The Creative Way

It's not JUST that the stage version of "Legally Blonde" added songs. That's plenty right there, but the tale of the underestimated blonde woman who gets herself a law degree has several more dimensions as a musical. Dancing for one, jumping rope for another.

It goes on from there, and Lauren Blair is in charge of all of it, as the director and choregrapher and casting director for the show, now onstage at Oregon Cabaret Theatre.

Vanessa Finney visits with the director in a new edition of The Creative Way. We get some idea of what it takes to go from bare stage to fully produced musical.

New York. Chicago. Plush. Plush, as in Plush, Oregon? Yep, it's one of the places in the country that saw a large influx of Irish people from the middle of the 19th century onward.

Corey Murphy sings songs of the Irish diaspora, with a special focus on the pipeline of people from the Old Country to Lake County. He's got an event coming up (July 13th) in Klamath Falls, to share some of his songs and stories, and Vanessa Finney grabbed him for an advance interview.

Corey Murphy is our latest guest on the podcast The Creative Way.

Imagine a vacation in a beautiful place, that someone else pays for. Just one catch: you have to do some work while you're there.

In the latest edition of The Creative Way, Host Vanessa Finney visits with Science Illustrator Serena Richelle at Hyatt Lake. Richelle is camping as part of a two-week Artist Residency program organized annually by the BLM. Listen for details of the residency, and how the artist is spending it.

While there have been efforts to make live performances more accessible to disabled audience members, large events, concerts, and festivals aren't always the most welcoming to disabled patrons. The SOU Choir's Spring Concert aims to highlight accessibility and center the voices of people who navigate the world differently.

JPR's Creative Way host, Vanessa Finney speaks with Choir Director Jerron Jorgensen about the upcoming concert and how to make live performances more welcoming.

As part of its Wednesdays at the movies series featuring curated films, the Ashland Independent Film Festival is presenting, T-Rex.

It's a 2015 documentary film about Claressa Shields, a 17-year old from Flint, Michigan who dreamed of being the first woman in history to win a gold medal in Olympic boxing.

Creative Way host Vanessa Finney speaks with AIFF Executive Director Jim Fredericks, filmmaker Gary Kout, and T-Rex director Drea Cooper.

Beca Blake creates art in a number of different media, a sign of her versatility. That ability to shift with circumstances came in handy during a period when Blake and her children were briefly homeless. And her interest in art and community led to her curating the Woman Kind contemporary art exhibit on display for much of April at an art gallery in Phoenix.

Beca Blake is the first guest in The Creative Way, hosted by JPR's Vanessa Finney. She and Beca explore art and the impulse to create it, and to foster its creation in others.

You know how, back in Williams Shakespeare's time, ALL of the parts were played by men, no matter the genders of the characters?

Lisa Wolpe has been working for a while now to turn that on its head. It is entirely possible that Wolpe has played more of Shakespeare's male characters than any other woman in history.

And she strings together several of Shakespeare's male monologues into a one-person show, "Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender," running through next week at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Wolpe is Vanessa Finney's guest in a new edition of our arts segment, The Creative Way.