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Blending several different theatrical genres and making it all work is a challenge. Murder for Two, which is reopening Ivoryton Playhouse combines elements of farce, murder mysteries and musicals.

The American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA) recently announced awards for authors of new plays.Her Honor, Jayne Byrne received the 2021 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award. SHIP, by Douglas Williams, takes home the 2021 M. Elizabeth Osborn Award. Runners-up for the ATCA/Steinberg honor were Khat Knotahaiku for Graveyard Shift as well as Jason Narducy and Brett Neveu for the musical Verboten.

James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim will talk during a digital event about Lapine's new book, Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday in the Park With George. This "intimate digital conversation event" will take place on the day of the book's release -- Aug. 3. Tickets are available at www.TheTownHall.org for the 7 p.m. EST, Aug. 3 event. Go to www.TheTownHall.org. Award-winning actress Christine Baranski will moderate the digital conversation.

Now available at opera box.tv, Boston Lyric Opera offers a mysterious, death-defying plunge into streaming opera. The eight part mini series stars Isabel Leonard and Talise Trevigne as a married lesbian couple who run a desert Inn, where people can be reunited with their dead loves, like a real world ouija board set in Palm Springs. The Inn sign is not missing a letter. The eerie Bates Motel missed some in the TV series. The kinky Chelsea, where traditional residents were like some of the characters in this series, also is distinguished by missing letters. What is not missing here is terrific music, drama and singing and not singing actors. James Darrah brings his film background and gifts to a wild opera moment.

The production is currently being rehearsed at The Egg PAC, where the Manhattan based professional company has been resident every summer since 2000. “We could not be more excited to be in the theater everyday” says Artistic Director Chiara Ajkun “This long pause has forced us to reflect on the importance of the Arts and the way they shape us as People. I, for one, strongly believe the magic of ballet does not rest in the opulence of sceneries and large ensembles, rather on pure emotion, beauty and magic it creates”. 

Jacob’s Pillow will offer two weekends of free Pillow Pop-Up performances in Berkshire County during the last weekend in July and first weekend in August. Performances will happen on a uniquely designed portable stage and feature local performers, as well as the all-female intergenerational Ladies of Hip-Hop Dance Collective (July 31 – Aug. 1) known for illuminating the strength, power, and diversity of women in hip-hop, and Philadelphia-based Kulu Mele African Dance & Drum Ensemble (Aug. 7-8), dedicated to preserving the traditional dance and music of West Africa and the African diaspora.

The Harvard Art Museums reopens to the public on Saturday, September 4, 2021. Advance reservations will be required for visitors and will be available up to three weeks in advance. Reservations can be made on the museum website beginning August 20. A limited number of tickets may also be available each day to walk-in visitors. In conjunction with the reopening plans, the museums are also pleased to announce a new “Free Sundays” initiative. The museums will offer preview days for members and supporters on Thursday and Friday, September 2–3, before opening to the general public on September 4.

The stunning matinee production of the monologue Becoming Othello: a Black Girl’s Journey at Shakespeare &Co. this July is set outside in the Roman Garden Theater. On a broiling hot summer day the air rippled with energy as the tall, imposing actor who wrote and conceived of the play, the award-winning Debra Ann Byrd, opened with a chaotic scene at a difficult time of her life, when options seemed blocked and things were not working out for her personally or professionally.

Casting announced for the World Premiere productions of Boca by Jessica Provenz (July 30-August 29 at the BSC Production Center, 34 Laurel Street) and Sister Sorry by Alec Wilkinson (August 13-29 at the Boyd-Quinson Stage, 30 Union Street)

Berkshire artist Galen Cheney will present Slow Burn at New York's David Richard Gallery opening on July 21. She has exhibited recently at Real Eyes Gallery in Adams and on line at Blue Heron Gallery. She lives and works in North Adams.

Award-winning South Florida actress Elena Maria Garcia will mount her hilarious, one-performer show for a third time. ¡FUÁCATA! or A Latina’s Guide to Surviving the Universe features more than 20 characters, mostly Hispanic women. ¡FUÁCATA in English basically means a backhanded slap.

Real Eyes Gallery in Adams is regarded by artists as one of the best gallery spaces in the Berkshires. The ample venue is well suited to showcase the colossal representational/ conceptual watercolors of Robert Morgan. His work is featured during August with the theme of Out of Context.

