is a cute title for a play about our society\'s ongoing argument over gay marriage. With its unmistakable whiff of regret, however, it doesn\'t leave much doubt as to which side of the debate it\'s going to take.
On the other hand, a musical extolling the sanctity of traditional marriage would seem an unlikely thing to come out of the left-coast theater world.
So the new musical by composer/lyricist Peter Alexander and librettist/lyricist Kevin Yell, which had its premiere Friday at the World Trade Center Theater and continues through Jan. 20, might be forgiven for taking its audience\'s sympathies for granted.
To read the full review, click .
Uprite Dub Orchestra: Reggae\'s echoey, reverby cousin, dub\'s the kind of music that\'s as much an experience as a sound. Add ska and reggae filled with the Orchestra\'s horns and bass, and you\'ve got a promising night. 9 p.
m. Thursday, , 2845 S.E.
Stark St.; $5; 503-239-9292.
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Sophe Lux (above): A pastiche of styles both visual and aural, have never skimped on the dramatics. Singer Gwynneth Haynes, in particular, knows how to channel everyone from her inner Shirley Temple to her inner Debbie Harry. 9 p.
m. Thursday, , 830 E. Burnside St.
; $6, 503-231-9663.
Sort Ofs: Don\'t let the name fool you: Nothing is equivocating about the Sort Ofs. The duo of Chris Robley and John Stewart make up the core of the band, but they are regularly joined by friends.
Their music is like being at a political protest where everyone is in his underwear and a fire alarm has gone off. And maybe snakes or scorpions are scattered on the ground. Each song accomplishes a sense of urgency, both in sound and message, which is just the kind of thing we need right now.
9 p.m. Wednesday, , 830 E.
Burnside St.; $5; 503-231-9663.
For more music choices, go .
Bark: This is a shaggy-dog musical set in a doggie day care (we kid you not) and featuring some pretty good Portland-area musical-theater folks, including Kregg Arnstson, Wendy Martel-Vilkin and Debbie Hunter. Opens 8 p.m.
Thursday, continues 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays and 2 p.
m. Sundays, through March 10. Triangle Productions at Artists Repertory Theatre second stage, 1516 S.
W. Morrison St.; $22-$30; 503-239-5919 or .
For more theater choices, go .
Soap (above): What if Pedro Almodóvar made a Dogme film? The result of a collision between the flamboyant, gynocentric Spanish filmmaker and the stringent rules of the minimalist film movement would probably resemble Soap, a Danish drama about an unlikely friendship.
Charlotte (Trine Dyrholm) owns a beauty shop and, having left her longtime boyfriend, moves into an apartment. Her downstairs neighbor is Veronica (David Dencik), a preoperative transsexual whose mother still calls him Ulrik. Touching moments ensue.
Opens Friday at the .
Reel Music Festival: The kicks out the jams on the 24th Reel Music festival starting this weekend, and the offerings are as diverse as we\'ve come to expect. Films profiling the Holy Modal Rounders, Bob Marley, Harry Nilsson and Keith Jarrett are on tap, as well as a series of films by Peter Whitehead, an avant-garde director who captured mod mayhem in 1967\'s Tonite Let\'s All Make Love in London, and caught Pink Floyd on film when the band was still known as the Pink Floyd.
The Reel Music festival runs from Friday through Feb. 4; check out our weekly for a preview.
Notes on a Scandal: Starring Judi Dench as a spinster high-school teacher and art teacher Cate Blanchett, whose affair with a student kicks Dench\'s conniving mind into overdrive, Notes packs more heat, acid, danger and drama into its brief running time than most films of nearly double the length.
Director Richard Eyre ( Iris, The Ploughman\'s Lunch ) whips up a rich, tart stew of heated melodrama, bitter comedy, cunning social observation and knockout acting. The result is pungent and toothsome, a blend of Evelyn Waugh, Harold Pinter and To Die For -- a bracing concoction decidedly not for the delicate of disposition. Go for theater locations and times.
For more entertainment choices, go .
: He\'s the son of late Psycho actor Anthony Perkins. But he\'s got a lot more to offer than simply his parentage.
His songs are melancholy, wistful, brooding, a kind of soundtrack for the long dark nights of the soul. 9 p.m.
Tuesday, , 1332 W. Burnside St.; $20 advance; Ticketmaster, 503-224-4400.
Even if this new Elvis doesn\'t do it for you, the show may be worth going to. Because MMJ will be there too. In a music environment where genre-bending has become a genre itself, this band seems to step back and focus on playing something refreshingly specific: rock and roll.
