A Murder for Old Time’s Sake

Photo, from left: Stephanie Nace, Harrison Fry and Vanessa Postil in A Murder for Old Times’ Sake. Courtesy Open Road Productions.

 Musical Murder Mystery at Pellegrino’s Event Center!

Published in the Weekly Volcano, Nov. 19, 2015

Rob Taylor (left) and
Kyle Henick.
Courtesy Open Road Productions.

Presented by Pellegrino’s Italian Kitchen and Open Road Productions, A Murder for Old Time’s Sake is a musical murder mystery dinner theater extravaganza that just might have you laughing so hard you spit out your Tuscan Pork Loin (or Parsnip Steak Marsala). It’s funny, it’s got great music, and a complicated mystery plot that you, the audience, will be asked to solve. And to top it all off, it comes with a three-course dinner from executive chef Sam Pellegrino.

I attended a dress rehearsal the night before opening night and came away thinking this is the funniest of the three dinner theaters I’ve seen at Pellegrino’s.

It’s the 20^th reunion of the South Pattersfield High School class of 1995, and gathered together is a quintet of former lovers and enemies plus the school principal. There’s Biff (Kyle Henick), the class clown, football hero and bully; Nancy (Vanessa Postil), Biff’s ex-wife who also “like-likes” David (Rob Taylor), the class nerd who invented a self-cleaning toilet and became fabulously wealthy — take that, Biff, for giving me that swirly. And there’s Lucy (Stephanie Nace), who was nobody special in high school and is now a famous mystery writer whose latest novel, Murder Comes to High School, eerily mirrors what is about to happen at the reunion; and Billy (Harrison Fry), class president and most likely to succeed, who ends up as the janitor at South Pattersfield High. Finally, there’s the drunken, idiotic school principal, Horace McGuffin (Dennis Rolly).

from left: Stephanie Nace, Harrison Fry and Vanessa Postil in A Murder for Old Times’ Sake. Courtesy Open Road Productions.

Right after a great rocking song. “It’s Biff” sung by Henick, somebody gets murdered. One of the five survivors must be the murderer, and it’s up to them, with the help of the audience, to figure out who did it. In the process, we’re treated to more great music and comedy plus a couple of spoof commercials.

The entire ensemble is outstanding — good actors and singers, with the bonus that physically they’re even cast to type, not that we even know what any of them look like, but they certainly look the way I would picture them. It was an especially enjoyable treat to see Henick, an actor I have seen only once before, and it was great to see Nace back on stage again after a long hiatus. Rolly and Taylor were both solid, and this is the best acting I’ve yet seen from Fry.

If some of the music is reminiscent of Harlequin’s A Rock and Roll Twelfth Night, it’s because some of them are adaptations of songs from that show and were written by the same composer and lyricist, Scot Whitney and Bruce Whitney, with lyrics for three new songs written by Daven Tillinghast. The band is the Wildwood Orchestra, led by Brad Schrandt (keyboard), with David Broyles (guitar), Cameron Arneson (bass) and Andy Garnes.

There are repeated intermissions during which second and third courses and dessert are served, and during which cast members wander through the audience in character so audience members can quiz them in order to suss out the killer. Audience members can fill out a sleuth sheet with their guesses about who the murderer is and how and why he or she did it. There are prizes awarded from those.

A Murder for Old Time’s Sake was written by Andrew Gordon and directed by Jeff Painter. Including dinner and intermissions, it runs a little more than three enjoyable hours.

A Murder for Old Time’s Sake, Nov. 20-21 at 7 p.m., $45 general seating, $55 front table seating, Pellegrino’s Event Center, 5757 Littlerock Rd SW, Tumwater, tickets online at www.pellegrinoseventcenter.com.

Susan Christian’s Sticks at Salon Refu

Published in the Weekly Volcano, Nov. 19, 2015

“The Date” by Susan Christian, courtesy of Salon Refu

Susan Christian paints patterns on sticks, and then she props them against walls or lays them on floors or puts them together in relatively rectangular shapes and hangs them like traditional modernist paintings. She’s even been known to take photos of them lodged among branches in trees. To some people, that may seem simplistic and childish, and perhaps it is; or perhaps it is as radical as when Duchamp bought a urinal and entered it in an art exhibition under the title “Fountain,” or as radical as when Frank Stella started making paintings in odd geometric shapes.

Christian’s first public showing of her stick paintings were at Batdorf & Bronson’s Coffee House in Olympia last April. Now she is showing a few of the paintings from that show plus many more in her own gallery, Salon Refu.

