ARTS Pick: Middlemarch in Spring
Thursday 3/23 & Friday 3/24 George Eliot’s novel arrives on stage as Middlemarch in Spring, a chamber opera that premiered in 2015. The musical treatment (part of the Virginia Festival […]
ARTS Pick: Stevie Nicks
Throughout the ’70s and ’80s Stevie Nicks reigned as a musical goddess. Her mystical words, gypsy attire and bewitching voice made an indelible mark on rock history, and her trail […]
ARTS Pick: Winter’s Ruin Metal Fest
Diseased Earth, Vomiting Dinosaurs and Dreaded may sound like Cretaceous period climate change warnings, but they are in fact perpetrators of modern angst that support the lineup at the second […]
ARTS Pick: Irish Night at the Coffeehouse
Performers from the Blue Ridge Irish Music School grab their tin whistles and fiddles and lace up their ghillies for Irish Night at the Coffeehouse with traditional music, song and dance […]
79.5 bandmates are romantic psychedelic soulmates
When 79.5 founder and frontwoman Kate Mattison started her band in 2012 she didn’t envision playing gigs in a setting that looked like something straight out of Pirates of the […]
Movie review: Disney’s live action Beauty and the Beast is a diverse reboot
The idea of a live-action remake of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is no better or worse than any of the mouse’s many examples of mining its own vault for […]
Jack Hamilton parses the racial history of rock music
Pop music critic Jack Hamilton didn’t listen to much pop music growing up in the 1980s and ’90s. His parents had a few Beatles albums and one Supremes record, but […]
Catch these highlights at the Virginia Festival of the Book
The programming of the annual Virginia Festival of the Book—now in its 23rd year—always seems to strike a beautiful balance of gravity and levity, tragedy and comedy, difficult reality and […]
Bryan Cranston on taking risks, misinformation and learning to cook…meth
Talk about Bryan Cranston and the conversation inevitably turns to his leading role in “Breaking Bad” as the high school chemistry teacher-turned-drug-lord Walter White. But Cranston’s career has many layers, […]
Album reviews: Novella, Chris Thile & Brad Mehldau and Chicano Batman
Novella Change of State (Sinderlyn) Perilous are the genres doggedly loyal to form in some way, like the blues or reggae. Just follow the chord progression, or chunk the guitar […]