Katie Kishore opened Kindness Café to give adults with cognitive disabilities structured, gainful employment and a place to feel like they’re part of something big. Photo: Eze Amos
Kindness Cafe + Play opened quietly during the first COVID-19 wave’s peak. Now, after battling pandemic-related challenges for almost two years, owner Katie Kishore is looking to expand on her mission: To give adults with cognitive disabilities structured, gainful employment and a place to feel like they’re part of something big.
“It has been wonderful—even getting going during the pandemic was great for us,” Kishore says. “Adults with disabilities often have a hard time engaging with the greater community, and during the pandemic that was even more so.”
Since its outdoor-only start in July 2020, Kindness Cafe has grown to employ eight part-time workers. The cafe opened its indoor space in May 2021, and Kishore says the shop is finally developing the sense of community she always envisioned.
Kishore is considering multiple ways to give even more adults with unique skill sets the sense of structure and responsibility employment provides. One option would be to expand hours (located in the Brooks Family YMCA, the Kindness Cafe is currently open from 8am to noon). Another would be to open a second location.
“There are people that are asking us to join our team and be a part of it,” Kishore says. “We intentionally began this small, and we are lucky to be at the YMCA, which gives us flexibility. I’m not saying we need to be open 12 hours a day.”
Kishore, who has two daughters, one with Down syndrome, modeled Kindness Cafe after Bitty & Beau’s in Wilmington, North Carolina. She had seen a video about the coffee shop, which also employs adults with disabilities, and visited to see what it was all about in 2017.
Kishore ran a crowdfunding campaign to get off the ground in 2019 and launched Kindness Cafe about a year later. The cafe uses grant funding and community support, in addition to sales revenue, to thrive.
“It is beginning to feel like a real community for people with and without disabilities,” Kishore says. “The staff has been fantastic. They show up each day and do their best to have a positive impact on those around them.”
When people look back on 2021-2022, what will they think of? Okay, other than that.
With a little luck, it will be the new coffee shops, bakeries, and lunch counters that braved the elements to open their doors to the city’s hungry and thirsty. With a little luck, it will be that elegant cake they brought to a small gathering, that brilliantly executed latte they grabbed while strolling the Downtown Mall, that picture-perfect main course they enjoyed with a friend.
Because with a little luck, the following nine restaurants and cafés will be some of our new favorites for years to come.
Photo: Anna Kariel
New to the coop
Birdhouse is the brainchild of an architect and communications pro, but you’d never know it for the inspired rotisserie chicken flocking out of their small kitchen.
Occupying the old Ace Biscuit & Barbecue space on Henry Avenue (Ace relocated one street over in 2020), Birdhouse roasts free-range, organic Cornish cross chickens on the spit before adding a glug of olive oil and more seasoning—sumac, which hits acidic, is the not-so-secret ingredient—and crisping the skin to order.
Tim Popa, who handles communications for a design firm by day, charts Birdhouse’s chicken work, while former architect Liz Broyles builds out the rest of the menu. Small plates like roasted squash and green pozole soup gird the chicken-focused offerings. Broyles says the pozole “is the one thing I feel like I could eat every day and never get sick of.” Birdhouse sources the soup’s hominy from heirloom bean supplier Rancho Gordo in Napa, California, soaks the kernels in-house, and marries them with a tomatillo-based broth infused with poblano and jalapeño. Cilantro and rotisserie chicken finish the dish—“lots of layering,” Broyles says.
Birdhouse currently gets its chicken from Shenandoah Valley Organic in Harrisonburg, but Popa and Broyles are working to find local farmers to provide other bird breeds. “We’re still playing with things and don’t necessarily have a strict thing we’re going to adhere to,” Broyles says.
Photo: Anna Kariel
A sweet spot
There’s a saying about too many cooks in the kitchen, but lucky for Cake Bloom, the same hasn’t proven true for bakers.
Susan Sweeney moved her cake business from the West Coast to Charlottesville in late 2019 and quickly pivoted to a home-delivery and small-party format due to 2020’s setbacks for wedding and other large-party suppliers. Sweeney’s sisters, Elizabeth, Mary, Sarah, and Paige, then joined the team, bringing to the turntable a variety of backgrounds and expertise in baking, event planning, and design.
Together, the Sweeneys have launched a new brick-and-mortar, cake-and-bubbles bar to pair their passions for baked goods and sparkling wine.
At the former Snowing in Space location, the sisters covered the former tenant’s Caddyshack murals and created a bright, modern atmosphere that’s modeled after a retail/restaurant hall down under. “We have a sister (and business partner) living in Australia whose recipe ideas, aesthetic, and sense of humor infuse everything we do here,” Sweeney says.
And if you try only one thing when you hit the new Cake Bloom bar, make it the five-slice sampler of the Sweeney’s rotating seasonal signature flavors, which, she suggests, you pair with a bottle of Cava Aurelia Brut Nature Gran Reserva.
Photo: Anna Kariel
FARMacy Café
Wife-and-husband team Jessica and Gabino Lino have taken fusion to the next level with FARMacy Café. Not only do they blend Executive Chef Lino’s native Mexican food with Italian, Indian, Asian, and classic American comfort influences, but they also try to make it as nutrient rich as possible.
