Richmond’s hopping like never before.
Looking for something to do, just open your door and take a step. You won’t have to go far to find everything from gallery art shows to big-screen movies to street festivals that will keep you busy for an entire day (or weekend). Love live music, watching a guy atop a 10-foot unicycle juggling flaming batons, or catching classic theater in an intimate room? Richmond has it all.
From spectacular new venues downtown to repurposed gems on the South Side to old favorites spread across the suburbs, there’s something to do – and someplace to go – no matter where you live or where in the area you like to visit.
“There’s just so much more now,” said Jonathan “the Juggler” Austin, a Richmond native who has been showing off his combination of juggling, magic and comedy skills around town since the late 1980s. “Look at First Fridays. That wasn’t any great plan, it just happened.”
Musician Robert Antonelli, also a Richmond native and a drummer who has played with Robbin Thompson, Janet Martin and Billy Hatley, among others, named the Folk Festival as the best thing to happen in town in the last decade.
“It really put Richmond on a different musical map,” he said of the five-year-old festival. “It’s the first time I can remember when Richmond latched onto something and did it right.”
For fans of local music, Antonelli said, the scene is more active than at any time he can remember since he started playing in the late 1960s.
“It seems like there’s always a benefit show of some kind with a long lineup of bands,” he said. “If you like variety, it’s there.”
All around town, venues have been spruced up or sprung up of late.
On a large scale, and drawing large national shows and acts, have been the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts – the recently completed $150 million expansion makes it the 10th largest comprehensive art museum in the country – and Richmond CenterStage. A step below in size, venues such as the National Theater have brought back to Richmond the type of acts that long skipped the area.
But it’s not all big-time. There’s plenty of local flavor, too, including the new Dogtown Dance Theatre in Manchester, which opened in May in a long-vacant building that once housed a middle-school gym.
“If CenterStage is for Broadway acts, we’re trying to be off-Broadway,” said co-founder Lea Marshall. A decade ago, she helped found Ground Zero Dance Company, which is now the resident company at Dogtown.
CenterStage, the downtown venue that combined the historic Carpenter Theatre with an innovative renovation of the old Thalhimers department store to create a block-square performing arts complex, is home to a dozen or so companies. But that’s not the only game in town, especially for theater. From the Firehouse Theatre on Broad Street to the Chamberlayne Actors Theatre in Henrico County to Swift Creek Mill Theatre in Colonial Heights, central Virginia has an abundance of stage shows.
If you like your entertainment on the big screen, there are choices a-plenty, too.
The Byrd Theatre in Carytown is showing movies as it has for decades, amid the splendor of a 1920s movie palace. Head west, and you’ll find the area’s newest theater: the Goochland Drive-in. It opened in 2009 and has quickly become a favorite. There’s plenty of traditional viewing, too, at places such as the Bow-Tie Cinemas’ Movieland at Boulevard Square – like Dogtown, this is another repurposed gem, with a one-time locomotive factory now a 17-screen movie theater – and Regal Cinemas all over the place.
Discover Richmond is an annual publication of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, offering a guide to the metro area for newcomers and longtime residents. The 36th issue is published with the Aug. 29, 2010, newspaper.
You can purchase additional copies for $2 at the front counter of The Times-Dispatch, 300 E. Franklin St., Richmond, 23219. Order by mail for $3 each; send check or call 649-6261 with credit card number. Orders for 25 or fewer handled at the front counters; for 26 or more copies (not guaranteed unless ordered in advance), contact Tammy Martin, at 775-2724 or tmartin@timesdispatch.com.
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