Arts & Culture
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‘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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Mint Museum’s Central Impact Exhibit Showcases Charlotte’s Skate Scene
When Josh Frazier opened the original Black Sheep Skate Shop in a space he sublet from the Charlotte Art League on Camden Road in what was then the underdeveloped neighborhood of South End in 2003, his immediate vision didn’t go much farther than providing gear to Charlotte’s fledgling skate scene. …
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‘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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A Guide to the 2025 Ayrsley Retro Horror Series
Beginning today for its 12th running year, Ayrsley Grand Cinemas will host its annual Retro Horror film series, showing a slate of classic slashers and frightening flicks … and this year is stacked. From Sept. 26 to Nov. 6, you can watch Retro Horror films on any day of the…
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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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Ten Movies To See at the Charlotte Film Festival
The 17th edition of the Charlotte Film Festival (CFF) kicks off on Tuesday, running for six days through Sunday, Sept. 28. The event kicks off with a premiere screening of Roofman at Carolina Theatre in Uptown, followed by a week of screenings at Independent Picture House (IPH). A celebration for…
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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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ESSAY: Processing the Life, Loss and Legacy of HNin Nie
HNin Nie has died. What an awful sentence that was to write. And worse still to read. But it’s true. It is real. I’ve been around the block a few times now with regards to loss, and in my experience it is the horrible reality of the situation that is…
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Don Garrett Sees Success Locally and on the Stand-Up Comedy Circuit
Countless stand-up comics have origin stories similar to that of Don Garrett — folks who were always the funny ones in their respective friend groups until the people around them convinced them that they should get onstage and try comedy in front of a crowd. For Garrett, however, he remembers…
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Artist Kirsten Stolle Takes Chemical Corporations to Task
“My mom was dressed up as this giant strawberry with fish gills.” It was this childhood memory that sticks with Asheville-based visual artist Kirsten Stolle as a pivotal moment that would later influence her work. It came during the mid-1990s during a protest in Santa Cruz, California, against American multinational…
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What to Do at the 2025 Charlotte International Arts Festival
The fourth annual Charlotte International Arts Festival (CIAF) kicks off today, running for the full month of September rather than two weeks this year. Bridging Charlotte’s local and international communities with global artists in a joyful celebration filled with live performances, art installations, and cultural expressions from around the world,…
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Ralph Ellis Looks Back 50 Years with ‘The Accident Report’
When Ralph Ellis took a gig at the Thomasville Times for $110 a week, the recent UNC Chapel Hill grad was living amidst what some might call journalism’s finest hour. It was 1974, the year that Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward released All the President’s Men, their…
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Quentin Talley Benefit Marks Return of a Cultural Beacon
Boris “Bluz” Rogers is a three-time national poetry slam champion, a multiple Emmy Award winner and former director of creative engagement for Blumenthal Performing Arts, but when he got a phone call on Feb. 19 he had just one role — a deeply concerned friend. The caller bore the frightening…
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‘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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1CLT Film Festival Unites the Silos of Charlotte’s Film Scene
After its inaugural 2020 event saw success only to sputter out in the succeeding years, The Independent Picture House (IPH) this August is bringing back the 1CLT Film Festival, conjoining the silos of Charlotte’s film scene to create a united front in celebrating the spirit of local cinema. Returning five…
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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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