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Arts & Culture
‘Scrooge in Rouge’ Nicely Rewards the Naughty
Up in Cornelius, Bob Cratchit still can’t afford new clothes for Tiny Tim and his kiddies as the holiday season approaches. But Ebenezer Scrooge’s downtrodden clerk can take comfort in knowing that the local butcher has been suffering even more. As he reports to his goodwife Martha, the butcher accidentally…
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Arts & Culture
‘Eureka Day’ and ‘Vanya…’ Disagree Agreeably in Separate Productions
Although conflict and chaos onstage oftentimes shock and alarm us, they can also be the springboards to comedy and satire. On balance, that is likely how you will experience the two new productions that opened last weekend: one at The Arts Factory on the Johnson C. Smith University campus and…
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Arts & Culture
Theatre Charlotte’s ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ Is a Clue-ful Poirot Treat
We can thank the Brits for the notion that passenger trains should run with absolute timeliness and precision. Now that Ken Ludwig’s meticulous adaptation has opened at the Queens Road Barn, we can also thank Agatha Christie, Britain’s most avidly read mystery writer, for Murder on the Orient Express. Layer…
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Arts & Culture
‘Laugh ‘Til You Die’ Is a Sketchy Spooktacular
A vampire visits a comely maiden dressed bewitchingly in black for Halloween. A werewolf goes to a special summer camp for monsters. A strange woman with a cloven head conspires with a mouse to murder an angel. These are among the seasonal dainties served up by Concord-based Post Mortem Players…
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Arts & Culture
‘Raisin in the Sun’ Remains an Aspirational Reminder
Did somebody just say something about FREE SPEECH?! Yeah, about a billion times per second if you’re tracking social media, college campuses, nation’s capitals, and late-night TV. Still no theatre critic we know would dare suggest in today’s torrid media climate that the subject generates too much heat and too…
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Arts & Culture
Vox Populi Deafeningly Lauds ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ at The Barn
Sunny, frolicsome, dark and bizarre; it’s tough to say whether the best landing spot for Little Shop of Horrors is during the spring, that fragrant time of flowering hope and romance, or the fall, that decaying season of colorful rot and the macabre. All of the Metrolina theatre companies and…
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Arts & Culture
Charlotte’s Off-Broadway Presents Three Acts in One With ‘Meet & Greet’
Auditions are a kind of interview, and interviews are a kind of audition. You enter, drop a résumé on somebody’s desk, and minutes or hours later, you exit elated or deflated. Instant drama. Singularly human. A paradigm of life. At the VAPA Center, auditions and interviews are the entire evening…
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Arts & Culture
‘Electricidad’ Electra-fies at the Arts Factory
Maybe by now we’re numbed to the truth. You know how it is: 30 dead, 57,000 acres burned, 18,000 homes and buildings burned to the ground, and 200,000 people evacuated. Not enough problems already in California? Let’s call in masked men from ICE and the National Guard! The upheavals out…
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Arts & Culture
Upsized ‘Immediate Family’ Has the Buzz, Needs More Heat
Anyone who saw the fine Theatre Charlotte production of Lydia R. Diamond’s Stick Fly this past spring can be forgiven if they feel a vague sense of déjà-vu this month at Booth Playhouse, where a revival of Paul Oakley Stovall’s Immediate Family has been launched with ultra upscale production values…
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Arts & Culture
‘Sex, Lies, and a Sycamore Tree’ Goes for the Jugular, Almost
Away somewhere in Sycamore Grove, a subdivision in the burbs of a certain fast-growing New South city in the Carolinas, there’s a diversity problem. For the McLeans and the McDaniels, lily-white next-door neighbors in playwright Elaine Alexander’s new comedy Sex, Lies, and a Sycamore Tree, there’s still too much of…
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Arts & Culture
‘Side Show’ Honors Two Little-Known Personalities from Charlotte History
When Louella Parsons, the undisputed queen of Hollywood gossip, saw the Hilton Sisters’ first movie in 1932, she proclaimed: “For pure sensationalism, Freaks tops any picture yet produced. It’s more fantastic and grotesque than any shocker ever written.” At the height of their fame, Daisy and Violet Hilton could draw…
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Arts & Culture
The Delphic Oracle Sings The Go-Go’s in ‘Head Over Heels’
Heaven, Elysium, Utopia, Paradise and Arcadia are all perfect places in our minds, too placid and static to be considered as settings for comedy, thrilling action or drama. If you were in search of a perfect backdrop for the music of The Go-Go’s, you would more likely pick a city…
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Arts & Culture
‘Stick Fly’ Proves Its Sticking Power at the Old Barn
After they break out on Broadway, some plays only seem to become more relevant, profound and mature — if they manage to stick around. That was my experience in attending the opening night of Lydia R. Diamond’s Stick Fly at Theatre Charlotte, which runs through June 1 at the Queens…
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Arts & Culture
Mena Mark Hanna on the Changing Face of Spoleto Festival USA
Across the Carolinas, the season flips on Memorial Day in late May each year, signaling the start of summer. In Charlotte and Charleston, our respective tourist meccas, each city’s transformation can be marked by an annual event. In the Queen City, it’s all about Circle-K Speed Street and the Coca-Cola…
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Arts & Culture
‘…what the end will be’ Is Damningly Futuristic
It’s amazing how public sentiment outpaces settled American law on some issues — specifically in the evolution toward the approval of marijuana, abortion, gay marriage and assisted suicide. When Marsha Norman’s ‘Night, Mother premiered on Broadway in 1983, the concept of physician-assisted suicide hadn’t really evolved into a public issue.…
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Arts & Culture
Get as Close as You Can to ‘She Kills Monsters’
While movies and TV serve as the hallowed afterlife for Marvel headliners and other superheroes, there are not many comic books that have been adapted into plays or musicals — save for that regrettable Spiderman the Musical fiasco. Video games often make it to the big screen, but never to…
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