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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (March 16, 2001)
34 J u s t o u t • march 16. 2001 ▼ ELANA D Y K EW O M O N reads from Beyond the Pale Friday, March 23, 7:30pm C o n c e r t t o B e n e fit \SmHwe A d u lt Foster C are f o r People L ivin g W ith A ID S S u n d a y M a rc h 2 5 a t 3 p m Kairos U nited Church o f Christ 4764 SE Log us Rd, M ilwaukee Singin' in the brain Portland Center Stage’s first musical ever is smart, funny and very gay by M a r c A c it o Il N O TH Eft W o f t TICKETS — $15 ($10 for seniors & students) Available at In Other Words Bookstore Or C A LL Swan House (503) 786-4829 WOMEN'S DOOKS AND ftESOUftCES D S Corner o f Sandy Blvd. & NE 64th 3106 NE 64th Portland, OR 97213 Gifts for Romance in an Elegant Setting It'4 My 5 0 3 -2 8 0 8 0 8 0 w w w .tc lc p o rt.c o m / -p lc a su rc A Place o f Romantic Invention KRISTINE W Kristine W. has been a staple in the worldwide dance scene since she released her first single, “ Feel What You Want," which took international dance floors by storm. Her debut album, LAND OF THE LIVING, re leased in 1996, was an imme diate classic, establishing her as a major force in the world of pop/dance music. It's been over three years since her fans have been able to get their hands on an official release from Kristine W. Her fans have been so hungry for her new music, remixes of cer tain songs from STRONGER have become some of the most bootlegged tracks in recent memory. “Loving You," “Club land," and “Stand in Love," have already established them selves as dance floor staples. STRONGER has Kristine W poised to break into the main stream pop world, with powerful singles like “Stronger," and “If Only You Knew." $ 1 0 .9 9 I ¿C D $ Q .4 4 Cass W O ffer G ood T hru 3-29-01 DON’T MISS K r is t in e W L iv e 3 / 1 6 at P anorama EAST PORTLAND • 32nd & E Burnside St. • 231-8926 1M ÜSÏC( M ILLENNIUM NW PORTLAND • 23rd & NW Johnson • 248-0163 Darrin Baker (left) and David Ayers (right) show their appreciation to T. Doyle Leverett, who plays the “nice nurse” nyone who played a nun or a Nazi in a high schtxil production of The Sound of Music knows how difficult staging a musi cal can be. But what if the musical you’re staging is set mostly in the mind of someone with a fatal brain condition? Suddenly, solving a problem like Maria seems about as easy as the boys on Queer as Folk. Yet the folks at Portland Center Stage, queer and otherwise, are facing that exact challenge as they prepare the company’s first musical ever. A New Brain relates the tale of Gordon Schwinn, a composer who’s been squandering his talents writing songs for a kiddie television show starring an obnoxious oversized frog named Mr. Bungee. Gordon collapses one day into a plate of ziti and awakens in the hospital to discover he’s been diagnosed with a terminal brain condition. An operation is needed, hut it’s potentially dangerous; there’s a significant chance he will die or never recover his faculties. W hat haunts Gordon most are the songs he never will write if he doesn’t live. From his bed, his wheelchair and the depths of an MR1, snatches of melody and memory flow out of his imagination and subconscious. “I liken it to The Wizard of O z,” says Darrin Baker, who plays Gordon. “M etaphor- mu ically, G ordon gets knocked on the head and is sent on a journey. A nd what he learns there is huge.” A New Brain was written by William Finn, the gay composer most renowned for the musical Falsettos, a profoundly moving and wackily neurotic examina tion of bar mitzvahs, base ball, AIDS and the lesbian kosher caterers next dixir. Even more so than his ear lier work, A New Brain can he seen as a musical diary of Finn’s own experiences. The composer for such kiddie fare as The Poky Little Puppy and The Brave Little Toaster, he was diag nosed with an inoperable brain tumor in 1992, shortly after winning a pair of Tony Chris Coleman rehearses his cast Aw;,rds for After a n,,rr<nv hmsh with death, Finn lived to tell the tale and felt compelled to tell it they way he knew best: through music. “When I came out of the hospital," he said shortly before the Lincoln Center premiere of A New Brain in 1998, “I couldn’t sit at the piano without writing a decent song. At the piano, there was just all this gratitude that I was alive and all this life spewing out of me—the piano was singing—and I was just there to write it down.” Indeed, Ben Brantley of the New York Times wrote that the musical’s “transformational tour of the valley of death.. .finds Finn using smoother, more conventional harmonies and rhythms than he has before.” And USA Today wrote, “Potent and original voices in tixlay’s musical theater are rare, and Finn remains one of them." Equally potent and original is Portland Center Stage’s new artistic director, Chris Coleman. He came to Portland last spring from his native Atlanta, where he was the founder of Actors Express, a dynamic and frequently controversial company that was a far cry from the kind of sedate programming Portland C en ter Stage has been known for. Coleman already has demonstrated his com mitment to shaking up the lix:al theater scene by instituting a “second stage” for experimental work as well as announcing cooperative efforts with the cutting-edge Portland Institute for the Contempo rary Arts. He was also one of six people recently chosen to take part in an international exchange program in Budapest, Hungary, designed to intro duce artistic directors from the United States to theater ideas and techniques of Eastern Europe. The challenge of manifesting Finn’s kaleido scopic journey was what drew Coleman to the work in the first place. “I was very intrigued by how Finn had pulled these very different songs together, connected with the most gossamer of threads,” he says. “1 knew that if the story was to make sense for the audience, the director and designers w’ould have to do some pretty fancy footwork—and that felt like a fun job to have.” Indeed, Dex Edward’s set for A New Brain features a huge MRI image on a turntable that from a distance almost resembles the earth as seen from the rmx>n. It kxims large as a metaphor for the brain as a world of imagina tion and, by extension, for the theater as a world of imagination. Meanwhile, musical transcriptions of an unfinished melody hover above the stage, flying in and out as Gordon stniggles to piece the fragments together. Coleman can relate to the musical’s theme of
