THEATER REVIEW by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS Director Aaron Lamb and the cast and crew of Harlequin Productions’ Man of La Mancha took a calculated risk that is paying off marvelously in their production of the classical musical by Dale Wasserman with music by Mitch Leigh and lyrics by Joe Darion. Lamb has updated …
By NOAH SHACHAR Summertime is coming around, and Olympia Film Society (OFS) welcomes warm weather with a new set of extraordinary films including Olivier Assayas’s philosophical romp Non-Fiction and Eric Becker’s documentary Return to Mount Kennedy. We spoke with programming director Rob Patrick about the screenings. As for Assayas, Patrick said, “The French director’s acclaimed …
By Christian Carvajal William Shakespeare will be celebrated this summer in a unique trifecta of his work on stage. Three theater companies have joined to create a mini-Shakespeare festival in the South Sound from June through August 2019. Beginning on June 28, Animal Fire Theatre has staged one of Shakespeare’s most outrageous comedies, The Merry …
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 …