The-Burg.com - Central Virgina's Arts, Culture and Entertainment Weekly

Author comes to Sandusky, Red Roosters play show

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — It’s hard not to think of the long-awaited “Dark Night of the Soul” as a tragic album.

First delayed by legal wrangling, then indelibly marked by the suicides of co-creator Mark Linkous and contributor Vic Chesnutt, the album carried some heavy baggage when it finally came out last week.

Even Lauren Smyk can admit she wasn’t very comfortable on stage when she auditioned for the Lynch’s Landing Lynchburg Star competition last summer.

Sure, she’d sung at local karaoke nights for years and had performed in classical music concerts while a student at Liberty University, but she’d never had to work the stage before.

“It was my first time in front of a crowd singing contemporary songs,” says Smyk, a Pennsylvania native who graduated from Liberty with a music degree in 2006. “There were a lot of people there that day. I thought, ‘This is scary.’”

The 26-year-old lost to friend Alma Hesson in the final round. But a video of her audition, an a cappella version of Carrie Underwood’s “Wasted,” wound up on YouTube and on the computer screen of The Almost Brothers Band guitarist Mike Davis, who was wowed by her voice.

In the opening moments of Ivy Mountain Players’ “Originals,” a group of students try out for a prestigious performing arts school that has some serious shades of “Fame.”

They sing, dance and play instruments.

Then, when it looks like we’ll be getting a story we’ve seen once or twice before, “they all find out they got rejected.“

When musician Amber Leigh Edmundson listened to her debut CD recently, she was surprised at how much she’s changed in the two years since it came out.

“I thought, ‘Man, I was definitely 15 when I wrote that song,” says the 19-year-old, who will be performing at The White Hart at 8 p.m. Friday.

“My lyrics have definitely matured.”

The inside of Heritage High School’s theater has been transformed.

Old vines wrap around the edge of the stage and spill out into the aisles. The exterior of a dilapidated house — Grey Gardens, the East Hampton mansion that belonged to Jackie Kennedy’s aunt and cousin, both named Edith Beale — sits in the center of the stage

When the play version of their story, “Grey Gardens,” begins, Little Edie, wearing her signature headscarf, sits inside and talks to her mother through the screen. She’s just found an old recording Big Edie made years ago, called “The Girl Who Had Everything.”

“I was the little girl who had everything,” Little Edie says wistfully.

“Well,” her mother pipes in, “that’s ancient history.”