Things to Do in Portland This Week, October 2025
Image: Michael Raines
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The Clinton Street Theater is much bigger than its 222 seats would have you believe. Since the late ’70s, the single-screen movie house has, by showing The Rocky Horror Picture Show, stretched to host anyone and everyone who feels more at home with Tim Curry and Susan Sarandon in Transylvania than in the material world. Monday, October 27, the Clinton’s regular shadow cast, the Clinton Street Cabaret, is expanding the walls further, by taking over the 3,000-seat Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall with Barry Bostwick, a.k.a. the real-life Brad Majors (7pm, $75+), for a supersize romp to celebrate the movie’s 50th anniversary.
Rocky Horror fandom has long been a haven for a specific brand of film geek and thespian across the world. But, as I learned while reporting a story about the local screenings this fall—officially, the movie’s birthday was September 26—Portland has a famously passionate Rocky cohort. The Clinton began screening the film in 1978. (It was inspired by midnight screenings in other cities, but thanks to a devoted projectionist’s efforts during COVID shutdowns, the Clinton’s is the longest-running Rocky screening anywhere.) While at first normies balked at the glitter and fishnets and ecstatic joy religious attendees sported, the mainstream crowd seemed to pick up on the show’s importance soon enough. “Members of its loyal audience may feel like social outcasts most of the time,” wrote The Oregonian in 1980, “but watching ‘Rocky Horror,’ they can feel that the whole world is outcast from them.”
At the Clinton and theaters elsewhere, shadow casts emerged as screenings grew more popular. The local Clinton Street Cabaret, a 30-person company, formalized in 1986. These groups perform alongside the movie, acting out scenes in costume while screaming, yelling, singing, dancing, and throwing things.
Kyle Horton, producer of the 76th term of the Clinton Street Cabaret, first joined the group in 2011. “All of a sudden…I wasn’t John’s kid. I wasn’t Lori’s kid…I wasn’t Derek’s brother,” he told me recently. “It was like, ‘Oh, this is my thing. I’m just Kyle here.’” In 2024, at age 53, Thee Countess Sinophelia joined the cast, which gave her the confidence to launch her drag career. If you don’t understand, do be sure to get yourself down to the Clinton one Saturday night soon—or to the Schnitz this Monday, for a gleefully debauched night at our city’s finest, velour-clad concert hall.
More things to do this week
dANCE Carmen+
7:30PM FRI & SAT, OCT 24 & 25 | NEWMARK THEATRE, $35+
If there’s such a thing as an earworm aria in 2025, it’s “Habanera” from Georges Bizet’s opéra comique, Carmen. “We’re opening our 22nd season with a killer,” boasts NW Dance Project, the contemporary dance company behind this adaptation. Indeed, the onstage murder (!) scandalized Paris in the spring of 1875, as did the opera’s story of a Spanish soldier’s downfall as he’s seduced by Carmen’s wiles. Choreographed by Ihsan Rustem, NW Dance Project’s take on one of the most popular canonical operas ever debuted in 2017. Here, original cast members Andrea Parson and Franco Nieto (cofounder of Open Space Dance) reprise their roles alongside current company dancers.
MUSIC Margo Cilker
8PM SAT, OCT 25 | ALADDIN THEATER, $32
Cilker is a distinct voice in Americana folk music—and, usually, a distinctly Pacific Northwestern voice at that. She sways, track to track, from jangly, high-toned acoustic songs to a lively, full-band sound, filled out with lap steel and horns. She recorded both of her albums (2023’s Valley of Heart’s Delight is her latest) with members of the Decemberists, Band of Horses, and Beirut. And while there are traces of the eclectic, hodgepodge orchestra sounds associated with those groups on her records, Cilker, who lives in southern Washington, is never overshadowed by quirky production. Her songs are like personal travelogues; the charmed, slight twang of her voice comes through in a gentle vibrato when holding a note through a chorus.
VISUAL ART Emily Counts
THRU NOV 23 | NATIONALE, FREE
The world of Counts’s figurative sculptures is like outer space as seen through a stage designer’s eyes. The moths, cats, fruits, flowers, and surreal figures that continue to show up in her work manifest in disorienting scale and sport multiple eyes, pastel glazes, and strokes of gold enamel, all of which feel beautifully mythological instead of deranged. In Tender Echoes, Counts takes a meta posture, exploring the patterns that arise in a yearslong body of work, the small changes that come up in pursuit of a muse that’s proven quite durable.
Elsewhere...
- In Jen Silverman’s adaptation of Witch, sixteenth-century drama is made modern, or perhaps the two are shown to be one and the same. “Peasants starve while lords feast, superstition rules, and everyone is defined by rigid expectations and hierarchies,” writes TJ Acena, reviewing Profile Theatre’s recent production. (Portland Mercury)
- A dive, and body slam, into the art of T Boy Wrestling. “Hell yeah, brother!” (Willamette Week)