Jessica Lino (née Hogan), who’s worked nearly every job in hospitality on top of spending years in retail, started FARMacy as a superfood smoothie delivery service, then bought a food truck with her husband (boyfriend at the time). They began focusing FARMacy on local, organic, superfood Mexican fusion and opened their new restaurant in the CODE building courtyard earlier this year.
FARMacy’s best seller is the Super Naan Taco: garlic Indian-style flatbread stuffed with organic al pastor pork, “super guac,” lettuce, minced kale, cilantro, onion, feta, and sour cream. The café’s just started offering breakfast items, as well, like a burrito with local eggs, chorizo, avocado crema, raw pepper jack cheese, minced kale, and black beans. “So full of flavor—it’s a great way to start the day,” Lino says.
Photo: Anna Kariel
Wine buzz
Nick Leichtentritt founded the business that would become Milli Coffee Roasters in 2012. Tragically, he died seven years later at the age of 34. The business survives today, though, having been shepherded through the hard times by Leichtentritt’s wife, Nicole, and later sold to regular Milli Coffee patron John Borgquist.
It was Borgquist, the coffee conglomerate’s somewhat accidental successor, who launched Milli Second Café & Wine Bar in December last year. Another new CODE building culinary destination, Milli Second adds alcoholic beverages to the group’s repertoire; Borgquist suggests trying the rotating Virginia wine flight. “It shows off the best of local wines, including wines that are tough to find anywhere but the winery itself,” he says.
Of course Milli Second still offers the goods in the grinds, like pour overs using micro-lots of green coffee roasted 100 grams at a time. It’s “coffee you’d otherwise have to get on an airplane to taste,” Borgquist says.
Milli Second has more to roll out in the coming months, but its Thursday night free wine tastings have already been a hit, Borgquist says. The wines are new every week, and like the café’s Virginia wines and micro-lot coffee, they’re drinks you’d have a hard time landing anywhere else.
Photo: Anna Kariel
Say “cheese!”
Ask a few chefs what they like to eat at home. They’ll likely say something simple but delicious, made with great ingredients treated gently, respectfully, properly. For cheesemonger Carolyn Leasure and chef Zack Leasure, the answer is deliciously predictable.
“I owned an artisan cheese shop in D.C., and I would bring home all these delicious cheeses from small farms,” Carolyn Leasure says. “We would make grilled cheese.”
The couple’s home kitchen experiments—with different toppings, compound butters, cheese combinations—led to some happy customers when Leasure began offering the sandwiches at her fromagerie. C’ville got its first taste of the results when ooey gooey crispy opened in the CODE building in mid-February.
If you’re a first-timer, what should you request when you come to the counter? You could go with one of the flavorful, hearty salads, like the Blustery Fall, with roasted celery root, arugula, celery hearts, lemon-soaked currants, toasted hazelnuts, brie, and sherry vinaigrette. But you’ll probably end up with something ooey and gooey. Leasure suggests the brie, truffle butter, and crushed potato chips cheeser. Her husband’s favorite is the fontina val d’aosta, coated and crisped with sage butter. “It’s so simple but so delicious,” she says.
Photo: Anna Kariel
You’re welcome
Kitty Ashi needed more space. Fans of her family’s Thai delicacies at Monsoon Siam had asked for years about catering services and a place to host special occasion dinners. But the beloved restaurant just wasn’t big enough to answer the call.
Ashi had her eye on a spot that could pad her Thai empire, though, and along with her brother and his wife, a chef, she opened Pineapples Thai Kitchen in the old Coca-Cola building last year. “I loved this space so much when it was still Timbercreek Market,” she says. “And it’s been empty for a long time.”
Pineapples have strong ties to southern Thai food and represent hospitality. Welcoming patrons to the Pineapples Thai Kitchen menu are appetizers like the Punim Pok Pok Salad, with green papaya, grape tomatoes, string beans, roasted peanuts, and spicy lime dressing, and Num Tok Pork Belly, with red onion, scallion, cilantro, spring mix lettuce, and dressing in a rice cracker bowl. Standout entrées are the crispy chicken with roasted cashews and the biyani style yellow curry with bone-in beef rib, served with roti. For those who like their yum yum with a side of pain pain, the Southern Heat brings it with minced chicken, kaffir lime leaf, yellow curry powder, rice paper, and steamed veggies.
French twist
Rachel De Jong has worked as a pastry chef for some of the world’s most accomplished culinary personalities—Ludo Lefebvre, Patrick O’Connell—but Cou Cou Rachou is her first solo gig. Here, she’s creating seasonal cakes, traditional French pastries, and inspired breads by elevating the classics with her own natural, organic style.
Cou Cou Rachou doesn’t offer a set menu; the pastries rotate almost daily, giving De Jong freedom to flex her creativity. She’s in the process of optimizing her cake production, so while she loves making custom cakes to order, she plans to rotate three options seasonally going forward. Coming soon are choices like pistachio and citrus and chocolate mousse with red fruit jam.
