Dottie Ashley
- Contact Dottie
- Call: 843-937-5704
Dottie Ashley reviews theater and dance and writes about local arts organizations. She is the winner of the 2003 Elizabeth O'Neill Verner Award given to the outstanding arts writer in the state, and twice won a National Partners of the Americas Journalist Fellowship to Cali and Bogota, Columbia. She worked for The State newspaper in Columbia for 15 years, where she won the 1985 American Dance Festival Critics Award. Ashley has covered the Spoleto Festival USA since its founding in 1977. She has a master's degree from the University of South Carolina.
Recent Stories
New musical a 'Blast From the Past'
Singer and dancer Brad Moranz says that "Little Shop of Horrors" meets "Superman" meets "Field of Dreams" is the best way to describe the new musical he and wife Jenny, a former Rockette, have penned.
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Ballet a real beauty
REVIEW
When Marianna Chemalina as Princess Aurora leapt on stage in strawberry pink and greeted five suitors for her 16th birthday party, she balanced on one toe, holding her other leg in an arabesque.
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Women to steal the show at Footlight
'When I got married, I had seven bridesmaids, and my corkage fee was doubled, not because of the wedding guests, but because my bridesmaids drank so much!" recalls Andrea K. McGinn.
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Artist uses her home as a gallery
You never know when that watercolor of a sea turtle hanging over your bathroom tub will strike someone's fancy. That is, if like artist Carol McGill, you use your home as an art gallery.
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Ruhl's 'Dead Man's Cell Phone' quirky
On a humid summer night in 2007 at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, D.C., I saw the premiere of the new play "Dead Man's Cell Phone." Amid the buzz at intermission, I noticed political luminaries such as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg intensely discussing this modestly staged show by an unknown playwright.
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Dark comedy on tap for LateNight
A local thespian of multiple genres, Robbie Thomas was in the Drama Book Shop in New York a couple of years ago when he came across a script by playwright Nicky Silver titled "The Altruists."
"I had never heard of this play, but I bought it because I really love Nicky Silver's wild comedic writing in 'Fat Men in Skirts' that was performed at the College of Charleston, and his comedy 'Raised in Captivity,' " explains Thomas, who directed the razor-sharp "Frost/Nixon" at the Footlight Players in 2009.
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Play weds audience to stage action
If you're brave enough to arrive as a "guest" at "Tony 'n' Tina's Wedding," you'll find you not only are treated to pasta and cake but you may become part of the play itself when it opens Thursday at the Village Playhouse.
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Smallwood's watercolors are 'Lifescapes'
When Philip Smallwood rides in a New York cab, he doesn't just watch the meter. He often studies the cab driver in the rear-view mirror, examining his wrinkles, or the lack of them and the expression in his eyes.
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Wiles resigns from league
One of the key players in establishing The Charleston League of Theatres, an organization formed in 2005 to promote local theatrical groups, has resigned, creating somewhat of a shock throughout the local performing arts arena.
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Character-driven plays to offer rewards
The actor James Spader once said of performing eight shows a week on Broadway: "There's going to be a repetition and a redundancy night after night, but it's the small variations in those moments: a word, a tone of voice, the smallest sense of enlightenment that can happen in an instant and be the most rewarding."
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