Top Things to Do This Weekend: June 11–14
PRIDE WEEK
Shoop! It's Spinderella! Image credit: Randy Miramontez / Shutterstock.com
Flare
Thursday at 7 pm, the Redd
Salt-n-Pepa's Spinderella. Massive geodesic domes. "Justice juice" to benefit Basic Rights Oregon—and two other super awesome nonprofits. In a citywide celebration of Portland’s vibrant LGBT community, Portland Monthly takes over an entire block in Southeast Portland. We've got five rad reasons why you should kick off Pride Week with us tonight at our biggest party ever!
THEATER
Marriage, for a Superman like me? I must flee! Ralph Fiennes broadcast live this Sunday. Image credit: NTLive.
NT Live: Man and Superman
Sunday at 2 pm and 7 pm, World Trade Center Theatre
Jack Tanner (the stunningly nuanced Ralph Fiennes) is a fiery radical philosopher threatened by the prospect of marriage. Bernard Shaw's 1903 four-act drama gets a "satanic" update from London's National Theatre. (Meaning, they've kept, and reworked—with much success, says the Guardian—the oft-omitted "Don Juan in Hell" scene of Shaw's original script, in which Tanner (played by the superbly sexy Ralph Fiennes) debates the devil.
CLOSING The Lion
Thursday–Saturday at 7:30 pm, Sunday at 2 pm, Portland Center Stage
What does the “best musical of the year” sound like? Well, sort of existentially acoustic. Traveling troubadour Benjamin Scheuer’s one-man, six-guitar show starts off wholesome and sweet—with memories of the cookie-tin banjo made by his late father—but soon navigates a “Freudian minefield,” according to the Huffington Post, to arrive somewhere far more macabre. Check out our review.
Gordy Boudreau churns, er, the butter? Image credit: Carr Hagerman Photography.
OPENINGThe Wildly Inappropriate Poetry of Arthur Greenleaf Holmes
Thursday–Sunday at 7:30 pm, CoHo Theatre
Kicking off CoHo's annual Summerfest is local roustabout Gordy Boundreau, whose fictional 16th-century “libertine poet” is most certainly unsuitable for children or unplucked maids.
OPENING In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play
Saturday at 7:30 pm, Sunday at 2 pm, Artists Repertory Theatre
Adriana Baer directs Sarah Ruhl’s spin on Victorian sex therapy for “feminine hysteria.” Tired? Hungry? Nervous? Spastic? If you’re an ailing lady in the 1880s, you might require treatment from the good Dr. Givings.
A still from Dough, starring Jerome Holder and Jonathan Pryce, playing at the 2015 Portland Jewish Film Festival. Image credit: Dough Films Ltd.
FILM
OPENING Portland Jewish Film Festival
Sunday at 7 pm, Whitsell Auditorium
The 23rd annual festival explores Jewish identity through films including Israeli documentary The Muses of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Magic Men (a Hasidic rapper on a road trip to Greece with his dad), 2014's Theodore Bikel: In the Shoes of Sholem Aleichem, (in which the well-known actor finds links between his life and that of the Russian playwright) and British flick Dough, where a bakery’s challah meets hash, and a rare friendship arises.
VISUAL ARTS
Jacques-Louis David, Erasistratus Discovers the Cause of Antiochus' Disease, 1774, Oil on canvas. École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (PRP 18). Photo courtesy American Federation of Arts.
OPENING Gods and Heroes
Thursday & Friday from 10 am to 8 pm, Saturday & Sunday from 10 am to 5 pm, Portland Art Museum
Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts trained artists like Jean-Honoré Fragonard, François Boucher, and Jacques-Louis David. See the biblical and Homer-inspired works that made them heroes in their own time.
MUSIC
OPENING The Rake's Progress
Thursday & Friday at 7:30 pm, Sunday at 2 pm, Keller Auditorium
Stravinsky’s 1951 opera, based on the cautionary series from 18th-century morality painter William Hogarth (whose dissipated rake ultimately lands in Bedlam), got a striking, whimsical update in 1975 with stage design from the eminent artist David Hockney. The show runs in tandem with an exhibition of Hogarth and Hockney at the Portland Art Museum.
