PRESS ROOM
Featured
By Jerome Langston
“Every Brilliant Thing is a play that I have seen more often than any other play that I’ve directed,” says Tom Quaintance, the Producing Artistic Director of Virginia Stage Company, during a recent phone chat earlier this week. It’s quite the striking statement from this long-time AD and theatre director, who has obviously seen a whole lot of shows during his decades long career. Tom led VSC’s 2022 production of Every Brilliant Thing, which closed out season 43. Now it’s bringing season 46 to a fitting close, with a short run production on stage at the Wells, that also celebrates its successful touring production — a show that has impacted thousands of people with its over 70 performances.
Contrary to some who complain that theater has gotten too political (theater, of course, has always been political), Virginia Stage Company‘s “Little Shop of Horrors” is merely, in the words of director Tom Quaintance, an innocent “horror comedy rock musical” designed to lull audiences into a plant-like stupor …
“I think Little Shop of Horrors is one of the great musicals, that is both fantastic score, great characters, and it is a story that does not at all feel dated,” says Tom Quaintance…
“A thousand jokes, a thousand stuck landings.” Don’t miss the laugh-out-loud brilliance of Virginia Stage Company and Virginia Rep’s FAT HAM.
Juicy, a queer southern college boy, is played by Marcus Antonio along with dual role-playing Kevin Craig West, who is Pap and Rev. Both actors appeared on Coast Live and discussed the play that's set against the backdrop of a family wedding barbecue.
“James Ijames is one of the best actors that you will ever see in your life,” surprisingly says Chicago-based play director, Jerrell L. Henderson, who is in town to direct Ijames’s best-known play, Fat Ham, for Virginia Stage Company’s current 46th season.
We hopped on a Zoom with cast members Anna Sosa and Dan Cimo to dish about how the women take center stage in this production and really stick it to the man–and just how funny that can be.
Playwright Kate Hamill (well-aided and abetted by director Melissa Mowry) has taken lucrative liberties with Stoker’s “Dracula,” just as she has with other out-of-copyright classics such as Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility,” “Pride and Prejudice” and “Emma.” Besides gender and nationality-switching key characters such as Van Helsing, Hamill has openly attacked paternalism on all fronts. This VSC production features, for example, an “all-female” creative team (with one nonbinary person, as Mowry specifies). In her playbill notes, Mowry calls this production “a labor of love and rage,” the rage directed against the degradation of women by men legally empowered to suck their life’s blood from them.
Actress Anna Sosa is joined by Connor Norton from the Virginia Stage Company to share a preview of "Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really," a revisionist take on Bram Stoker's legendary tale.
The newest production from Virginia Stage Company to hit the stage at the Wells Theater is coming just in time for Halloween … with a twist! It’s: ‘Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really’. Cast members Darlene Hope and Madeline Calais-King joined HRS with details about the show.
"What does it mean to have Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, really told from the perspective of a woman of color," says Melissa. ...That eventually opened up the world of the play to her. "This play was written during the #MeToo movement, and the Harvey Weinstein trial," she later adds. "Unfortunately, I think the world is meeting the play, where it sort of starts."
The newest production to hit the stage at The Wells Theatre is taking audiences on a journey with a family where everyone has a secret. Kathy Strouse and Linda Slade star in Virginia Stage Company’s production of “Arsenic and Old Lace,” and joined us to share more about their characters and the show.
Though generally a shy nocturnal species, we theater critics are inordinately fond of plays and films about other theater critics, e.g., “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” “All About Eve,” and, of course, the old chestnut dark comedy kicking off Virginia Stage Company’s 46th season, Joseph Kesselring’s 1941 “Arsenic and Old Lace.”
A play to be performed at James Madison University on Tuesday hopes to inspire conversations on topics like depression and suicide. In partnership with Sentara, the Norfolk-based Virginia Stage Company will perform the one-man play “Every Brilliant Thing” at 5:30 p.m. in the Hall of Presidents on the third floor of D-Hall as part of its traveling tour.
Actors Victoria Alev and Michael Raver join Coast Live to discuss "Arsenic & Old Lace," the latest production coming to the Wells Theatre in Norfolk from the Virginia Stage Company.
Starting Sept. 4, Virginia Stage Company’s new season is funny with a dark twist, artistic director Tom Quaintance said.
The day is set in 1940s Brooklyn, NYC, and the Brewster sisters are living in a Victorian or Gothic-style home, typical of the time. The Wells Theatre then should provide a pretty perfect space for the set. “I’m really excited about it being in the Wells Theatre, I find the Wells Theatre to be a really beautiful space," said Nick. The scenic designer, Kim Powers and I. have really considered the space itself, when looking at the design of the show.
Meet the Cast & Creative Time of Virginia Stage Company’s production of ARSENIC & OLD LACE Sponsored by TowneBank running September 4 - 22, 2024 at The Historic Wells Theatre of Downtown Norfolk.
Join director Jerrell L. Henderson and actor James T. Lane as they share some of the exciting and beautiful layers that make Virginia Stage Company’s production of BLUES FOR AN ALABAMA SKY sing in a way that everyone needs to hear!
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In the late evening of May 2, 2025, Virginia
Stage Company received word that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was withdrawing a $15,000 grant that had been awarded to us to support performances of the mental health-focused play, Every Brilliant Thing, for high school audiences. The NEA’s email explained that our program does not align with new funding priorities, intended to “reflect the nation's rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President.”