By Bob Hicks
A few nights ago, as I watched the premiere of Find Me Beside You, Jessica Wallenfels’ “rock story ballet” stage adaptation of Van Morrison‘s 1968 concept album Astral Weeks, three things crossed my mind.
The first was the tradition of the minimally staged Broadway musical — in essence, concert versions of full-blown theater pieces — that has been popularized in the Encores! series at New York City Center and emulated across the country, including productions by the Portland company Staged!
The second was Working Girl, the 1988 romantic movie comedy starring Melanie Griffith as a working-class sharpie who, as a gopher for conniving big-biz baddie Sigourney Weaver, figures out how to make a stalled television megadeal work: let a little air out of the tires and reap big profits in radio instead.
The third was Winterreise, Franz Schubert‘s 1827 song cycle based on poems by Wilhelm Muller.
Ben Waterhouse has reviewed Find Me Beside You here for Willamette Week, and Catherine Thomas here for The Oregonian; both were in general impressed, with reservations. I tend to see a little less diamond and a little more rough, but I agree that what’s good here is promising. And I have a modest suggestion: let a little air out of the tires. Find Me Beside You tries to do too much on too many platforms, and its high ambitions make it a sprawling muddle instead of the focused gem it might be.
Jesse Kornbluth, editor of 
As Kornbluth explains it:
The condition causes a great deal of pain and makes it difficult for her to handle basic daily tasks. Surgical procedures can help immensely, but her American insurance plan has denied coverage. Without insurance, treatment in the U.S. would cost $30,000 a week or more. She can get four weeks of treatment in Germany for between $12,000 and $19,000 plus travel expenses, and has been accepted for treatment to begin Oct. 5. She’s paid 4,000 Euros on account, but because she’s needed to pay caregivers for the past three years, her savings are wiped out.
In a nutshell, Roberts would like to turn Stage and Studio into an online hub and radio show covering arts in the Pacific Northwest. She’s made a good beginning, and has the chops and smarts to follow through. As print sources of arts news and comment become slimmer and slimmer, we need as many good alternative sources as we can get. You can read about her project 
Shows like Idol and 
John died on Friday, July 24, 2010, taking his familiar motorized wheelchair off of Portland’s streets and silencing his singular voice. He seemed to us a necessary antidote to Portland smugness (we ARE the center of the universe, are we not?), and his presence among us ironically added to our notion of self-worth: John Callahan is one of us! Rest in peace, John, if peace, finally, is what you wish for. Or keep fighting the metaphysical good fight.
At his perch on the news desk, Charlie was known to lightly mock certain passages of flowery writing as he slashed through copy with his big black pencil. Sometimes he’d sigh or giggle and choose to overlook a phrase that not so privately drove him crazy: He knew which writers had permission to roam and which did not. But that didn’t stop him from pulling out his inkpad and his favorite stamp and branding the hard copy with his own gleeful judgment. The type was in a florid, immediately post-Gutenberg, barely readable old gothic. “WRETCHED EXCESS,” it said.
Boffo. There it is. He loves that word. It makes him feel so, so … Variety-ish. As in, “Sticks Nix Hick Pix” (improved to the more rat-a-tat “Stix Nix Hix Pix” in the 1942 movie musical