PICK: Thirty-Seven

Staying active: As a part of the Charlottesville Player’s Guild’s Amplify season, Leslie M. Scott-Jones’ play Thirty-Seven explores living, surviving, and fighting while being Black in America. Jamahl Garrison-Lowe plays Seth, a young Black man struggling with the decision to become an activist, and he asks himself: What will I risk? What will I gain? […]

Tunnel vision

By Lisa Provence Nothing happens quickly with the Claudius Crozet Blue Ridge Tunnel. Not its mid-19th-century eight-year construction, nor Nelson County’s nearly 20-year effort to reopen it, nor the documentary recently released by local filmmakers Paul Wagner and Ellen Casey Wagner. “I thought it would only be a few years, weaving the reopening and the […]

Golden games

This year continues to be anything but typical, and yet the march to the 93rd annual Academy Awards ceremony, moved to April 25, feels familiar. While far fewer films played in theaters over the past 12 months, we still have many cinematic achievements to celebrate, and a must-see movie list is a welcome distraction from […]

PICK: Mike Nichols

Following directions: Mike Nichols’ beginnings as an improv comedian in 1950s Chicago informed his long career as a film and theater director. He shepherded numerous Neil Simon plays to Broadway success, and drew brilliant performances from Robert Redford, Elizabeth Taylor, Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, and Tim Curry, among many others. In 1967 alone, he had […]

PICK: Met Stars Live in Concert

Hitting the high notes: Though the Metropolitan Opera house remains dark, the talent from its stages is still beaming around the world. Met Stars Live in Concert (in HD broadcast) features two performances from last summer: Renée Fleming from the Dumbarton Oaks estate in Washington, D.C., and Jonas Kaufman from Polling Abbey in Munich, Germany. […]

PICK: Equinox

Safety dance: “Well, everybody’s dancin’ in a ring around the sun,” sang the Grateful Dead. Seems that vibe is right on time to shake off a year of COVID quarantine. GD cover band The ’77z takes up the mantle of the hippie pied pipers at Equinox. The live gig will explore the transitional moods of […]

Letting it flow

By Alana Bittner When writer and photographer Kori Price agreed to be part of the curation committee for a Black artists’ exhibition at McGuffey Art Center, water was not on her mind. It didn’t come up until someone asked how they wanted viewers to move through the gallery. Price recalls discussing ways to make viewers […]

Rockin’ stout

Beer drinkers are weaning themselves off of so many unfortunate St. Patrick’s Day traditions. Green beer? Gone. Drinking enough to shame their Irish forebears by the end of the night? Well, mostly gone. The next step? Reaching for a locally made, artisanal stout or porter, rather than that well-known macro sludge. No, we’re not talking […]

Music, mystery, memory

It’s been the year of the pandemic, yes—but it’s also been the year of the book. Since the world shut down 12 months ago, we’ve turned to books to escape our stressful surroundings and also to explain the cataclysmic shifts outside and inside our homes. Last year’s Virginia Book Festival was cancelled as the pandemic first […]

Small-town noir

S.A. Cosby set out to be the next Stephen King. But he soon turned to a life of crime writing, and his latest noir caper, Blacktop Wasteland, may have pulled him in too deep to let him out. “I love writing about crime because it’s something everyone can understand,” Cosby says. “The platform makes it […]