Events

Though their work is essential in the matrix of progressive forces that push back against reactionary powers, nonprofit organizations get less shine for their efforts than, say, a popular musician might get for one social-justice-flavored tweet. Carolina Performing Arts is changing that, at least for one evening, with Stories on Citizenship: A Convening to Connect Campus and Community, a free-with-RSVP event at Current. The kick-off of a 2018-19 season exploring what it means to be a member of the body politic, the event features people from local nonprofits such as The Jackson Center, Community Empowerment Fund, and El Centro Hispano taking the stage to tell the stories of the people they serve in song, oral history, theater, and other forms. UNC students involved in social-justice work will emcee the proceedings, and Vimala Rajendran, who will also speak about activism through food, provides dinner. —Brian Howe

In significant ways, Once—adapted from John Carney's critically acclaimed 2007 film—is almost an anti-Broadway musical. Its bristling score for an upstart Irish folk band, performed on stage by musicians who double as actors, sets us squarely in a Dublin pub far removed from Tin Pan Alley. Raw, vulnerable lyrics by Glen Hansard (The Commitments) and Markéta Irglová, which won the film its single Academy Award, repeatedly disclose the emotional sharpness of this story of almosts: an Irish busker who almost gives up his dreams, a diffident Czech pianist who is almost free to love him, a breakthrough album and musical career that almost didn't happen, and an almost happily-ever-after ending. Director Tim Seib and musical director Joanna Li helm the Theatre Raleigh production starring Dave Toole and Morgan Parpan. —Byron Woods

Though it's full of abstract forms, what could be more concrete than nature? This quiet paradox beats at the heart of the new triple show at Durham's Craven Allen Gallery, which runs through September 8 after this opening reception. But the three formally diverse exhibits become one in the resonances of their titles and themes. In Layered, FRANK Gallery member artist Peg Bachenheimer shows her imaginative landscapes and abstractions in encaustic wax. In Fecundity, Ronan Kyle Peterson displays wheel-thrown red earthenware that embraces a "comic-book interpretation of ... the perpetual organic comedy of growth and decay." And in Embellished, former Craven Allen director Paul Hrusovsky comes home with a clutch of new paintings, complicated with stencils and silk screens, which portray organic shapes in what the artist calls "a cacophony of excessive adornment." —Brian Howe

The Community Church of Chapel Hill Unitarian Universalist has hosted a variety of arts programming, including comedy by Cheryl Wheeler and folk music by the Kruger Brothers. This fall, it features original paintings and fabric art, mostly by female artists, who live in Weya, a town in Zimbabwe's Makoni North district. The Zimbabwe Artist Project celebrates and supports the talent of these women—whose income from agriculture can be unreliable, and who often support whole households—by buying art from them directly to exhibit and resell in the U.S. Textiles are integral to Zimbabwe's culture, and tapestry is a medium of meticulous visual storytelling; the works on display and for sale until Oct. 28 run in a variety of sizes and feature dynamic, richly colored, detailed stories of community life in Weya. —Sarah Edwards

Anyone who's ever been to camp knows that fire and stories are intertwined. Anthropologists say that spooky tales—and ancient folkways and traditions—have been conveyed by firelight for millennia. This year, Paperhand Puppet Intervention cofounders Jan Burger and Donovan Zimmerman have been pondering some unconsidered similarities in both. Like fire, stories can illuminate and warm us. When not critically viewed, both are also capable of great destruction. In Paperhand's nineteenth annual pageant, a cadre of designers, artisans, performers, and musicians take five different looks at the dualities of fire and stories. Fantastical puppet creatures, from a multistory firebird to little baby sparks, populate choreographer Tommy Noonan's midshow fire pageant. Cantastoria, an Italian form of storytelling, turns the tale of a good fire into "a giant graphic novel with singing," Zimmerman says. And a group of tricksters who graced the world with stolen myths and flame ponder the dichotomy and legacy of their greatest gifts. —Byron Woods