Their music is known for its reverb. But it\'s the band members\' ability to move from a heavy, driving register to a softer, more heartfelt one, often within the same song, that makes their work so compelling. Lead singer Jim James\' voice comes off as that of an offspring of Neil Young and Michael Stipe.
But in My Morning Jacket\'s music it has found a perfect home. 9 p.m.
Tuesday, , 1332 W. Burnside St.; $23; 503-225-0047.
Barry Manilow: He doesn\'t get the buzz of, say, Neil Diamond, but Manilow keeps packing them in. 8 p.m.
Monday, Rose Garden, One Center Court. Tickets are $30 and $95, 1-877-789-7673. Click to read an interview.
Soap: What if Pedro Almodóvar made a Dogme film? The result of a collision between the flamboyant, gynocentric Spanish filmmaker and the stringent rules of the minimalist film movement would probably resemble Soap, a Danish drama about an unlikely friendship. Charlotte (Trine Dyrholm) owns a beauty shop and, having left her longtime boyfriend, moves into an apartment.
Her downstairs neighbor is Veronica (David Dencik), a preoperative transsexual whose mother still calls him Ulrik. Touching moments ensue. Opens Friday at the .
Reel Music Festival: The kicks out the jams on the 24th Reel Music festival starting this weekend, and the offerings are as diverse as we\'ve come to expect. Films profiling the Holy Modal Rounders, Bob Marley, Harry Nilsson and Keith Jarrett are on tap, as well as a series of films by Peter Whitehead, an avant-garde director who captured mod mayhem in 1967\'s Tonite Let\'s All Make Love in London, and caught Pink Floyd on film when the band was still known as the Pink Floyd. The Reel Music festival runs from Friday through Feb.
4; check out our weekly for a preview.
Notes on a Scandal: Starring Judi Dench as a spinster high-school teacher and art teacher Cate Blanchett, whose affair with a student kicks Dench\'s conniving mind into overdrive, Notes packs more heat, acid, danger and drama into its brief running time than most films of nearly double the length. Director Richard Eyre ( Iris, The Ploughman\'s Lunch ) whips up a rich, tart stew of heated melodrama, bitter comedy, cunning social observation and knockout acting.
The result is pungent and toothsome, a blend of Evelyn Waugh, Harold Pinter and To Die For -- a bracing concoction decidedly not for the delicate of disposition. Go for theater locations and times.
Julia Scheeres: The author reads from her book Jesus Land.
7:30 p.m. Monday, , 1005 W.
Burnside St.
For more entertainment options, go .
Summary: Leann Underwood has the legs, the energy, the training and the discipline, and now she\'s headed for New York City and one of the best ballet companies in the world
Leann Underwood sits beneath the bright dance studio lights, silently lacing up her pink pointe shoes.
One hour to class. Three hours to rehearsal. Twenty-eight days to her last performance as a company member of Oregon Ballet Theatre.
Each day is a countdown now.
Bye, sweetie girl, her father had called out that morning as she walked down the front steps of their Wilsonville home.
Bye, sweetie girl.
In just three weeks, she leaves Oregon and her family, perhaps for good, and boards a plane to New York City.
She is just 16, but already she is a rising star in the world of professional ballet. Her countdown has been sounding for years now.
James Canfield, Oregon Ballet Theatre\'s artistic director at the time, declared her a prodigy when she was 13.
At 15, she was named a full member of OBT\'s company.
And now, at 16, she\'s off to join the Studio Company of American Ballet Theatre, one of the most prestigious ballet companies in the country.
The company\'s director (who has worked with some of the finest young dancers in the world and once partnered famed prima ballerina Gelsey Kirkland) can barely contain himself at the sound of her name: I have never seen a 16-year-old that\'s excited me more, he says.
She is a study in perfection: long, poetic limbs -- Oh, those legs, the ballet\'s costume manager sighs. Like a thoroughbred\'s -- milk white skin, eyes like the sea after a storm, dark hair swept back in a perfect French twist, the kind of beauty, as poet Stephen Dunn puts it, others want to own.
And that might scare some folks -- the thought of how much New York could take from someone like that.
In the dim hush of his office, beneath a framed photograph of his own years as a dance prodigy, her current artistic director murmurs worries about her being pushed too soon, too fast.
But just watch her for a moment, off in the corner, running through her steps, her face calm, serene, even as you can see every muscle stretching, straining, roiling beneath her porcelain skin.
This is the girl who once danced for days on a fractured foot, trying to suffocate the pain with sheer will, who has, since the day she was born, her mother says, never had to be pushed, who starts each morning, without fail, with a reading from her devotional. Making friends her own age has always been difficu she projects a maturity, a self-possession beyond her years.
