An equity touring production of The Wiz is playing an engagement in Miami through Sunday before heading north. The production is high-tech with an Afrofuturist flavor without sacrificing genuine emotion. The Wiz is a 1975 award-winning musical that features an all-Black cast. \

For the final production of the season Berkshire Theatre Group is hosting a pool party at the Unicorn Theatre in Stockbridge. Based on Ovid, Isadora Wolfe is directing eleven actors in Mary Zimmerman's adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphosis. This lively and inventive production makes a splash

I do recall making Sidecars, Whisky Sours, Brandy Alexanders, Manhattans, Tequila Sunrises, Blue Lagoons, classical Martinis, Gin Fizzes, and there was the artichoke liqueur Fernet Branca, vile stuff, but good for hangovers, and the poetically named feuille morte, made of pastis and grenadine, never liked it myself, and the kirs, champagne with crème de cassis was called kir royal, with white wine simply kir, and with red wine un carabinier.

We are at a very dangerous turning point in this country, and I feel any and every form of protest is not only appropriate but necessary if we are to regain any semblance of a democracy.                                                  

New City Players impresses once again with a hilarious and energetic production of 'The 39 Steps.' Under Ali Tallman's brisk, precise direction, the production whizzes by like a bullet train, but allows us to savor the comedy.

The theater calendars are filling up in both Connecticut and New York. Looking over the planned productions for the fall, a number of them jumped out as being particularly interesting.

Park Avenue Armory is hosting 11,000 Strings, a trsnsportting soundscaoe creaated by composer G. F. Haas. The work is a play on sounds created by the space between two notes.

A full-length play-within-a-play has a cast endure zany pratfalls. Unpreparedness, dipsomania, love triangles, antagonisms, prop misplacements, and more produce endless farce.

The first band to sign with MASS MoCA Records is The Kasambwe Brothers, a multi-generational band who has been making music together for almost 40 years and are grounded in the rich, musical heritage of Malawi, Africa.

Attention to detail helps the audience immediately form attachments with the cast. Even with the first cuts, you are disappointed that a favorite or two did not make it. By the end of the show, you are upset when a favorite doesn’t make the final cut.

The presentation of All the Men Who’ve Frightened Me comes to the La Jolla Playhouse via it’s DNA New Work Series.  The play follows young married couple Ty (Hennesey Winkler) and Nora (Kineta Kunutu) as they move into Ty’s childhood home.

When my students ask what I ate, the answer is this: I ate warmth and energy on a bustling street corner. I ate harmony and balance from shared plates. I ate history in a piece of braised pork belly and mindfulness in a simple egg tart. And in my last meal, I ate a final, perfect memory. I ate China, and I returned full.

Stebbins writes, “People are inclined to view past changes in taste as unique misjudgments that will not happen again….   How unthinking, how stupid, they think, not realizing that the pattern has been repeated again and again in the past and will be in the future. We now recognize that the process is a continual one. Each past canon was established for good reason; there are no mistakes, there is only history. Many of the favored artists of any period including our own will drop from favor, something that art dealers never tell their clients, or museum curators their boards.”

One of the canon's most fabled operas, the story of a frail, doomed courtesan and her star-crossed love for a man from the upper class has resonated with audiences of all ilks for over 170 years. Verdi's sumptuous score with stunning arias and ensembles is matchless.

New City Players is set to stage a professional production of the stage adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock's "The 39 Steps." Four performances will portray a variety of characters.

If you are lucky enough to have tickets for Noises Off at the Legacy Theatre in Branford, prepare yourself for riotous laughter.This farce by Michael Frayn combines a behind-the-scenes look at a play (Nothing On) as well as the complicated relationships among the cast.

George LeMaitre and Patricia Fietta have renovated an enormous mill in Adams, Mass. It includes the generously spaced Gallery 13 ½ . Instead of Never on Sunday it is open Only on Sunday. Starting at 3 the gallery will serve sundaes. So its sundaes on Sunday. The artist is North Adams Eclipse Mill resident Joanna Klain. The gallerists are also showing examples of their own work.  

David Robertson and the New York Philharmonic performed a program that displayed the orchestra in all its glory.

Bread and books. Two more essentials. Shakespeare and Co. will always be dear to my heart. The first real bookstore to sell my book of poetry. And to host a reading I gave there. George Whitman, the founder, was a dedicated and friendly guy. I remember him as being serious about what he was doing. Creating a place for writers and artists to hang out and do what they do.

The absurdist and experimental South Florida professional theater company, LakeHouseRanchDotPNG, is giving the absurdist play, "Art Duty" a fine world premiere production. The production runs one more weekend at Main Street Players' intimate black box space in Miami Lakes. The play reflects the zeitgeist.

Tenor Pene Pate gave his first concert in New York at the Park Aveneue Armory. He has a superb voice, impeccable, warm deilvery and a special generosity, charcteeristic of his Samoan heritage.

Korean-Canadian immigrant Appa Kim owns a mini-mart in Toronto. He faces challenges in the two areas of greatest importance to him, his family and his business. Those interests intersect as the store sustains the family; as he has no succession plan because his children aren't interested in running the business; and because he has a good offer to sell the store. But isn't it funny how conditions change?

It’s shoulder season for the arts. With deft serendipity Alan Paul, artistic director of Barrington Stage has maxed on bucolic euphoria by going local with The Weekend: A Stockbridge Story by Ben Diskant. It is being given a world premiere directed by Paul.  

Jonas and Betsy have been a part of my life - and the life of my extended family - since they moved to the Berkshires when I was a kid. Jonas and my father Peter were great friends and engaged in some epic cross-country aerial adventures over the years. I worked for Jonas - and with him - on myriad projects over the years - we were in touch just a few days ago about making some updates to his website, which I’ve managed since the web began back in the early 2000s.

If you listened carefully to a panel discussion at the Guggenheim Museum a few weeks before the opera by Mason Bates, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, opened, you could hear the problems staging this work was going to face at the Metropolitan Opera.