COMEDY

Lily Tomlin
Saturday at 7:30 pm, Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
Ernestine lives! Tomlin revisits a dozen characters that helped build her peerless reputation, from Laugh-In in the 1970s to acclaimed new Netflix series Grace and Frankie. 

Andy Kindler
Saturday at 7:30 pm, Mississippi Studios
The LA-based comedian’s self-assured delivery and incisive observational humor has led to over forty appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman, and a starring role on IFC’s Maron as a fictionalized version of himself. Now Kindler brings his Live and Impersonal Tour to Mississippi Studios.

Paula Poundstone
Saturday at 6 pm & 9:30 pm, Aladdin Theater
If you, like us, love Poundstone’s impromptu wit on NPR’s Wait Wait ... Don’t Tell Me, then catch this stand-up show from the mistress of sassy spontaneity. And read our interview with her here.

MUSIC

Gregory Alan Isakov
Thursday at 7:30 pm, Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
The rootsy South African says latest album The Weatherman focuses on overlooked miracles—like the climate prophesizing of a TV anchor—that mystify the mundane.

Nick Jaina
Thursday at 8 pm, Mississippi Studios
Jaina takes a break from writing high-minded memoir to reconvene his longtime alt-folk act.

Nareh Arghamanyan
Saturday & Sunday at 4 pm, Lincoln Performance Hall
The 25-year-old virtuoso on the piano dedicates her opening show to the memory of the victims of the Armenian genocide—marking the tragedy’s 100th anniversary with her original music alongside works from artists like Komitas, Bach, and Pärt.

FILM

Reel Music Film Festival
Friday at 7 pm & 9:15 pm, Saturday at 4:30 pm, 7 pm, & 9:30 pm, Sunday at 5 pm & 7 pm
NW Film Center’s annual event features wide-ranging documentaries like The Amazing Nina Simone and The Glamour & the Squalor, about the Seattle DJ that made grunge music the soundtrack of the 1990s.

BOOK & TALKS

Carlos Labbé
Thursday at 7:30 pm, Powell's on Hawthorne
Metafiction, ekphrasis; the Chilean author bends form in Loquela, a detective novel Kirkus calls “endearing.”

Jason Gurley
Thursday at 7:30 pm, Powell's City of Books
The Portland author spent 14 years on Eleanor, a book he self-published through Amazon in June 2014. Soon thereafter, the e-book version made it into Amazon’s top 50 sellers—on the entire site, that is. No wonder publishers were quick to bite: Crown Publishing snapped it up just months later. Find out why all those e-book readers are feeling smug about their early Gurley fanhood.

THEATER

OPENING The Book of Mormon
Thursday–Sunday at 7:30 pm
Uganda, Utah, and singing evangelicals—in the hands of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, that’s the recipe for one of the most successful musicals of the 21st century. 

OPENING Broken Promises
Thursday–Saturday at 7:30 pm, Sunday at 2 pm, Milagro Theatre
Dating, drinking, drugs—and then things get really dark. This bilingual premiere from Milagro’s former artistic director Olga Sanchez treats the shadow world of immigrant sex trafficking.

OPENING The Yellow Wallpaper
Friday & Saturday at 7:30 pm, Sunday at 2 pm, CoHo Theatre
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic slow-burning short story (here adapted for a contemporary world premiere), Victorian practices of forced bed rest challenge the sanity of a depressed woman.

VISUAL ARTS

CLOSING Paradise
Thursday & Friday from 10 am to 8 pm, Saturday & Sunday from 10 am to 5 pm, Portland Art Museum
In an immersive, fruit-themed installation, LA’s David Allen Burns and Austin Young pluck at the Oregon link between Eden and manifest destiny.

CLOSING Abra Ancliffe
Friday–Sunday from noon to 5 pm, c3:Initiative
The mystique of space is Ancliffe’s inspiration for When Looking Down Is Looking Up—a gallery show that also launches the art book The Secret Astronomy of Tristram Shandy.