De Jong says several Cou Cou Rachou pastries are quickly becoming fan favorites and difficult to take off the daily list. For a past/present hybrid, check out the French onion croissant, inspired by Lefebvre’s renowned soup of the same name and oozing with caramelized sweet onions, thyme, black pepper, bay leaf, and local cheese. Or go sweeter with a croissant that features frangipane (almond pastry cream) spiked with loads of fresh citrus zest.
The secret to de Jong’s decadent croissants? “The two biggest things are patience and beurre d’isigny,” she says. Aka: “French butter, from Normandy.”
Photo: Anna Kariel
Answer the call
Laura Fonner made her name as one of Charlottesville’s best chefs at Duner’s, where she settled in for many years turning out acclaimed, upscale-but-accessible, American-fusion fare. Since leaving the Ivy Road restaurant, Fonner’s bounced around a bit, but great talent usually finds its place, and for Fonner, that place may well be Siren.
Focused on American- and Mediterranean-inflected seafood, the new Ridge Road dining room (in the former Shebeen space) is part of the Champion Hospitality Group, which now has five in-demand restaurants under its um-beerla. Fonner, who’s a mother of three and former “Guy’s Grocery Games” winner, has held various roles with Champion since summer 2020.
The Siren menu is short and simple, opening with soups and salads, such as the crispy fried lentil falafel with tzatziki, quinoa tabbouleh, and feta on mixed greens, turning to shareables like curried yogurt-marinated grilled shrimp with harissa tomato jam and crispy fried chickpeas, and crescendoing with entrées like rockfish with kabocha squash gnocchi, mushrooms, and lemon beurre blanc.
Photo: Anna Kariel
More to love
Justin van der Linde’s come a long way since he launched his Smoked BBQ Co. food trailer almost a decade ago. Back then, his stock-in-trade was a 250-gallon offset smoker and all the pulled pork, ribs, chicken, and beef he could crank out. Now, he’s expanded his culinary point of view to a wider selection of comfort food and sandwich styles.
“We don’t invent many new items,” van der Linde says of his new venutre, Taste Shack. “We just like to make a run at the classics our way.”
Those classics include a housemade pastrami; van der Linde and his team start with a whole brisket, brine it, season it, smoke it, and pile it on a classic Reuben or in the Shack Pastrami, with Swiss cheese, cole slaw, tomato, onion, bread and butter pickles, and Shack Sauce. Then there’s the steak and cheese made with hand-trimmed, thin-sliced rib-eye. “Every steak is made to order, and we use a signature roll that we get direct from New York,” van der Linde says. “We are probably the only place in town using real rib-eye.”
Steve Nicholson's spec house on Hinton Avenue is only 19 feet across—and crested $1M when it sold last year. Photo: Steven Barling
If you had your eye on the more than $1 million new construction home at 802 Hinton Ave., bad news. Someone beat you to it.
But also good news. The builder, Steve Nicholson Construction, is still out there doing HGTV-worthy work on spec and for specific homeowners with style—not to mention substance.
For context, consider the Hinton spot. How did a Belmont neighborhood home, which is only 19 feet across in the interior, eclipse the $1 million threshold? According to Nicholson, it’s a combination of material, design detail, and building science.
“Say you are going to go out on the town tonight, and you’re going to decide what to wear,” Nicholson says. “Whether it be a black-tie tuxedo or jeans and a T-shirt, there is a difference in the cost.”
Nicholson thinks of 802 Hinton Ave. as a tux. The mid-century modern structure includes concrete and steel building materials, warm and cool colors, white trim, glass banisters and stairways, and high-end hardware and finishes. All of it comes together to give the impression of luxury—and more space than you’d expect from the outside.
The Hinton home was built on spec—a phrase typically synonymous with cutting corners—but Nicholson says corner-cutting isn’t in his playbook.
He points to the Hinton house’s front entryway. Concrete retaining walls lead up to the home; treated boards of ipe, also known as Brazilian walnut, form the porch floor and ceiling; painted steel girders and modern light fixtures complete the high-end effect.
Inside the home, a white oak stairwell, lined in glass, immediately greets the homeowner. “To my mind, you deserve that at this price point,” Nicholson says. “When you have width challenges, you have to be cognizant of them, and it has to drive your architecture and fit and finish—what the living experience is going to be in that house.”
Elizabeth Jennings of Small House Design served as architect on the project, and Nicholson says she grasped what needed to be done immediately.
Steve Nicholson. Photo: Stephen Barling
“I’m not a good salesman, but I think we nailed it,” he says. “When my wife Lori started to market Hinton and the price was big, one of the first things that always came out of her mouth was, ‘Have you seen the house?’ Every person that I have spoken with directly was amazed.”
Nicholson got into the building biz in 2003, founding the Maple Ridge Group with a close friend. The partner has since exited, and Nicholson has mostly rebranded. Over the years, he’s done some striking work under the Steve Nicholson Construction name: Italian-style farmhouses, homes with Japanese-style baths, even treehouses.
But according to Nicholson, good homebuilding isn’t about flashy projects. It’s about making the right choices when it comes to structural materials, details like insulation, and merging form and function.
