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Arts & Culture
‘Kimberly Akimbo’ Isn’t About Making Wishes
In Kimberly Akimbo, David Lindsay-Abaire’s upsized and upgraded musical version of his 2001 comedy, the perfection begins before the lights go down. We enter Knight Theater, where the Blumenthal production runs through April 27, and see a stage-filling projection of blue sky with white clouds punctuated by a telephone pole.…
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Arts & Culture
‘Violet’ Crosses the Country in a Musical Filled with Blues and Gospel
There are apparently two schools of thought on how to portray a horrifically scarred woman onstage, as we’ve learned over the past month in Charlotte’s theatre scene. Back in late February, Carolina Actors Studio Theatre took the cinematic approach at the original Mint Museum on Randolph, painstakingly applying makeup to…
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Arts & Culture
‘A Small and Humble Erasure’ Addresses an Historic Desecration
As playwright Tracy Letts knows well, there are unpleasant truths at the heart of American life and the American Dream. “Sometime tonight, when the temperature of your home drops to a specific mark and you hear the heater come on because that’s what you’ve programmed it to do, remember that…
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Arts & Culture
CAST’s ‘Alabaster’ Is All About Artists in Crisis
Google and Alexa will tell you if you ask: It’s a little bit more than a 17-mile drive from Bessemer to Alabaster, Alabama. Every source I’ve checked also confirms that Gip’s Place, known as the last backyard juke joint in America, was in Bessemer until its blues guitarist founder, Henry…
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Arts & Culture
‘The Play That Goes Wrong’ Goes Perfectly at The Barn
Every time Inspector Carter declares his determination to solve “The Murder at Haversham Manor,” lights at Theatre Charlotte suddenly turn a lurid red to triple-underline the melodrama. This may be the only technical element that consistently goes right in The Play That Goes Wrong, now running — and decomposing before…
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Arts & Culture
Matthews Playhouse’s ‘Bright Star’ Shines Zestfully
Though it never settles down in the Queen City, it’s nice to know that the storylines of Steve Martin’s beautifully crafted Bright Star trace a graceful decades-long oval around Charlotte — crisscrossing between Asheville and Raleigh with stopovers in Hayes Creek and Zebulon. Martin’s music leans pleasantly westward, delivering bluegrass…
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Arts & Culture
‘Christmas at Pemberley’ Gets a Gendered Makeover by DCP
If it weren’t for all the adaptations we hear about on TV and in movies, we could say that it required supreme audacity for Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon to tread in Jane Austen’s footsteps and pen a sequel to Pride and Prejudice, the Georgian-era author’s wittiest and most beloved…
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Arts & Culture
Upbraided and Uplifted at ‘Jaja’s African Hair Braiding’ in Harlem
My dear old Mom was born and raised in Harlem over a century ago, when a massive African-American cultural and literary Renaissance named for the fabled Manhattan district had already begun, with its storied 125th Street having been a major destination for northern migration after Lee surrendered to Grant. Even…
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Arts & Culture
Charlotte Ballet’s Beyond the Surface Amazes as It Parties Down
The new Charlotte Ballet season is off to a blazing beginning. In presenting Beyond the Surface at the McBride-Bonnefoux Center for Dance through Oct. 26, the troupe looked fresher and younger than ever. The choreography, in fact, was far younger; two world premiere hatchlings from Omar Román de Jesús and…
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Arts & Culture
‘The Humans’ Is More Haunting Than Ever in Davidson
Set on Thanksgiving in Chinatown — in the shadow of the fallen Twin Towers — Stephen Karam’s spooky, mystifying and hilarious The Humans hands us a world teeming with paradox. For an afternoon in a creaky, old two-story apartment, newly rented by Brigid Blake and her boyfriend Richard Saad, Blake’s…
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Arts & Culture
‘One Year to Die’ Is a Premiere to Be Proud of in Matthews
September 11 was a tragic date in LaBorde family lore long before it became such for most other Americans. On that date in 1943, German torpedoes sunk the USS Rowan in Mediterranean waters after it delivered an arms shipment to Italy to combat the Nazis. Local actor/director/playwright/school principal Charles Laborde’s…
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Arts & Culture
Sit Back and Let ‘The Drowsy Chaperone’ Hypnotize You
My advice for best enjoying the current run of The Drowsy Chaperone at Theatre Charlotte is to listen to the Man in the Chair — and yield to his pitch-dark hypnosis. Yes, before the lights even go up at the old Queens Road barn, he’s in his chair speaking to…
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Arts & Culture
‘The Mystery of Irma Vep’ Brings Giddiness to VisArt
My first hints that PaperHouse Theatre’s new production of The Mystery of Irma Vep would be truly unique came when I glanced at a hidden nook in the set and saw a little, half-hidden bar napkin that read “Homo Sweet Home.” About that same time, my first peep at the…
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Arts & Culture
Free Reign Theatre Presents Trim, Syndicated Run of ‘The Tempest’
Rarely mentioned among William Shakespeare’s best comedies, let alone among his best works, The Tempest maintains an enviable popularity within the Bard’s celebrated canon. The current Free Reign Theatre presentation at the Gettys Center in Rock Hill, where it runs through Aug. 25, marks the seventh local production to appear…
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Arts & Culture
‘Mojada’ Gives the QC a Flaming Taste of Euripides
The first time Euripides took the top prize at the Dionysia Festival, Athens’ five-day playwrights showdown celebrating Dionysius, it was so long ago that theatre scholars aren’t sure whether he won an ivy wreath or a goat. Ten years later, when his Medea took third place, we still can’t say…
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Arts & Culture
‘Ripcord’ Brings Mortal Combat to Bristol Senior Living
We’ve had more than a couple of engaging David Lindsay-Abaire moments in the Charlotte Metro over the years, beginning with the Actor’s Theatre production of Fuddy Meers in 2002. Wonder of the World continued the company’s love affair with Lindsay-Abaire in 2004, and when the playwright’s Rabbit Hole took the…
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