Joseph Haj is leaving PlayMakers Repertory Company to become Artistic Director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, starting in July. Haj has been Producing Artistic Director of UNC-Chapel Hill’s professional theater company since 2006, presiding over Shakespeare and Sondheim as well as helping establish a more adventurous second-stage series, PRC2. “We are enormously grateful […]
Brian Howe
Posted inCulture
Movie review: Kingsman: The Secret Service is a witty, rollicking pastiche of spy-movie tropes
Kingsman: The Secret Service ★★★★ Now playing I can’t be alone in pegging Colin Firth as an awkward, bumbling romantic also-ran because of his roles in things like Pride and Prejudice, Shakespeare in Love and Bridget Jones’s Diary. So I also won’t be alone in marveling at his confident, entirely convincing alpha-turn, in Kingsman: The […]
Posted inArt
In the provocative exhibit Wonderland, Sarah Anne Johnson turns sex and nature inside-out
WONDERLAND: SARAH ANNE JOHNSON 2002–2014 CAM Raleigh 409 W. Martin St., Raleigh 919-261-5920 www.camraleigh.org Through May 5 My frustration with photography is that it shows only the surface,” Sarah Anne Johnson is quoted as saying in the catalogue for Wonderland, a dozen years’ worth of work at CAM Raleigh. Instead, she tells the truth with […]
Posted inArt
The NC Comedy Arts Festival celebrates 15 years of local laughs and national impact
DSI Comedy Theater runs on the maxim “Yes, and?” This algorithm keeps improv moving, as players build on each other’s scenarios. It also keeps DSI’s NC Comedy Arts Festival, now in its 15th year, in a steady state of growth. Through small, perseverant steps, what began as a “college improv keg party,” as founder Zach […]
Posted inArt
John Waters discusses his one-man show “This Filthy World,” his iconic films and his ongoing obsession with the outré
JOHN WATERS Friday, Feb. 6, 8 p.m. $34–$75.50 Carolina Theatre 309 W. Morgan St., Durham 919-560-3030 www.carolinatheatre.org If H.L. Mencken was the “Sage of Baltimore,” then John Waters is its court jester, rabble-rouser and camp-shock guru. The paradox is that a filmmaker who has built a decades-long career on the offensive and the obsessive is […]
Posted inTheater
Hands Up: 6 Playwrights, 6 Testaments holds a space for hard discussions about race and police brutality
HANDS UP: 6 PLAYWRIGHTS, 6 TESTAMENTS Feb. 5–7, 8 p.m., $8 Common Ground Theatre 4815B Hillsborough Rd., Durham 919-384-7817 www.cgtheatre.com Arts presenters talk about “starting conversations” with an almost mystical belief in the power of art to engender talk and of talk to engender action. Sometimes, one wonders if these conversations really exist, and whether […]
Posted inArt
As the Triangle arts scene gathers steam, who’s being left behind?
“Why the hell do you need an art teacher at a school for the blind?” That’s what someone asked Alice Zincone when she took that position at the Governor Morehead School in Raleigh. On a recent evening, she showed us exactly why: Using teaching tools such as 3D models, Wikki Stix (waxed yarn for tactile […]
Posted inArt
Assessing an active but stratified N.C. literary scene—plus, some cool 2014 titles you might have missed
THE YEAR IN BOOKS Trying to diagnose the Triangle’s literary scene in 2014 is like using the same instrument to examine an eyelash and a distant cliff. Microscope or telescope, the focal length is hard to find; the lens blurs or cracks. In most places outside of New York City, local literature is more nebulous […]
Posted inCulture
Dance review: A brutal, moving Brother Brother in its U.S. premiere
Tommy Noonan and Clint Lutes Brother BrotherThe Carrack Modern Art, Dec. 20, 8 p.m.Tommy Noonan and Clint Lutes emerged from a closet wearing white terrycloth bathrobes, then stripped down to black briefs and tennis shoes. They stood side by side, an arm’s length away from the audience, staring at us. Their almost affectless expressions held […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Raleigh filmmakers race extinction to complete poaching documentary in Kenya
There are three northern white rhinos in Kenya. Not a specific threejust three. Two more live in the San Diego Zoo, making the known global population five. As the African poaching epidemicdriven by foreign demands for ivory and abetted by weak regulationnears its logical conclusion, some venerable species are on course for extinction within a […]