“Being a good builder is much more than knowing how to nail a couple two-by-fours together,” he says. “The whole reason I became a builder was because of my fascination with architecture.”
To Nicholson, that means extreme attention to detail, making decisions that hopefully yield efficient, long-lasting homes, and making some decisions that end up pushing prices up.
“Is Steve Nicholson a risk taker in the real estate market?” he asks. His answer? “I believe in what we are doing here.”
TAKE THREE
The Maple Ridge Group, doing business as Steve Nicholson Construction, has been building around Charlottesville and beyond since 2003. The following is a look at three of owner Steve Nicholson’s favorite projects.
Photo: Stephen Barling
Kings Grant
ν Structure: Wildlife viewing platform and recreational pavilion
Nicholson’s take: “The owners had been to the Amazon and spent the night in some aboriginal treehouses in the canopy of the trees. It was an ecstatic experience for them, and they said, ‘We want to replicate that experience.’”
Nicholson’s take: “This is not necessarily a compound, but it is a family project. It has a main house and guest house, with a detached garage and offices. The attention to detail there is just beautiful, with huge opening doors that create a beautiful stone hall dining room. It’s probably one of my favorite projects ever.”
Italianate Farmhouse
ν Structure: Five-bedroom home
ν Location: Central Albemarle County
ν Size: 7,918 square feet
ν Style: Italianate
Nicholson’s take: “The Italianate house was created inside a factory and brought over. Not only the wall panels, but all the details were pre-fabricated and shipped to us on trucks, and we put it together like a puzzle.”
In Belmont, this addition by Wolf Ackerman melds modern with traditional. Photo: Tom Daly
Dave Ackerman and his architecture and design firm, Wolf Ackerman, have been making modern additions to traditional homes for at least a decade, and he thinks the trend is definitely catching on.
“We’ve done a lot of older houses, specifically in and around Belmont, that just don’t suit the way people live today,” Ackerman says. “They are 75 to 100 years old, and the owners want more light and more space.”
So what exactly is the traditional homeowner who wants more space to do? Try to copy the home’s original styling? Make an addition that’s subtly different? Or go extreme and produce an extension that demands attention?
Dan Zimmerman of Alloy Workshop says existing architecture should drive the decision-making. “If the two structures were dancing, one wants to lead and the other wants to follow,” he says.
Existing buildings that are leads—those with striking features like high-design mid-century modern houses, Zimmerman suggests—might step on the toes of hyper-modern additions that would also like to lead. But a simpler farmhouse or gabled roof design, for example, might be willing to follow bolder add-ons.
Once the decision to go the hyper-modern direction is made, Ackerman says homeowners must strike a balance. “It wants to be distinct and different, but it also needs to play nicely with the existing house,” he says. “For us, it’s like, let’s figure out the scale and rhythm and find a way to put this thing on so it looks right and feels right, rather than like a spaceship landed.”
And where should the audacious additions go? Often, they work best off the back of homes, where they can do what modern designs do best—open the interior space and work seamlessly with exterior space.
“Generally what happens is the kitchens, living, and dining rooms, that is where the expansion wants to happen, so you open it up and create a better connection to the yard,” Ackerman says. “That’s where people are living these days.”
Exceptions exist, Ackerman says. His firm has done modern front porches and standout second stories and side yards. But there, too, it’s all about opening up space and meeting the old and new in the middle.
Zimmerman isn’t as keen on hyper-modern additions to old homes in general, but he agrees it’s all about finding that middle ground.
“I like our architecture to relate in some way to the building,” he says. “I might take an approach where I match the form of the addition to the building but may deviate with materials or color. Or we can do the opposite, deviating in form and matching materials and colors. Whenever I talk to potential clients and they are looking for people to work with, I talk about finding a balance.”
Tara Nurin details the massive, and largely overlooked, contributions that women have made in beer brewing. Photo courtesy of the VA Festival of the Book
Thomas Jefferson’s oldest daughter, Martha, wrote to her own daughter, Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge, on the occasion of Ellen’s marriage. Postmarking her letter to Boston from Virginia, Martha said she would not be sending Ellen the family’s beer recipes. A fine young woman like Ellen wouldn’t need them, as Martha didn’t “presume” Ellen would ever brew her own beer.
Whether Martha was correct is lost to history. But the presumption itself is all too common. While women have been at the forefront of beer brewing for centuries, they have never received the credit they deserve.
Tara Nurin, a journalist and writer (who reported for Charlottesville’s WVIR years ago), is out to change that. The note about TJ’s granddaughter shows up in her book, A Woman’s Place is in the Brewhouse: A Forgotten History of Alewives, Brewsters, Witches and CEOs. In it, Turin tracks the history of beer through the glasses of women going back to the beginnings of the beverage.
“As divisions of labor formed along gender lines, perhaps with the gradual development of tools for hunting large game and weapons for fighting foreign clans…beer making fell to the women,” Nurin writes in the book, which will be featured in a virtual discussion and tasting on March 18.
Libby Roether, innovation brewmaster at Devils Backbone Brewing Co., will host a virtual tasting of four beers brewed with women in mind: All Dolled Up, an aperitivo-style spritz ale, Suffragette Sour, Bomba Ass Queen pale ale, and Equal Pay IPA. Folks who want to sip along can pick up a Bounce Box of brews at the DB brewery off 151 in Roseland.
