While you’re in: Hear happy Irish tunes, get a Shakespeare fix, peek at pandemic art
Live from Ireland
We Banjo 3, who wowed locals at a sold-out 2017 concert at The Washington Center for the Performing Arts in Olympia, is performing live on stage Saturday for the first time since the pandemic put an end to live performances around the world. Known for its happy and upbeat tunes, the Irish Celt-grass quartet will take the stage at Dublin’s Pearse Lyons Distillery at 2 p.m. Pacific time. (The name doesn’t add up because the group started as a trio, and, well, We Banjo 4 isn’t nearly as melodious a moniker.) Tickets are available through the center, which will get a portion of the fee. “We were thrilled to bring We Banjo 3 to Olympia in 2017 alongside the Irish Rovers for a sold-out performance,” center executive director Jill Barnes said in a press release. “We know our patrons will remember this performance fondly and be ready to accompany these musicians for another great journey.” The $25 tickets allow a household to watch live and access the recorded show through March 20.
Pretend you’re in Ashland
Plenty of South Sound theater folks love to head down to Ashland, Oregon, to binge on the bard at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The festival recently announced plans for a 2021 season that will include some live performances, pandemic permitting. But it won’t be like the old days yet. Meanwhile, the festival is offering devotees a spring season of filmed performances from years past. The company’s 2017 take on “Julius Caesar,” with fight scenes inspired by modern dance, is available to stream through March 27. Tickets are $15 per household, or $40 for “Caesar” plus April’s “Manahatta” and May’s “Snow in Midsummer.” (The festival, as these titles make clear, isn’t only about Shakespeare.)
‘Picturing the Pandemic’
The latest exhibit at Childhood’s End Gallery in downtown Olympia takes inspiration from the events of the past year, including not only COVID-19 but also politics, protests and fires. “Picturing the Pandemic,” on view through April 18 online as well as at the gallery at 222 Fourth Ave. W., includes both works that respond to the tumult and pieces that offer an escape from it. In the former category are monotype and mixed-media works by Marilyn Frasca of Olympia. Frasca’s figures suggest a backstory the viewer can only imagine, and in her “Staying Home,” the mysterious subject, of indeterminate gender, holds on their lap a turtle, an apt symbol of 2020. “During the summer and fall of 2020, fires raged in California and Oregon, people all over the world were becoming ill and dying from COVID, and Donald Trump was votes away from winning another term as president,” Frasca wrote in her artist’s statement for the show. “Our atmosphere was literally thick with smoke and stress as I made the short walk to my studio, where I made drawings as a way of sorting things out, as a way of seeing what I was feeling. “ The other artists in the show are Mary Denning, Sara Gettys, Lisa Sweet and Mimi Williams.
Freelance writer Molly Gilmore loves Ashland so much that she travels there even when the theaters are closed. She discusses arts, entertainment and more with 95.3 KGY-FM’s Michael Stein on “Oly in a Can” from 3 to 4 p.m. Fridays.
This story was originally published March 12, 2021 at 5:45 AM.