Culture Features

That’s what we call a dress rehearsal. It's the opening night of Sweet Charity at 2nd Street Theatre and it's a full house in the tiny theater. As a Second Street Theatre virgin I am surprised by how small the theater really is. While some would call this an "intimate" setting, I am more concerned that if there is a fire, or if this happens to be a sort of Cats-like production where the cast interacts with the audience, I won't be able to get out of the theater fast enough and will therefore either die in the flames or be arrested for punching an overzealous actor. The show could not start soon enough. As the show tunes crank out of the sound system, the lights shine on a young couple standing by the left edge of the stage.
 
Sweet Charity  tells the story of a young woman named Charity Hope Valentine who works at a dance hall in New York City as a sort of dance partner for hire. The play begins with Charity being pushed into Central Park Lake by her boyfriend. Charity later meets Oscar Lindquist, a nerdy tax accountant. The two fall madly in love until Oscar learns of Charity's occupation as a dance hall hostess. The play ends with Charity again being pushed into Central Park Lake by Oscar and then emerging (presumably with hepatitis or some other water-borne disease by this point) optimistic that she will some day find love and get away from the dance hall. The musical numbers include hits like "Big Spender" and "If My Friends Could See Me Now."

photographs from caldera’s hello neighbor project grace the source weekly headquarters.When was the last time you talked with your neighbors? Maybe they're your best friends, or perhaps more likely, you've never even really gotten to know them beyond a simple wave. Somehow, we seem more likely to seek out friends on MySpace than we are to take the time to understand the individuals who make up our community.
 
Caldera, a non-profit organization that mentors students in Central Oregon and Portland schools through artistic programs, has brought to town the Hello Neighbor program, a project meant to encourage kids to get out and meet the people in their neighborhoods.
The murals are hanging from the Boys and Girls Club on Wall Street, on the side of the Merenda restaurant, the Des Chutes Historical Museum, and of course, on the brick façade of the Source's Bond Street headquarters. The photos are hard to miss, given their seven feet by five feet size, and it's likely you've already seen a few at the aforementioned locations.

 Toward the end of Jhumpa Lahiri's mournful, deeply satisfying new collection of stories, two Bengali lovers visit a museum in an Italian town founded by Etruscans. There, amidst dusty sarcophagi, they discover shelves lined with terra-cotta urns depicting the journey the Etruscans made to this landscape - a landscape since claimed and reclaimed by several other populations. "The sides were covered with carvings showing so many migrations across land," observes Lahiri's narrator, "departures in covered wagons to the underworld." It is a beautiful, yet idealized, image of how people get from here to there. Nothing at all like the scattered, dislocating journey she or her family made to the U.S.
 
"Unaccustomed Earth" is a profound meditation on the emotional undertow
of these migrations. Ranging in setting from Seattle to suburban
Boston, Rome to the clattering streets of Calcutta, Lahiri's cast of
mostly Bengali characters struggles to grow accustomed to their new
homes, their new families created by loss sustained in faraway places.
In the title story, a recently widowed father flies out to Seattle to
visit his daughter, a new mother, ferrying a secret about a woman he
has begun to see. "Once in a Lifetime" chronicles a brief time when the
Chaudhuri family lived with friends outside Boston while searching for
a new home. It later emerges that their house hunting has a haunted
edge: Mrs. Chaudhuri has cancer. The home they buy will be the place
she dies. 

David Barsamian loves public radio, but he hates what it has become - a mouthpiece for mainstream politicians and a timid political presence, unwilling and unable to challenge conventional thinking. Barsamian, who produces a weekly radio program out of Boulder, Colo. featuring dissidents’ voices like his longtime collaborator, Noam Chomsky, will be in Bend to discuss his work and what it will take to reclaim the airwaves from corporate America. The presentation is sponsored by KPOV, as part of its ongoing look at alternative media.
 
the Source Weekly: Do I hear birds?
David Barsamian: Yeah, I'm in my garden. I've a lot of stupid dandelions. It just rained yesterday, which is good because it's pretty easy to get them out.
tSW: You've got a new book out called Targeting Iran.
DB: I've also got a new book with (Noam) Chomsky out, called What We Say Goes and there is information about that on my website.

feeling flush at CTC’s urinetown. Dystopia, the opposite of utopia, is not an uncommon a sight in American drama. Think of plays such as Waiting for Godot and films such as Bladerunner. Think of the spectacle of the current Bush administration. Briefly. My point is, Americans conscious of the forces that have spawned such work would hardly expect a drama titled Urinetown: The Musical (UTM) to paint a vision of paradise. So, the fairest question that can be put to The Cascades Theatrical Company's current production of UTM (playing at the Tower Theater) is: "How well does it paint its particular vision of dystopia – given the expressive possibilities of the stage, as opposed to the screen, and of musical comedy, as opposed to, say, 'straight' drama?"
 
Urinetown: The Musical is a Tony-winning work that, according to
Wikipedia, "rejects musical theatre convention, parodying . . . shows
such as Les Misérables . . . and West Side Story." Pu-leez. UTM's book,
like "Les Mis's," pits have-nots against haves, and, like West Side
Story's, heightens dramatic conflict to the plane of life and death.
But when leads Bobby Strong (Ricky Johnson) and Hope Cladwell (Briana
Jayne Hinchliffe) harmonize unreservedly about "love," "peace" and
"tomorrow," what's "shattered," if anything, is the pretense that even
such a hoary convention as poor-boy-and-rich-girl-meet-and-fall-in-love
are interrogated, much less demolished, by UTM.