Roether, who’s read A Woman’s Place is in the Brewhouse twice, will also participate in the discussion.
“There are so many women that are mentioned in the book that I know, and for a lot of these women, I didn’t even know all of their amazing accomplishments,” she says. “Every chapter, I was surprised by the history and the way everything evolved.”
At its heart, Nurin’s book is about inequality. Women have invariably been replaced in the modern beer consciousness, not to mention the history books, by men. From Suzanne Stern, who co-founded famed craft brew trailblazer New Albion Brewing Company but was shoved from the spotlight by the surly Jack McAuliffe, to women like Roether, who all too often cede recognition to the burly bearded brewers of today, circumstances have conspired to keep women out of craft beer’s halo.
And while that’s not right, Nurin thinks things may be changing.
“With craft brewing, we are finally seeing a reversal and women reentering the industry,” she says. “The more women who do reenter the industry, the more accepted and mainstream women being in beer will be. And I think that will encourage other women to get into beer and break down some of these stereotypes that Libby hears all the time, like ‘do you know anything about beer?’ That is just the beginning of misogyny.”
Tara Nurin will discuss her book, A Woman’s Place is in the Brewhouse: A Forgotten History of Alewives, Brewsters, Witches and CEOs, with Devils Backbone Brewing Co. brewmaster Libby Roether at Reading Under the Influence, a virtual discussion held on March 18 at 8pm.
The Legend of Georgia McBride, Live Arts’ “celebration of divas and difference,” opens on March 4. Photo: Will Kerner
It’d be easy for a bunch of theater-minded folks to say to themselves, “I’m not part of the drag community, but I can put on a play about drag, no problem.”
That would be a trap, though, and one the Live Arts’ production team wants to avoid in its latest play, The Legend of Georgia McBride. The show, which tells the story of an Elvis impersonator who attempts to become a drag queen to make a living, opens at the Water Street theater on March 4.
“The biggest challenge we took on from the get-go was making sure we were stepping into this in an authentic way,” says director Perry Medlin, who’s helmed three shows for Live Arts and many others at Tandem Friends School, where he teaches theater and public speaking. “None of the company has had a great deal of experience in drag, so we wanted to make sure we were coming to this from a place where we were able to learn about what that culture involves and to honor it, not just imitate it.”
Enter Jason Elliott, a former drag queen and current model and public speaker. Live Arts and the Georgia McBride team recruited Elliott as a production consultant, and Medlin says Elliott’s ability to “take that world and put it onstage” has been critical to developing the show’s authenticity.
The Legend of Georgia McBride, written by Matthew Lopez and winner of multiple awards, will be the third show in Live Arts’ current six-play season. The company is trying not only to recover its stage legs post-pandemic, but also integrate a new artistic director’s vision. Susan Evans, who joined Live Arts last June, said presenting inclusive shows with a variety of perspectives would be central to her mission. “More voices need to be heard,” she told C-VILLE in October.
The show will feature five cast members changing in and out of more than 50 costumes. It lines up with the theme of the company’s annual fundraiser—this year, Elliott will host the fundraiser on March 20. Marketer and Design Coordinator Katie Rogers calls it a “big, boozy brunch and live drag show.”
The Legend of Georgia McBride will be the company’s annual mentor/apprentice show, too. Live Arts’s mentor/apprentice program has been giving high school students the chance to participate in community theater for at least a decade, according to Education Director Miller Susen. The program invites students to act as production team apprentices in one mainstage show per year, typically drawing eight to 10 student volunteers and assigning them to areas of their choosing. This year, six high schoolers will apprentice in stage management and scenic, props, lighting, sound, and costume design.
Susen says the mentor/apprentice program has brought countless students back to Live Arts over the years to volunteer on later productions, as well as helping push others on to drama school and even theater careers. That benefits Live Arts, but it’s also good for the theater community in general, according to Susen.
“We have a great group of apprentices on Georgia, and we are delighted to have people finding their way back to Live Arts,” she says. “It’s been a difficult time for theater, so that’s really important.”
What can folks who come to see The Legend of Georgia McBride expect? Medlin calls the show “a huge number with so many moving parts.” In addition to those 50-plus costumes, the production boasts extensive setwork, props, and technical lighting and sound—all great opportunities for those high school apprentices.
“The thing I love about this show is it is this great big drag extravaganza, but at its heart it is a story about somebody who wants to be better and meet the people around them,” Medlin says. “It’s that core of humanity amidst the feathers and the bangles…that make the show interesting for the audience.”
As the five Georgia McBride cast members—Brandon Bolick as the lead, plus Danait Haddish, Marc Schindler, Randy Risher, and Jude Hansen—move around the stage and (hopefully) perform without a hitch, Medlin says it’s important to remember just how many people are working behind the scenes to make it possible.
Oh, and he suggests remembering one more thing: “Don’t forget to tip your drag queens. They get mad when you don’t.”
