The Virginian-Pilot: Arts and culture in South Hampton Roads fuel $270 million economic engine, study says

The Virginia Stage Co. presented a four-week run of “Fiddler on the Roof” in October. John Payonk played Tevye and Velkassem Agguini played The Fiddler. The production was the theater’s highest-selling play in its 45-year history. (Courtesy of Sam Flint)

The arts made a huge economic impact on South Hampton Roads in 2022 — to the tune of $270 million, according to a recent study.

The nonprofit arts and culture sector in South Hampton Roads created $140 million from organizations and another $130 million from event-related audience expenditures, according to the “Arts & Economic Prosperity 6,” the sixth in a series of national studies conducted by Americans for the Arts based in Washington, D.C.

The sector supported nearly 5,000 jobs and produced $52 million in local, state and federal government revenue last year, according to the economic and social impact study.

“This research demonstrates that the arts and culture sector is a powerful economic engine, contributing significantly to job creation, tourism and the overall economic vitality of South Hampton Roads,” said Lisa Wigginton, executive director of the region’s Arts Alliance nonprofit.

The study showed that the typical attendee in South Hampton Roads spends on average $35.73 per event aside from ticket admission. Those dollars go to local restaurants, retail stores, parking, hotels and more.

“This is the thing about the arts — they boost other businesses,” Wigginton said. “Not only do the arts enrich our lives, providing a source of inspiration, but they also play a pivotal role in driving our local economy.”

The Alliance, started in 1987, aims to foster a strong, vibrant and inclusive community through arts leadership, advocacy, services and support.

The study included 372 other regions across the U.S. that Wigginton said enables Arts Alliance to compare results, gather more data, determine best practices, spread the word more effectively and strengthen support for arts organizations, individual artists and the area’s creative culture in general.

Participating organizations for the study of South Hampton Roads included a multitude of nonprofits and cultural organizations such as the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center, Norfolk Botanical Garden and the Virginia Zoo. Out of 158 eligible organizations, 85 participated from Portsmouth, Chesapeake, Suffolk, Virginia Beach and Norfolk and Franklin, Isle of Wight and Southampton counties by submitting surveys and were collected from 802 audience members. The surveys were collected from May 2022 to June 2023.

Tom Quaintance, Virginia Stage Co.’s producing artistic director, said the study results are a great example of how the arts mean business.

“It’s a study that shows how much the arts can benefit a community both in the way in which we add to the cultural life, but also the financial life,” he said.

A four-week run of “Fiddler on the Roof” in October at the Wells Theatre in downtown Norfolk was the highest-selling show in the Virginia Stage Co.’s 45-year history, Quaintance said.

He pointed out that the number of people involved in the behind-the-scenes six-month process leading up to the production outnumbers the people on stage.

“We are driving the economy, not just on performance day, but around all the productions,” he said.

Quaintance also said audiences came out in force for the opportunity to experience something together that can’t be achieved other than at a live performing arts event, especially in light of the post-pandemic world focused on the importance of communal gathering.

The study also showed that 17% of event attendees were from outside the city or county of the event. On average, they spent close to $50 at local businesses.

Additional figures showed that 90% of survey respondents saw the event or venue as a source of pride for the community and 86% said they would feel a sense of loss if the activity or venue was no longer available.

Nolen V. Bivens, president and CEO of Americans for the Arts, said in a news release that arts and culture organizations produce authentic cultural experiences that are magnets for visitors, tourists and new residents.

“When we invest in nonprofit arts and culture, we strengthen our economy and build more livable communities,” Bivens said.

By SANDRA J. PENNECKE | sandra.pennecke@pilotonline.com | Staff writer

Virginian-Pilot Review: Traditional ‘Fiddler’ on the right roof: Virginia Stage Company nails season opener

By Page Laws

Note: This review was written and submitted before the start of the recent Israel-Hamas war.

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As Tevye the dairyman notes, it is really risky to play the fiddle while perched atop a roof. The title of the great American musical in which he’s the star alludes to Marc Chagall’s painting and the fact that Jews have long had to conduct their religious life and culture under conditions as precarious and nomadic as any people on Earth have had to bear.

So why play fiddle up there, in constant danger of a deadly fall?

Tevye — masterfully performed by John Payonk in Virginia Stage Company’s “Fiddler on the Roof” — answers that with the show’s rousing first number: “Tradition.”

