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Best of Olympia 2013 Arts and Entertainment: Lauren O'Neill, Bruce Whitney, Kathy Gore-Fuss, Ruby Re-Usable, Chris Maynard and others ...

Weekly Volcano staff names the best in Olympia arts and entertainment for 2013

LAUREN O'NEILL: Thankfully, she wears many hats at Capital Playhouse. Photo credit: Winter Teems

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BEST NEW HIRE

Lauren O'Neill at Capital Playhouse

Just when Capital Playhouse seemed out of the woods, it got slammed with the horrifying pubic implosion of its artistic director. It needed a top-quality replacement, stat. Enter Lauren O'Neill, a bright, sparkling stage presence whose résumé seems tailor-made for the struggling company. "Solvency, sustainability, community connections," O'Neill notes. "Those goals are neon-bright in my mind." The bottom line, of course, is the bottom line: "I've lived this reality for my entire artistic career," she says, "and the compromises I've had to make to produce an affordable show were never at the cost of the quality of the art or the comfort and safety of the performers and crew. The trick is to balance that with managing the business of a nonprofit - making the magic that makes the magic." Here's hoping she and her cohorts will find entertaining new rabbits in CP's hat. - Christian Carvajal

BEST NEW PLAYWRIGHT

Will Shakespeare

This Shakespeare kid - have you heard of him? He's all the rage on local stages, and a starburst of new talent emerged last year to keep his rep alive. A mere calendar-year gave us As You Like It at South Puget Sound Community College, Animal Fire's Hamlet, Olympia Little Theater's Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III at Harlequin, Theater Artists Olympia's Titus Andronicus, and a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream I was unable to catch at St. Martin's University. That's a jaw-dropping passel of iambic pentameter, most of it great. Best of all, each of these productions found its own idiosyncratic avenue toward updating centuries-old material. Next comes Hamlet at SPSCC. If Tim Shute has his way, expect more Elizabethan drama from OLT, starting with The Tempest. At this rate, Mr. Will.i.am Shakespeare may finally get the respect he deserves. - CC

BRUCE WHITNEY: Photo credit: Winter Teems

BEST MAESTRO

Bruce Whitney

Let's face it, I tend to slight musicians in my reviews, largely because it isn't my area of greatest expertise. Yet even I have become thoroughly aware of the breadth and power of Bruce Whitney's conducting and songwriting talents. He's probably best known for backing Harlequin Productions' rock and holiday revues, but his songs uplifted Andrew Gordon's adaptation of Wind in the Willows for Olympia Family Theater as well. He wrote and performed the full (and toe-tapping) musicals The Incredible Undersea Trial of Joseph P. Lawnboy and A Rock ‘n' Roll Twelfth Night. And much like the bandleaders on late-night talk show, he's required to leap styles and genres every five minutes, a task he handles with deceptively unshowy charm. Up next: a groovy biography of some cat named Jesus Christ Superstar - and, I hope, a holiday show very much like last year's Yule-tastic Christmas Survival Guide. - CC

BEST D.I.Y.

Homegrown plays

I recently found myself surprisingly entertained by an evening of locally-written one-acts called A Peck of Improbable Plays. As I said at the time, I've seen many such evenings over the years, and this was among the best. Thanks in large part to Olympia playwright Bryan Willis, new voices have room here to develop under capable guidance. Then there's Kickstarter, which helps foster an environment in which "almost famous" artists can afford to crack an otherwise intimidating market. Ted Ryle of Olympia Family Theater used Kickstarter to pay for musical arrangements on his new musical, an adaptation of Ellen Jackson's Cinder Edna, opening May 24. Perhaps new scripts will find their way onto e-readers, for a faster, more narrowcast escape vector. In years to come, I'd love to see Oly's two major theater troupes devote even more energy to new play debuts. - CC

BEST LAUNCH PAD

Olympia Little Theatre

I have mixed feelings about community theater. I'm glad we have it. I like quite a bit of it; but when it's bad, it is SO EFFING BAD. I've worked with amateur theaters in four states, and in all those places, community theater attracts legions of folks who brag about the dozens of shows they've directed, never realizing most of them sucked. Sure, OLT's produced its share of turduckens over the years. Recently, however, I've noticed its actors getting markedly better before getting snatched up by companies as prestigious as Harlequin or Balagan in Seattle. Now Terence Artz is taking steps toward improving show quality at OLT while lobbying for formalized training. It's a welcome development. In particular, OLT would benefit from director development, so A.D.s aren't learning from other tyros. As OLT continues to renovate its physical space, it's encouraging to see similar efforts toward artistic craft. - CC

BEST PLEIN AIR PAINTING

Kathy Gore-Fuss

Longtime Olympia artist Kathy Gore-Fuss brought together a bunch of local artists for a week of plein air painting and it changed her into a landscape painter extraordinaire. Shortly afterward, she had an exhibition at Dino's Coffee Bar, Olympia's newest café art venue, featuring many of the paintings that grew out of the experience. The results were fabulous, and Gore-Fuss continues this new direction in her art. Plein air painting, meaning painting outdoors, was popular amongst the French Impressionists in the mid-19th century. There hasn't been much of interest done with it since, but Gore Fuss' paintings done among the dense foliage in Priest Point Park are outstanding. They are simple, strong and vibrant. The paint application is luscious. They teeter between pure abstraction and realism and display a sheer love of paint and of nature. - Alec Clayton

