The building of wall drawings at MASS MoCA has become a pilgrimage site for Sol LeWitt one of the foremost artists of his generation. They are on semi-permanent display with a contract for 25 years. For a more limited time, through June 11, there is the opportunity to experience the work on a more personal and intimate manner with Strict Beauty: Sol LeWitt Prints at the Williams College Museum of Art.

Leave it to Leon Botstein, America’s great educator, to bring Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige to Carnegie Hall, where is premiered in 1943 as a fundraiser for the Russian war effort, (The world turns.) Eleanor Roosevelt, Marion Anderson and Langston Hughes were in attendance that evening. Now Botstein conducting is cool.  He often listens and taps his foot, slightly swaying to the improvisatory sections of works performed

Lynn Nottage's drama, Intimate Apparel is a fine fit at Palm Beach Dramaworks (PBD). The professional, nonprofit company's production runs through April 17. PBD's production, fittingly, takes place in the company's intimate Don & Ann Brown Theatre.

Playwright Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize and multiple Tony Award winning play concerns the family reunion from hell.  The family doge, Beverly, was a prominent poet in his younger days, but settled into a long life as a disgruntled teacher and acknowledged but likeable alcoholic.  Several days after his unexplained disappearance, Violet, his wife and family doyenne, musters the troops. 

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents an exhibition devoted to Chilean artist, poet, activist, and filmmaker Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948, Santiago), who has been based in New York for the last forty years.

Director Layne has cast 22 performers to tell the achingly poignant story of Cyrano and Roxane.  There are a couple metaphors on the foibles and folly of the human condition that run throughout that could easily recall a memory or two bringing misty eyes to those in the audience who can still relate. Yes. It’s somewhat of a tragedy masquerading as a comedy in dead earnest  Love is like that sometimes.

Organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the National Gallery of Art, Washington and Tate Modern, London, Philip Guston Now is the first retrospective of the artist’s work in nearly two decades. The exhibition features 73 paintings and 27 drawings from public and private collections, including both well-known and rarely seen works. Among the highlights are paintings from the 1930s that are rarely on public view; a reunion of paintings from Guston’s groundbreaking Marlborough Gallery show in 1970; a striking array of small panel paintings made from 1968 to 1972 as the artist developed his new vocabulary of hooded heads, books, bricks and shoes; and a powerful selection of large, often apocalyptic paintings of the later 1970s that form Guston’s last major artistic statement.

American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) at Harvard University announces the full cast and creative team of its upcoming revival of 1776 directed by Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus. Co-presented with Roundabout Theatre Company (RTC), the production begins performances at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge, MA, on Tuesday, May 17; opens officially on Thursday, May 26; and plays through Sunday, July 24, 2022.

In 1977, María Irene Fornés’ innovative “Fefu and Her Friends” replicated the notion of an all-female cast but flips the script on all of those dimensions.  It concerns a reunion of a group of friends gathered to rehearse a presentation to be given to a charity; themes are varied, including women’s relationships with women, which was pretty daring at the time; the single setting is Fefu’s house; action takes place in one day; and the characters, if a little wacky, are grounded in realism. 

Through his blog Painting, the artist Martin Mugar posts think pieces about theories of fine arts. He applies in depth critical analysis to a probing review of the Charles Giuliano book Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 1870 to 2020: An Oral HIstory.

Gong Lum's Legacy is presented by Woodie King Jr.'s New Federal Theater in association with The Peccadillo Theater Company. Written by Charles L. White. Directed by Elizabeth Van Dyke. The world is still Jim Crow's.  We can peek into  to the the lives of those oppressed by the system, both the African Americans and the newly arrived Chinese immigrants.  

Broadway Across America has announced the 2022-23 line-ups for Broadway in Miami and Broadway in Ft. Lauderdale. Among the shows, audiences will be able to see "Hamilton" again in Ft. Lauderdale, and "Wicked" in Miami. Perhaps the hottest show on Broadway, "Six" will play in Miami and Ft. Lauderdale.

Unforgettable moments, laughter, discovery, and joy, he Lyric Stage 2022/23 Season is a season to share.

Next to Normal which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama is opening the season at Westport Country Playhouse through Sunday, April 24. The musical by Tom Kitts (music) and Brian Yorkey (book and lyrics) tells the story of an American family facing a serious mental health issue.

The story is placed in “the not so distant future”, a dystopian exposition of the legal persecution of people with non-binary sexual and gender orientation. Julia is completely rejecting of her son's sexual reality. Roan has been taken away by the authorities, imprisoned and tortured. We learn that neighbors, family members and 'friends' have been responsible for turning him in. It is only a matter of hours before he will be picked up and returned to prison.

The jazz scene is alive and well in the Berkshires, as the Berkshire Eagle points out in this deep-dive by Bob Luhmann. Some history and a good look at the current scene combine to provide context for the Pittsfield CityJazz Festival, April 23-May 1

The Clark Art Institute’s Research and Academic Program (RAP) presents an MCLA Artist Lab Roundtable on Blackness as a Multifaceted Experience and Giving Artists an Opportunity to Interpret the World on Their Own Terms on Thursday, May 12 at 5:30 pm.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. We have to shut down the print edition of this publication for the second time since March 2020 effective immediately. For those of you that follow the American news industry—its local print markets in particular—this should come as no surprise.

The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) is pleased to present the next iteration of Remixing the Hall: WCMA’s Collection in Perpetual Transition. This ongoing exhibition reinterprets the museum’s encyclopedic collection through thematic groupings, highlighting new research, new acquisitions, and new curatorial voices.

The Vienna Actionist, Hermann Nitsch, died at 83 on 18 April, 2022. Then in his 20s during the 1960s he and colleagues Otto Muehl, Gunter Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler performed actions entailing animal and human body parts and functions. They went for the jugular of conservative/ reactionary, post war Austrian culture. The authorities were not enlightened or amused. Their outrageous stunts were punished by prison sentences from a few months to seven years in the case of Muehl. During the late 1980s I spent a day with Nitsch at his rural schloss and studios.

Star of Freedom has music by Connecticut resident Jeff Blaney and a book by Lawrence Thelen. The piece began life as the concept album Exodus; Executive/Artistic Director Jacqueline Hubbard saw the possibilities and brought it to Thelen to write the book.

The Pittsfield CityJazz Festival is now in full swing (sorry), ushered-in last weekend with the very successful Jam Session at Mission Restaurant. Ten different musicians rotated among the various positions “in the window” at the popular North Street restaurant.

The Munich Philharmonic Orchestra will take over two more concerts at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg on May 20 and 21. The orchestra is filling in for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which had to cancel its entire European tour for this spring due to a major corona outbreak among the musicians*. The Munich Philharmonic is looking forward to these two concerts with Andris Nelson.

All’s Well That End Well is based on a tale from Boccaccio’s The Decameron. (It was tale  9 of day 3: the story of Giletta di Narbona.) Like a few other Shakespeare plays, All’s Well is considered a problem play, suggesting that it involves complex ethical issues that can’t be dealt with by simple solutions. Most scholars believe that Thomas Middleton, a noted playwright of his time, either collaborated with Shakespeare on the play or revised it later.

Charlotte Moore must have the same feeling for the Irish and their language that the playwright John Milington Synge did. In the W. Scott McLucas Studio Theater, a small venue located underneath the main house at the Irish Repertory Theatre, the people of Ireland are brought startlingly, truly to life. Two Synge One Acts abut each other.  As audience in this theater, you are so close that you feel a part of the action, the language invades and elevates you.  It is a thrilling experience.