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Suzette Smith is the arts & culture editor of the Portland Mercury. Go ahead and tell her about all your food, art, and culture gripes: suzette@portlandmercury.com. Follow her on Twitter, Bluesky, and Letterboxd.
The well-curated fest enters its 44th year with documentaries and fresh perspectives.
KKELLY PHOTOGRAPHY Nesting: Vacancy gets the allure of the binge-watch. When I stepped into the Shoebox Theater last Saturday to catch episodes one and two of the new serialized production, I joined an audience packed with people electing to see the show’s entire four-episode arc in a single stretch (not a bad choice for a […]
Hello, Christopher Sobbin’.
Nesting: Vacancy makes for a frightening binge-watch.
Artists Rep’s new play has a super dumb Secret.
Suzette Smith I attended the EMA TBA set with some expectations. 1) After a week of vociferous social media spamming, I expected the show might sell out. 2) Based on EMA’s 2015 PS1 MOMA installation—which involved VR headsets and stage design resembling a shrine to a messy living room—I thought the performance might be delicate […]
Blackwell on an inflatable ice cream sandwich. Sign language interpreter looks on. Suzette Smith Before Becca Blackwell’s show began, we in the audience were asked to raise our hands if we’d been to a TBA performance before, and again if we’d been to an Artists Repertory Theater performance, and finally if we’d seen a Frontier […]
TOPS Joni Mitchell songwriting with Vanessa Paradis production. Richmond Lam Mellow Montreal pop band Tops is at a tentative level of success where everyone I know seems to have heard of them, but no one can really say where they came from. I latched onto 2014’s Picture You Staring through some friends in Detroit (there’s […]
How the publishing organization faced Portland’s rental crisis—and survived.
Tops talks positive breakups and perfect pop songs.
Here comes Stephen King and Owen King’s father-son magical feminist thriller.
As they do in every film, things really pick up in the graveyard. That’s where Patti Dumbrowski (Danielle Macdonald) wheels her sedated grandmother into a dark tunnel, over which someone has spray-painted the phrase “The Gates of Hell.”
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