Center Stage
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‘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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‘…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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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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‘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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‘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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‘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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‘A Realm of Existence’ Gives Deepest Look Yet at Cerrudo’s Style
There were four excellent works of what I suppose we would call contemporary ballet featured in Charlotte Ballet’s A Realm of Existence, which ran last weekend at Knight Theater. Three of these were choreographed by Charlotte Ballet’s artistic director, Alejandro Cerrudo, including his first new, original work created for Charlotte…
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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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‘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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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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CAST Announces Return to Theatre Scene After 10-Year Absence
Carolina Actor’s Studio Theatre (CAST), a local theatre company that once electrified Charlotte audiences with thought-provoking and experiential multimedia productions, will return to the city’s theatre scene next month after a 10-year absence. Produced by CAST co-founders Michael Simmons and Dee Abdullah in association with Actors Collaborative Theatre (ACT), the…
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‘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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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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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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‘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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‘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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