The Best Shows and Events in Portland This Week, March 2026
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Ira Glass calls his roadshow Seven Things I’ve Learned. It’s a modular template for bringing the radio show he started 30 years ago, This American Life, onstage. He includes excerpts from classic episodes and new stories, dropping things in as they come up to recreate the narrative audio journalism form he all but invented for a live audience. Saturday, Glass is bringing his current bag of stories to the Schnitzer (7:30pm, $35+). And there’s a chance he has a Portland story in that bag.
Listeners know—is there anyone out there who’s never listened to This American Life?—the texture of Glass’s broadcasts. It’s the audio version of New Journalism: first person, boots on the ground, essayistic wonderings answered by reporting on real people’s real stories. Sometimes it’s autobiographical. “Call Your Parents,” which aired March 20, revisits interviews Glass did with his own parents decades ago. Reliably, it’s affecting, like the 2013 dive into Long Island used car lots, or 2008’s “Switched at Birth,” about two newborn babies swapped at the hospital.
In December, the show came to Portland, where Glass and fellow producers explored the image that right-wing media, Trump, and online influencers had drawn of the city. “We’re in a reality show right now,” one right-wing streamer told the show outside Portland’s ICE facility. “It’s like the Big Brother house, where you can go in the kitchen or the bedroom just to spy on people. Same thing, except we’re actually in it.”
This collaborative “movie about Portland as a place that’s war ravaged, a hub for Antifa, ripe for military intervention,” Glass and company found, made the city into a soundstage for propaganda, “proving that the threat to America from Antifa is real and that a massive, nationwide hunt was called for.”
Of course, dear reader, it was not.
More things to do this week
MOVIES Party Girl
7PM THU, MAR 26 | TOMORROW THEATER, $15
When’s the last time you brushed up on the Dewey decimal system? Bianca Sparta, of flower shop Colibri, and Pamela Baker-Miller, of downtown clothing boutique Frances May, host this screening of the iconic 1995 Parker Posey movie. Posey plays an everyday diva in her twenties who bops between gay clubs wearing Gaultier and Westwood and glamorously thinking only of herself. When the world begins to catch up with her, she settles into a life as a librarian with a wardrobe to kill. There is a costume contest of sorts at the theater—the best dressed party girl gets a sash.
DANCE Spring Songs
7:30PM FRI & SAT, MAR 27 & 28 | NEWMARK THEATRE, $39+
Choreographer Ethan Colangelo, of the National Ballet of Canada, joins NW Dance Project for this spring show. Colangelo is premiering a new work drawing on the push and pull of a favorite Mahler symphony—the mix of “love/fear, longing/intimacy, and hope/anger” in the German composer’s Symphony No. 5. NW Dance Project’s founding artistic director, Sarah Slipper, is also premiering her latest, which promises to deliver the full force of the city’s leading contemporary dance company.
BROADWAY Les Misérables
MAR 31–APR 5 | KELLER AUDITORIUM, $80+
“What is fascinating,” director Cameron Mackintosh, who adapted Les Misérables for English-speaking audiences in 1985, recently told The Guardian, “is that most of the current cast were not even born when the show was first staged.” His adaptation has now been seen by more than 130 million people around the world and, however compromised it may be in the eyes of many critics, has in turn brought the ideas of Victor Hugo’s 1862 epic—about the injustice of a 19-year prison sentence over stealing bread and the lingering taint of a criminal record—to those 130-million-plus people, including a few thousand more this week thanks to Broadway in Portland.
Elsewhere...
- “Precisely no one loves the Moda Center,” Brian Libby writes of what’s next, architecturally, for the Blazers’ home court. “Opened in 1995, the arena has always appeared to have been designed by Fred Flintstone.” (Oregon ArtsWatch)
- How Portland Public Schools will decide which schools to close. (Willamette Week)