Kendall Street Company hits the road for 20 shows in February, all of them in Virginia. Publicity photo
What’s with the “company” in Kendall Street Company? If you know anything about the local band, an 8- to 9-year-old jam-rock outfit with a dedicated regional following, you know these guys are anything but stuffed shirts. Business casual for frontman Louis Smith and his colleagues doesn’t even come with socks and shoes.
No, Smith says the “company” in Kendall Street Company refers to the company the band keeps, the folks who follow the rockers from show to show and know the words to every song on their eponymous 2014 debut EP, as well as those who’ve shown up more recently.
Over the next three weeks, the band stands to learn a lot about its Virginia-based faithful. Smith and his mates have launched a five-city, 20-concert, in-state tour. In addition to shows in Blacksburg, Harrisonburg, Roanoke, and Richmond, the tour includes four shows at Charlottesville’s Rapture on the Downtown Mall. KSC will start its week on Tuesdays, and wind its way to C’ville on Friday nights, before concluding the state circuit in Richmond on Saturdays.
“We were thinking, we don’t want to plan this giant tour that is going to be going out to places hundreds of miles from home and potentially have cancellations,” Smith says. “We decided, let’s play in our home state, let’s put on some awesome shows for all these people in the state of Virginia.”
Playing four concerts in the same city in as many weeks isn’t without challenges. The big one? Filling the venues. Bands try to space out their bookings in individual locations to keep demand up—play too many times in the same place, and you’ll stop attracting crowds.
But the tour venues were selected with that in mind, and Smith’s confident in his band’s ability to pull off the weekly engagement over the next month. The KSC website says “no two shows [are] ever the same,” and those aren’t just corporate buzzwords. The band’s thick catalog of originals and covers is impressive for an act that’s only been formally touring for five years, and with lengthy improvisations dotting its setlists, Kendall Street Company knows how to keep it fresh.
The group is coming off a nationwide fall tour, which served as a proper promotional effort for 2021’s COVID-driven The Year the Earth Stood Still double LP. But even if fans caught one of the shows on the swing, which included highlight reel performances in Denver, Virginia Beach, and NYC, they’re in for at least one surprise. KSC’s original keyboardist, Price Gillock, will play the 20 shows alongside the band’s five current members: Smith (acoustic guitar, vocals), Brian Roy (bass), Ryan Wood (drums), Ben Laderberg (electric guitar), and Jake Vanaman (saxophones, keys).
So what can Charlottesville audiences expect during the weekly Rapture shows? Intimacy is the watchword, with the smallish venue bringing the band and its company close together. What’s more, KSC has dubbed the in-state tour “Kendall Street Is for Lovers,” and will play songs at least tangentially in line with the theme. That means, in addition to crowd-pleasers like “Wasted” (“your love is tearing me apart”) and on-the-nose title tracks like “Lady I Love,” showgoers will get “Rocky Raccoon,” The Beatles’ ballad about an ill-fated love triangle.
“We learned a bunch of covers and rehearsed over four days before the tour,” Smith says. “We are diving deep into the catalog.”
The band has come a long way in developing that catalog since its 2014 debut. Early on, it might have been easy to dismiss the group as a DMB knockoff. Horns, raspy lead vocalist, jazzy/folky Americana, jams/improvisations. Check, check, check, check.
And while Smith admits it was in part his love for Matthews that brought him to Charlottesville (to study architecture, physics, and music at UVA), KSC has evolved into something more. A Phish-like whimsy, a Widespread Panic-like sense of desperation—all mashed up to make the band one of a kind.
According to Smith, it’s driven by the music his parents listened to when he was growing up—Miles Davis, Talking Heads, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Herbie Hancock—and inflected by modern curios. Think Aussie indie rockers King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, soul singer D’Angelo, and former Roots drummer-cum-late night star Questlove.
Which brings us to where Kendall Street Company is today: a tight jam band, dependent on its members being closely in sync, quickly recovering from a brief pandemic-induced period of alienation.
“Like the first year or nine months, we didn’t get together at all really,” Smith says. “We did a livestream series on YouTube…those were fun, but it was definitely like grasping at something to do and keep creating the art and be the band we wanted to be.”
Smith thinks one of the upsides of playing Rapture and the other statewide venues once a week for four weeks is that KSC will get better and better. And with any luck, the band’s company will also start to feel it.
“We’re hoping the people at the shows are going to meet each other and bond over a love of jam music,” Smith says. “I feel like in Charlottesville, it’s been hard to find the scene, like what is going on? I’m sure it is similar in other cities, coming back and going to see shows. I just want to see live music flourish.”
Tracy Cox stars in Victory Hall Opera’s Fat Pig, an original opera based on a play
by Neil LaBute that champions body justice and positivity. Supplied photo
There might be a few local residents who haven’t yet heard of Victory Hall Opera. But rest assured that opera aficionados nationwide—from the Deep South to the Pacific Northwest—have begun to take notice of the Charlottesville-based company.
Victory Hall is turning heads thanks to its embrace of cutting-edge productions, like its latest, a world premiere of the original opera Fat Pig.
