March/April 2006

The Show Must Go On

The Virginia Arts Festival has been delighting audiences for a decade—and judging by this year’s line-up of dazzling performances, it’s 10th season will continue the tradition of entertainment and awe.

By Montague Gammon III

From Alvin to Yo-Yo via Van and Chesapeake to Williamsburg via Cape Charles—this year’s 10th edition of the Virginia Arts Festival brings even more big names to even more places in nine Hampton Roads cites than any of its highly acclaimed predecessors. It will even manage, for a totally unique finale, to pair the Virginia Symphony with Judy Garland.

The skirl of bagpipes, ruffle of drums and crack of rifle shots annually herald the return of the Festival’s big draw, the Virginia International Tattoo, to Scope. Boasting 750 performers from six countries, this three-performance showcase of multi-national martial music adds the efforts of local groups like the Tidewater Pipes and Drums and the Festival’s unique Rhythm Project to the bands, drill teams, choristers, commandos and dancers that the Festival, NATO and Norfolk’s International Azalea Festival cooperate to bring here from all over the world.

Pianist Van Cliburn, whose name still means classical music to a whole generation of Americans, comes back to join the Virginia Symphony at the Ferguson Center in Newport News. After Yo-Yo Ma’s 10th Anniversary Celebration this past February, brilliant young pianist Lang Lang kicks off the Festival proper with one performance at Chrysler Hall, where living legend jazzman and classical composer Wynton Marsalis leads the Festival debut of his Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra as well.

The performances of Mark O’Connor’s Appalachia Waltz Trio at the Great Bridge Presbyterian Church in Chesapeake and Canadian Fiddler Natalie MacMaster’s visit to the Granby Theatre give audiences folk music plus a little more. O’Connor’s group of violin/fiddle, viola and cello blends classical with contemporary sensibilities in a new form of wholly American chamber performance. Grammy Award-nominated MacMaster hails from good old Celtic tradition, updated with an infusion of bluegrass, jazz and rock.

Traditional chamber music remains one of the Festival’s strongest suits. National Public Radio will again be recording a host of concerts in Norfolk, Portsmouth, Virginia Beach, Williamsburg, Hampton, Newport News, Suffolk and Williamsburg for national broadcast.

JoAnne Falletta leads the Virginia Symphony Orchestra and the Virginia Symphony Chorus in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in D, the culmination of his unmatched career. The musical “Three B’s” materialize as blues, Broadway and Big Bands in locally born vocal great Ruth Brown, Broadway Under the Stars, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and The Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.

Plus, there will be organ and classical guitar performances, Vivaldi and the new works from the John Duffy Composers Institute.

Dance diversity jumps from the Russian Cossack State Dance Company to the Hispanic-flavored Limon Dance Company, adding two premier American troupes, the legendary Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and the witty, cutting edge, Emmy-winning Pilobolus Dance Theatre.

Diversity becomes almost an understatement for a Festival that accommodates under the one rubric of vocal music the wry singer/songwriter/movie actor Loudon Wainwright III, most famous for his sub-textually political song called “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road,” along with Native American singer Joanne Shenandoah and the male a cappella ensemble Lionheart, known for its Gregorian chant-based repertoire.

Indoor venues are as big as the multi-thousand capacity Scope and as intimate as churches that hold no more than a couple of hundred people. In Cape Charles, the Art Deco Historic Palace Theatre, a converted 1941 movie house, hosts the Dorsey Orchestra. In Suffolk, which presented its first Festival event last year, chamber music and Cossack dance will be among the earliest performances on the stage of the Suffolk Center for Cultural Arts, newly revamped from the 83-year-old Suffolk High School.

Regent University in Virginia Beach, Christopher Newport University in Newport News, ODU and Tidewater Community College in Norfolk represent the region’s schools as venues for performances. Willett Hall in Portsmouth and the Cavalier Hotel in Virginia Beach are on the docket. The redone Chrysler Museum Theatre, not far from downtown Norfolk, gets a visit from the chamber music artists, too. A few blocks away, the Wells Theatre is taken over by the literate antics of Reduced Shakespeare.

Outdoors, the Sunken Garden at William and Mary is the site for Broadway and classical concerts, the fourth annual PANorama Caribbean Music Festival plays at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront and the fifth annual Virginia Beer Festival comes to Town Point Park next to Waterside in Norfolk.

The Festival lasts from April 20 through June 4, ending with the Virginia Symphony, live, accompanying Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Burt Lahr, Jack Haley, Billie Burke, Margaret Hamilton, et al., on film. For an event that harkens back to the days when cinema was enlivened by live music, and at the same time manifests the best of 21st-century tech wizardry, the Festival has acquired the rights to one of the original prints of The Wizard of Oz. With the studio instrumental music separated and removed from the sound track, the symphony steps in to cap off 10 years of the Virginia Arts Festival and begin setting the stages for decades to come.

For the rest of this story, including previews of this year’s best Virginia Arts Festival performances, see the March/April 2006 issue of Hampton Roads Magazine, currently available on newsstands.