Williamstown Theatre Festival

Back in the day the Berkshire Museum, the oldest in the region, collected everything from soup to nuts. The museum's director, Stuart Chase, is challenged to find projects drawn from a vast collection of 30,000 objects. The interactive exhibitions are fun for families and instructive for 13,000 annual visiting students.

The sexual predators Madame la Marquise de Merteuil (Elizabeth Aspenlieder) and Le Vicomte de Valmont (Josh Aaron McCabe) are involved in Les Liaisons Dangereuses at Shakespeare & Company through March 21. While all is fair in love and war this drama deftly conflates those extremes.

There is something magical about James Taylor and Tanglewood. But add his pal, Carole King, and wow. With the Pops on Friday, and three concerts by the dynamic duo, Tanglewood is set to draw some 60,000 visitors on the Fourth of July Weekend. Talk about fireworks. Zowie.

In the dead of winter The Clark Art Institute collaborated with its neighbor The Williamstown Theatre Festival with a reading of the hilarious Yasmina Reza play ART. This summer, when the Clark mounts Picasso Looks at Degas, they will again join forces with a reading of Steve Martin's comedy Picasso at the Lapin Agile.

The Clark and the Williamstown Theatre Festival present a staged reading of Yasmina Reza's international hit Art February 5 at 7 pm at the Clark. Hailed as "a remarkably wise, witty and intelligent comedy" by The London Times, Art is sure to tickle your funny bone and brain. Reservations are required for this free event.

David Esbjornson was Arthur Miller's director of choice late in life, staging the premieres of his last two plays. He will bring Miller's classic "All My Sons" to the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston through February 7.

With a combination of budget cuts, a reduced schedule and mixed reviews the second season for Williamstown Theatre Festival artistic director, Nicholas Martin, proved to be challenging. In 2010 Martin will work with a new general manager Joe Finnegan. This appointment has been announced by WTF.

For 2009's Williamstown Film Festival the emphasis is on movies and film making, not what the starlets are wearing on the red carpet. Film makers and film lovers love the Berkshire's version of a film festival since the emphasis is on craft and content, not gossip and glamour.

At the age of 78, Olympia Dukakis could easily retire having earned the title of legendary actress and a mantle full of Oscars, Obies, Gabbys and Golden Globes. Instead the busiest actor of her generation makes a surprising decision - to return to Shakespeare & Company and work with her old friend and favorite student, Tony Simotes.

In the "staff room" of the Cull-Loomis School of English for Foreigners in Cambridge, England seven teachers interact in lives of repressed desperation. The 1983 play focuses on events set in the 1960s. This is a time capsule and comedy of manners starring Tony Award winner Jefferson Mays.

The veteran actor Will LeBow performs as a piano playing ghost in the world premiere of the Melinda Lopez play "Caroline In Jersey" at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. We met to discuss the past 32 years in theatre with the last 17 years in the company of the American Repertory Theatre.

The world premiere of "Caroline in Jersey" by Melinda Lopez needs a bit of fine tuning but is destined to cross the river and have a nice run in Manhattan. Lea Thompson, yes That Caroline, anchors a super cast that includes Will LeBow, Brenda Wehle and Matt McGrath.

There is a hive of activity surrounding Williamstown Theatre Festival's premiere of Caroline in Jersey, and a lot of the buzz surrounds actors Lea Thompson and Matt McGrath, and the return of Laika, the Russian Canine Cosmonaut. This new play sounds so strange that those involved won't reveal much about it. But dig we must, and they threw us a bone or two.

During the Monsoon of 2009 we all need a few laughs. Actor/ director Dylan Baker and a superb cast provide a hilarious revival of the 1922 George Kelly comedy about the pratfalls and pretentions of community theatre in "The Torch-Bearers.

The actor and director Dylan Baker has a history with the Williamstown Theatre Festival that started in 1983. He returns this season with an adaptation of the 1922 comedy by George Kelly "The Torch Bearers." It was a hit Off Broadway when Baker directed an earlier production. He talked about a life in theatre when not "working at a car wash."

Last summer Justin Waldman directed the one man play 'The Atheist" which ran Off Broadway from September through January after two weeks at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. He sat with us to discuss "What Is the Sound of Thunder?" by Noah Haidle which he has directed in its world premiere at WTF.

Noah Haidle was inspired by a line from King Lear to write a spoof of soap operas "What Is the Cause of Thunder?" The play is having its world premiere at the Williamstown Theatre Festival starring Betty Gilpin and Wendie Malick directed by Justin Waldman.

Each summer, the Youth Theater at Barrington Stage presents a polished musical for some 40+ performances. These productions never fail to amaze and delight sold out audiences. They are full of energy and vitality that are a credit to both director Christine O'Grady and her young performers, and to Music Director Brian Usifer who is at the helm each night setting the tempo and intense pace that are their trademark.

If David Mamet is East then Sam Shepard is a paradigm of the West. Together they define the bookends of contemporary American theatre. The Williamstown Theatre Festival has mounted a galvanic production of Shepard's "True West" and its Biblical tale of sibling rivalry.

For 26 years John Barrett has served as the Mayor of North Adams. He is running for yet another two year term. In a meeting with artists of the Eclipse Mill complex he related the epic struggle to salvage a depressed city largely through his personal efforts to help Tom Krens and then Joe Thompson in their plan to transform the abandoned Sprague Electric campus into Mass MoCA. Some $35 million in state revenue was used to renovate the museum which is celebrating its first decade.

Tina Packer, after 32 years as Founding Dirctor of the Lenox based, Shakespeare & Company has stepped down. It was planned that Tony Simotes, now in his first season as Artistic Director, would be handed the reins of debt free company with a $10 million new facility including a second stage, The Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, and the start on an endowment. Then the economy fell off a cliff.

Knickerbocker, by Jonathan Marc Sherman, directed by Nicholas Martin, is the first of three world premieres this season on the Nikos Stage of the Willianstown Theatre Festival. It stars Reg Rogers as a fortysomething adolescent being forced to grow up and face the reality of the birth of a son. He agonizes in a series of dialogues conducted in the booth of a Manhattan bistro.

The Tony and Drama Desk nominated (2007) actor, Brooks Ashmanskas, will be back on Broadway in January with Noel Coward's "Present Laughter" starring Victor Garber and directed by Nicholas Martin. Ashmanskas is currently starring in Martin's production of Jonathan Marc Sherman's "Knickerbocker" which premieres at Williamstown Theatre Festival. It brings together several Bennington College alumni.

Bebe Neuwirth takes to the Mahaiwe stage Saturday for an evening of songs and remembrances, but will she have time to check out the Berkshire antique shops she loves so dearly?

Williams alumnus A.R. Gurney is back for his 9th season at the Williamstown Theatre Festival with a WASPY play "Children" suggested by a John Cheever story. This production begs the question Was John Cheever (1912-1982) the "Chekhov of the Suburbs." Serendipitously this play set in the Fourth of July launches the WTF season on the Fourth. What fun.