Front Page
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Swing into Spring
Jazz in the Berkshires
By: - Mar 01st, 2024Spring fast approaches, with good news from our friends at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington, and the opening of the box office for our own Pittsfield CityJazz Festival.
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Blue Heron's Stillness
By: - Mar 03rd, 2024The blue heron, a majestic bird with piercing yellow eyes and a spear-like beak, embodies a unique paradox. It is a creature of both profound stillness and lightning-fast action. But it is the heron’s stillness that truly captivates, a quality that has enthralled artists, writers, and philosophers for centuries. This stillness isn’t just an absence of movement; it’s a potent force, a language of patience, focus, and a deep connection with the environment.
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The Clark Art Institute Selects Bénédicte Savoy
2024 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing.
By: - Mar 07th, 2024The Clark Art Institute has selected Bénédicte Savoy as the recipient of the 2024 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing. Savoy is a professor of art history at Technische Universität in Berlin and is a noted expert on the provenance and repatriation of works of art, including looted art and other forms of illegally acquired cultural objects.
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Moulin Rouge the Musical
Equity Production in Ft. Lauderdale
By: - Mar 08th, 2024Moulin Rouge the Musical is gorgeous to look at but slight on story An equity national touring production runs through March 17 in Ft. Lauderdale's Broward Center for the Performing Arts. Much of Moulin Rouge carries the celebratory aura of a party.
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Dara Haskins at Corridor ’62
When Life Gives You Lemons You Paint Them
By: - Mar 12th, 2024It was energizing to meet the 31-year-old artist, Dara Haskins, who was born in Baltimore and now lives in Philadelphia. We found it impossible to resist her charm and enthusiasm. She was eager to sell me a small painting but I fended off stating that I was there as a critic. Her intent is to raise enough money to return to Cuba where she recently resided for a month.
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Mother by Kelsey Shultis at Eclipse Gallery
New Paintings and Works on Paper
By: - Mar 15th, 2024The paintings of Mother explore the diverse aspects of Motherhood, from the Divine Feminine to the Kitchen Witch.
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The Far Country
Berkeley Rep's Fine Version of a Drama Set in Nearby Environs
By: - Mar 15th, 2024Gee, a Chinese immigrant living in San Francisco, wishes to visit China but needs documentation that will ensure his return. To obtain that, he must undergo interrogation at the notorious Angel Island detention center. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, immigration officials are loathe to facilitate entry and re-entry into the U.S. by Asians, who are crafty in developing strategies to overcome the resistance.
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Erin Go Bragh Yourself
Luck of the Irish
By: - Mar 18th, 2024Once a year I get to celebrate my half Irish heritage with a vengeance. That means corned beef and cabbage and raucous singalong at the Freight Yard Pub in North Adams.
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Berkshire Jazz Festival
Tickets on Sale
By: - Mar 18th, 2024Starting with an open jam session and ending with a jazz brunch at Dottie’s, the events include the popular Jazz Crawl, a swing dance, the jazz prodigy concert introducing two (!) young musicians to Berkshires audiences, and headline concerts featuring Brandon Goldberg and Marcus Roberts. The box office is open, and you can find a link at the end of this newsletter.
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Pipeline
The Dangers of Growing Up Black in America
By: - Mar 18th, 2024In response to provocation, Black private-school-student Omari has crossed a line with his White teacher. The boy's mother, Nya, who is a teacher, is conflicted, as she values the rules that serve to protect society, but she understands that her son is a good boy with a future now in peril. Dominique Morisseau's riveting play explores numerous issues of race and relationships, and African-American Shakespeare's production does the play justice.
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Power of Stillness
Present Moment Awareness
By: - Mar 21st, 2024One exercise I suggest to my students is a “slow by slow” day each week: walk just a little slower than you usually walk; speak just a little slower than you usually speak; eat just a little slower than you usually eat. Not slow motion, and not so anyone else would notice, but slower than usual.
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Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation
Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA)
By: - Mar 22nd, 2024On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Not long after that, John Quincy Adams Ward (1830-1910) created the bronze sculpture “The Freedman.” It depicts a semi-nude seated figure in the act of his removing shackles. Resembling the iconic Roman “Boxer,” the work was arguably the first bronze sculpture to depict an African American.
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The Hot Wing King
At Hartford Stage
By: - Mar 22nd, 2024It is easy to see why this play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2021. The play is about family, friends and dreams. It is about the challenges we all face in navigating the potential pitfalls in families and the difficulties of new romantic relationships.
