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

Joseph Cashore saw his first marionette hanging in a gift shop when he was 10 or 11 and on vacation with his family.

“I asked the lady if I could try it out,” he said in a phone interview last week. “She wouldn’t let me, so I went home and made my first marionette.”

Even he can admit that first effort — made from clothespins, wood, string and a tin can — was a bit crude, but it fascinated him.

“Every once in a while, by accident, it would move,” he said. “Just for a second, it looked like it was alive, and that’s what I remember.”

It all started with a serious case of menopause.

Kyler Johnson didn’t know if acting would be his thing.

“I’m usually outside on my skateboard,” says the 9-year-old Altavista Middle School student.

Walter Kmiec is stalking around one of Sweet Briar College’s old dairy barns during an evening rehearsal for Endstation Theatre’s outdoor production of “Hamlet.”

It’s the famous “Get thee to a nunnery” scene — right after the “To be or not to be” speech, if you’re keeping score — in which Hamlet confronts his love, Ophelia.

When he gets to the line, “What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?” director Geoff Kershner interrupts.

“I’m going to be indulgent here,” he says, indicating that Kmiec should point to the sky and the ground when he says the line. “Since we’ve got the earth, and we’ve got heaven, let’s use it.”

They’ve also got music.

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.“

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.”