is a young actor on a fast track to the top of the heap among area actors. I first saw him in a student production of “Laramie Project: Ten Years Later” at South Puget Sound Community College and was impressed with how easily he played nine different characters, and then I saw him as Bogle in “Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol” at Olympia Little Theatre, and I was sufficiently impressed to name him “Best Supporting Actor” in my annual Critic’s Choice column. At first – early on in the first act – I was uneasy watching him in this show. His posture, the way he held his arms and hands, and some of his facial expressions looked like a parody of a street gang member, which doesn’t fit with his character. But I soon got used to that and began to buy into him as a man who is arrogant and shallow on the surface but actually quite real and sincere.

The third actor and the only woman in the show – the character who truly makes this show sparkle and zing – is Monda, one of the most talented, versatile, and hardworking actors in the South Sound region. Monda is equally at ease in comedy, drama and musical productions. I’ve seen her as a zombie and a witch, and I’ve seen her rock the house in musical reviews – the recent “I’m Into Something Good” at Centerstage and “Summer in the Sixties” at Harlequin, for which she was another of my Critic’s Choice picks (Most outstanding singer (female) in a musical or music review). In this show she gets to demonstrate the range of her talent as she transposes herself into a variety of radically different personalities. She is sexy, she is demure, she is a weeping mass of insecurity, an almost Stepford-like housewife, and an ambitious career woman. At one point she burst into song in what people who saw her in “Summer in the Sixties” will recognize as self-parody, and she climbs on furniture and dances acrobatically. Watching her is exhausting but fun.

Set changes and transitions are often killers of otherwise good shows, but never at Harlequin – or, for that matter, never at Capital Playhouse. In this respect Olympians are fortunate to have two of the theaters that handle changes beautifully. Credit Jill Carter for both lighting and set design. Making it easy this time, the physical properties never change except for during intermission, and transitions between scenes are taken care of with some subtle but beautiful light changes and recorded music, mostly British rock. What’s not to like about interludes listening to the Beatles and Queen?

If TV sitcoms were half as good as "The Love List" I would never leave the house.

WHEN: Thursdays through Saturdays, 8p.m., Sundays 2 p.m. through Oct. 22

WHERE: State Theater, 202 E. 4^th Ave., Olympia

TICKETS: prices vary, call for details

INFORMATION: 360-786-0151; http://www.harlequinproductions.org/

Note: Harlequin’s production of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” previously scheduled for this time, has been postponed until a later date due to a serious actor injury shortly before rehearsals were to begin. Tickets for Cyrano will be honored for the “The Love List” without making any exchanges. Same seats, same performance.

Parkland is Burning

2011-09-29T14:51:00.000-07:00

Art Chantry’s posters at Fulcrum

The Weekly Volcano, September 28, 2011

Fulcrum Gallery is packed with Art Chantry posters. Courtesy Fulcrum Gallery

"Art Chantry is a freaking legend."

That's the opening line from an article in the Portland Mercury.

Chantry practically invented the poster art and album cover art associated with grunge. He's done album covers for Nirvana and Hole, and posters for Hempfest. His art has been shown in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Art Museum, the Smithsonian and the Louvre - or so says Wikipedia, and who am I to question such an authority? Right now, under the title Parkland is Burning, you can see a large selection of Chantry's work at Fulcrum Gallery.

Don't let this opportunity pass you by.

Inside Fulcrum there are three rooms loaded with Chantry's posters, representing 40 years of his art. You've probably seen many of these posters before, but probably not all at the same time, and never grouped together like this. Unless you are a fanatical collector I can almost guarantee you'll see many of Chantry's posters in this show that you've never seen before.

The best of this show is the back room, which is usually set aside for performance events at Fulcrum and seldom for displaying art. In this room we see not only some great posters, but the mechanicals the artist used to create them. Here you will see a poster for Chantry's show at the Seattle Art Museum in eight stages, as each color was printed separately. And you'll see four versions of the same poster in black and white with images from various sources - trashy magazines, ads and so forth - collaged onto clear plastic sheets.

Chantry's art is all about finding trashy images that border on offensive, often with implied - but seldom explicit - sexual connotations, and combining them with words in startling and effective ways. But let's face it: when you're advertising rock bands with names like Nashville Pussy you don't have to stretch much to border on offensive.

