Margaret Glaspy doesn’t mince words or deal in excess. Clocking in at a brisk 34 minutes, the singer-songwriter’s debut, Emotions and Math, made several best-of lists in 2016 with its blend of bluesy riffs and pared down rock ’n’ roll. “I do like things boiled down to their kind of most distilled nature. That was […]
Margaret Glaspy doesn’t mince words or deal in excess. Clocking in at a brisk 34 minutes, the singer-songwriter’s debut, Emotions and Math, made several best-of lists in 2016 with its blend of bluesy riffs and pared down rock ’n’ roll. “I do like things boiled down to their kind of most distilled nature. That was […]
Richmond band Jouwala Collective builds on the foundation of Gnawa music, which has its roots in Northern African spiritual celebrations, using the ancient form for a layered transcendence, blending it into modern, rhythmic trance music that meanders through funk, jazz, soul, reggae and electronic. Thursday, February 2. $7, 8pm. The Ante Room, 219 Water St. […]
A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters takes a poignant look at what passes between two people who share a deep bond despite vastly different lives. Childhood friends Melissa and Andrew correspond over 50 years, revealing a lifelong connection that examines multiple angles of human emotion. Broadway vets and real-life married couple Linda Poser and Kenneth H. Waller […]
“This play is not about my mother and me,” the character of Lisa insists at the beginning of Well. The play is, in fact, about Lisa and her mother, who cannot heal herself despite her extraordinary ability to heal a changing neighborhood. But Well is about many other things, too—the idea of wellness, the fraught, often […]
Singing, step-dancing fiddle player April Verch shows her roots in trademark fireball performances that channel the founding players of traditional folk music. The Ottawa Valley Canadian has been onstage since the age of 6, and with no sign of slowing down at age 38, she’s releasing The April Verch Anthology on February 17, an 18-track collection […]
There was something rather poetic about Synthetic Division’s recent impromptu performance at Goth Night at The Pit at Cinema Taco on the Downtown Mall. Melancholy cabaret duo Please Don’t Tell was scheduled to perform that night, but vocalist Christina Fleming lost her voice. Shawn Decker—the musician behind Synthetic Division—stepped in with his keyboard, his synth […]
Watching Gold, you can’t help but feel that every member of this production arrived with a different sense of what the final product would be. Stephen Gaghan is directing a fact-based procedural, Robert Elswit is shooting a psychological comedy-drama and Matthew McConaughey came overprepared for a madcap crime farce. The result plays out like American […]
A new exhibit at Second Street Gallery might represent the start of a new era for the gallery. José Bedia, a renowned Cuban painter and sculptor, will visit the gallery February 3 for a solo show and other events. Born in 1959 in Havana, Bedia studied Palo Monte, a branch of Congo-derived religion brought to […]
First Fridays: February 3 When Kemi Layeni was a child, she asked her mother to do her hair “like the fishies,” to fit her thick, kinky hair into a sleek ponytail. “I so desperately wanted to be anyone but me,” Layeni says, “whether that meant trading in my kinks for blonde hair, changing my name, Oluwakemi, […]
At a reading on January 25, author Junot Díaz encouraged an open dialogue with the audience of mostly UVA faculty and students through two generous question-and-answer sessions. He advised students to read to become better writers, because “reading becomes your frame of reference that informs your own work.” Díaz, who won the Pulitzer Prize in […]