Boléro ★★★½ Through Sunday, March 25 Fletcher Opera Theater, Raleigh Warmer weather must be in the offing; Carolina Ballet’s principal dancers, Lara O’Brien and Yevgeny Shlapko, have already packed their bags for the seashore. A quick inventory: Sunscreen? Check. Shades? Got ‘em. Pointe shoes for her, ballet slippers for him? Those would be mandatory. For […]
Byron Woods
Bio: Byron Woods is the INDY's theater and dance critic.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/byronwoods
Posted inCulture
Theater Review: Pequod Productions’ No Exit Is a Problematic but Promising Attempt at an Existential Classic
No Exit★★½Through Sunday, March 25 Page-Walker Arts and History Center, Cary Minds great and small have debated the concept of Hell for millennia. Christian fundamentalists think it’s stoked with fire and brimstone; Dante believed it is frozen in the middle. George Bernard Shaw said it’s full of amateur musicians. Nobel laureate Jean-Paul Sartre added his […]
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Celebrate Women’s History Month at the Hayti Heritage Center with Wimmin@Work2018
Saturday, March 24 Hayti Heritage Center, Durham 3 p.m., $10 www.souloworks.com Two years ago, choreographer Andrea E. Woods first convened this colloquium of dance, music, poetry, and scholarship in order to gather, celebrate, and share the work of women artists, particularly women of color, during Women’s History Month. The festival was “a way to say, […]
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Theater Review: Even After a Recent Revision, EverScape Playwright Allan Maule’s Framing the Shot Still Feels Like Early Work
Framing the Shot ★★★Through March 25 Sonorous Road Theatre, Raleigh Almost a decade before he wrote EverScape, his breakout play about online-gaming culture, which won accolades at the 2015 New York International Fringe Festival, Allan Maule wrote and staged three-person comedy Framing the Shot for his master’s thesis at UNC-Chapel Hill. But even after an […]
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Spend an Existentialist Eternity in Cary’s Page-Walker Hotel with Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit
NO EXIT PAGE-WALKER ART AND HISTORY CENTER, CARY See website for times, $12-$14 www.caryplaywrightsforum.org Cary’s Page-Walker Hotel building, now home to the city’s arts and history center, celebrates its sesquicentennial this year. It’s a nice place to visitbut you wouldn’t want to spend eternity there. Should you doubt it, consider the three characters who face […]
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Carolina Ballet Steps Out to Maurice Ravel’s Beloved Boléro
BOLÉRO FLETCHER OPERA THEATER, RALEIGH Various times, $32-&91 www.carolinaballet.com As composer Maurice Ravel himself admitted, Boléro, his most famous work, is musically minimal: seventeen nearly identical iterations of the same theme, with little variation or development, aside from the number of instruments gradually joining in the march toward an inexorable climax. Yet the suite has […]
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In the Inaugural Bull City Black Theatre Festival, Underserved African-American Theater Artists Go Straight to the Audience They Richly Deserve
BULL CITY BLACK THEATRE FESTIVAL Thursday, March 15–Saturday, March 24 Manbites Dog Theater, Durham www.bullcityblacktheatrefest.wordpress.com JaMeeka Holloway-Burrell has to stop and catch her breath for a moment. I’ve caught her between appointments on a busy day, moments before she rushes into a rehearsal for PlayMakers Repertory Company’s upcoming world premiere of Leaving Eden. Over the […]
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A Spacefaring IT Specialist Runs Low on a Precious Resource—Coffee—in One-Act Comedy Girl in Space
GIRL IN SPACE KENNEDY-MCILWEE STUDIO THEATRE, RALEIGH | 7:30 p.m. $6–$10 theatre.arts.ncsu.edu Peter Lalush had never seen a sci-fi comedy with a female hero in the lead, so he wrote one last year as a senior at N.C. State. In his comic one-act, Girl in Space, Lana is the spunky IT systems analyst aboard the […]
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Theater Review: Some Vocal Problems Aside, Fats Waller-Based Musical Ain’t Misbehavin’ Left Us Humming
Ain’t Misbehavin’ ★★★Through March 25 North Raleigh Arts and Creative Theatre, Raleigh As is discussed in our article on the Bull City Black Theatre Festival (see tomorrow’s issue), the Triangle’s African-American stage artists have repeatedly demonstrated a bench deep enough to fill multiple iterations of works by August Wilson and Lorraine Hansberry—but the scarcity of […]
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A Cast of Young New York Actors Pumps Fresh Blood into The Wizard of Oz
TUESDAY, MARCH 13–SUNDAY, MARCH 18 MEMORIAL AUDITORIUM, RALEIGH 7:30 p.m. nightly/2 p.m. Sat. & Sun. $26–$98 www.nctheatre.com Name recognition is the main factor that entices theatrical talents to take on The Wizard of Oz. But it also makes most them think twice. How do you hold your own against, much less top, the iconic performances […]