“A big part of our mission when we started was to take the usual structure of opera and reinvent it,” says Miriam Gordon-Stewart, Victory Hall’s co-founder and artistic director. “Rather than singers being slotted in, the productions are based around the cast and our ensemble. It functions like a troupe. It’s the kind of model you might have seen…at some major theater companies.”
Now entering its seventh year, Victory Hall has put on 26 original productions, more than most similar opera companies stage in a six-year stretch. Five of them have been world premieres; several have been Virginia and U.S. premieres.
The company’s mission and production schedule have drawn the attention of critical U.S. opera onlookers. The Music Academy of the West has given VHO two national Alumni Enterprise Awards for putting on “revolutionary” shows. And The Washington Post called it “the future of the field.”
Now, Victory Hall has attracted a major national talent to star alongside its ensemble in Fat Pig, which premieres on January 22 and will be reprised on January 27.
Tracy Cox, a Dallas native and current Los Angeles resident, has become an in-demand soprano around the world. In addition to performing on some of the biggest stages—she’ll travel to New York to perform at the Metropolitan Opera for a to-be-determined run later this season—she’s also a prominent voice in the body positive movement, with more than 17,000 followers on her fat activism-focused social media platforms.
Cox’s combination of singing talent and activism came together to make her the ideal choice for Fat Pig. The subject of the opera convinced her to add two shows at a small, young opera company in central Virginia to her performing schedule. The show is “a story that we felt has never been represented in the opera—the story of a fat person’s experience,” Gordon-Stewart says.
For the lay opera observer, the notion is odd. Stereotypical opera singers are often big-bodied—“the fat woman with the horns,” Cox suggests. And the ability to sing at length without tiring goes hand in glove with body size, Gordon-Stewart admits. But bigger players are often cast in farcical roles and openly pilloried—never before, the Victory Hall artistic director says, has a lead operatic role been given to a fat person who is celebrated as such on stage. “Often, larger singers are asked to appear thin while playing their roles, or they are dressed to minimize their body and ignore the fact that they are fat,” Gordon-Stewart says.
Fat Pig is based on a play of the same name by Neil LaBute, with its original libretto written by Gordon-Stewart and music by Matt Boehler. The adaptation is Gordon-Stewart and singer/composer Boehler’s first opera, which will be performed at the V. Earl Dickinson Theater at Piedmont Virginia Community College with a small cast and chamber orchestra.
Cox, who had heard of Victory Hall and its repertory through her professional and personal network, believes Fat Pig is an important production for both the opera industry and body justice.
“I was instantly floored by the concept of the project,” she says. “Because there really has never been anything like this. Never has there been a piece where the romantic lead is cast as a fat woman.”
The LaBute play itself has drawn plenty of attention, winning multiple Off-Broadway awards while courting controversy. “He’s been accused of being misogynistic, but we both view his work as presenting misogyny as something you just have to deal with,” Cox says. “The piece presents a fat person who I feel like I understand but is not necessarily me.”
Gordon-Stewart says she and her team approached LaBute about turning Fat Pig into an opera because “we loved this play—it is controversial, and it is relevant.” LaBute, she says, gave them free rein to do what they would with the piece.
Gordon-Stewart says her own perspective as a singer afforded her a unique perspective when adapting Fat Pig to the opera. She found herself cutting significant text and adding new material while attempting to preserve LaBute’s voice. For Cox, the resulting adaptation was a revelation.
“For the first time in my career, I wasn’t worried about my body when I showed up on day one,” she says.
Live Arts’ new artistic director Susan Evans brings vision and a desire to see the theater evolve to reflect the Charlottesville community. Supplied photo
Susan Evans knows nothing is permanent in the theater. Nor should it be—theaters must evolve to stay relevant, says Live Arts’ artistic director.
“A successful theater is a theater that never stops examining itself,” Evans says. “I think that many theaters get stuck. And it’s easy to get stuck because of money.”
Evans got her own taste of impermanence in August 2020. That’s when she was laid off as artistic director at the Town Hall Theatre Company in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The change put things in perspective for Evans, who’s spent nearly 20 years working in arts direction. “This is my fourth artistic director position—I’m just hoping to get it right,” she says.
Evans’ ouster on the West Coast was outside her control. The Town Hall Theatre told local media outlets the move was driven by budget considerations, and the theater’s leadership praised Evans, noting her “deep artistic vision and theater acumen.”
But budget cuts have, indeed, meant curtains for many community theaters nationwide. According to data from the National Endowment for the Arts, theater, dance, and other performing arts companies lost nearly 60 percent of their employees from March to April 2020. Theaters owning, renting, or leasing space suffered most, with many having to shut their doors.
Theaters in and around Charlottesville struggled like many nationwide. Staunton’s nearly 70-year-old Oak Grove Theater went to a virtual model for 2020 but returned for 2021. Barboursville’s Four County Players has likewise returned to a live season for 2021-22, but Gorilla Theater Productions, which leased a multi-use space on Allied Lane off McIntire Road, announced it was seeking a tenant to take over the facility in July 2020. Bent Theatre, which used Gorilla’s space for improv comedy shows, has moved to virtual productions for the time being.
