2nd Street Theater not only has a jam-packed 2016 season, but it still has plenty left for us in 2015 as its Season Showcase demonstrated. The house was full, the audience excited, and the almost three hours of material was very well prepared. For a sneak preview, it was impressive to see all the actors […]
2nd Street Theater
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They Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a, Touched Me
Rocky Horror time warps Bend back to 1975
I’ve been a member of The Rocky Horror Picture Show fan club since 1988. I was eight years old when I found the VHS at a video store in Paradise, California, with those big, inviting lips beckoning me to take them home and discover what weird and possibly sensuous pleasures they had to share. All […]
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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Graveyard
The Cemetery Club brings life, death and humor together
One of Ivan Menchell’s three Broadway credits, The Cemetery Club first opened at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in 1990—and three years later jumped to the big screen in a middling film starring Ellen Burstyn, Diane Ladd, and Olympia Dukakis. Here, at 2nd Street Theater, it has recycled back to the stage, with the main characters […]
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Erupting in Laughter
A sitcom as hot as lava
Most plays are written to fit snugly into a genre so they’re easier to market to an audience. Comedy. Drama. Tragedy. Historical. But local playwright Suzan Noyes’ new show, Hot Spot in Pompeii, is a mash-up, a delightful breath of fresh air that takes a screwball romantic farce and plops it smack dab next to […]
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F-U-N-N-Y
Use that in a musical?
Ten years ago, 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, an interactive musical, stormed Broadway, capturing six Tony nominations and a Grammy nomination for its songs. The performance is a perfect storm of improv comedy, theatrical flare and gleeful musical numbers. This month, the musical is being staged for the first time in Central Oregon. Recently, […]
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Picks 3/11-3/18
thursday 12 Dearly Departed WORDS—A good book can transport you to another time and place. Return the favor and bring your favorite (deceased) author into the present at this tribute to authors of yesteryear, organized by the OSU-Cascades Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing program. Readers will channel their favorite writers in word and in […]
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Sibling Hatred
2nd Street’s latest is intense, but lightly comical
More than a frame to hold the actors and the storyline, the set—as well as the soundtrack—plays a central role in the charm of 2nd Street Theater’s current production of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. Front-and-center is a stripped-down space that does triple-time as a 1910 cabaret, a 1935 movie set and a 1962 […]
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The Dolce & Gabbana-logues
Love, Loss and What I Wore opens at 2nd Street
Love, Loss and What I Wore is a gutsy proposition of a play. It focuses exclusively on stories of women, some hilarious, some bittersweet and heartbreaking, all told through the outfits and accessories they wore at the time. It is simply staged, with images of some of the dresses projected around the cast of five […]
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A Christmas Snark
Santaland at 2nd Street Theater…
David Sedaris is a damned national treasure. I’m not saying all of his work is perfect (hell, I’m not sure he has ever topped 2000’s “Me Talk Pretty One Day”), but when Sedaris goes after a subject he is impassioned about, he can find some of the most incisive observational humor of any satirist working […]
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A Friend With Weed is a Friend Indeed
Reefer Madness infects 2nd Street Theater
Reefer Madness: The Musical is not at all what I expected it to be. The play is based on the 1936 propaganda film that extolled the evils of marijuana by luridly depicting innocent teens descending into attempted rape, murder and madness once the devil weed touched their lips. In the 1970s, the film was rediscovered […]
