It’s difficult to say if Dominic Fike’s output is the inevitable result of our multicultural musical monoculture (an oxymoronic irony for sure) or if he and his team’s creative choices are attempting to contribute to its continued dominance. While he could very well be from Los Angeles, New York, or maybe even Atlanta, Fike, a […]
For all of the negative-energy detritus that Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) left smeared across popular culture, no one rioted upon its release—including the people camped out by movie theaters to see it first. But as the origin tale for a beloved sci-fi trilogy, there was no way it was going […]
When I was in college in the early 1990s, I got swept up in the Riot Grrrl music movement despite the fact that I wasn’t female, Queer, or even female-presenting. Sure, I wore a skirt and a shit-ton of makeup to go out—but this was New York City and I was at my gothiest with […]
Has there ever been a musical group more committed to the conceptual panacea known as yacht rock than Pablo Cruise? That hindsight-made genre can be found in the name. You can see it in the Pablo Cruise logo: the cheesiest sunset and palm tree art this side of a “My Parents Went to Florida and […]
Little Dancer: A New Musical, an original play written and produced by local daughter-father duo Olivia and Chris Colvin, is set for its stage debut. Inspired by the life of Marie van Goethem, the young ballerina who modeled for Edgar Degas’ famous sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (1878–81), the performance imagines how van Goethem’s years […]
A B3 model Hammond organ from 1962, like the type Sam Fribush sets himself up behind, weighs upwards of 310 pounds—and that’s just the console unit alone. Throw the bench and a Leslie speaker in, and you’re easily crossing the 400-pound threshold. When your instrument of choice rivals the usual transportation concerns drummers contend with—their […]
What is it about music as an art form that pushes some people to demand authenticity from those they listen to? Honesty of vision is often expected of musicians in a way that visual or dramatic artists are generally free to ignore—at the very least, there’s supposedly a virtue in musical earnestness that audiences are […]
For a few years now, the UVA music department has taken to highlighting the works of its most progressive and conceptually minded students at the Digitalis Electronic Music Festival each spring. As a loose genre name, electronic music can be confounding to wrap your head around—the classification is broad, and never really reveals what you’re […]
It’s got a mouthful of a title: Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812. But we can be thankful that Dave Malloy, the musical’s original composer, lyricist, playwright, and orchestrator confined himself to adapting only a sliver of War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy’s monumental tome. Self-aware of its complexities, the production reveals what audiences […]
I’ve seen a few one-man or one-woman plays over the years and they’ve all had one thing in common: monotony. Being exposed to that kind of sameness adds up when you’re facing a lone actor strutting and fretting their ass off for 90 minutes or more—tasked with embodying the same persona for the entirety of […]