“Sense and Sensibility”

The American Shakespeare Center brings Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility to the stage this summer. Brimming with wit, despair, humor, and insight, the adaptation by Emma Whipday with Brian McMahon shares the story of Dashwood sisters Elinor and Marianne as they navigate the entanglements of familial and romantic relationships. Exploring themes that continue to resonate […]

The Broken Hearts

Created in 2017 by former Tom Petty and Mudcrutch bandmate Charlie Souza, The Broken Hearts is dedicated to accurately capturing the live concert experience of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers in a tribute that won’t back down. If you don’t know how it feels to free fall into a setlist made for rock refugees and […]

Bellringer: Celebrating the Poetry of Rita Dove

Bellringer: Celebrating the Poetry of Rita Dove brings together the work of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and composer and bass-baritone Jonathan Woody. The world premiere of Woody’s new piece takes Dove’s poem honoring the life of Henry Martin—an enslaved bell ringer at UVA’s Rotunda who was born at Monticello on the day Thomas Jefferson died—and […]

Charlottesville Opera’s “Carmen”

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 […]

Adrian Younge pulls from the past and vast musical cultures

There’s a Portuguese word, saudade, that doesn’t translate exactly to English. Maybe it works out to something like “a mournful longing?” But composer and multi-instrumentalist Adrian Younge describes its meaning perfectly in trying to pinpoint his own particular brand of emotive music. “It’s the vortex of where dark music meets romantic music,” he says on […]

Aimee Mann

The Jefferson Theater Thursday 6/19 You really have to hand it to someone who hit rock bottom multiple times across a career, yet consistently managed to dust off and get back to business. Aimee Mann weathered an early success comedown with ’80s outfit ‘Til Tuesday, stepped out on her own, and got the proverbial shaft from […]

Author Lydi Conklin sets up camp in “Songs of No Provenance”

Lydi Conklin’s first novel, Songs of No Provenance, was published earlier this month, and tells the story of Joan, a disgraced New York musician seeking reinvention by teaching songwriting at a teen writing camp in rural Virginia. Conklin is also the author of Rainbow Rainbow, a story collection that was long-listed for The Story Prize […]

Mighty Joshua

Independent reggae artist Mighty Joshua’s conscious lyricism, decrying historic and contemporary inequity while praising positivity and resilience, speaks broadly to the experiences of the African diaspora. His words flow over compositions driven by African percussion traditions, creating a real roots reggae sound reminiscent of genre stars like Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. The artist has […]

Author Event: Brendan Slocumb

Classical music and criminal narratives commingle on the pages of The Dark Maestro, the latest offering from author, educator, and musician Brendan Slocumb. The book follows Curtis Wilson, a cello prodigy from a Washington, D.C., housing project. Wilson ascends to the heights of his profession, but his life is torn asunder when his father turns […]

On multiracial identity and the temporary insanity of writing

Danzy Senna’s latest novel, Colored Television, tells the story of Jane, a novelist and tenure-track professor, and her husband Lenny, a painter and teacher at a Los Angeles art school that’s described as “a white hipster playground.” As a self-identified mulatto woman married to a Black man, Jane is abundantly aware of issues of race […]