Okay, I wasn’t prepared for the complete gut-busting insanity of The Play That Goes Wrong at Virginia Repertory Theatre’s November Theatre. Before heading to the Iron Blossom Festival this past Sunday, I caught a matinee. I didn’t know much about this play other than...
Why federal arts funding keeps the city’s creative economy alive. by Catie-Reagan King, Ed.D. On any given weekend in Richmond, you can find a stage lit up with stories, some bold and provocative, others warm and familiar. Whether it’s a world premiere at Firehouse Theatre, a boundary-pushing musical at Richmond Triangle Players, or a Shakespeare...
On stage and in the kitchen, some recipes are meant to be followed to the letter, while some are wide open for flair and interpretation. Big Broadway musicals thrive on delivering an experience as replicable as a chain restaurant’s marquee burger. This is not a dig. When you pay for a Broadway hit musical, you want a Broadway hit musical with all...
WIlliam Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the most popular comedies in the history of literature. It’s timeless. One of the best things about performing timeless Shakespeare comedies is that you can tweak, jigger, flip, and reverse his work into whatever shape pleases you and your audience. Set it in James Dean and Marylin...
A woman works in a diner. The kind with refills, regulars, and fluorescent lights that never quite turn off. She’s married to a man who doesn’t deserve her. She bakes pies that are better than most people deserve. And she wants out. That’s Waitress, more or less. It opens this weekend at Virginia Repertory Theatre, runs...
Richmond Shakespeare’s Summer Series is upon us! Opening this past weekend was Cyrano, the 1897 romantic revivalist play by Edmond Rostand (1868-1918), loosely based on the life and exploits of the 17th-century French novelist Cyrano de Bergerac. Considering the theatre world was consuming Ibsen, Chekov, and Strindberg at the time of Cyrano’s...
Once again, a trip to the Firehouse Theatre has found a way to send me home with a boiling pit of emotions churning in my gut and fiery rants on the tips of my fingers. Art is made to provoke, not to placate, and this is what I signed up for. SMOKE, the current exhibition taunting audiences at the corner of Lombardy and Broad, was produced by...
A horror-comedy about America’s favorite pastime—looking the other way. It starts with a wedding on a mountaintop. A shiny McMansion. Fancy coffee. Everyone posting the perfect angle of their happiness. But something’s off—and no one wants to talk about it. Produced by Cadence and opening tomorrow at Firehouse Theatre, SMOKE is a new...
Richmond’s own Black VA Theatre Alliance brings this month’s second outing of a Dominique Morrisseau play to a local stage, following Firehouse Theatre’s excellent production of Detroit 67. Like Detroit 67, Sunset Baby explores the living room dramas that persist against the backdrop of social unrest, activism, and disenfranchisement. We are...
I flew in under the wire to catch 5th Wall Theatre’s final performance of Martyna Majok’s Sanctuary City at Richmond Triangle Players' impressive stage in Scott’s Addition. This play is a curious hybrid, a bifurcated cryptid if you will, as its first and second acts are paced in startling opposition to each other. The play begins in time-lapse...