There\'s something that\'s expressed from deep within her, says John Meehan, artistic director of American Ballet Theatre\'s Studio Company.
Something very quiet, but . . .
very insistent.
She was so insistent. Just a little thing, still in the first grade, begging her mother in a tiny voice to sign her up for ballet.
One of her friends at the time took lessons. Leann -- who loved to move, who had been moving since she was born, her father, John, liked to say, who reveled in playing dress-up and whirling around the house so much that her grandmother would alter old prom dresses to fit her -- thought it looked like something she would like to do, too.
Her parents -- a human resources manager and a teacher\'s aide at a private Christian school -- simply followed her lead.
We had no idea what this was all about, her mother, Dixie, says. We had no background in the arts, no dancers in the family. It was like learning a foreign language.
Literally. She\'d come home and tell us all these ballet terms, and we didn\'t know what she was talking about.
For Leann, the connection was immediate, fierce.
Soon, Dixie recalls, All her teachers were pulling me and my husband aside and saying that she really needed to go to a professional ballet school.
At 9, she began classes at OBT. Dixie still remembers what her daughter said when she crawled into the car after her first day there, so small, yet so serious, so certain: This is what I\'ve been looking for, Mom.
Even then, she danced with an intensity, a focus, a hunger, rarely seen in someone so young, remembers Elena Carter, one of Leann\'s teachers. Carter, herself a talented dancer, who over the course of her career danced with companies in Mexico and New Zealand, the Dance Theatre of Harlem and OBT, among others, has been a member of OBT\'s school faculty for more than 15 years and has seen many young dancers in that time. Here you are, in the presence of something extraordinary, Carter recalls thinking.
James Canfield, OBT\'s artistic director at the time, also was immediately taken with Leann. She knew things you couldn\'t teach, he says. When she first put on pointe shoes, it looked like she had been living in them all her life.
He invited her to attend company classes, to spend as much time as she wanted absorbing the company\'s daily life. He gave her opportunities to dance in the company corps. When she was just 13, he passed over seasoned dancers from the company to cast her in the central pas de deux of Equinoxe, the first piece he ever choreographed.
The ballet cognoscenti outside Oregon were drawn to her, too. The School of American Ballet and American Ballet Theatre courted her with full scholarships to their highly competitive summer programs. At her first audition for the School of American Ballet\'s summer program, Leann was offered a full scholarship on the spot.
She was 11.
These are not details that you will learn from Leann. In fact, Leann is disarmingly understated when she discusses her dancing.
If you find something you\'re OK at, she says, sincerely, you just love doing it.
Her humility, says Canfield, is part of her gift.
Classes, rehearsals, travel
Home-schooled for much of her life, Leann has fit in her education outside of ballet whenever she can.
Her days are a blur of classes and rehearsals. She has spent more hours than she cares to count in the passenger seat of her mother\'s car, hurtling down the interstate between Wilsonville and Portland, sometimes as many as four times a day.
In six years, Dixie has gone through three cars.
Her current Honda CRV, just two years old, already has more than 50,000 miles on the odometer.
There is an intense tenderness in Leann\'s dancing, a subtly, a quietness, a control, as Meehan puts it, that shows up in the rest of her life.
She is the girl who bakes cupcakes with pink frosting for her fellow dancers, who announces before class that her church is having a canned food drive -- Can anyone spare something?
-- and walks away, just days later, with seven overflowing paper bags.
Even as she is still waking up, the car just beginning its daily trajectory toward Portland, she does not settle into a sleepy teenage silence but instead sweetly offers to quiz her brother Jeoff, who is 11, on his vocabulary words. She sews, in what little spare time she has -- tiny little dance skirts in sheer, luscious fabrics, which she sells to the other dancers and which on a recent day nearly every woman in the company seemed to be wearing.
Early in the year, as she was just settling into her first year as a full member of the company, Leann remarked on how happy she was dancing professionally with OBT ( I remember thinking it can\'t get any better than this ), how she was in no hurry to go anywhere else.
But as Canfield had predicted, it was just a matter of time before a big company came calling.
In this case, it was American Ballet Theatre, one of the most storied companies in the world, company of Lucia Chase, Jerome Robbins, Agnes de Mille and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Leann\'s father received the call at work. A spot had opened in ABT\'s Studio Company, and company director Meehan, who had seen Leann dance at ABT\'s summer program, had his heart set on her.
ABT\'s Studio Company, which is made up of a dozen dancers ages 16 to 20, is considered a training ground for the world\'s rising young stars of ballet.
