Reviews

Between the Internet and all the entertainment shows on television, it’s hard to be surprised when you sit down to watch something these days. Movie trailers give away most of the plot and the best jokes, and someone online will happily post the surprise ending of the latest thriller. You’d better watch the latest episode […]

  People under 50, particularly musical comedy lovers caught up in the flood of new musicals, probably don’t know much about Cole Porter. They should. The super-clever, dryly hilarious lyrics, the lush melodies, and the sheer sophistication of his songs (many rife with sexual innuendo) have put him in a class by himself as one of the

Clackamas Rep’s Revival Puts the Song and Dance into Oregon’s Shrewish Summer A really good musical comedy is a contradiction in time. It pushes things ahead, always keeping its eye on the story, surging like a locomotive toward its narrative destination. And it stops things dead in their tracks, creating scenes so mesmerizing that the

Political satire and gallows humor were integral to the scene in sleazy cabarets in pre-war Berlin, and ironically history has never captured that scene more powerfully and memorably than in a little musical based on a play based (“I Am A Camera” by John van Druten) on the book Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood. The