Yes, many of Chantry's posters are offensive as hell. He's the John Waters of poster art. Yet I can't recall seeing a single image in this show that includes total nudity or explicit sex or violence.

Chantry's posters are rough and gritty. They're designed to shock and titillate. Like, for example, the poster for a rock show featuring The Gits. It's a grainy black and white picture of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, shirtless and arm-in-arm with black bands over their eyes, looking like a gay couple on a muscle beach. Or like what may be the most famous of all Chantry's works, the safe sex poster with a photo of a cop holding a condom and the legend, "I take one everywhere I take my penis!" Both are part of Fulcrum's current Chantry exhibit.

Blank staring eyes are a common theme in Chantry's posters, eyes that are sometimes reduced to a round gleaming light. Very strange and hypnotic, like in the Breeders posters on display that features not only the staring eye but a face with a wonderfully bizarre haircut.

Chantry's colors are lurid; the images and the lettering are crude looking. There is nothing in an Art Chantry poster than can be considered pretty or elegant in any classic sense of those words. But they are art, and provocative, entertaining art at that. Not to mention that seen in a show like this they offer a look at the history of the past half-century, with an emphasis on Northwest culture.
Parkland is Burning

Through Nov. 17, noon to 6 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and by appointment, artist talk Thursday, Oct. 20, 6 p.m., Fulcrum Gallery, 1308 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Tacoma, 253.250.0520

Blancmange a la mode

2011-09-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

Photo by Kat Dollarhide

“Little Women” at Tacoma Musical Playhouse
Reviewed by Michael Dresdner

With “Little Women, the Broadway Musical,” Tacoma Musical Playhouse has managed to dress up a weak property with some outstanding singing, sporadic doses of good acting, and very respectable production values. Costumes are attractive and convincing, the set is both clever and effective, lighting is unobtrusive, and the music is solid and substantial, though it does wander into the realms of “too loud” and “out of tune” more often than is ideal.

The musical itself is a meringue; a sweet, light dessert with no real substance. You get two and a half hours of wallowing in very pleasant and unchallenging songs with little in the way of plot, set-up, resolution or much of anything that evokes emotional commitment. It is light fare in its truest sense.

The music consists of songs that sound more alike than different. In fact, they mostly reminded me of the song Belle sings as she breezes through town in the opening of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast.” This is not great or enduring composing, nor songs that wrench the emotions. On the other hand, it is certainly pleasant enough to listen to. Think of it as an “easy listening” musical.

I trust you know the basic story; it’s Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Set both in Massachusetts and NYC during the latter half of the Civil War, it is less a progression of events than a window into the lives of women of that period. Told by the eldest, it is the story of the four March sisters coming of age and seeking mates, or in the case of Jo, a career. Surrounding them are their mother, their rich neighbor and his nephew, their wealthy aunt, and their various suitors.

As is often the case, it seemed the cast was chosen for singing ability rather than acting skills. Jo (Brynne Geiszler) is the eldest, a tomboy who’d rather become a writer than a prim lady or wife. She’s the main character of this tale and narrator of the ones she writes. Her singing is beautiful, pitch perfect and strong, backed by expressive and energetic movement. In short, she’s just about perfect on stage, until she stops singing. Unfortunately, her acting lines between songs are often delivered in an almost sing-song cadence, as if she can hardly wait to get back to singing.

She and the supporting cast are at their absolute best when they sing and act out Jo’s fictional stories, which happens in both the first and second acts. As she belts out the story in song, she acts it out as well. Each of her actions is mimicked simultaneously with flawless coordination by actors portraying her fictional story’s characters. They are seen through a rear lighted scrim cleverly hidden in the center section of the set, an effect that gives the image of watching a dream sequence.

Jo’s other three sisters, Meg (Lindsay Hovey), Beth (Samantha Lobberegt), and Amy (Claire Idstom), follow Jo’s lead by being very accomplished singers with mostly adequate acting chops. There are exceptions, though.

