Have you ever seen Stunt Rock? You’d remember if you did. The 1978 trash cinema is some kind of musical/action/mockumentary about an Aussie stuntman who arrives in L.A., meeting up with a relative who performs in a terribly confused band called Sorcery. It’s the band I want to talk about: theatrically adventurous though musically inept, […]
Since 2006, The Vivaldi Project has been stringing audiences along with a host of engaging programs focused on Baroque and classical works. Co-directors Elizabeth Field (violin) and Allison Nyquist (viola) have created an impactful trio with the help of Stephanie Vial (cello); for their performance at UVA’s cozy but stately Old Cabell Hall on Friday, […]
When you’re ambitious, you do what you can to chisel out your chunk of fame. So what has Sharon Van Etten been doing? In following a singer-songwriter migration pattern that’s led her to Tennessee, New York, and California, she’s stockpiled her cred in indie circles (note her press release being penned by none other than […]
For a classical strings-meets-hip-hop beats duo, there’s something very unexpected about what Black Violin has become: easy to listen to. That’s both good and bad. Violist/vocalist Wil Baptiste and violinist Kev Marcus have made a choice to evolve over 21 years of fusing disparate styles. But as is often the case, time and repeated exposure […]
According to the internet, Bob Mould performed at the Marquee in New York City on March 8, 1991, touring his second solo album, Black Sheets of Rain. As an 18-year-old, I won two tickets to the show by calling into the local Long Island alternative radio station around 2am. Because no one I knew was […]
Here’s a failed movie pitch: A 1980s-era top 40 solo artist of some success finds his way into a time machine and emerges in 2025 with the songwriting and production knowledge of all the years he missed in between. Yet in spite of that new understanding, he stays comforted by the tastes that defined his […]
American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Playhouse, Through August 2 As far as Shakespeare plays go, The Winter’s Tale is stuffed full of the tropes audiences are familiar with from the Bard’s more well-tread works: jealous rage aimed at assumed infidelity, disguised identities, forbidden love, and misuse of power. But in the reliably capable hands of the […]
Monticello Friday 7/4 In these tense times, you have to wonder what the Fourth of July means to us in 2025. Independence from the English crown, sure, but with No Kings protests and a growing lack of faith in major political parties, the democratic intentions of the founding fathers may reverberate with added gravity—at least […]
The Paramount Theater 6/21–6/22 Man meets woman. Woman seduces man. Man leaves wife. Woman leaves man for a bullfighter. All hell breaks loose. It’s a story as old as—well, as old as 1845, when Prosper Mérimée wrote a novella about it. Thirty years later, French composer Georges Bizet enlisted librettists Henri Meilhac and Lodovic Halévy […]
Saturday 5/3, IX Art Park Ships In The Night, the one-gal, electronic, smoke-and-mirrors synth project of Charlottesville’s own Alethea Leventhal, descends from the ethereal mists for what local fans will recognize as a performance wrapped in a thematic event. SITN has a recurring habit of playing all manner of spookily framed balls, proms, raves, and […]