Kirill Petrenko and Jonas Kaufmann are still standing after four performances of the grueling Tristan and Isolde in Munich.  In 1869, the New York Times reported that Wagner’s music was driving people to insanity and suicide. “We learn from Munich that Herr Eberle, the piano-forte conductor, has gone mad over Tristan and Isolde and it is known that rehearsals of this unique opera had previously killed a celebrated German tenor, Ludwig Schnorr.” Familiarity has made this opera an all the more thrilling experience.

Jacob’s Pillow presents the world premiere of a new work by legendary club dancer Archie Burnett entitled Life Encounters on the Henry J. Leir Stage from July 28 - August 1. Life Encounters explores New York City Club Dance styles through treasured memories from Burnett’s own life with a cast of illustrious dancers including Abdiel Jacobsen, Princess Lockerkoo, Ephrat Asherie, Samara Cohen, Maya Llanos, and Deandre Browne.

The very mention of the New York City’s own wildly popular actress and comedian Jackie Hoffman – she of 1000 facial expressions, bodily quirks, a score of well-placed adlibs, and a mesmerizing voice that takes you prisoner with a waterfall of precisely enunciated words – signals that somewhere lurking around a corner is yet another not-to-missed Hoffman Happening.

This Saturday the one and only Jeff Tweedy takes the stage in MASS MoCA's Joe's Field, joined by special guest and Wilco bandmate, Nels Cline. If you're mourning another year sans-Solid Sound, here's your chance to get that Wilco-meets-MASS MoCA fix.

Blue Heron Gallery Online, a virtual art gallery, will be presenting the art of northern Berkshires artist Ann Scott beginning at noon on Monday, July 12, 2021, and running through August 12, 2021.  The exhibition, appearing on www.blueherongallery.online, will feature 12 of her most recent paintings depicting a path of some kind found in the forests of the northern Berkshires as well as a brief bio and her Artist Statement.

The Munich Opera House may not be the house that Wagner built, but it was an important venue in his career, a place where he conducted, and where his works were premiered.  King Ludwig II insisted that the first two episodes of the Ring premiere here. Wagner had hoped to withhold them for his new Festival Theatre at Bayreuth.  Tannhäuser, whose 2017 production in being reprised in Munich’s annual festival, was an immediate favorite of Ludwig, Wagner’s sponsor and savior. 

Our visionary founder, Lola Jaffe, passed away on July 7, 2021. In 2002, Lola looked at a threatened and neglected historic theater and saw beauty, transcendent performances, transported audiences, and one show following straight on the heels of the next in perpetuity. Then she started calling her friends to help her make it happen.

The al fresco evening will begin with a stroll and tasting in the orchard, then move onto a multi-course savory farm dinner, featuring craft cider pairings as well as remarks by the cider makers and our farmer about the cider and the apples.

Playwright Michael Gotch uses the current trend toward tiny houses – those houses that are under 500 square feet (and often smaller) that forces closeness and massive downsizing of possessions.

Anne Leonard, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, examines the continuing influence that master print maker Albrecht Dürer has had on generations of artists who have drawn inspiration from his incomparable body of work. This lecture will be presented live over Zoom and Facebook Live at 6 pm.    

The Hudson Eye, arranged by curator Aaron Levi Garvey, presented by Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation commences August 27th - September 6th, 2021, timed throughout Labor Day Weekend in historic downtown Hudson, NY. The Hudson Eye curatorially frames 26 participating artists with performances, exhibitions, and a Hot Topics humanities symposium co-organized by Operation Unite NY confronting nine issues spanning global topics at a local level.

The online-only theater company New Normal Rep scores another hit with its riveting production of Nikkole Salter's riveting drama, "Lines in the Dust." The production is streaming on demand through Aug. 8. The play centers on a poor, single mother who commits residency fraud in an effort to give her daughter the best possible education. "Lines in the Dust" takes place in New Jersey in 2009-2010.

A major exhibition of portrait painting spanning the decades between 1512-1570, seems to me a risky proposition. A great idea for scholars, students and serious amateurs of art history, but usually not a show that would attract the general public. This one is different, thanks in part to a first-rate installation by Daniel Kershaw, the Met’s senior exhibition designer.