Marmee, their mother (Nancy Hebert) and Professor Bhaer (F. James Raasch) both brought an impressive combination of top notch acting and equally good singing. Their neighbor Laurie (Bryan Gula) was also a better actor than most, though admittedly not as strong a singer. Then, of course, there is the redoubtable Sharry O’Hare, whose skilled acting and powerful stage presence, as always, burst forth at every entrance to create a perfectly crafted Aunt March.

The set design by Will Abrahamse is particularly clever. Three separate rotating segments with various additions and furniture quickly create a range of simple yet convincing sets. Copious musical support is provided by a 13 member pit orchestra led by musical director Jeff Stvrtecky. Lighting (John Chenault,) including a clever gobo that projects the time period of each scene on a side of the proscenium, was well done and suitably subtle.

Bremerton Community Theatre and Marianne Taylor take credit for costume design, which was mostly very attractive and period appropriate, with a few glitches and anachronisms. Amy’s dresses, for instance, which at first were hand-me-downs, looked appropriately ill fitting, but did not get much better once she got her own stylish designer togs. Jo unzipped a dress on stage, blithely unaware that zippers would not be available for another 30 years.

All in all, with some less than stellar acting and more than stellar singing, it’s a pleasant enough musical. You won’t go home humming any brilliantly catchy songs, nor exhausted from emotional release, but you will have spent an entirely enjoyable evening.

Little Women, the Broadway Musical
Sept. 23 through Oct. 16, 2011
Tacoma Musical Playhouse www.tmp.org

Elizabeth Lord and Lord Franzannian

2011-09-28T09:34:00.000-07:00

Pictured: the cast from last year's show.

Photo courtesy Elizabeth Lord (seen in red hat and coat)

Yesterday I posted a review of the 5th annual "Lord Franzannian's Royal Olympian Spectacular Vaudeville Show!" Today I'd like to share a little information about the show's producer and master or ceremonies, Elizabeth Lord.

When Lord was a senior year in high school in Las Vegas she made up her mind that she wanted to be a professional storyteller. She had studied acting in high school and dreamed of becoming a famous actress but realized she could never "make it in the hardcore acting world of TV and film" because she was "not skinny and 'cute' enough."

But where could a young woman just out of high school study to be a professional storyteller? Where else but The Evergreen State College? So at TESC Lord studied folklore, world mythology, world religion, folktales, orality vs.literacy, and theater arts.

After graduation in 1995 she began "gigging" - getting paid to tell stories, and she's been doing it ever since. telling her stories for such organizations and groups as City of Olympia, Pierce County Library, Olympia School District, TESC, and many Washington State Agencies. She's built an impressive following for her original one-woman storytelling shows, including "Vegas Childhood," "Cheap Rent," "Smoking is Cool" and others.

She has also acted in, narrated or directed many plays for Theater Artists Olympia and Prodigal Sun, including "Stop Kiss," "Parallel Lives," "Reefer Madness," "Don Juan in Chicago," “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” and "Cannibal!! The Musical." And she manages The Midnight Sun Performance Space. She is nothing if not versatile.

In 2001 Lord and others created BigShowCity, an organization dedicated to raising money to support performance artists, and they put on what they hoped would be an Olympia annual festival. They created a three-day, multi-venue festival. It lasted only three years. The first year 20-plus people helped organize and fundraise; the second year it was only Lord and Erik Fabian; the third year it was just Lord with help from an Evergreen intern.

The festivals could not be continued, but Lord didn't give up. She decided to do a one-night, one-venue variety show. Vaudeville, the original variety show format, seemed like the way to go, so in 2007 she gathered some artists together and created the first show. The main collaborators were Lord and Mark Franzen, a former member of The Audition is Dead theater troupe. "We decided to go with the old school Vaudeville show poster format which always put the producers name first on the bill," Lord said, "And so we created a fictional producer name, which is a combination of our names, Lord and Franzen, and the fictional character Lord Franzannian (played by Lord) became a character in the show.

The rest, as they say, is history. The 5th annual "Lord Franzannian's Royal Olympian Spectacular Vaudeville Show!" continues through this weekend at The Midnight Sun Performance Space. It's a lively, bawdy, and entertaining show that includes song, dance, comedy, burlesque and more.

Recomended for folks over the age of 16.

September 30, and October 1, 2, 2011 (Fridays- Sundays)

Showtime 8 pm
Two Shows on the Saturdays 8 and 10 pm!