BEST POLITICAL ART

Black Dot Museum

The Black Dot Museum show of political art at Northern's new location in Olympia was an exciting show of literary and political art by Jean Smith and David Lester of the rock-duo Mecca Normal. It was nice to see Oly's musical, literary and visual arts scenes come together in a funky new venue. Included in the show were four acrylic paintings by Smith of the band Pussy Riot - displayed with absolutely perfect timing because the band had just been taken political prisoners in Russia, jailed for the crime of singing. She also showed a series of paintings "by" Martin Lewis, a character in her novel. Lester showed the digital print cover and pages from his graphic novel "The Listener," a dark story about the holocaust as told in a conversation between a woman and an unseen man (out of the frame in the pages shown). The novel was a finalist in ForeWord Reviews' 2011 Best of the Year award. - AC

BEST CRAFTED ART

Susan Aurand and Betty Jo Fitzgerald

I was torn over whether or not to include the Susan Aurand and Betty Jo Fitzgerald show at Childhood's End. At best, I gave it a lukewarm review. But both women have been making art in Olympia since before I moved here 24 years ago; they are each artists of note, and Fitzgerald in particular deserves recognition because she is getting old and is in poor health. She is living with severe COPD. Dependent on a wheelchair and oxygen, she cannot paint anything large but sticks with things she can paint holding them in her lap. Her works in this exhibition comprised a series of nine triptychs, each section of which was about 12-inches square - all abstract and nicely composed. Aurand's works were fantasy or surrealistic images that combined soft-edge, realistic painting with finely-crafted constructed or assembled elements. Her painted images included birds, eggs, tree limbs and clouds. Constructed elements included doors, windows and boxes that contain odd materials. Very strange and lovely. - AC

BEST ART SHOW

"Gathering Together"

"Gathering Together: The art of Danielle Bodine, Adriene Cruz and Alonzo Davis"at The Evergreen State College brought a wide variety of works celebrating traditions of many cultures to the Olympia campus. The three artists combined varied materials and techniques including weaving, stitching, tying, painting, collaging, sculpting, and more, with natural and manufactured materials to create artworks both traditional and innovative with a strong sense of connection to the earth and to peoples of many cultures. While first looking at the show before reading any of the wall labels I was convinced that I was seeing art by African and Native American artists. I was not. But the strong connection with the earth and with native traditions from both continents conveyed that feeling. Bodine is a fiber artist originally from Seattle and now living on Whidbey Island. Cruz is a native of Harlem in New York City, now living in Portland. Davis, a Southern Californian who attributes his art to influences from world travel, wrote: "The magic of the Southwest United States, Brazil, Haiti and West Africa has penetrated my work. ... and the colors and rhythms of the Pacific Rim continue to infiltrate." - AC

BEST LONGEST ART EXHIBIT

"27 Feet of Art ..."

A unique event was the special exhibition "27 Feet of Art ... And More"at the Washington Center for the Performing Arts. Well, it was unique a year ago when they did it the first time. This year's repeat performance added the "and more" to the title because curator Sally Penley wanted more, and the participating artists were more than happy to oblige. The original idea was to show 27 12-inch by 12-inch paintings by 27 different artists. This year they added a few larger pieces and ended up with 89 feet of art displayed over the lobby, balcony and mezzanine floors of the arts center. Artists included in the show were a who's who of Olympia artists and a few from outside the area. Familiar names in the show included Ron Hinton and Ron Hinson, Gail Ramsey Wharton, David Mark Leon, Susan Emley, Beth Evans, Tom Anderson, Debra Van Tuinen, Mimi Williams, Jennifer Kuhns, Judith Smith, Shelley Carr, Jean Mandeberg, Sherry Bruckner, Marianne Partlow, Kim Merriman and Kathy Gore Fuss, just to name a few of the many.  Almost an oxymoron, it was a blockbuster of modest proportions. - AC

BEST COSTUME

Dandelions

Forget Halloween. Here in Olympia, the Procession of the Species, the d.i.y. parade, is the costume event of the year, every year. Last Spring brought out a particularly creative bunch of outfits. The standout: a formally suited dandelion with an elaborate hat that had gone to seed. Think the kind of weed that might have sprouted in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. - Molly Gilmore

BEST AMATEUR ARTS MARKETER

Ruby Re-Usable

Ruby Re-Usable, she of the plastic-bag babies and brilliantly colored fascinators, was voted the Volcano's Best Non-traditional Artist the past two years running. This year, that category was eliminated. But Re-Usable gets a shout-out for her amazing ability to market not only herself and any group or project with which she's involved but also any other artist in town. She knows them all and she knows their stories. There has to be a lucrative career in this talent of yours, Ruby - though maybe not here in Olympia. - MG

BEST USE OF FEATHERS

Chris Maynard

If you haven't heard of Maynard, you will very soon. The artist, whose art both celebrates and is made from feathers, is tickling fancies all over Puget Sound and beyond. He made a big splash at last fall's Arts Walk and will be the cover artist for the spring edition. But his fame has already spread: His work made the front page of Reddit and inspired an article in the Huffington Post. - MG

LINK: Best of Olympia 2013

LINK: Best of Olympia 2012

LINK: Best of Olympia 2011

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