Jewish life has long been balanced between millennia-old religious beliefs and customs that unite the people and the need to grow and change — accepting women, for instance, as fully formed human beings, capable of making their own decisions about, say, marriage partners. Sorry, Yente (the frustrated matchmaker, played by Jacqueline Jones)! Women have rights, too!

So, precarity/change is the theme, and this show’s Tevye is a dream.

Payonk has a booming baritone coupled with operatic finesse and resonance rich enough to raise the roof of Norfolk’s Wells Theatre, especially as stoked by the brand-new sound system (new seats, too). He also has the comic timing of his best Borscht Belt predecessors — a must for carrying on his soliloquies with God and impromptu mangled citations from “The Good Book.” He’s a man blessed and cursed in having five daughters (cursed in that he has no dowry funds to marry them off). But more on his family and supporting cast later.

The pandemic has made times precarious for theater, but it’s not that risky for the VSC to have chosen what some may consider a chestnut of theater repertory. Especially with the show being generously backed by the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater and the Simon Family Jewish Community Center. This first-time producing partnership has also provided top-notch, pre-show lectures by Rabbi Michael Panitz of Temple Israel along with a showing of the film “Fiddler: Miracles of Miracles,” which documents the show’s provenance and even features an interview with this production’s director, Gary John La Rosa — a friend of “Fiddler” lyricist Sheldon Harnick, who died in June. Here La Rosa duplicates the original choreography of Jerome Robbins, with some success. (He has even directed Chaim Topol — the famous Tevye of Norman Jewison’s 1971 film and many subsequent stage incarnations — in a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Broadway version.)

The original source of “Fiddler” is a considerably darker collection of short stories, written about 1894 and later, about Tevye the milkman by Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem. They’re set around 1905 during pogroms in czarist Russia. In 1906 he fled Ukraine — then a region of Russia called the Pale of Settlement, in which Jews were allowed to live — and eventually settled in New York. (As for his name, it’s a pen name, the greeting “Peace be with you”; he was born Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich.)

Some, including Panitz, have called the musical ”Sholem Aleichem Lite,” referring to its assimilationism and relatively benign conclusion: quiet reconciliation between Tevye and his daughter Chava (Amelia Burkley) who has married outside the faith. This is prompted, of course, by the forced scattering of the entire community of the shtetl Anatevka. Panitz’s overall evaluation of the show is, however, far more measured, especially in his scholarly article “Fiddler on a New Roof,” inspired in part by the 2018 Yiddish-language staging with Joel Grey: “Fidler afn Dakh,” which Panitz calls “more frankly ‘Jewish’” in tone.

Most critics agree that “Fiddler” is a canonical, great American musical that belongs in the worldwide repertory. So it’s really a matter of how good a Tevye and supporting cast can be assembled.

In this case, Payonk nails Tevye, and his supporting cast supports him, using the mix upon which many regional theaters rely — namely, imported Actors Equity members (five here), most often for the leads, and more local community actors for the ranks. Tevye’s special imaginary friend, the Fiddler, is played, for example, by Velkassem Agguini, a violinist at the Governor’s School for the Arts, who does some of his own fiddling for the whirling, cavorting, nonspeaking role. Golde, Tevye’s not-so-long-suffering wife, is Eva DeVirgilis. She maintains her kosher home with panache, modeling the proper wife and mother for all she’s worth. Tzeitel (Ally Dods), the eldest daughter, has inherited her mother’s gumption and her father’s almost Socratic nature.

Tzeitel rejects the matchmaker’s choice of Lazar Wolf (Scott Wichmann), the wealthy (by village standards) butcher who’s none too pleased by it. Tzeitel chooses, instead, Motel the tailor (Greg Dragas), dirt poor but rock solid in a crisis. Daughter No. 2, Hodel (Mia Bergstrom), is the family intellectual who chooses another thinker to wed. He’s Perchik, the student revolutionary, well rendered by Nathan Matthew Jacques. It is he who helps the hidebound citizens of Anatevka begin to see that change is coming, and fast. The third daughter, Chava (Burkley), breaks even more definitively with her family and people when she chooses to love a Russian gentile named Fyedka (Timothy Wright).

Other familiar local actors — Matt Friedman as Mordcha the innkeeper, John K. Cauthen as the rabbi, Scott Rollins as the constable — plus a lively handful of child actors (Gavin and Jasper Gayer, Ellie Madelyn Ruffing and Stormie Treviño) round out some of the large cast.

