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Hi! Happy weekend.
Our Fall Arts Issue is now on stands with beautiful designs from our creative department (Nicole Moore and Ann Salman are the ones behind the work!) — if you’re heading out to Hopscotch tonight in this very perfect weather, grab a copy. You’ll find our special Hopscotch section with weekend picks; if you’d like to read up on some of the North Carolina acts taking the stages this weekend, here’s a Twitter thread of our coverage of many of those acts, with features on Dante High, Jooselord, Sluice, Dissimilar South, and more.
Keep reading in the issue: you’ll find the arts preview introduction, which my editor let me sneak a Brat Summer reference into, as well as features on the making of Bull Durham, a New Musical, new arts space Queen Street Magic Boat, a feature on artist Ellen O’Grady about the process of transmitting “grief, protests, and hope” into a new comics art book on Palestine, and an interview with Thomas Sayre about the massive Sunflower Power Poles project in Dix Park. A bit more on these below.
Up-top, though, I’d like to highlight the Visual Arts and Performing Arts recommendations we put together. Truly, these guides are just a starting point— some galleries and venues haven’t published their fall programming yet, so I’ll continue to share events as they come across my desk—but these shows are very energizing. Black Label Movement’s ADF Battleground is particularly exciting, as is the Huang Yi HUANG YI & KUKA production from NC State LIVE, the Nasher’s sweeping and scary Anthropocene exhibit, and Maya Freelon’s multimedia installation at Historic Stagville, later this fall.
Thanks for reading!
elsewhere in the culture section
After a long road from Hollywood, Bull Durham, a New Musical, opens at Reynolds Theater next week. Produced by Theatre Raleigh, the local nonprofit professional theater group, the script is written by Ron Shelton and has run once, in Atlanta in 2014, before landing in Durham.
This production has seen a lot of revisions over the past decade, producer Lauren Kennedy Brady says, and has gotten “better and better,” according to actor John Behlmann, who played Nuke in 2014 and loved the story so much he returned to the role for its next iteration. (Kennedy Brady was a teenager in Raleigh when Bull Durham was filming, she told me; one night, she and her sister snuck out when a scene was being filmed at Mitch’s tavern—an anecdote that illustrates the ties between the Triangle and the movie.)
How do you translate a beloved sports classic into a musical? To get a sense, I went to a rehearsal, interviewed the cast, and had a breakfast-for-lunch meal with the very game Ron Shelton, who dove deep into movie lore with me, making offhand references to “Kevin” and other actors he’s worked with, as he spoke about Durham, the threat of AI, and the joys of the minor leagues. I loved getting to write this feature and can’t wait to see the show. Also! Here are some more fun rehearsal photos from Playbill.
I also wrote about Queen Street Magic Boat, the radically reimagined home of Catherine Edgerton, which opens this month as a community arts space and launches with a sprawling, immersive exhibition by 22 Triangle artists. The space is a story about scuba diving, trying to live with integrity as an artist in a changing city, filling in the gaps of the present with the past, and much more. Tasso Hartzog wrote about Durhamite Ellen O’Grady, an artist who spent many years working in Palestine and is dedicated to bearing witness to the immense suffering from the occupation and war in Gaza.
Finally, a bit on those massive 46-petal sunflowers: “As a society, we build a lot of stuff: bridges, roads, power poles, and other things that sometimes sink to a kind of prosaic utilitarian level. Does it have to be that way all the time? And I think the answer of the sunflowers is that it doesn’t.”
out and about in the triangle
The big Durham bar news this week: Fullsteam Brewery is moving to a spacious, 9,000-square-foot space in the American Tobacco Campus’s Power Plant building. It’s great news that the brewery has found an (iconic!) new location after facing issues at its longtime Rigsbee location, and the move raises some interesting questions: Will the ATC, which tends to be quiet after 9-5 hours, become more lively? Is the center of gravity changing for Durham’s hangout bars, which have coalesced, for many years, around Rigsbee? We’ll be following.
More food news: Redstart Takeaway, eatery kin of Redstart Foods, opened this week on Roxboro in Durham. Also in Durham, it looks like Oscar Diaz of Little Bull is opening up a second project, this one on the retail floor of luxury apartments GeerHouse. Important: Axios has put together a roundup of the best breakfast burritos in the Triangle. (My two cents: I think Hatch Breakfast Burritos and Lady Gold Tacos also should make the list.)
On The Broadside: A look at North Carolina’s relationship with the film industry. The NC Museum of History is beginning a “grand revitalization” and closing, beginning in October, for an undetermined amount of time.
The Duke Human Rights Center has a few cool events coming up: Lessons from Pauli Murray’s Legacy, tonight at the Durham County Main Library, and a screening of the environmental justice documentary Movement Starts Here (more on this soon) next week. The Debt Collective, the “nation’s first union of debtors,” is presenting an event at NorthStar Church of the Arts on September 19. Finally, a fascinating interview in The Nation with Durham poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs about their scholarship and new book on Audrey Lorde.
— Sarah Edwards —
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