NEW! October 2 is the special Youth Audience Show! Starts at 4 pm (now folks 15 and under can come see some Vaudeville!)

All performances at the Midnight Sun Performance Space
113 N. Columbia St. in downtown Olympia

Tickets: $15 -25 Suggested Donation (No one turned away! Pay more if you can, less if you can't - don't sweat it)

Available at the door night of show or go to www.brownpapertickets.com/event/126005 to reserve a seat.

Tickets $7 for those under 15 on October 2nd!

Lord Franzannian’s vaudeville show

2011-09-27T10:32:00.000-07:00

This past Friday night was the muggiest night of the year in Olympia. The heat in the downtown Midnight Sun Performance Space was almost unbearable during the sold-out performance of Lord Franzannian's Royal Olympian Spectacular Vaudeville Show. The only thing hotter than the humid night air was the show on stage.

From Elizabeth Lord’s story of a milkman named Harvey – illustrated by fast-draw artist The Great Sylvester Simon – to Nani Poonani’s hot burlesque performance, to Lauren O’Neill’s reading of a letter of complaint to “Hmmmm Foods” – to the inimitable Vaude deVille, it was one hell of a show.

Earlier that afternoon I had mentioned to a friend that we were going to a vaudeville show, and my friend had two interesting responses: first, she said she didn’t know there was vaudeville in Olympia, and then she said, “I wish we had burlesque.”

Well guess what, Olympia – we have both. They’re both outstanding, and Lord Franzannian combines them in “his” fifth annual show. It’s a shame that only a handful of dedicated fans even know about this spectacular event. It should be more widely promoted and should fill major venues the likes of the Washington Center.

Lord Franzannian's Royal Olympian Spectacular Vaudeville Show is the brainchild of storyteller, actor and producer Elizabeth Lord. She came up with the idea years ago as a way to earning money to support local performing artists, and the host/master of ceremonies/ringmaster, Lord Franzannian, is none other than Lord in a fat suit wearing a big mustache and a bright red circus ringmaster suit.

From the press release: “Working in the tradition of vaudeville shows from the early part of the 20th century, this fast-paced variety show promises a little something for everyone. Dance, music, comedy, storytelling, burlesque, juggling, even feats of amazement! …Proceeds benefit working performers, and BigShowCity, a non-profit Performing Arts Organization whose mission is to help burgeoning artists realize their ambitions by providing financial and emotional support.”

Hardly anyone alive today remembers what vaudeville was like in its heyday, but some of us at least remember the Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen shows on television, and we remember George Burns and Gracie Allen and Jimmy Durante, and those are Lord Franzannian’s predecessors.

Many of the acts are bawdy, some are lovely and nostalgic, and some are downright insane.

Vaude deVille, one of the founders of and a performer with Wrinkles of Washington, does song and dance numbers in the old vaudeville style. You can almost imagine him performing two shows a day at The Palace. He kicks off both the opening act and the second act with his smoothly expressive singing and soft-shoe dance.

The singing duo Birds of a Feather entertain with sweet romantic songs.

Lester Crafty the Bearded Lady is… well, you just have to see her act.

O’Neill’s reading of a letter of complaint is hilarious and graphic and filled with over-the-top references to vomiting and defecating, but read in a very underplayed and sweet manner. If I hadn’t seen O’Neill act and sing in other shows I might have been tempted to think there was no acting involved at all in her performance -- that it was just a straight reading. Oh, but it was a performance all right, with pitch-perfect inflections to clue us in that there is something deliciously wicked underneath her Little Bo Peep demeanor. The letter was so original that I had to ask: was it an actual letter with only the name of the food company fictionalized or was it written for this performance? She said it was an actual letter written by a friend to “Hmmmm Foods.”

Nani Poonani’s burlesque was funny, acrobatic and sexy. She has – in addition of a fabulous stage name – a beautiful body filled with tattoos, none of which (that I know of) are hidden from the audience. A second burlesque number featuring Frida Fondle as Peter Fondle is an inventive and comical routine that begins with a woman in drag as a fat man and ends with the traditional burlesque tassel twirling. Both performers are members of Tush! Burlesque in Olympia.

