Beverly Weston, aging poet and professor, sits among overstuffed bookshelves and reflects on the sum of his life: a marriage bound by whiskey and pills, a career lost in the shadows of tortured art. He quotes T.S. Eliot—“life is very long”—to his newly hired, live-in housekeeper, a young Cheyenne woman named Johnna, and admits it [...]
The streets will sound with tapping and twirling, leaping and jigging this Saturday, May 25, as the first annual Charlottesville Day of Dance takes over the Downtown Mall. This family-friendly event features an international array of dance forms and fitness practices, from Ireland to India, ballet to Nia. Megan Hilary, the festival’s founder, says the [...]
Vicious but mesmerizing, The Duchess of Malfi tells the story of one of the stage’s greatest women and two of its greatest villains. The widowed Duchess disobeys her two brothers by secretly marrying her household steward. When they reveal her sham, a slew of dreadful events are planned that ultimately result in a tale of [...]
06/18/2013 8:00 pm Trivia and Travis Fellini’s #9, Charlottesville VA
You don’t have to book an international flight or travel back in time to connect with cultural relevance—just buy a ticket to the ninth annual spring dance gala at PVCC.
A mass of jittery young actors crowded the stage on Thursday night, peppering drama teacher and theater director Madeline Michel with last minute concerns before rehearsing Monticello High School’s spring musical, In the Heights. Then the lights dimmed, the students found their stage marks, and [...]
Live Arts takes an ambitious foray into the comically dysfunctional dark side of a pill-popping, secret-keeping Midwestern family in its spring production of August: Osage County, under the direction of Fran Smith. This Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning drama by Tracy Letts gives an all-access [...]
Enjoy the verbal sparring and spirited courtship of Katharina and Petruchio as Four County Players closes its 40th anniversary season with Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Comedy ensues when a determined suitor (Martyn Kyle) pursues a strong-willed and resistant maiden (a fiery Mendy St. [...]
“‘Leapin’ lizards!’ You do not want to miss this show,” said MaryAnne Thorton, the director of The Black Box Players’ production of Annie, which will open tomorrow evening. Thorton has directed all of The Black Box Players’ shows since she founded the theater in 1986, and has [...]
Never was there a tale of more woe than that of Maria and her Tony. Broadway’s West Side Story travels south to the John Paul Jones Arena for one night only. Revel in the Bernstein and Sondheim score, the knife fights, and the love story as the Jets and the Sharks spar on the streets [...]
It’s two days before opening night, and the Albemarle High School Players are taking a rare breather. Larry Johnson, a retired math teacher who’s been building sets at AHS since the current cast of Hello, Dolly! was in elementary school, is seated in a chair near the edge of the stage. Clad in [...]
In addition to flowering trees and early morning bird songs, spring is the time for a bounty of annual student concerts, exhibitions, and performances for the lucky public. PVCC’s spring dance concert, “Simplicity,” features original jazz, salsa, contemporary, and hip-hop choreography by [...]
Liz Duffy Adams’ Or, is Live Arts’ latest offering, a deftly minced hodge-podge of a play, primarily consisting of what may be incompletely described as a retroactively considered Restoration comedy. Now, when was the last time you had a serious hankering for a Restoration comedy? Some [...]
The UVA drama department closes its 2012-13 season and busts open the doors of the much anticipated, state-of-the-art Ruth Caplin Theatre with the 1936 classic screwball comedy, You Can’t Take It With You.
Spring is here and it’s time to put a little art into it.
Chances are, your favorite creature feature stars the work of makeup and special effects master, and UVA alumnus, Stan Winston.
The 17th-century never looked as wildly seductive as it does within the world of Aphra Behn. There’s a war in the background of Liz Duffy Adams’ Or, but more importantly, Behn—a spy, poet, and key feminist writer—moves in a social circle marked by cross-dressing and free love.
What goes around If you think that bureaucracy and red tape are absurd, Czech playwright Václav Havel couldn’t agree more. And in his Soviet-era satire The Memorandum, everything from language to human sociality becomes ridiculous. When office worker Josef Gross finds a memo written in the [...]
Prison riot Even Shakespeare and John Fletcher knew that the rewrite of a Chaucer poem took some serious guts back in the early 17th century. Despite the potential for total demolishment of a poetic monument, the duo lets chaos run rampant in The Two Noble Kinsmen. What happens when two [...]
Slammer time In case the new Die Hard flick didn’t cut it and you still need your fix of action with little to no plot, World Wrestling Entertainment brings us RAW: Road to Wrestlemania a great one. All the big names, from the perpetually shirtless John Cena to the cleverly named The Miz and [...]
Nasal passages: Although Edmond Rostand’s theatrical classic Cyrano de Bergerac needs no other proof of success beyond the introduction of the word “panache” into the vernacular, the folks over at Play On! have done him another favor. In local playwright Peter Coy’s take, Mostly Cyrano, a [...]
Onstage, a fine-featured woman removes her skirt, collapses her bustle, and adjusts the corset nipping her waist. Her hands are pale and flighty as she sits on the doctor’s bench and pulls a medical drape up to her chin. Diagnosed with hysteria, a Victorian umbrella term for ailments including [...]
“Originally it was the idea of taking an old science fiction premise that wasn’t very good, and using it as a basis for sketch comedy,” Jones said. “But then I found this movie, that had everything I wanted."