Things to Do in Portland This Week, September 2025
You’re reading a past edition of our weekly Things to Do column, about the concerts, art shows, comedy sets, movies, readings, and plays we’re attending each week. Read the current installment. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.
Onscreen, Simba’s coming of age is an inspiring moral tale of perseverance and succession, fate and inheritance. It’s the lion kingdom half-anthropomorphized, the circle of life. But as it was adapted into a stage musical in the mid-’90s, Disney’s The Lion King, which is coming back to the Keller Auditorium this week (September 17–28; $50+), reconfigured much about the Broadway industry. It also changed the life of at least one Portlander forever.
Michael Curry was a young theater production designer specializing in puppets when the movie premiered in 1994. Curry had recently moved back to Portland, after a successful few years in New York, when he got a call asking to build puppets for a new Disney movie parade. A few years later, the theater director Julie Taymor, whom he’d collaborated with in New York, asked if Curry would like to help her with the costumes for the Broadway adaptation. It was no doubt a big contract, but Taymor, Curry, or any Disney executive could not have predicted that the show, with its revolutionary puppetry that showed both mask and performer simultaneously, would tour the world for 30 years, with no signs of slowing, and gross over $10 billion, the most of any show, ever.
One of the show’s famed Mufasa masks greeted me at the top of a stair set at Curry’s Scappoose headquarters when I visited last fall. His company still supports the touring production, though The Lion King is just one of the 50 other touring shows for which the 62-person company now makes costumes and set pieces. Curry had recently expanded his practice to include a vein of experiential architecture called “placemaking,” something he got into while designing spaces at theme parks and Vegas resorts. In 2016, while working on a local run of The Lion King at the Keller, Curry got a call asking if he had any ideas about how to renovate the seismically unfit venue. “We thought, if he’s doing something on the inside,” the architect Don Stastny told me, “he might have some ideas about what happens outside as well.” More or less, that’s how the guy who designed the Lion King puppets wound up redesigning the Keller Auditorium.
More Things to Do This Week
MOVIES Portland Dance Film Festival
7PM FRI–SUN, SEPT 19–21 | TOMORROW THEATER, $15 (PER SCREeNING)
Celebrating its ninth year, this festival dedicated to dance shorts—that’s artful films of dance, not documentaries about dancers or recordings of staged performances—is split into three sections (“Picks” 1–3). In all, the 25 films selected come from 14 different countries, as far as Spain, China, Ireland, Australia, Finland, and France, and as close as Oregon, United States.
VISUAL ART Sasha Fishman
RECEPTION 5–7PM SAT, SEPT 20; THRU DEC 20 | ILY2, FREE
Marine biomaterials, toxicology, energy harvesting—these are the building blocks underlying Sasha Fishman’s sculptures. Fishman, a recent Columbia MFA grad who lives in New York, is as much a researcher as she is an artist. Collaborations with biology labs in school manifested an ongoing series of sculptures made with things like hagfish slime, algae, and cicada shells. Repurposing these once-living materials in art—instead of the industrial means they’re engineered for—Fishman questions the use of so-called natural resources in industry. Culminating a summer residency with the Portland gallery ILY2, Shad Mode collects Fishman’s insights from observing lamprey and sturgeon at the Bonneville Lock and Dam as well as the tribal-run hatcheries of the Yakama Nation.
MUSIC Andrew Bird w/ the Oregon Symphony
7:30PM SAT, SEPT 20 | ARLENE SCHNITZER CONCERT HALL, $44
Indie-rock violinist is a very particular label. Past Arcade Fire and a few Modest Mouse arrangements, the phrase can really only lead you to Andrew Bird, the folk-orchestra wunderkind known for live-looped fiddling, whistled melodies, and soulful crooning. Many would tell you Bird got it right when he named his Grammy-nominated 2019 album My Finest Work Yet (“Sisyphus,” “Manifest”). But his backlog of 16 albums produced throughout his 30-year career is deep and varied. He’s currently on a 20th anniversary tour of The Mysterious Production of Eggs, the 2005 album on which he first aligned his off-kilter intellectual storytelling with a palette of sounds made from, among so many other things, plugging a violin through a mess of guitar pedals. Here, that mad vision comes to life backed by the Oregon Symphony and conductor Jason Seber.
Elsewhere...
- Performance Works Northwest celebrates 25 years with 25 hours of dance programming. (Portland Mercury)
- Ricky Bearghost’s weavings made with traditional, found, and foraged materials. “His pieces read as authentically fun and rich, an intersection of traits lacking in many contemporary art spaces,” writes Hannah Krafcik. (Oregon ArtsWatch)