One of the most astounding acts was Soren’s buugeng performance to the accordion accompaniment of Rheanna Murray. I had never before heard of buugeng and had to look it up. It’s a curved wooden instrument associated with martial arts that is handled somewhat like nunchucks. The performance was hypnotic, combining elements of dance and juggling (without tossing things in the air).

There were a couple of less than stellar performances. Brent Blakley’s stand-up comedy act had some funny moments but fell flat overall, partly due to a self-effacing, deadpan delivery that didn’t quite make it; and although the Gotta Swing dance troupe was lively not all of the individual dancers were quite up to snuff.

Most but not all of the musical numbers were backed up by the four piece band, The Vaude Zannian Playerz, made up of Scuff Acuff (band leader) on guitar/washboard and kazoo, Alison Metheny on bucket bass, Ethan Rogol on mandolin, and multi-talented Rheanna Murray on accordion (of whom I wrote in my review of Olympia Family Theater’s February 2011 production of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” in which "she plays Alice with dignity and grace...")

Acuff and Metheny also performed in duet on a song about a “tight, wet, pussy cat” which was fall-on-the-floor funny.

Lord tells a different in every performance, inviting the audience to supply major story elements including who the story is about and then totally improvising the story with accompanying fast-draw illustrations by The Great Sylvester. So she’s told stories about a milkman, a red rubber boot that leaves the closet and goes on adventures, a London prostitute abducted by aliens, and a badger who travels to Australia and goes to the opera. In a stroke of genius Friday night Sylvester gave Harvey the milkman a shirt that said “Harvey Milk.”

With its near nudity and a plethora of sexual content and double entendre, this show is without a doubt intended for mature audiences only, but there will be a special performance added for an all-ages audience October 2 at 4 p.m.

Remaining shows are:
Friday September 30 @ 8 p.m.
        Saturday October 1 @ 8 p.m. and 10 p.m.
        Sunday October 2 @ 4 p.m.
Ticket Price: $15-$25 at the door (however, no one will be turned away for lack of funds).
Special Youth Ticket Price October 2, under 15, $7.

Tickets available at door night of show, or to reserve a seat buy a ticket online at www.brownpapertickets.com/event/126005
Where: The Midnight Sun Performance Space, 113 N. Columbia Street in downtown Olympia.

Border Songs

2011-09-27T09:09:00.000-07:00

A Jim Lynch novel adapted for the stage by Bryan Willis has winner written all over it.

I’ve been a Bryan Willis fan since I first saw “The Incredible Undersea Trial of Joseph P. Lawnboy” in the back room of an art gallery with the audience standing around in a circle and the performance in the middle. That must have been close to 20 years ago. “Lawnboy” has been done by Harlequin Productions and Tacoma Little Theater and many other theater companies, and Willis’s plays have been performed all over the world -- off-Broadway, on the London fringe, throughout the U.K., Israel, and in theaters across the U.S. and Canada, including ACT, New York Theater Workshop, Seattle Rep, Milwaukee Rep, Unseam'd Shakespeare Co. and Riverside Studios in London. He is probably best known by South Sound theater goers for his traveling show about the life of Edgar Allan Poe.

I’ve been a Jim Lynch fan since he released his first novel, The Highest Tide, a wonderful story set in Olympia about a young boy who knows more about ocean creatures than almost anyone.

Now Bryan, with director David Quicksall, has adapted Lynch’s second novel, Border Songs, for the stage, and it is being performed by Book-It Repertory Theatre in Seattle.

Quicksall most recently directed his critically acclaimed adaptation of Moby-Dick, or, The Whale, a Seattle Times Footlight Award winner.

Border Songs is the story of Border Patrolman Brandon Vanderkool, a 6-foot-8, dyslexic, bird-watcher who discovers by accident that he has an uncanny ability to catch the bad guys. It was a wonderful novel. I liked it even more than his more famous first novel.

Performances are at 2:00 for matinées, or 7:30 for evening shows. Post-play discussions are will follow the Sunday matinees on September 25 and October 2.

Box Office 206.216.0833, Tues. through Fri., Noon – 5:00 p.m. (Wed. – Sat. during production)

BOOK-IT REPERTORY THEATRE

305 Harrison Street, Seattle