Hollywood's been trying to convince the Catholic church it needs to up its production values for decades. Almost half a century before the 1992 blockbuster film Sister Act—in which Whoopi Goldberg, as a lounge singer in witness protection in a convent, irked the Mother Superior by putting "Salve Regina" on the good foot—Bing Crosby similarly flabbergasted Barry Fitzgerald with newfangled songs in the sentimental chestnut Going My Way. Cheri and Bill Steinkellner's 2006 musical theater adaptation moves the setting from San Francisco to mid-seventies Philadelphia. Songwriter Alan Menken (Little Shop of Horrors, Beauty and the Beast) jettisons the film's instantly recognizable girl-group send-ups for an all-original score that turns central character Delores Van Cartier (Tyanna West) into a disco diva who isn't exactly keeping the lowest profile while mobster goons are on her trail. Nancy Rich directs stage veteran Alison Lawrence as the Mother Superior in this Raleigh Little Theatre production. —Byron Woods

This is going to sound crazy, but did you know there used to be an underground mall under Cameron Village, and that it housed nightclubs that both incubated local rock and hosted legendary touring acts as diverse as R.E.M., Barry Manilow, Jimmy Buffet, and Chuck Mangione? In the late seventies and early eighties, before it was shut down because of concerns about safety, The Village Subway—aka the Raleigh Underground—roiled with nightclubs such as The Frog and Nightgown and The Pier, where Sonic Youth recorded the cover of "I Wanna Be Your Dog" that appears on Confusion Is Sex. This rich history, mostly lost beyond some hazily remembered blogs, is the subject of a new exhibit at The City of Raleigh Museum, which runs through January after a sold-out, wait-listed reception with photographer Chris Seward. His dynamic black-and-white photos from the scene capture now-famous names and local, proto-indie-rock bands such as The Fabulous Knobs and Arrogance in their primes. More than two hundred photos are featured in the exhibit, along with flyers, videos, and other artifacts. —Brian Howe

The color blue teems with different emotional registers. In author Maggie Nelson's Bluets, for example, the color embodies a seductive fluidity bound up in anxiety and loss—the condition of "feeling blue." In William Paul Thomas's new exhibit, running through September after this opening reception, a steely blue edges into subjects' faces—a reference to cyanosis, the discoloration that results from oxygen deprivation, a metaphor for the disenfranchisement of African Americans under white supremacy. Thomas, who moved to North Carolina to earn a fine-art degree at UNC-Chapel Hill, is now a visiting professor at Duke University. His work is primarily portraiture, and his oil paintings of men are squared so closely on their faces that you can almost feel their breath. This urgent intimacy is furthered by the fact that most of Thomas's subjects are friends or community members. His portraits are literally disembodied, but the effect is one of full embodiment: that which is seen, recognized, and carefully evoked. —Sarah Edwards

Worldbuilding isn't an unusual thing to encounter in music, be it through a band writing its own mythology (see Oasis, The Beach Boys) or concept records from The Who's Tommy to Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick to My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade. But with the new Moon 2, Ava Luna take their own crack at such architecture with a pop angle, and the results are unequivocally delightful. Throughout the record, band members trade off on lead vocals, creating a communal feeling atop squiggly electronic arrangements that are at once impressively slick and ingratiatingly danceable. "Mine" feels like a lost cut from Of Montreal's sweeping Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, while "On Its Side the Fallen Fire" feels like a heady float through space. The rest of Moon 2 is a wriggly, unusual thrill, like encountering a massive neon light show in the middle of the darkness. Desert Secretary opens. —Allison Hussey

The times are dark. A greedy autocrat has taken power, instituting taxes that favor the wealthy while slowly starving the working class. Indeed, twelfth-century England was no paradise for the non-nobility, as Richard Lionheart waged a disastrous crusade abroad and his corrupt brother John milked the monarchy and his countrymen for all they were worth. Such times call for a hero, and legend still has it that one came forth: Robin of Loxley, friend to the powerless, partisan to the absent king, and sworn enemy of the usurper on the throne and his local henchman, the Sheriff of Nottingham. Playwright Ken Ludwig takes a lighter look at the fabled British champion in his swashbuckling 2017 comedy. Guest artist Joshua David Robinson (Three Sisters) plays the title character. Christine Mirzayan is Maid Marian. Ray Dooley and Jeffrey Blair Cornell are the heavies, Prince John and Sir Guy. Red Clay Rambler Jack Herrick contributes an original score. —Byron Woods