A condensed all-female production of Shakespeare’s King Lear reimagines the Bard’s darkest masterpiece as a compelling exploration of maternal authority and sisterhood in Queen Lear. Mounted by Cottage Industry, a women-only performance and production troupe based in Charlottesville, the one-hour play places veteran actress Kate Bennis in the titular role under the direction of local […]
A condensed all-female production of Shakespeare’s King Lear reimagines the Bard’s darkest masterpiece as a compelling exploration of maternal authority and sisterhood in Queen Lear. Mounted by Cottage Industry, a women-only performance and production troupe based in Charlottesville, the one-hour play places veteran actress Kate Bennis in the titular role under the direction of local […]
Long before he stepped onto a stage, Jim Waive was putting on a show. “Our household was filled with music,” recalls Patti Rightmier, one of Jim’s three older sisters. “My mom loved music. My mom listened to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass…” “Tom Jones, the 5th Dimension—a variety,” adds Judy Crist, another sister. “And Jim—as […]
For families—that is, people with kids—there may be no better local entertainment this summer than driving out to Barboursville for The SpongeBob Musical by Four County Players. Sure, you could go see the latest Pixar-y mega-movie, but films aren’t able to offer one critical element: real live humans performing with the thrill of theatrical danger. […]
Live Arts offers up a teen show doubleheader of Mel Brooks’ musical Young Frankenstein and Shakespeare’s tragedy Coriolanus. Monstrous laughter ensues when Frederick Frankenstein, grandson of the infamous Victor Frankenstein, inherits his family’s Transylvania estate and quickly takes up the mad sciences in Young Frankenstein. In Coriolanus, Rome is experiencing famine-induced unrest, which is disrupted […]
American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Playhouse, Through August 2 As far as Shakespeare plays go, The Winter’s Tale is stuffed full of the tropes audiences are familiar with from the Bard’s more well-tread works: jealous rage aimed at assumed infidelity, disguised identities, forbidden love, and misuse of power. But in the reliably capable hands of the […]
The Virginia Theatre Festival keeps rolling with The Heart Sellers, a deeply moving play by Pulitzer Prize finalist Lloyd Suh. Set in 1973 in the wake of the Hart–Celler Act’s abolition of immigration quotas in America, two 20-something immigrant women meet by chance in a grocery store on Thanksgiving night. The women spend an evening […]
The 51st Virginia Theatre Festival opens with Into the Woods, directed and choreographed by UVA alum and VTF veteran Matthew Steffens. The Tony Award-winning fan-favorite musical follows fairy tale characters including Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and others in a show exploring the costs of happily ever after. With a cast that combines Broadway talents […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]