Stage
Smokey Joe's Cafe is a musical revue showcasing 39 pop standards by the great songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. It's rock and roll; it's rhythm and blues; it's the song track of the 1950s and early '60s with dancing and costumes but no story line or dialogue. When it played on Broadway 20 years
Arts
First impressions upon entering a gallery are often misleading. Art that might dazzle at first glance often turns out to be flashy but without substance, and works that may be off-putting could be too new or too outside the ordinary to be appreciated until you've had time to study it
Stage
There is practically an entire genre of theater about theater, typically farces about bad theater companies doing bad theater. Often these are as bad as the plays they lampoon, but there is one exception - the mother of all farces about theater: Noises Off by Michael Frayn, now playing at
Arts
"Edvard Munch and The Sea" at Tacoma Art Museum includes 25 prints and drawings and one oil painting by the Norwegian expressionist and symbolist master. Like most people, I have seen very little of Munch's art other than the two or three pieces that habitually show up in art books,
Arts
Canadian artist Amanda McCavour's installation, "Embroidered Spaces" at South Puget Sound Community College, is a magical, gossamer world that is, quite frankly, unlike anything I have ever seen. And believe me, I have seen a lot of art. A lot. But nothing like this. McCavour draws with thread by stitching on
Stage
Blame it on Beckett is an intelligently written comedy-drama by John Morogiello and directed for Olympia Little Theatre by Kendra Malm. High on irony and insider-theater references, the humor is esoteric and the drama realistic. Jim Foley (played by Rick Pearlstein in the biggest and best performance I've seen him in
Arts
The Evergreen State College is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Long House with an exhibition called “Swigwial?txw at 20: Building upon the Past, Visioning into the Future”, featuring works by more than 70 Native artists in paint, print, sculpture, glass, basketry and other crafts. Each of the artists have
Stage
Theater Artists Olympia's The Credeaux Canvas totally immerses the audience into the lives and the hearts of an East Village artist named Winston (Christopher Rocco); his scheming, outlandish and desperately unhappy roommate, Jamie (Mark Alford), and Jamie's girlfriend, Amelia (Alayna Chamberland). The time is the present; the place is a seedy
Arts
Tom Anderson and Christopher Mathie have each shown their paintings many times not only here at Childhood's End where they are popular regulars, but throughout the country. Mathie is one of the best pure abstract expressionists in the Pacific Northwest. Much of his latest work, which I have seen online only,
Military Life
When we say Olympia Meet-ups, we're not necessarily talking about groups organized around a topic or discipline like a booklovers' meet-up or skateboarders' meet-up. We're talking about places where people in Olympia get together to talk about stuff. And since it's Olympia, we're talking about hippies, artists and writers -
Outdoors
There's food all around us in the many forests in western Washington. It's free for the picking, and it is tasty and nutritional, organic, all-natural, and with no harmful hormones or chemicals. But you need to know what you're picking and eating, because while much of it is healthier than
Arts
The name of the show is "Politi Oso", and the catchy title, "Alarm Bells of Consciousness" is the descriptor from the B2 Fine Art website. Featuring works by the recently departed Aminah Benda Lynn Robinson and the great Faith Ringgold, this visual exploration of feminism, race, culture, religion and politics
Outdoors
Do you feel the heat? Oh, it's coming. Springtime and summer are right around the next bend in the river, and the water is calling to you. Whether it's fishing in Washington's lakes and smaller streams or heading out into the open water of the Pacific Ocean, you first have
Stage
Henrik Ibsen's classic play Hedda Gabler as adapted and directed by Aaron Lamb for Harlequin Productions is just as relevant and contemporary today as it was when it premiered at the end of the 19th century; although it is probably not as shocking as it was then - not because
Arts
It used to be called the avant-garde, and then it was called the cutting edge. What's beyond that I do not know, but whatever it is, you'll find it at Salon Refu in Olympia - the place where art happens that you'll never see anywhere else, where you can see
Stage
The new play Death on the Supermarket Shelf, written by Alan Bryce and directed by Tina Polzin, premiered March 3 at Centerstage Theatre in Federal Way. This is Bryce's first play since last year's smash hit musical For All That. Death on the Supermarket Shelf is most definitely not a
Arts
The more time I spent in the gallery at South Puget Sound Community College looking at art by Chad Erpelding and Florin Hanegan, the more fascinating the work became. And despite being totally different in subject matter, style and media, I began to see striking similarities between Hanegan's life-size linocuts
Stage
The witty title Waiting in the Wings is the kind of turn of phrase playwright Noel Coward is famous for. Actors wait in the wings before going on stage, but in Coward's play, which runs this weekend only as a staged reading at Olympia Little Theatre, "The Wings" is the
Arts
By definition, "people's choice" shows are always well loved. When the works the people have to choose from include such giants of early modern art as Mary Cassatt, Jacob Lawrence, Edward Degas and Pierre-August Renoir, how can the popular choices go wrong? On the other hand, such shows tend toward
Arts
The first thing to catch the eye when entering the gallery of new gifts to the Tacoma Art Museum is Guy Anderson's "Mountain Picnic," a moody painting in oil on paper mounted on plywood. Next to it is an equally dark and moody painting by Paul Horiuchi titled "Religious Heritage",
