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

American Theatre Magazine: The Top 10* Most-Produced Plays of the 2023-24 Season

The Top 10* Most-Produced Plays of the 2023-24 Season

Dramas and comedies with a political edge top this year’s list (*actually 12 due to ties).

OCTOBER 18, 2023

BY ROB WEINERT-KENDT

1. What the Constitution Means to Me by Heidi Schreck (16 productions)

2. Clyde’s by Lynn Nottage (14)

3. POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive by Selina Fillinger (12)

4. The Lehman Trilogy by Stefano Massini, adapted by Ben Power (12)

5. Dial M for Murder adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher from Frederick Knott’s original play (9*)

6. Fat Ham by James Ijames (9)

7. The Thanksgiving Play by Larissa FastHorse (8)

8. Beautiful: The Carole King Musical by Douglas McGrath (book), Gerry Goffin & Carole King, Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil (music & lyrics) (8)

9. Sanctuary City by Martyna Majok (8)

10. Cabaret by Joe Masteroff (book), John Kander (music), Fred Ebb (lyrics) (7)

11. Every Brilliant Thing by Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe (7)

12. The Rocky Horror Show by Richard O’Brien (7)

*In fact there will actually be 10 productions of Dial M for Murder in the coming season, but Norfolk’s Virginia Stage Company will use Knott’s original script rather than the Hatcher adaptation.

Satire is what closes on Saturday night, goes an old theatrical saw, and more recently we’ve heard from some quarters that theatregoers would rather not have politics mixed in with their entertainment. Well, if this year’s list of most-produced plays is any indication, TCG member theatres are banking that that’s not the case—or at least not entirely. As in past years, this list reflects a healthy mix of main course and dessert, of challenge and escape (if you don’t recall, last year’s top three plays were Clyde’s, Chicken & Biscuits, and Clue).

The list starts with three plays by women, all with a political valence: Heidi Schreck’s brilliantly personal yet pointed What the Constitution Means to Me, Lynn Nottage’s sneaky allegory about forgiveness, Clyde’s, and Selina Fillinger’s raucous farce POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive. The list also includes the bravura economic history, The Lehman Trilogy, the blistering satire of “woke” white folks, The Thanksgiving Play, and Martyna Majok’s moving piece about immigration, Sanctuary City. James Ijames’s Fat Ham is arguably a hybrid case—an examination of toxic masculinity and Black manhood that morphs into a dance party (spoiler alert). The rest includes a straight-up mystery (Dial M for Murder, remarkably its first appearance on our lists), the improvisatory play Every Brilliant Thing (its first reappearance on the list since 2019), and substantive musicals: the cautionary Cabaret, the empowering Beautiful, and, in an age of renewed moral panic about drag shows and gender fluidity, the freshly edgy Rocky Horror Show.

These listings were compiled from a total of 1,560 full shows (productions with runs of at least a week) at 558 TCG member theatres all across the U.S. as they appear in our Fall 2023 print issue. (The listings you can see here may not match the printed listings exactly.) It should be noted that the former number is up from last year’s 1,298, though still well short of the roster in the 2019-20 season, which was 2,229. There’s still some recovery in store for U.S. theatres, it’s clear. As usual we excluded productions of A Christmas Carol and plays by Shakespeare from this list. (For the record: This year, the former numbers 43, the latter 40.)

And of course, as meaningful as these lists can be as a snapshot of the industry’s tastes, please don’t skip the many pages of listings in our print edition (or, again, scroll through these listings). To my eyes they paint a picture of a sprawling and thriving American theatre, which we’re grateful to cover, in bad times and good.

Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is the editor-in-chief of American Theatre.

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.

___

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!”

Avenging angel Nina Simone swoops down from the heavens to sing at the Wells Theatre

By Page Laws

Virginian-Pilot Correspondent
May 11, 2023 at 7:44 am

An angel, as active in death as she was in life, is here in town and ready to fuss about justice:

Don’t tell me

I’ll tell you

Me and my people just about due.

Yolanda Rabun as Nina Simone. (Ken A. Huth)

The title of the song from which that lyric comes, “Mississippi Goddam,” also provides a less-than-subtle clue:

Nina Simone was a troubled (probably bipolar), often angry, artist, hounded out of a classical music career because of her race. But she was and is (especially as reincarnated through Sunday at the Wells Theatre by supercharged actor/singer/lawyer Yolanda Rabun) quite ready to sing her soul out in an effort to save ours, both as individuals and a nation.

The one-woman show is called “No Fear and Blues Long Gone: Nina Simone,” by playwright Howard L. Craft, and that title, too, is telling. The scared little girl who became the international singing legend was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, in 1933, the sixth of eight preacher’s kids, about 400 miles from the Wells, down in Tryon, North Carolina. More about the Tar Heel connection later. She mostly got over being scared; she likewise dismissed the blues as “her” genre. She sang all genres, and fiercely.

Eunice was allowed to study piano and proved so talented she was also permitted to study at Juilliard. But the world wasn’t ready for, in her own words, “Black fingers” on a classical keyboard. A young Simone (she rechristened herself after tough, beautiful French acting sensation Simone Signoret) had no choice but to sing for her subsistence and later write and sing all manner of her own and others’ popular and political songs.