Much like baseball\'s minor league farm system, the dancers in ABT\'s Studio Company spend one to two years training for a potential shot at the big leagues. The best are called up to ABT\'s main company. In recent years, ABT soloist Erica Cornejo and corps de ballet members Misty Copeland, Danny Tidwell and Oregonian Angela Snow (who also trained at OBT) have all come up through the Studio Company.
Meehan clearly has similarly high hopes for Leann.
Reached at ABT\'s studios in New York, he borders on the reverential: We speak in very hushed tones about Leann, he says. And then the superlatives spill out across the telephone line, one after the other.
Extraordinary. . .
. Phenomenal. .
. .
It was all very flattering, but at first, the Underwoods said thanks, but no thanks.
Sixteen seemed much too young for a girl to head off on her own to New York. She hadn\'t finished high school yet. Also hanging in the air was the fact that ABT is much bigger.
Even if Leann were to land a spot in ABT\'s main company one day, she would be one of 90 dancers in the company\'s corps de ballet, while at OBT she was one of just 21 dancers. Competition for attention, for precious performance time, let alone solos, would be much greater.
For several days, the family talked and prayed, enlisting the advice of close friends from their church.
In the end, John and Dixie decided to do what they had always done, ever since their daughter had first begged to take ballet: They would leave the choice up to Leann.
After methodically weighing all the pros and cons, Leann decided that she wanted to go. I didn\'t want to look back and regret that I didn\'t take this chance, she says.
The news surprised Christopher Stowell, the artistic director of OBT for the past two years. He had expected something like this might come -- just not so soon.
I don\'t want to sound like I\'m unsupportive, he says in his office one morning, as Leann prepares for rehearsal down the hall.
One gets protective of the kids you work with. . .
. You worry about people saying, \'This girl\'s really talented. Let\'s push her really fast.
\'
He has tried to be very thoughtful, very strategic about her development, he says. He just hopes other people will do the same, hopes they will allow the flower to bloom the way it\'s supposed to.
And that\'s the thing about her decision to leap into the unknown, about any of the big decisions that we all must make -- no one can say for sure what will happen next.
All Leann knows is that she wants to dance -- has to dance.
For her, it\'s the same as breathing, Elena Carter says. She needs it.
And whether it will ultimately be in New York or perhaps back with a smaller company some day, those who have worked with her over the years are not hesitant in their predictions. I have no doubt she will have a brilliant career, Canfield says. She is smart, her eyes are open, and she is gifted.
On a recent evening, after a long day of rehearsals at OBT, Leann placed a large silver pan in the sink and dumped a tray of ice cubes into it, so that she could soak her aching feet. Then she turned on the tap and as the tub filled, she padded off to her bedroom, painted a vibrant lavender.
As the OBT season wound down, she had been trying to do what she could in her off hours to get ready for New York.
Recently, she had applied for a passport and picked up the paperwork for an ID card (she had still not yet had time to study for her driver\'s license or finish her schooling -- she was hoping to take the GED test this summer).
Near her bed, she passed a small beige box. In it were scissors, notepads decorated with polka dots, scented lotions and, more intriguingly, two photo albums.
One album held picture after picture of her mother, father and younger brother. The other album contained page after page of photographs chronicling her days with OBT.
These are the things she is collecting for her apartment in New York, she said -- the things that she will carry with her as she leaps into her great unknown.
Big news for , a talented young dancer who left Oregon at just 16 for a chance to dance with the storied American Ballet Theatre in New York.
After dancing with ABT\'s Studio Company for just under a year and a half, Underwood has been named an apprentice with ABT\'s main company.
It\'s a huge accomplishment.
ABT\'s Studio Company is made up of a dozen dancers ages 16 to 20, who are hand-picked from around the world. They are considered the rising young stars of the ballet world. The way the Studio Company works -- and you\'ll have to pardon the clumsy sports metaphor -- is a lot like baseball\'s farm team system.
These young dancers spend one to two years training for a shot in the big leagues. The best are called to up to ABT\'s main company.
Underwood\'s success is not entirely unexpected.
Named a full member of Oregon Ballet Theatre\'s company at just 15, people had been tipping her to go far for years now.
To read a story about Underwood that appeared in the Oregonian just before she left for New York, go .
The has announced the winners of its 2007 Book Awards.
They are:
David Biespiel, Portland, won the William Stafford Memorial Poetry Award for Long Journey. Biespiel writes a poetry column for The Oregonian.
Iain Lawrence, British Columbia, won the Children\'s Book Award for Gemini Summer.
Other recipients include Ivan Doig, Seattle, for The Whistling Season and David James Duncan, Montana, for God Laughs Plays.
Greg Mortenson, Montana, and David Oliver Relin, Portland, won for Three Cups of Tea . Jess Walter, Spokane, won for The Zero.
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