Entertainment

Country superstar and Fulton County, Arkansas, native Ashley McBryde has clearly moved into the "universe building" phase of her career, and we're OK with that.

It might seem counterintuitive that a painter’s depictions of Virginia Woolf and Walt Whitman and Gabriel García Márquez could be a self-portraiture, but for Egypt (Craighead County) native Ray Allen Parker, the works in “Lit” are just that.

The ebbs and flows of local music scenes are normal; they can be disheartening during the lulls, and raging to the point of god-like power during their peaks. We are fortunate to find ourselves currently in the latter. From Northwest Arkansas, all the way over to Jonesboro, down to El Dorado, and all throughout all of Central Arkansas, there are more active heavy music projects right now than at any time in the last 25 years.

You could ding the festival on a number of fronts: an almost total lack of hip-hop (or, hell, country for that matter), data deserts that made coordinating with friends (or tweeting, or anything else) impossible, camping options that ranged between $$$ and $$$$. But Sam's millennial grandkids Steuart and Tom Walton, and their OZ Brands venture, pulled off an event that was at once completely novel, psychically unmoored from any known reality, and yet could have only existed in Northwest Arkansas, where middle-of-the-road curatorial tastes meet Mariana Trench-deep pockets. For about a hundred bucks a day, audiences got to see what sort of toys real money can buy.

The Biscuit is back.

Who says the Buffalo River season ends when the water levels at Ponca get low?

As ever, the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival is a week-plus of films you’ll think about for years, plus parties you hopefully won’t regret the next morning. Highlights of 2022 include Mark Fletcher’s (“My Octopus Teacher”) undersea conservation tale, “Patrick and the Whale”; Kathlyn Horan’s “The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile”; Shaunak Sen’s award-winning tale of a bird hospital in polluted New Delhi, “All That Breathes”; Violet Columbus and Ben Klein’s portrait of Tiananmen Square massacre documentarian Christine Choy, “The Exiles”; and loads more, much of it with connections to the American South.

Last week for a take on Harvey Fierstein's "Kinky Boots" at the Studio Theatre in downtown Little Rock, and word has gotten out that the cast is fantastic. 

Bike races, lawn games, food and music celebrate the efforts of Recycle Bikes for Kids, a program that collects bikes through individual donations, community bike drives and scrapyard donations and re-distributes the repaired bikes to kids who need them, often through partnerships with organizations like Our House, Habitat For Humanity and Arkansas CASA.

Real deal blues at Four Quarter tonight from Holly Springs, Mississippi royalty, Garry Burnside.

Limón's sixth book, “The Hurting Kind,” came out this year and, like its predecessors, lends itself to being spoken aloud in exactly this type of in-person gathering.

September is the "traditional festival performance month" for ACANSA, but since the arts organization threw its three-week long ACANSA Arts Festival of the South in March due to pandemic-related delays, we get a mini-fest in September anyway, with performances from pianist Tatiana Mann, hip hop statesman Big Piph and his band Tomorrow Maybe, guitarist Stuart Montez and actor Ben Grimes.

Arts festival and community gathering at the Seventh Street Murals this Sunday, Sept. 25 as part of Arkansas Peace Week.

Expect the seats at UA Pulaski Tech to be filled with new converts as well as longtime fans who know just where every pregnant pause falls in “32 Flavors.” 

Chad Bradford, the stunning performer behind The Rep's production of "Every Brilliant Thing," careens between a boy’s reckless enthusiasm to a teenager’s angst to an adult’s worry about his own potential depression and does it in a way that masterfully raises and lowers the energy in the room.

In which White County, Arkansas, native Beth Ditto plays Gigi, the red carpet crashing, working momma who bowed outta the fame game but is obviously destined to be a star despite the fact that it is her sister, not she, who's been deemed heir apparent to Dotty Roman's (Susan Sarandon) musical throne.

With quite possibly the most well-known ode to this particular month of the year in their repertoire, September is prime touring time for Earth, Wind & Fire. Arkansas Times staff photographer Brian Chilson was at Simmons Bank Arena to catch snapshots of the show Saturday night.

Tricia H. Spione directs D.W. Gregory’s rapidfire two-act play “Radium Girls,” penned in 2000 through the lens of young women working in factories in the early 1900s, where they were hired to paint the faces of watches and dials with radium, often dipping the brushes in their mouths to moisten them — and, for many of them, unknowingly accelerating their death by radium poisoning.

“Holy Souls" is confident, sturdy yet loose and, rarer still, joyful.

Seis Puentes Education and Resource Center marks the occasion with a festival in the Argenta District of North Little Rock, offering in its second year free dance workshops from Ballet Quetzalli; interactive activities with Laman Library and Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub; and food from local vendors and food trucks like Kalua’s, DolceLuna Bakery and Tacos Godoy.