Anecdotal evidence suggests volunteer organizations like Live Arts and more flexible theaters not tied to leased or rented spaces have had more success than others. The Charlottesville Players Guild, which performs at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, announced that its 2022-23 Black Indigeneity season will include classes and a podcast that follows the production journey. And the Charlottesville Playwrights Collective is producing live plays in the Belmont Arts Collaborative theater on Carlton Road.
For its part, Live Arts stayed afloat with streaming performances and general community outreach. “We reinvented the wheel,” Audience Experience Manager Darryl Smith says.
As Evans sought a new position and Live Arts went through its own pandemic pains, the local theater advertised for a new artistic director. Evans had visited Charlottesville many times—her mother was at the Westminster Canterbury of the Blue Ridge senior living center for 15 years. But in all her visits, she had never heard of Live Arts.
“It was completely new to me, but you can tell a lot about a company just by looking at the kinds of shows being done,” Evans says.
What she saw impressed her. She credits Live Arts for doing, “for lack of a better word, edgier” shows from its inception up to now, and exploring topics that challenge audiences.
In today’s charged political environment—and especially in a place like Charlottesville—Evans says taking on the big issues is more important than ever. At Live Arts, she says she won’t have to rework the theater’s vision. But she does plan to put her stamp on the lineup.
The current season launched on October 15 with Every Brilliant Thing. Directed by Clinton Johnson, the single-actor play digs deep into mental health. The season also addresses LGBTQ+ issues, the environment, and politics; this week’s opening of Pipeline (see story on page 16), by contemporary African American playwright Dominique Morisseau, has been highly anticipated.
“We don’t want it to just be lip service—we have a commitment to talk about LGBTQ and under-resourced communities, and that needs to be expressed in the kind of work we do,” Evans says. “Are you putting on a play with an all-white cast or an all-male cast or an all-cisgendered cast? What stories are being told?”
Evans will direct the season’s final play, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, a political farce by Italian Dario Fo that explores police brutality and government overreach. Directing pieces that speak to what’s going on in the community and nation is something Live Arts’ new artistic director plans to continue doing throughout her tenure.
And while Live Arts’ current season has gone well so far, theaters across the country are still struggling with pandemic-related issues. Live Arts will require everyone other than active performers to wear masks in the space, but in some U.S. theaters, unmasked performers have drawn backlash. Live Arts will also ask volunteers and audience members 18 and over to show proof of full vaccination, practice social distancing where possible, and stay home if they are feeling sick or have a recent COVID exposure.
As Live Arts navigates this next act, Evans looks forward to continuing to evolve along with the theater.
“I have grown up with one artistic director model that’s fairly top-down, and I need to expand my own mind and view of diversified leadership,” she says. “More voices need to be heard.”
On stage at Live Arts in 2022
Pipeline January 14-30, 2022 Written by Dominique Morisseau Directed by David Vaughn Straughn
The Legend of Georgia McBride March 4-27, 2022 Written by Matthew Lopez
The Children April 15-May 7, 2022 Written by Lucy Kirkwood Directed by Betsy Rudelich Tucker
Accidental Death of an Anarchist May 20-June 5, 2022 Written by Dario Fo Directed by Susan Evans
New weddings-and-more venue The Bradbury is open for business on the Downtown Mall—and the team behind the new spot is a who’s who of weddings and events experts: Harvest Moon Catering’s Mark Hahn, Ken Notari, and Anne Peterson, photog Sarah Cramer, Just a Little Ditty’s Dickie Morris, and Second Line Business Management’s John Spagnolo.
The group came together when heralded restaurant Prime 109 met its untimely demise last year due to the pandemic. Morris says she and Hahn had been talking for some time about creating a “venue collective,” and the newly opened spot at 300 E. Main St. checked their boxes.
“It’s just a beautiful space, and Mark put together a great group of like-minded people,” Morris says.
The Bradbury venue proper, which the group named after the architect who designed the building, offers room enough for a standing party of about 250 or 140 for a seated dinner. Hosts can also book the gallery space abutting the venue in the Vault, giving them at least another 150 standing or seated.
The planning supergroup has not made their new venue’s price list publicly available, but Morris assures it’s in line with similar event spaces.
In addition to booking events now—not just weddings but rehearsals, brunches, birthday celebrations, graduation parties, work gatherings—the group intends to launch a café in the space in front of the Vault. It’ll be a place “you could just come in through the front door and grab a coffee or a sandwich,” Morris says. The team has not yet decided on the café’s hours and offerings but is targeting a November 2021 opening.
“We are really trying to get more traffic through the space because it’s such a beautiful centerpiece,” Cramer says. “We would love to get more people enjoying that space, and not just for events and gatherings.”
Morris and Cramer say they know event hosts have many options in Charlottesville, but they think The Bradbury offers several things most other venues don’t. Harvest Moon provides their in-house catering, and they have a pastry chef onsite, a central downtown location, and a “breathtaking” main events room—not to mention that group of experienced planners bringing different expertise areas to the table.
“We all work together beautifully,” Cramer says. “We’ve worked together for such a long time, and we love it. This space just sounded like a fantastic idea. We love Charlottesville—all of us. We want to give back to the community and be a part of it.”