The set and costumes, while solid, look very much like the dozens of touring versions constantly moving across stages worldwide. There are wigs and male facial hair galore, most seemingly in accordance with Jewish custom of the time but some that looked (intentionally?) comical.

Though not directly emphasized in this production, it pays to remember that real Anatevkas in Ukraine may be suffering bombardment as we watch this show or read this newspaper account. Awareness of “Fiddler’s” relevance to the war in Ukraine seems to have somewhat diminished since the last touring production I saw, at the Ferguson in Newport News in March 2022; the cast dedicated it to the people of Ukraine.

But this should not detract from the accomplishment of the two Jewish organizations and Virginia Stage Company in putting on a fine “Fiddler,” starring an admirable Tevye. For that accomplishment in still-precarious times, they deserve a heartfelt ”Mazel tov!”

VA Pilot Review: Merry meta Christmas play! ‘Twelve Dates’ a slightly racy, contemporary one-woman show

Emel Ertugrul stars in The Twelve Dates of Christmas, a co-production with Core Theatre Ensemble.

NORFOLK — Yes, “The Twelve Dates of Christmas” is X-rated — for a bit of naughty language — but the X on this shiny bauble of a play really stands for “Xmas.”

Most exciting to people who groove on Greek prefixes is that this one-woman play, starring Emel Ertugrul — an impressive stalwart of the Virginia Stage Company and the Core Theatre Ensemble — is meta all the way, standing beyond and reflecting on not one but two other Christmas chestnuts. The first: the VSC’s current “A Merry Little Christmas Carol,” with which it shares a set and runs in repertory. The second: the original “A Christmas Carol,” from which it largely derives. Thus it’s doubly meta.

Are you finding this confusing? Well, what’s the meta with you?

Before Facebook changed its name to Meta and the regrettable portmanteau word “metaverse” (for “meta universe”), literary critics threw about the prefix “meta” with abandon, latching it onto anything that, in Merriam-Webster’s words, seemed “cleverly self-referential.” So it goes here.

While “The Twelve Dates of Christmas” is contemporary in feel and appeal (and also references the hoary old song) the central character Mary — Ertugrul plays her and 12 others — happens to be a classic struggling New York actor who, while vacationing in her native Virginia (one fills in the state where the show is performed), spots her fiancé on camera at the Macy’s parade, sucking face with his co-worker.

The show follows Mary through her difficult but enlightening post-breakup year as she struggles to banish the ghost of her fiancé past and find happiness — with a dozen suitors, who turn out to be a dubious, soul-testing bunch.

All must be conjured by Ertugrul through narration, the kind in which she deftly steps in and out of voices and accents. This kind of play can be done by the actor’s racing from spot to spot onstage, laboriously delivering both sides of a conversation. Ertugrul, as directed by Laura Agudelo, also of Core Ensemble and frequently VSC, thankfully forgoes that shtick, more subtly suggesting the switches as needed. (Ertugrul’s glasses-wearing, interfering Aunt Kathy is particularly winsome with her Tidewater drawl.)

Playwright Ginna Hoben created and premiered this now one-woman show at American Shakespeare Center in Staunton before moving it to Manhattan Repertory Theatre and elsewhere. Hampton Roads’ Core Theatre Ensemble, and Ertugrul, is similarly peripatetic, having performed in Italy, Lithuania and all over this region. They often choose literary adaptations such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (a still-memorable hit, also starring Ertugrul).

Here, the mood is somewhat literary — in that Ertugrul’s character Mary is employed during her post-breakup year as Lady Macbeth and then as a familiar Dickensian figure. Mary explains the irony: “So, while I am trying to thwart the Christmas spirit, I get hired to be the Christmas spirit. Specifically, the Spirit of Christmas Past.”

But she and we the audience are mostly focused on her parade of suitors, which she describes as the “125 jackasses it takes to meet one decent man.” While not quite that many are depicted, they do deserve the comparison.

Mary has a one-night stand with good-looking Irishman Aidan O’Reilly, who says in parting, “The only thing I enjoyed more than your fine wit … is your fine (X-rated body part).” There are folks like Emil, a “One-Hit Wonder” who “unwittingly ruined himself with (her) by showing up in a Stars and Stripes fanny pack. God bless America!” There’s “Psycho Joe,” who activates an app on Mary’s phone to track and stalk her. And there’s Mr. Tim, the father of Mary’s co-actor, Tiny Tim, a 5-year-old heartthrob who easily beats out any adult for a place in her heart. Can you hear someone’s biological clock ticking?

