If Parade doesn’t win the Tony Award for the outstanding revival of a musical, the producers should demand a recount.

De Montebello, who was formerly Executive Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has repeatedly refused to address staff concerns about health and safety for both staff and the collection itself.  

It was great to see an audience laughing and enjoying themselves at The Legend of Georgia McBride now at Ivoryton Playhouse through Sunday, April 30.

Mezze Hospitality Group will open Bluebird & Co., its forthcoming restaurant celebrating the outdoors, in Hancock, MA, near the base of Jiminy Peak. Bluebird & Co. is the group’s first new restaurant since selling allium, in Great Barrington, Mass., almost five years ago

Barrington Stage Company (BSC) announces that Broadway’s master songman, Mandy Patinkin, accompanied by Adam Ben-David on piano, will bring his newest theatre concert Mandy Patinkin in Concert: BEING ALIVE, to the Boyd-Quinson Stage for one night only on Tuesday, June 27.

Tosca has been one of the most performed operas in the world for over a century.  There is a good reason for that.  Beautiful music delights from curtain rise to fall, starting with the resounding orchestral chords of the Scarpia theme, and punctuated by memorable arias and powerful ensembles.  Opera San José offers a beautifully staged and performed rendering that sears with passion.

BMOP continues its extended 25th Anniversary celebrations with a trip to Carnegie Hall. Featuring three works originally commissioned, premiered, and recorded by BMOP, "Play It Again" provides the capstone to the first 25 years of BMOP's mission. Andrew Norman's Play, Lei Liang's A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams, and Lisa Bielawa's In medias res all receive their New York premieres on the historic Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage in Carnegie Hall.

With his highly successful “Vietgone,” playwright Qui Nguyen, told the beginning of his family’s immigrant story, following the fall of Saigon in the Vietnam War.  His equally thoughtful and humorous sequel, “Poor Yella Rednecks,” continues the family’s saga.  Amusingly, he writes himself in as a character in the play and facetiously disavows to the audience that its characters are real.

Endgame livestreamed from the Irish Rep. Samuel Beckett’s Endgame enjoyed a must-see run at the Irish Repertory Theatre.  Starring Bill Irwin, the clown and Beckett aficionado, as Clov and John Douglas Thompson as Hamm, here uncharacteristically for Thompson, the “insider.”  He is bound to a wheelchair, blind and dependent on painkillers, yet the clear force of the moment. Clov lurches around him

Barrington Stage Company announces that Founding Artistic Director Julianne Boyd will be honored with The Berkshire Nonprofit Awards Lifetime Achievement Award from The Nonprofit Center of the Berkshires, in partnership with The Berkshire Eagle on May 23.

Bill and Nancy have been married for 50 years, and on the surface, they have been happy, or at least content.  But when they dispassionately announce their decision to divorce to their visiting adult sons, Brian and Ben, the boys are flabbergasted.  As expected, they have questions like “What happened?” but worse, they have answers, like “We can fix this,” as if the breakup could be within their control.  And when they finally realize that it could actually happen, it’s “Why couldn’t you get divorced when we finished school, like normal people?”

In 1923 Edward Hopper spent his second summer in Gloucester. He met and later married the artist Josephine Nivison. That summer he painted several pictures and created a number of water colors. They worked side by side. A century later, on the occasion of Gloucester 400 Plus their work will be on view at the Cape Ann Museum.

The Boston Modern Opera project is making its Carnegie Hall debut this weekend (April 15).  Bostonians have had the privilege of hearing and seeing this company for many years.  The program at Carnegie is enticing

As part of a rolling world premiere, Refuge is running at Theatre Lab in Boca Raton, Fl. in an intense and believable production through April 23. The production features music, magical realism, and puppets. Refuge is about the migration crisis, but does not deal with politics. Rather, it is a piece brimming with humanity.

In their respective practices, Sue Williamson (b. 1941) and Lebohang Kganye (b. 1990) incorporate oral histories into films, photographs, installations, and textiles to consider how the stories our elders tell us shape family narratives and personal identities. Implicitly and explicitly addressing legacies of racial violence and social injustice, their work offers a cross-generational dialogue on history, memory, and the power of self-narration.

Passages in American Art is a fundamental reinterpretation of the collection, platforming multiple voices, revealing new ways of looking at some of the museum’s most beloved works of art, and inviting community members to drive the conversation. Opening May 27, 2023, the project examines the existing collection, and along with recent acquisitions, commissions, and select long-term loans, integrates Atlantic narratives and Indigenous perspectives to expand the story of American art. 

The Huntington announces its complete lineup for the 23/24 season, featuring an eclectic mix of 7 highly acclaimed shows by a wide variety of diverse artists, the first full season completely programmed by new Huntington Artistic Director Loretta Greco. 

Haskell Free Library and Opera House straddles the border between the U.S. and Quebec Province in Canada as a result of a surveying error that occurred before the library was built.  A line on the floor designates the border.  The playwright has deftly used this real-life anomaly as the crucible for the play’s conflicts. After the Muslim Travel Ban of 2017, a kerfuffle arises as a result of a social media posting which suggests that the library is a good crossborder meeting place.  The message is not lost on Muslims, particularly families with members on both sides of the divide.

Announcing the opening of my artist-in-residence exhibition at the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies at UMass, Amherst.

In Bold Ventures: Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy (Other Press), author Charlotte Van den Broeck asks some interesting questions: When is a mistake so all-encompassing that an individual feels he or she can’t go on? What is the line between creator and creation? If the art deconstructs, should the artist as well?

Born to immigrant parents, Iranian-American playwright Sanaz Toossi looks at a part of a global industry that has derived from the ubiquitous nature of English – teaching English to non-native speakers.  Calling upon her own heritage to generate a narrative, her incisive dramedy “English” won both the Lucille Lortel and Obie awards for best new play in 2022.

Richard Strauss preferred to spell the title of his most popular opera: Der Rosencavalier.  Although the opera began with conversations between librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Count Kessler, a diplomat, scholar and director of the Cranach-Presse in Weimar, the opera is very much Strauss’s.  Kessler promised Hofmannsthal that he could pay for his children’s education with the proceeds from productions.  That he did. 

The Velvet Underground & Nico: Scepter Studio Sessions highlights the Velvet Underground and the music from their first recording sessions in April 1966 at Scepter Studios in New York City. The exhibition centers on the original tapes of the nine initial tracks recorded by the band, recently identified while processing Andy Warhol’s archive at The Warhol, which became the bedrock of their debut album The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967, Verve Records), one of the most jarring and influential albums in rock music.

Composer Allen Shearer and librettist Claudia Stevens's “Prospero’s Island” borrows from the “The Tempest.” But they have moved it a significant measure from the source material. In addition to lyrics in modern American-English vernacular interspersed with poetic accents, a plot update and revision gives the material more contemporary relevance while altering the moral profile of the main character. The result is a riveting chronicle of moral corruption followed by a quest for redemption that is accompanied by equally compelling music, calling on diverse idioms. Although the narrative arc is clearly dramatic, the creators frequently punctuate the proceedings with humorous interludes.

MASS MoCA announces Summer 2023 programming including the exhibitions Joseph Grigely: In What Way Wham? (White Noise and Other Works, 1996-2023), on view beginning May 28, Anne Samat: Love, on view beginning June 24, and Elle Pérez: Intimacies, on view beginning July 22