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I'm Christa McIntyre and I write about arts, music and culture. I'm a Portland theater critic, chef of sandwiches and occasional backseat canoe paddler.
To borrow from Henry James, there are times when Beethoven has nothing to say to us, and those are our worst moments.
05/31/2016 By CHRISTA MORLETTI MCINTYRE // Part I of a candid, frank, open, in-depth interview with Blues legend, drummer Tony Coleman, who was known as the spine of BB King's band for 29 years and has played with the best. Tony "TC" Coleman has been playing drums his whole life.
Over 60 years ago, Bill Waddill took his just-painted flaming-red hot rod and added some weight to the back to meet the race entry rules, and a car went over 200 miles per hour for the first time ever. America's love of driving and the wide-open road is built on an admiration for well-designed machines and the people who build them.
Each day as the sun breaks over the horizon in Bata Atha, a small coastal village in the South of Sri Lanka, men row their boats toward the dry sandy beaches and wade through the clear azure waters carrying woven baskets full of fish, crab and prawns.
The beat of the Motor City, the sound of young America, the soundtrack to a generation, hit the stage Tuesday evening at the Keller Auditorium with Broadway's Motown: The Musical .
Ah ... the Reagan '80s, back when politicians had good hair. It was a B+ era: Spielberg dominated with milquetoast dramas pinned on the high-octane antics of cleverly drawn action films. The causes were taken out of rebels, former Yippie Jerry Rubin became a vitamin mogul, and Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver voted Republican.
Over the last 55 years, King Lear has been staged more times than in the first 355 years after it was written. Much of the interest in was revived by Peter Brooks's 1971 film adaptation, which took a haunting look into politics, conflict, rivalry, and homelessness, and revealed an almost unbearable wasteland of emotion in the face of growing old.
The Miracle Worker was first performed more than half a century ago, and while critics were sharp to illustrate its production flaws, it won the hearts of audiences. Even now, most Americans are familiar with the deaf and mute firecracker Helen Keller, who rewrote the map on how disability is perceived: when we think of the play, we think of her.
To paraphrase Mark Twain's comment about Jane Austen, playwright Mike Bartlett would dig up Thornton Wilder and beat him with his own shinbone. Defunkt Theatre is putting on Bartlett's play Cock through November 15. Cock is no Our Town.
Play On Words is a brand spanking new production company here in PDX, and as you know, we're a theater-going town. Don't let their newness put you off: down in the throes of The Boiler Room at Lincoln Performance Hall, they're performing an edgy retelling of Euripides' Women of Troy.
In an age when collecting has trumped the library and become a mausoleum of consumer culture, Rap is one of the last cultural holdouts to maintain a sense of the individual as prominent in the artistic process. Its fluid appeal is easily translated, copied and replicated from continent to continent.
Lakewood Theatre Company packs punches with its production of Clifford Odets' Golden Boy, but not the kind you expect. Boxing as the American sport has gone by the wayside since Mike Tyson started biting ears, but once it was the golden sport, responsible for a huge number of radio sales: Families crowded around the old wooden box to see if their hero and their bets were coming through.
In its December 2015 issue, Harper's Magazine published The Bed-Rest Hoax: The case against a venerable pregnancy treatment . The essay's author, Alexandra Kleeman, was the person at rest, and was taking her doctor's prescribed leave in the Pacific Northwest. She writes in detail of the mental prison she assumes while on bed-rest, and the decline of her body.
The Headwaters Theater is on the beaten tracks. Passing by the huddled Arts and Crafts homes of old North and Northeast Portland and down a winding path, you end up right against the railroad tracks, where the full-speed-ahead comings and goings of lumber-cars packed high to the rafters are signed off by the fugitive and ornate scripts of graffiti artists.
Cuba is a magical and mysterious little island whose long sweet roots have nurtured a folk tradition that frames the art of the Southern continent as it inspires heated debate to the north.
By CHRISTA MORLETTI McINTYRE "Blasted," as a word, draws a picture in the mind. More than most other words, which may simply exist as ways to communicate quickly or as storage containers for current topics, "blasted" can be a verb, an adjective, a curse, or slang for a state of intoxication.