ARTS Pick: Legally Blonde, The Musical

Paint the town pink with perky sorority girl-turned-law student Elle Woods and her lovable four-legged sidekick Bruiser in Legally Blonde: The Musical. Based on the novel by Anna Brown and the 2001 motion picture, the play showcases everyone’s favorite heroine as she sings her way through boyfriend woes, Harvard Law School, and the murder of the century, […]

Interview: Billy Campbell discusses lessons from his Virginia youth

Some people claim that Disney World is the only place where dreams come true. I beg to differ, Cinderella’s castle notwithstanding. My case in point: a broke intern, far from her hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia, forced to babysit on the side to finance her fanatical addiction to Nike running shorts, can, in fact, find herself interviewing […]

ARTS Pick: Ash Lawn Opera’s La Bohème

If you prefer passionate narratives to summer blockbusters, then the annual Ash Lawn Opera Festival is probably already on your radar. The arts community stronghold is kicking off another season with Giacomo Puccini’s beloved masterpiece La Bohème. Set in 19th-century Paris, the foundation for the popular Broadway musical Rent follows a group of struggling artists […]

Heritage Theatre Festival’s Red depicts an artist in turmoil

The year is 1958, and abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko sits in a chair in his New York studio, smoking a cigarette and considering the audience. Or rather an invisible canvas that hangs between us. Aside from a coffee pot, a phonograph, and scotch, every surface is dedicated to artistic detritus. Rusty buckets, stained drop […]

Capshaw’s Starr Hill Presents enters partnership with The Southern

Coran Capshaw is expanding his live-music footprint on the Downtown Mall, today announcing a new partnership with The Southern Café & Music Hall. Starr Hill, the concert promotion arm of  Capshaw’s Red Light Management, released a statement today that confirmed the new relationship pairing the small venue on South First Street with the local industry giant, […]

Summer stocked: The Heritage Theatre Festival returns with guns out

The construction is complete, and Robert Chapel is ready to dig in. As Heritage Theatre Festival’s Producing Artistic Director, Chapel is eager to launch the company’s first full season in two years following the opening of UVA Drama’s new Ruth Caplin Theatre. “I’ll be doing five shows: two in the Caplin, two in the Culbreth, […]

Local kids shine in Missoula Children’s Theatre

While the summer sun beats down outside this weekend, the Paramount stage will be replete with winter wind workers, blizzard bringers, icicle sharpeners, and snow smoothers – all local children cast in the Missoula Children Theatre’s modern adaptation of The Princess and the Pea. From kings, queens and phony princesses to flower gardeners and dust […]

Live Arts hits home and heart with full force in August: Osage County

Beverly Weston, aging poet and professor, sits among overstuffed bookshelves and reflects on the sum of his life: a marriage bound by whiskey and pills, a career lost in the shadows of tortured art. He quotes T.S. Eliot—“life is very long”—to his newly hired, live-in housekeeper, a young Cheyenne woman named Johnna, and admits it […]

First Annual Day of Dance makes moves on Saturday

The streets will sound with tapping and twirling, leaping and jigging this Saturday, May 25, as the first annual Charlottesville Day of Dance takes over the Downtown Mall. This family-friendly event features an international array of dance forms and fitness practices, from Ireland to India, ballet to Nia. Megan Hilary, the festival’s founder, says the […]

ARTS Picks: The Duchess of Malfi at Blackfriars Playhouse

Vicious but mesmerizing, The Duchess of Malfi tells the story of one of the stage’s greatest women and two of its greatest villains. The widowed Duchess disobeys her two brothers by secretly marrying her household steward. When they reveal her sham, a slew of dreadful events are planned that ultimately result in a tale of […]