I have to quote from the “artist’s statement” from this show. It’s too good not to: “In the summer of 2013 I went to a plein-air painting workshop taught by Helen O’Toole in Kathy Gore-Fuss’s garden. I love these workshops, though I don’t do plein-air painting. On the first morning, as I sat there not painting anything, Kathy handed me a little foot-long stick. I painted the stick white. Then I painted a red line on it. Then I went hunting for another stick, and so on.” There’s a little painting in her current show called “Bird” that fits that description. There’s a little red splinter of wood partially broken off along the top edge that looks dangerous. It also looks like a feather. I wonder if it could be the one that started it all. 

One of the things that keeps her sticks from being too outlandish (art should always be at least a little outlandish) is that the patterns she paints on them are almost classically balanced with carefully chosen color combinations, but in many of them some little something is skewed — not quite fitting with the regularity of the patterns. It’s as if the artist makes a mistake on purpose to prove she’s human. 

For instance, “Sail” is made of 13 horizontal strips of lattice glued together in a rectangular configuration. They are painted with subtle variations of gray-blue and a dull yellow. One strip slightly above center is darker than the others, and evenly spaced across its width are black dots. And then way up at the top and slightly off center is one more black dot that seems to have escaped from the chorus line of dots in the center.  

Many of the patterns she paints are diagonals or zig-zags that overlap or repeat in nuanced ways that lend the pieces both unity and variety of form.

 “Maesta,” is a long horizontal painted in soft of gray with a purple tint and — all modulated and restful. And then it is disrupted by two square blocks of wood stuck on with heavy globs of paint. 

In one of the front windows stands a curtain-like array of painted vertical strips of wood, and along one wall a group of arched sticks like tightly drawn bows, mostly yellow, braced between the floor and ceiling. One gets the feeling they might spring loose and go shooting across the gallery at any moment. High on another wall hangs a heavy piece called “Sebago Lake” that looks like a crosscut saw. The radical positioning of this one resonates and contrasts with another stick that lies on the floor against the opposite wall.

Most of her works are horizontally oriented. One vertical piece called “Tall” with an emphatic blue line down the middle looks more like sculpture than painting, even though it hangs against the wall.

I can imagine people thinking this show is playful, insubstantial, and not very serious. But that playful, what-the-heck aspect is deceptive. This is art of a high order.    

Susan Christian at Salon Refu, Thursday-Sunday 2-6 p.m., and by appointment. Through Nov. 28, closed Thanksgiving, 114 N. Capitol Way, Olympia, riddie.glenn@gmail.com.

Sensations That Announce the Future

Intriguing but difficult show at The Evergreen State College

Published in the Weekly Volcano, Nov. 12, 2015

“Souvenir,” cabon pigment print by Amjad Faur, courtesy of PDX Contemporary Art and the artist.

The latest exhibition in the art gallery at The Evergreen State College takes concentration and thought to comprehend. It is not a show that can be easily enjoyed for its beauty alone but one that stimulates deep thought from those willing to put forth the effort. It is called Sensations That Announce the Future. It showcases artworks created by and chosen by TESC students and faculty based on the book Thinking in an Emergency by Elaine Scarry, and it posits the theory that art can look at patterns in the present and the past and intuit the future.

A gallery handout, uncredited but presumable written by faculty member Shaw Osha, who organized the show and has a series of eight paintings in it, says, “Art shifts our perspective so we can perceive current circumstances differently. Art makes visible the subterranean ‘forces of chaos’ we contend with every day.”

I have to admit that I had a hard time understanding a lot of the works and seeing how they relate to the stated themes, possibly because I have not read the book that purportedly inspired them all.

For such a conceptual and future-oriented show, Osha’s contributions look surprisingly like paintings from the early 20^th century Ash Can School, but with looser and more expressive brushstrokes and less clear definition of form. Her eight small paintings, which are not shown together but are scattered throughout the gallery, are street scenes with people. The setting might be the TESC campus, but that is hard to tell because there are few recognizable details. The colors are lush and soft, and figures and backgrounds bleed into one another. In one of her paintings the co-mingling of figure and ground is so extreme that the walking man, a shirtless figure facing away from the viewer, all but vanishes. The plaza or sidewalk and buildings and trees can be seen through his body. In another there is a man walking on what is probably “Red Square” on campus. The brushstrokes across his head and hair are so broad that they merge into the autumn leaves on the tree behind him. The ground he stands on is orange and tan, and as bright as glowing embers in a campfire — a treatment of the sidewalk that is common in all of her paintings. I don’t get the meaning of this series of paintings, but from a purely formal point of view they are outstanding. I would be proud to own any one of them. 

In Steffani Jemison’s video, “Personal,” the setting is a street scene with a mural picturing Barack Obama and Desmond Tutu. A large black man walks back and forth in front of it, seemingly unsure of where he wants to go. Perhaps he is waiting from something or someone. Cars drive by, quickly, going backwards. Other pedestrians pass by, also going backwards. The scene then changes to a park scene where a man walks endlessly in a circle. Is the film making the point that we are walking blindly and backwards into the future? It is funny and perhaps prophetic.

