Spamalot: Goldy's a nerd.
  • Spamalot: Goldy's a nerd.

Super Eagle: Brooding breakup dance.
  • Super Eagle: Brooding breakup dance.

Vice and Virtue and Other Works: Literal, eclectic dance.
  • Vice and Virtue and Other Works: Literal, eclectic, red.

The Normal Heart: We heart Thone.
  • The Normal Heart: We heart Thone.

The Icelandic Illumination Rangers: Lo-fi cartoon fun.
  • The Icelandic Illumination Rangers: Lo-fi cartoon fun.

A Great Wilderness: Bleak ex-gay reckoning.
  • A Great Wilderness: Bleak ex-gay reckoning.

Black Like Us: Multiracial, multigenerational controversy.
  • Black Like Us: Multiracial, multigenerational controversy.

Ed, Downloaded: Thin thought experiment.
  • Ed, Downloaded: Thin thought experiment.

American Wee-Pie: Redemption through cupcakes.
  • American Wee-Pie: Redemption through cupcakes.

Genre Bender: Trying new things.
  • Genre Bender: Trying new things.

Find more information about these shows—and more information about all the other shows happening this weekend—in The Stranger's theater calendar.

Addendum: This weekend, one-man vaudeville circus Frank Olivier plays Hale's Palladium. I used to watch Frank from backstage at the Oregon Country Fair, back when I was just barely an adolescent and hanging around the fringes of the neo-vaudeville/cirque noir crowd. (It's also where I first ran across Circus Contraption—their tour bus parked just a few steps from my tent.)

I haven't seen Frank perform in years, but I remember him as a clown car of talents—just when you thought you'd seen him do everything (juggling, unicycling, fire acts, tongue contortionism), some other bizarro delight would come tumbling out. He's a great juggler, but he specializes in looking like he's completely losing control when he is, in fact, master of the situation.

Watching him do his act over and over (and manufacture a sense of disaster for audience after audience) was one of the first times I noticed that magical tightrope a very few performers can walk between transporting people in a theatrical way and terrifying them in a real-life way—the ability to layer dramatic time on top of real time. (Ryan Mitchell and I talked about that phenomenon in this interview about Implied Violence and Saint Genet, which also layered real time and dramatic time—though with very different techniques and to much darker effect.)

It's hard to find good video examples of that, since it's such a visceral experience—and vaudeville on TV always looks so much worse than it does in person, when a performer is on her own turf and creating her own atmosphere—but here's Frank freaking out a daytime TV host years ago:

Here's him enraging Howie Mandel on America's Got Talent:

Here's Johnny Carson being a much better sport than Mandel about the same trick several years earlier.

You can imagine how fun he was to have around the campfire.