In her remarkable career, Simone befriended a bevy of other major Black artists and leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Following the lead of Josephine Baker, Richard Wright and many others, including her friend and fellow artist James Baldwin, she eventually chose exile in Africa and Europe. As with Baldwin, Simone’s politically charged life ended in France, in 2003.

But it’s the North Carolina connection that runs particularly deep in the Wells production. Every principal involved — playwright Craft, actor Rabun and director Kathryn Hunter-Williams — sports a dab of tar on his or her feet for some reason, with this particular version of the show also having been developed at PlayMakers Repertory, Chapel Hill.

The show, as seen in dress rehearsal, was still understandably rough with delayed lighting cues, one case of forgotten lyrics (deftly handled and soon recalled). Rabun, as full of vim and vigor as Simone must have been, powers through all discrepancies to seize the stage and audience by the scruff of our necks. There are only 10 songs, with at least one other, Simone’s version of “I Put a Spell on You” (by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, 1959) noticeably absent and missed.

Yolanda Rabun as Nina Simone. (Ken A. Huth)

There’s also a good bit of actor/audience banter and a somewhat methodical account of biographical highlights. Rabun switches costumes onstage, going from one gown to another, from a tank suit with cowboy boots (quite the look!) to a lovely dashiki. She occasionally rests on a divan or chair center stage, her three-piece band sitting always stage right. The gentlemen acquit themselves well, but sometimes their limited number seems a false economy. A trio can create only so big and varied a sound.

Simone shares anecdotes about her two husbands and countless affairs, one with an unidentified “prime minister.” She says of one husband: “He never lied to me … (perfect beat) … until he did.” Husband Andy physically abused her and tried without success to rein in her political activities. There were sometimes violent altercations with record executives, who, she felt, cheated her all her life. When (self-)accused of shooting a record executive, she clarifies for the audience, “I shot at a record executive.” We sense her deep anguish at the deaths of King and Medgar Evers, but especially at the killing of the four little girls in Birmingham (Sept. 15, 1963). She has the audience repeat each child victim’s name out loud.

The premise of Simone’s visiting us from the afterlife allows for witty commentary on developments since her death. She’s proud of the protest tactics of Colin Kaepernick, but she’s equally eager to return to heaven to party with folks like Langston Hughes and Tupac (who strikes her as fine-looking).

She touches briefly on the time, when she was still on Earth, that she swallowed 35 pills … and lived. Her two psychiatrists never helped but so much.

Since she’s now appearing from the afterlife, she’s quite comfortable with computers and takes some (fictitious) questions from the online public. She grapples briefly with her invisible-to-us, long-disapproving mother and her own, much-loved daughter Lisa Simone, herself a singer and a documentarian of her mother’s life. The film her daughter worked on, “What Happened, Miss Simone?” (2015), is part of a still-breaking wave of plays (including last year’s “Bessie, Billie and Nina: Pioneering Women in Jazz” at the Attucks), films, books, song remixes, etc., that keep the Simone legacy alive.

Most recently and of possible interest to those in Hampton Roads is the restoration of Simone’s home in Tryon, thanks to the support of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In fact, on May 20, there will be a gala at New York’s Pace Gallery and, into May 22, an online auction by Sotheby’s devoted to raising additional restoration funds. (See pacegallery.com/nina-simone or savingplaces.org/supportnina.)

Were Simone actually still among us, she would doubtless have supported Black Lives Matter and all other efforts to fight racial injustice and, the bane of her life, racial hypocrisy. In the Wells offering — rough as it was when I saw it — Simone quotes an odd but telling observation she attributes to Malcolm X: “You can put kittens in the oven, but that doesn’t make them biscuits.” You can deny the validity of Black history, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

To chase the kittens/biscuits image from your mind, here’s another line from the show’s “Mississippi Goddam,” perhaps just as telling and rightfully disturbing:

Lord have mercy on this land of mine

We all gonna get it in due time.

Tell it, Nina, from wherever you are.

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

Original Story Linked Here at The Virginian-Pilot

___

If you go

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday; 7:30 p.m. Friday; 3 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday; and 2 p.m. Sunday

Where: The Wells Theatre, 108 E. Tazewell St., Norfolk

Tickets: Start at $35

Details: 757-627-1234, vastage.org

Actress Yolanda Rabun channels Nina Simone in new play from VSC on Coast Live

HAMPTON ROADS, VA. — Actress Yolanda Rabun joins Coast Live to discuss her upcoming role in the Virginia Stage Company's "No Fear and Blues Long Gone: Nina Simone," and shares a look at her unique take on the legendary singer.

No Fear and Blues Long Gone: Nina Simone
by Howard L. Craft
Directed by Kathryn Hunter-Williams
May 10 -14
Wells Theatre, Norfolk

This 90-minute, one-woman show features the Jazz legend and Civil Rights activist when she returns to present times to address certain events in her life, answer questions and leave her audience with a unique perspective on dealing with fear and current events in our world today. Featuring some of Ms. Simone’s greatest hits including “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”, “I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to Be Free”, “Feeling Good” and “Young, Gifted and Black”.

Paid for by Virginia Stage Company
vastage.org
Box Office: 757-627-1234

Original Story Linked at CoastLive.com