I loved C. Davida Ingram’s “Conjures & the Mermaid,” a selection of three photographs and a poem printed on three panels. The first line of the poem is “Here Lies the Nigress,” and the photos of the “Nigress,” are of a black woman seated in one photo and lying down in the other two. A dark, shadowy figure sits or lies in front of her in one of the photos; cushions on a bed replicate the shadow figure in the other; and in the third, something indistinguishable and mysterious stands in for the shadow figure. These are dramatic and attractive photos, and as with much good art, the images and the poem relate to each other but not overtly.

There are some fabulously dramatic black-and-white photos of storm clouds by Joan Livingstone.

Naima Lowe’s “Thirty-nine questions for white people,” notes in ink on notecards with brown paper wrapping and tied with ribbon, give whites and blacks much to think about, especially in light of the Black Lives Matter movement.

There is much more to this show, much of it difficult but most of it intriguing.

Sensations That Announce the Future, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday-Thursday,, through Dec. 2, The Evergreen State College Gallery, 2700 Evergreen Parkway NW, Library 1st floor, Olympia, 360.867.5125

Review: A Comedy of Errors at Lakewood Playhouse

Published in The News Tribune, Nov. 13, 2015

Ben Stahl as Antipholus and Frank Roberts as Dromio

Jodie Chapin as Adriana and Ben Stahl as Antipholu. Photos by Kate Paterno-Lick

Director Kristie Worthey and the Lakewood Playhouse took a bold risk in presenting Shakespeare’s “A Comedy of Errors” as a contemporary comedy set in Portland, Ore., with a large cast filled with fresh young faces. Messing with Shakespeare is nothing new; he’s the most messed-with playwright in history. His plays are nearly always edited and it is not uncommon to update them to modern times. Sometimes it works, and probably more often than not it doesn’t. Sadly, Lakewood Playhouse’s bold experiment does not.

In the crowd scenes with mostly young and inexperienced actors portraying street performers and other “Keep Portland Weird” hippie characters, they are loud, clichéd almost to the point of offensive, and not particularly funny. I don’t think this is because of the age of the actors; the director simply didn’t pull it off.

Many of the principle characters, by contrast, are excellent, most notably Ben Stahl as Antipholus and Jodie Chapin as Adriana.

“A Comedy of Errors” is one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, and critics generally consider it one of his least successful. Even the director of this productions seems to agree, stating in her program notes, “… while it might not be his wittiest or cleverest play, it does portend word play and scenarios in plays to come; a peek into his creative process.” It has been suggested that in this play Shakespeare tried out many of the plot lines and tropes perfected in his later comedies such as “Twelfth Night,” a grown-up and more sophisticated version of this earlier play.

This version plays on the supposed friendly competition between Portland and Seattle. Aegeon (Cameron Waters), a building developer of Seattle whose new project in Portland is slated to be killed, begs the mayor (Chris Johnstone) for one day to raise money to save the project.  Meanwhile, his son Antipholus of Seattle (Stahl), comes to Portland where his long-lost twin brother Antipholus of Portland is a bike shop owner. The identically named identical twins have identical twin slaves, both named Dromio (Frank Roberts, with Waters doubling as one of the Dromios when they’re on stage at the same time). In typical Shakespearean fashion, everybody confuses the two sets of twins, including the Portland Antipholus’s wife, Adriana (Chapin) and her sister, Luciana (Nastassia Reynolds), whom the Seattle Antipholus falls in love with.

Roberts is outstanding portraying two very different characters, the two Dromios. Likewise, Stahl shows great versatility and a wide range of facial and bodily expressions as Antipholus and Antipholus. Most outstanding and a beginning actor who should be destined for good things is Chapin as Adriana. Seldom have I seen an actor so thoroughly understand a character and become that character so convincingly. The scene where she seduces the twin she thinks is her husband is comic gold, played amazingly well by both Chapin and Stahl. Chapin is also loveable, sassy and funny in a scene on roller skates.

Kudos to Bret Carr for the wonderful set design with the in-joke advertising signs and the flying, cut-out Portland bridges and skylines.

Despite clever word play and funny local references, and despite excellent acting by the main characters, I felt in the end that I had just watched a lampoon of Shakespeare written and produced by high schoolers.

  WHAT: A Comedy of Errors

WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through Nov. 29

WHERE: Lakewood Playhouse, 5729 Lakewood Towne Center Blvd., Lakewood

TICKETS: $25.00, $22.00 military, $21.00 seniors and $19.00 students/educators, pay what you can

INFORMATION: 253-588-0042, www.lakewoodplayhouse.org