posts that contain mini-bios of our writers
By Molly Walsh and Billy Thomas On Olympia’s third week of July, a five-day summer vacation rolls into town with an opportunity for residents and visitors to relive childhood memories and create new ones. Capital Lakefair delivers time-honored landmarks evoking an atmosphere best suited to balmy summer evenings. Flashes of color whirl around the festival’s …
By Molly Walsh A group of five, the EveryLeaf Band covers the quintessential elements of American music, combining classic rock, country rock and a few risqué blues tunes into its set. Based in Issaquah, Washington, EveryLeaf Band travels throughout the Pacific Northwest with their favorite songs along for the ride. The band prides itself on …
By JONAH BARRETT Driving to a dark park to spend 30 minutes watching Fourth of July fireworks from the dewy grass is so 2018. Also, there are bugs — gross. Why not turn the outing into an entire festival? For 19 years, the Tumwater Downtown Association has put on the Artesian Festival at Tumwater Valley …
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 …
By Molly Walsh Portland band MarchFourth boasts a visually powerful set, with 20 onstage performers that do it all from guitar to vaudevillean dancing, acrobatics to trombone. A supernova of color and carnival chic, MarchFourth gets people of all ages clapping hands and stomping feet. Breaking the barriers between musical and visual performance, the troupe …
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 Molly Walsh On Sunday, June 23, thousands of members of the LGBTQ community and their supporters convened on downtown Olympia to celebrate Pride. It was the largest parade on record, according to Capital City Pride Coordinator Gina Thompson. Accompanying the parade at Heritage Park were over 100 booths of local organizations, artisan crafts and …
ART REVIEW by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS Mia Schulte knows her way around paint brushes and palette knives. When it comes to color, form and texture, she has a sure hand. So do the four other women who join her in the exhibition Out of the Blue at Childhood’s End Gallery: Susan Glendenning, Laraine …