Storm Large Is Home for Thanksgiving
Hometown hero Storm Large is in town for her annual “Holiday Ordeal,” with a new Christmas album to boot.
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Storm Large is Portland’s own Rock Star: Supernova—that’s the CBS competition show that launched her out of a standing weekly gig at Dante’s in the aughts. In the years since, she’s toured on her own and as a member of Pink Martini, spent some time on America’s Got Talent, released a handful of albums, and penned an Oprah-approved and Oregon Book Award–winning memoir. In short: Large has achieved “holiday special” fame. Holiday special in November fame, actually, as she’s bringing her Holiday Ordeal to the Aladdin for two nights just after Turkey Day (November 29 & 30; $66).
Large didn’t wait to be anointed by anyone before taking on the holiday thingamajig. Christmas albums and concerts are the most conspicuous cash grab there is. But Large has her way with it. While hers isn’t quite a campy John Waters Grinchmas, it’s far from a Coca-Cola commercial drenched in cursive singing and Bible verse. Famously, the late great Darcelle used to read ’Twas the Night Before Christmas at the show. Pink Martini bandmates would (and in all likelihood will again this year) show up to sit in for a song or two. In the way she’s able to maintain an edge while satisfying the brief for a TV competition–type singer, Large hits the tender beats of a seasonal showcase—medleys and carols and whatnot—but skips the Camila Cabello “quismois” affect. Which might be why, despite years of putting on this “Ordeal,” it’s only now that she’s releasing a true holiday album.
A Joyful Noise is out Friday, making this local set of shows a record release party of sorts. But here Large is singing a taste of all 18 tracks in 60 seconds, as if tempting Simon Cowell and Sofía Vergara to…push the button? I caught “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and the psalm that is the title song. China Forbes, Ari Shapiro, and Jimmie Herrod are promised as features on the album, but you’ll have to buy a ticket to see who shows up for the live show—this one won’t be on TV.
More Things to Do This Week
Comedy Lady Bunny
7 & 9:30pm Wed, Nov 27 | Helium Comedy Club, $27–37
If RuPaul is the “Queen of Drag,” Lady Bunny might be the empress of its underworld. Bunny and RuPaul moved to New York together in the ’80s, and eventually two roads diverged. Alas, “Lady Bunny is arguably the city’s reigning drag queen,” The New York Times wrote in 2018. RuPaul became the face of drag as it meandered into the mainstream and Bunny founded Wigstock, the Labor Day drag festival in New York City that functions as something like the end of gay summer. Bunny, who’s originally from Chattanooga, Tennessee, is in town on her Don’t Bring the Kids stand-up tour. Rumor has it her last Portland show was canceled at the last minute, because her bipartisan political jokes were too “spicy.”
painting Jose Bonell
Thru Dec 14 | Adams & Ollman, FREE
Catalan painter Jose Bonell’s aims with Ways of Measuring Twilight—“to quantify that which is incalculable, like a fleeting sunset or transitional phase of life”—aren’t terribly unique. The magic is that he’s able to pull it off. From casual joys, like wearing a bow tie with silk pajamas (Best Outfit), to monumental shadows cast across history (Simone Weil Looking into the Future), Bonell’s tender oil-on-linen paintings delicately coddle life’s most fleeting moments into an image, though they threaten to disappear the longer you look at them. Maybe that’s why he paints such marvelous hands, dancing like firefly squid around laundry and doors and glittering butterflies and the sun as it slips off the horizon.
Theater Cyndi Lauper
8pm Sat, Nov 30 | Moda Center, $20–175+
What does it mean that this Girls Just Want to Have Fun tour is a farewell tour. What it sounds like, Cyndi Lauper told Good Morning America. “No more packing, planes, trains, and automobiles, and schlepping,” she said, her thick Queens accent furthering the idear. Lauper, now 71 and sporting a celadon green pixie cut, went on to make a Devil Wears Prada joke and explain that the tour came together in tandem with Let the Canary Sing, the 2023 documentary cataloging her rise to ’80s pop icon. And to be sure, in a world plagued by long-run, whole-album anniversary shows, you better believe this one’s about the hits.
What We’re Reading About Elsewhere
- Bella Swan’s abode and the Goonies house in a new doc. (The Oregonian)
- French novelist Constance Debré’s workshop for incarcerated Portlanders. (Some People Press)
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