July 12, 2019 -- Volume VI, Issue 25

It’s happening a lot, nonetheless, it feels incredible when an RVA performing artist makes it to the Big Time. RVA’s own Lucy Dacus has done just that. In 2012, Lucy appeared in Virginia Rep’s production of Spring Awakening. She was 17 years old, and a student at Maggie Walker Governor’s School. Three years later, she performed her first concert in NYC, closely followed by the release of her first single. Her debut album, No Burden, was produced in Nashville by RVA friends, Berklee College of Music graduate Collin Pastore and Oberlin Conservatory of Music graduate Jacob Blizard. It was released digitally, on CD, and on vinyl via Richmond's EggHunt Records in Feb 2016. Lucy then signed with Matador Records, and they re-released her album in Sept. Also in 2016, she performed at Lollapalooza in Chicago’s Grant Park, and made her television debut on CBS This Morning. Lucy recorded a Tiny Desk Concert for NPR the same weekend. In Oct, she played the London Calling festival in Amsterdam. Her second album, Historian, was released in Mar 2018. Like its predecessor, it received extensive critical acclaim. Lucy’s RVA fans were blown away last week when the BBC used her song Pillar of Truth to close their coverage of the Women’s World Cup. We may be dreaming too big, but we’re going to try to book Lucy into the inaugural season of the Perkinson Center. 

Throughout the ages, the arts have brought communities together. Virginia Rep was formed in 2012 by the merger of two major theatres: Barksdale Theatre and Theatre IV. In 1954, in open defiance of Jim Crow laws, Barksdale welcomed a group of 40 Virginia Union University professors and students to Gold in the Hills, their first mainstage production at their Hanover Tavern home. In approximately 1981, Theatre IV elected Martha Gilbert as the first African American Board President to lead a major Virginia nonprofit arts organization. This year, over the 4^th of July weekend, while preparing for tech rehearsals for the upcoming Hanover Tavern production of Forever Plaid, it broke our hearts to discover a KKK recruitment rally taking place directly across Rt. 301 from our ancestral artistic home. In Chesterfield, we’re working hard now on a creative placemaking proposal to the National Endowment for the Arts, seeking to use the arts to bring our community together once again at the new Perkinson Center. Our theme for these placemaking efforts is “Come Together.” Over the next two years, we’ll be inviting everyone to help us remember historic moments when our diverse community came together in Chesterfield. If you’d like to join in this exploration, please email us at perkinsoncenter@gmail.com with your story. We’d love to hear from you.  

When I have a day to gallery-hop in NYC, I start with an exciting exhibit I’ve found in the NY Times or one of the art blogs I follow. Then I build my day around that show. I’m a walker—I love exploring neighborhoods. Most of the NYC galleries are in Chelsea, the Lower East Side, or the Upper East Side. So I usually focus on one of those three districts. With over 350 galleries as well as the Whitney Museum, Chelsea has the most to offer. You’ll see mainly contemporary work there, and I find that exhilarating. Chelsea is bounded by the Hudson River to the west, 6^th Ave to the east, and lies between 14^th and 34^th north and south. The Lower East Side weaves through Chinatown’s funkiness, and I enjoy the hip feel of the small galleries there. Those galleries are less clustered together than in Chelsea, so I often Google search for a list of their names and addresses. For two years, some of my paintings have been selected for group shows at Van der Plas Gallery on Orchard St in Lower East Side. So when I’m near there I always stop to visit. It’s a vibrant neighborhood favorite. Sometimes I head to the Upper East Side for the classic Metropolitan and Guggenheim Museums, always good destinations to stay a while when the weather isn’t ideal for walking. And there’s exciting news from MOMA: they’ve closed to expand, and will reopen their enhanced exhibit space in October. I can’t wait.

Finally, an RVA critic has written a review that may help sell some tickets. In the old days, when Roy Proctor ruled from his desk at the Times-Dispatch as unofficial dean of Richmond theatre pundits, if he LOVED a show, you KNEW it! We used to guesstimate that a Proctor rave was worth about $25,000 at the box office. Theatre critics today tend to be more circumspect; often you end a review not really knowing if they liked the show or not. Not so with Tony Farrell’s review of The Wiz, which finally appeared in print in last week’s T-D. In the first paragraph, he promises that the show “will rock us and sock us like no other musical this season.” He then follows with this: “Hang on to your hats, folks. The Wiz is a stunner. Even before the curtain rises, crack musicians reach out and grab us by the throats as they spin up the show’s thundering overture with gleeful abandon. You can hear the joy and jubilation in every note. Superlative on all levels, this phantasmagoric revival of Broadway’s 1975 Tony Award-winner stands so tall and strong it could easily be transported lock, stock and barrel back to the Great White Way.” Then he ends with this directive: “Don’t even think about missing it.” After Mariah Lyttle, the actress playing Dorothy, sang so beautifully and graciously at our ground breaking, we hope all Chesterfield arts lovers will venture downtown for this wildly entertaining summer treat.

Three interesting comments came in this week, each about Henricus. Sunny Reed stated, “Enjoyed the bit about Henricus. It’s an amazing place I watched develop over the 30+ years I lived in Chester.” Jim Hartough added this: “Your comment on Henricus being ‘the second successful English settlement in North America’ is factually incorrect. That distinction belongs to Cupids, Newfoundland, which was settled in 1610, a year before Henricus.” Many thanks, Jim. Google agrees with you, and we stand corrected. We found the claim on the Henricus website. We won’t repeat it again. Finally, Katie Cox read: “The historic park recreates everyday life in the Virginia Indian community of Arrohateck.” “Am I wrong,” she asked, “to suggest that you should be saying ‘Native American’?” We asked ourselves the same question, and found this opinion at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian: “Whenever possible, Native people prefer to be called by their specific tribal name. In the US, ‘Native American’ has been widely used but is falling out of favor with some groups, and the terms ‘American Indian’ or ‘indigenous American’ are preferred by many Native people.” Also, in “A Guide to Writing about Virginia Indians and Virginia Indian History,” the Virginia Council on Indians preferred the term “Virginia Indians.” Thanks for ALL the great feedback.