THEATER REVIEW by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS Outdoor performances of Shakespeare continue through the Summer in Olympia with Goldfinch Productions’ As You Like It, featuring performances at LBA Park and Sunrise Park after an opening performance in City Park, Yelm. As You Like It is a smart and thoughtful, romantic comedy — the kind …
Theatre Review by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS The Merry Wives of Windsor is arguably Shakespeare’s funniest comedy. It is also one of the bard’s most accessible plays. Animal Fire Theatre’s outdoor production of Merry Wives, using Olympia’s Priest Point Park as its venue, is hilarious, and the dense and sometimes difficult to understand Shakespearean …
By CHRISTIAN CARVAJAL Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s two-part novel The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha, first published in 1605 and 1615 — concurrent with Galileo, the King James Bible and Shakespeare — has been called the greatest novel ever, easily the most influential of the Spanish Golden Age. That novel inspired the 1965 …
By NOAH SHACHAR Some movies win Academy Awards, are nearly forgotten and hardly spoken about again. Some movies are simply boring, while others are entertaining or insightful. But a few movies ignite themselves in a blazing pyre to emerge as a phoenix from smoldering ashes ever livelier, more passionate and mesmerizingly intriguing — growing and …
By Billy Thomas The Washington Center for the Performing Arts, one of Olympia’s premier performing arts spaces since 1985, has announced their recipient of the Anacker Scholarship for the Arts. The scholarship is provided each year to a graduating high school senior from Thurston County who plans to study and pursue a career in the …
By Ellis Boran Howl’s Moving Castle is about a girl named Sophie Pendragon who has her youth stolen from her by an evil witch. She then meets a magic scarecrow who is the result of a spell set by an evil entity’s henchman. The scarecrow leads Sophie to the mobile castle powered by a demon …
By Ellis Boran I’m Ellis Boran, and it is a pleasure to start my own film review column, “Cine-Files!” My first movie review will be on the new animated film Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse. Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse is about a young boy named Miles Morales who is intrigued and bewildered at becoming the new …
By KAREN LUNDE Back in the mid-1920s, the Liberty Theatre, a vaudeville house, contained a Wurlitzer 2/9 theater pipe organ. After a renovation in 1948, the Liberty became the Olympic Theater. In the 1980s, it was completely rebuilt and evolved into The Washington Center for the Performing Arts. Throughout the building’s evolution, the mighty Wurlitzer …
By Karen Lunde Comedian Drew Carey once said, “Oh, you hate your job? … There’s a support group for that. It’s called everybody, and they meet regularly at the bar.” Not everyone in Daphne’s Dive, a play by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudés, hates his or her job; but everyone has a story, and …
By CHRISTIAN CARVAJAL Lacey will soon have its own theatrical troupe. Artistic director Kevin McManus explains, “Seven of my closest friends and I gathered together to form a theater company. We got ourselves a little 501(c)(3) license and are heading toward a three-production, inaugural season.” That fledgling company is Goldfinch Productions. “It’s exciting and a …