Pick: 16 Winters, or the Bear’s Tale

Exit, pursued by a bear: The queen is in hiding, the king is wallowing, and everyone is pursued by a bear in 16 Winters, or the Bear’s Tale, an imaginative comedy set in the 16 years between acts three and four of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Written by Mary Elizabeth Hamilton, the music-filled play examines […]

Pick: Charlottesville SOUP

Slurp and support: Celebrate local arts, and enjoy a cozy dinner with friends at Charlottesville SOUP, a public dinner series that supports creative projects. Attendees are served a delicious dinner from Tilman’s, including a sandwich, salad, and dessert, and local artists will give short presentations on current projects. At the end of the night, each […]

Sandwiched in

“It was the Hot Wet Beef that started it all,” says Morgan Hurt.  Kitchenette, the lunchtime sandwich shop Hurt co-founded with her partner, Gabriel Garcia, boasts 22 different subs, hoagies, and rolls. But the Hot Wet Beef, a juicy roast beef hoagie with eggplant and pepper spread, is the OG. The inspiration came after a […]

Sound choices

By Greg Walker Lord Nelson Transmission, Self released If Tom Petty, with his tight-gripped, loose-lipped optimism, sang about bank robberies and car crashes, drug busts and broken relationships, it would sound something like Lord Nelson on Transmission, the group’s latest 11-track offering, a project that attempts to capture the dynamic, gritty-yet-generous pre-pandemic live sound of […]

All this and more

Co-directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All At Once is a relentlessly entertaining, hilarious parody of the nonstop kinetics and overused “multiverse” concepts of recent comic book and action movies. Although it’s heavy on its cartoonish, Sam Raimi-esque mayhem, the consistent likability and humanity make the film peculiarly uplifting. This science fiction/kung fu […]

Pick: The Children

In a fix: Do we owe future generations a better world than we’re leaving them? The Children, Live Arts’ latest production, explores this real-world question through the lens of three retired nuclear scientists. In a post-nuclear world, Hazel and Robin are trying to live a normal life despite radiation pollution and rationed electricity and water. […]

Pick: Sharon Van Etten

There must be a clone: Sharon Van Etten does it all. The singer-songwriter found time to write her fifth studio album, Remind Me Tomorrow, while she was studying psychology, pregnant, creating scores and soundtracks, and acting on Netflix’s “The OA.” It’s no surprise that the new album is an energetic, expansive record about pursuing your […]

Pick: Lucille Stout Smith

History of learning: Lucille Stout Smith uncovers local history in her new book, Unforgettable: Jackson P. Burley High School, 1951–1967. In a segregated Virginia, the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County came to an agreement to build and jointly operate Jackson P. Burley High as a “separate but equal” school for Black students living in […]

Seeing the divine

“A few months before she passed, my mom told me she’d had a dream that she was supposed to have a show called ‘Turn on the Light!’ It would be in January of the new year, manifesting our emergence from COVID and hope for our brighter future, and she would ask each artist she represented […]

A part to play

The Charlottesville Players Guild will perform its 2022-23 season entirely in the round, with the stage completely surrounded by audience members who are not considered observers, but rather part of the production. That’s the aesthetic Leslie M. Scott-Jones, associate curator of education and public programs at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center and artistic […]