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Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida
A Three Ring Circus of Art
By: - Mar 22nd, 2024The Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida is one of the most unique, and curious collections in America. It is sited on a manicured, tropical, 66-acre campus that conflates nature, leisure, warmth and depth in Old Master paintings, Ancient Mediterranean art, Asian art, 19th and 20th century art, prints, drawings and photography, as well as extensive circus related memorabilia. There are period rooms with collections of decorative arts. Through expansion it is now the 20th largest American museum.
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Escaped Alone at Yale Rep
Signifying Nothing
By: - Mar 22nd, 2024I admit to still being perplexed. It kept reminding me of the Shakespeare lines from MacBeth, which begin “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time;” and ends with “It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, /Signifying nothing.”
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King Liz
Breaking Down Barriers in City Lights' Smashing Production
By: - Mar 25th, 2024Overcoming odds, Liz Rico has become a highly successful basketball agent. She now must represent a first-round draft pick who lacks college experience and maturity. Further, he has a police record that the media could pick up on. In this dramedy, she must determine how to handle the conflicts of managing the relationship with the client and the broader community.
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The Taming of the Shrew
Ft. Lauderdale's Thinking Cap Theatre
By: - Mar 26th, 2024Thinking Cap Theatre in Ft. Lauderdale presents an updated "The Taming of the Shrew" at Broward Center for the Performing Arts. The production takes place in a modern-day office building. The reading of a play that is a response to Shakespeare's piece is also scheduled.
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Queen
TheatreWorks Fine Production About Bees and People
By: - Mar 26th, 2024In 2017, the world's bee population has plummeted, putting the food supply at risk. Two research assistants at University of California Santa Cruz have produced research that identifies the source of the die off, but then one last data collection undermines the previous results even though their paper is about to be published. The play confronts the dilemmas that researchers deal with.
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Two at Gallery Naga
Joseph McNamara Josué Bessiake: A Bird’s Last Look
By: - Mar 29th, 2024Joseph McNamara is a New York-based, realist painter whose work—often large-scale—is centered on paintings of the industrial landscape and his relationship to it. His paintings are painstakingly detailed and can take months and even years, to complete. McNamara uses photographs as aids, however, the paintings are not “photo-realistic”: each painting strays away from a strict accounting of the subject matter and takes on a life of its own.
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Unhurried Grace
Patience of a Forest Stream
By: - Mar 31st, 2024While offering instruction in the various taiji forms I teach, I often refer to a forest stream and urge my students to become it, ever-flowing, to find and then move at the pace of their breath, ever-flowing, just as the stream finds its pace. The stream does not move from one place to the next; there is no line of demarcation between places. The stream simply flows.
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Pal Joey
Rodgers and Hart's Greatest Cad
By: - Apr 01st, 2024Nightclub entertainer Joey Evans attracts a patroness, Vera, who stakes him to a club of his own. But she is older, domineering, married, and hot for him. He's a footloose schemer with the morals of an alley cat. What could possibly go wrong? Happily, the clashes of nightclub life are revealed with liberal doses of the beautiful tune "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered."
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Kathia St. Hilaire at the Clark
Lunder Center at Stone Hil
By: - Apr 01st, 2024"Kathia St. Hilaire is a remarkable young artist who creates captivating works that combine a wide range of media,” said Olivier Meslay, Hardymon Director of the Clark. “She interweaves Haiti’s history and her own personal biography into images that are beautiful, sometimes difficult, and utterly original.”
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Gatsby the Musical
American Repertory Theatre
By: - Apr 02nd, 2024Gatsby is directed by Tony Award-winning director Rachel Chavkin (Hadestown; Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812; Moby-Dick) with choreography by Tony Award winner Sonya Tayeh (Moulin Rouge!). The production features an original score by international rock star Florence Welch (Florence + The Machine) and Oscar and Grammy Award nominee Thomas Bartlett (Doveman), and a book by Pulitzer Prize winner Martyna Majok (Cost of Living). Keenan Tyler Oliphant is associate director and Camden Gonzales is associate choreographer. Casting will be announced at a later date.
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General Manager of Met Opera Competes with Trump
Preivew of John Adams' El Nino at Works & Process
By: - Apr 04th, 2024John Adams’ masterpiece Oratorio, El Nino, is being given a full production at the Metropolitan Opera this spring. The work premiered at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in 2000. Kent Nagano conducted. Luxury casting included Dawn Upshaw, Lorrraine Hunt Lieberson and Willard White
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Season of Hits Planned for Lyric Stage
Programming Proven Winners
By: - Apr 06th, 2024From Urinetown to Hello Dolly Boston's Lyric stage has programmed a seasons of hits. Unabashedly Artistic Director Courtney O’Connor says, “We’re thrilled to share six stories that focus on character connection and joy told by artists you already know and love and new artists we can’t wait for you to meet."
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