Sometimes there are two suitors at a time. Mary takes to one, breaks things off with the other, and then the one she liked ghosts her.

With each suitor’s departure, she drops a Christmas tree ornament into a box and we hear a “ding.” (The original script has it the opposite — her hanging an ornament — but this way seems more appropriately ironic.)

Like all one-actor shows, this 90-minute, no-intermission show demands enormous, tour-de-force acting. Ertugrul, slightly restrained on opening night, seemed to be pacing herself for a dependably bravura run.

As a meta-member of the inspired-by-Dickens club of plays, “Twelve Dates” is not all jokes and raucousness. It conveys a modern but still Dickensian quest for finding oneself, which everyone hopes to do before life’s final chimes ring out our season on Earth. In that sense, this slightly racier-than-Dickens Christmas show also proves salvific.

In Mary’s words, “The best date I had all year involved a 5-year-old.” Christmas, after all, was started by and for a child.

Page Laws is dean emerita of the Nusbaum Honors College at Norfolk State University. prlaws@aya.yale.edu

Virginia Stage Company presents ‘Wiesenthal,’ inside the world of a Nazi hunter

NORFOLK — Against the backdrop of rising antisemitic violence and rhetoric, the Virginia Stage Company and the Holocaust Commission of the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater will present the play “Wiesenthal” Tuesday.

“Wiesenthal” is a one-man show about Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor who became a Nazi hunter after World War II and brought more than 1,000 escaped criminals to justice. “Wiesenthal” was written by and stars Tom Dugan, who said he wants people to know the man often called the “Jewish James Bond.”

Because educating young people is a focus of the Holocaust Commission, student groups will see it free on Wednesday.

Elena Barr Baum, director of the UJFT Holocaust Commission, said that it is as important a time as ever to remember the lessons found in “Wiesenthal.”

“The Holocaust Commission is not political,” Baum said. “But we have to understand why the Holocaust happened and be aware of the conditions that were right in Germany in the 1920s and ‘30s that made these things, these horrible things, happen.”

Last week, the FBI warned of a “broad threat” to New Jersey synagogues and located a man who the agency stated exhibited “an extreme amount of hate against the Jewish community.” Around the same time, NBA star Kyrie Irving made national headlines for not making an immediate apology for posting a link on his social media to a documentary that contained anti-Jewish sentiments.

“This should not be happening in a democracy,” Baum said.

“Wiesenthal” is one of six one-person, historical plays Dugan has written including “Shades of Gray” which spotlighted Robert E. Lee, “Frederick Douglass In The Shadow of Slavery,” and his most recent, “Tell Him It’s Jackie,” focusing on Jackie Kennedy.

Dugan has historians vet his scripts for historical accuracy.

“But each of my plays has been written and produced to be entertainment,” he said, “and my way of saying it is: If you’re not careful, you might learn something.”

Dugan isn’t Jewish, but his wife and two children are. Dugan was raised in an Irish Catholic family and his inspiration for “Wiesenthal” stemmed from his father’s experiences as being in an American military unit that liberated a concentration camp.

But “when I first started even thinking about writing about the Holocaust,” Dugan said, “I said to myself who wants to sit and listen to sad stories for 90 minutes.”

Then, he discovered that Wiesenthal was a pre-war amateur stand-up comedian.

It gave Dugan material to present more than Wiesenthal’s horrors.

“What is most surprising about the play to most audiences is how much they laugh,” Dugan said.

According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Wiesenthal was born in what is now Ukraine on Dec. 31, 1908. He graduated in 1932 from the Technical University of Prague after being rejected from a school closer to home because he was Jewish.

During the war, he and his wife were shipped to a series of forced labor and death camps before being liberated. While Wiesenthal and his wife survived, 89 of their relatives did not, including Wiesenthal’s mother.

“When history looks back,” Wiesenthal once said, “I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it.”

Wiesenthal later hosted students in an office he kept in Vienna. Dugan’s play is set in an office. Dugan, as Wiesenthal, speaks to the audience as if they were the last group he ever spoke to in the twilight of his life. Wiesenthal died in 2005.

“I’m not jumping into different characters, but he’s a good storyteller,” Dugan said. “So along the way, you’ll get to know his wife, and you’ll get to know certain war criminals based on the way that Simon tells the story.”

Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8138, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com