Williamstown Theatre Festival

For the first annual Berkshire Theatre Awards seven shows received more than five nominations each including 11 for The Pirates of Penzance and eight for Broadway Bounty Hunter, both produced by Barrington Stage Company. Seven nominations were received for Or, and six for The Merchant of Venice at Shakespeare & Company. Also popular with five nominations each are The Rose Tattoo (Williamstown Theatre Festival), Little Shop of Horrors (Berkshire Theatre Group), and American Son (Barrington Stage).

What are the options when patients opt to end treatment for devastating, excruciatingly painful terminal illnesses? With astonishing performances by the renowned actors Alfred Molina and Jane Kaczmarek the issues are explored in And No More Shall We Part by Tom Holloway at Williamstown Theatre Festval.

Tony and Pulitzer winning Wendy Wasserstein, who died ten years ago at 55, was among the most successful and admired playwrights of her generation. One of her lesser Broadway plays, An American Daughter, is being revived at Williamstown Theatre Festival. It features a strong woman and candidate for high office who, because of a gaffe on camera, is being crucified by the media. Does this sound familiar?

What happens when you conflate Old Miss and Brooklyn routed through Boston University? As a playwright Boo Killebrew draws on her childhood and the heritage of gracious Southern women with the here-and-now sexual politics of a single mother and her sister traying to get the shards of her life together. That illusion of a stay at home wife and mother came to a screeching end with the death of her husband. Now just 29 she is picking up the pieces in a misfired drama striving for comedy.

The hilarious comedy The Chinese Room by the Irish playwright Michael West is having its world premiere at Williamstown Theatre Festival. The current production allows for fine tuning for when the play transfers Off Broadway to Manhattan Theatre Club. It is sure to be a hit in New York.

The powerful drama Cost of Living, by Martyna Majok, having its world premiere at Williamstown Theatre Festival entails two individuals with disabilities and those who provide care for them. The production will transfer to Manhattan Theatre Club during the coming season. It is an evening of theatre that audiences will never recover from.

Based on the casting of Academy Award winner, Marisa Tomei, the production of The Rose Tattoo at Williamstown Theatre Festival is the most anticipated theatre event of the summer season in the Berkshires. For the most part audiences will be thrilled with her perfomance in a sprawling and chaotic production of the Tennessee Williams classic play.

Currently Long Day's Journey Into Night, the masterpiece of Eugene O'Neill, is enjoying an all star Broadway revival. One of the last of his plays before a decade of illness he left instructions that it not be published until 25 years after his life. It was produced in Sweden within three years of his death. Based on the horrendous circumstances of his alcoholic, drug addicted family he hoped to avoid collateral damage to survivors. It begs the question of who owns the moral and legal rights when artists draw upon family and friends as material for their art.

The Williamstown Theatre Festival season, running from June 28 – August 21, 2016, begins on the Main Stage with a production of Tennessee Williams’ Tony Award-winning play The Rose Tattoo (June 28 – July 17) directed by Obie Award winner Trip Cullman and featuring Academy Award winner Marisa Tomei; continues with the world premiere of Boo Killebrew’s comedy Romance Novels For Dummies (July 20– July 31), directed by Tony Award nominee Moritz von Stuelpnagel; and closes with the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner Wendy Wasserstein’s An American Daughter (August 3 – August 21), directed by Evan Cabnet.

Barrington Stage is the first to announce its program for the 2016 season. For the winter blues there will be the 10x10 New Play Festival February 11-28. The shoulder season warms up with previews beginning May 10 with the world premiere of a musical "Presto Change-o."

In some of the most exciting and insightful productions and performances of the year there was a notable cross pollination and invention as vernacular street cultures and indigenous art forms conflated into high art. Classic works were not just revived but reinvented from the insight out. The best works of 2016 raised the bar through risk taking and challenging audiences. These rare experiences tend to make the majority of what we experience ordinary and enervating. In an era signified by ubiquitous standing ovations what is truly worthy of special recognition?

For seven years former Guggenheim Foundation director, Tom Krens, made grueling monthly trips to China. He declines to discuss how he was "beaten down" in negotiations with the Chinese. He has opted to develop two museum level projects closer to home. Krens, a Williams alumnus and former director of its museum, initiated what is now Mass MoCA. He left decades ago but has maintained a residence in Williamstown.

Using a satellite image Tom Krens commented on a six mile line connecting North Adams and Williamstown. It was a part of an engaging power point presentation to develop a cultural corridor connecting world class resources including a new for profit museum and one in North Adams featuring model railroads and maquettes by renowned architects. Former governors Dukakis and Weld attended the presentation.

A feature of the New York conferences of the American Theatre Critics Association is a lunch with Broadway stars at Sardi's. It was my pleasure to introduce Marlee Matlin. Other guests were Tony winner, Michael Cerveris, actress Kathleen Chalfant, creator of legendary musicals (Fiorello!, Fiddler on the Roof, She Love Me) Sheldon Harnick, actor Brian D'Arcy James, Tony winner Judith Light, director Bartlett Sher, four time Emmy winner, Marlo Thomas, Tony winner Doug Wright and playwright Arthur Kopit.

A Confederacy of Dunces was published in 1980 eleven years after John Kennedy Toole's suicide. Recently the creative team- adapter Jeffrey Hatcher, director David Esbjornson, and actor Nick Offerman- met with the media to discuss the production for Boston's Huntington Theatre Company. The comedy will run from November 11 through December 13.

If bad luck comes in threes what's next for the Boston theatre community. Today we have reported on the break up of a 33-year-old relationship between the Huntington Theatre Company and Boston University. Now we report news the Emerson College, the owner of the 115-year-old Colonial Theatre has plans to convert it into a student center. These developments were predicted several years ago by then NEA chair Rocco Landesman. As he suggests, here in the Berkshires, there are too many arts organizations pursuing the same limited potential donors.

With the opening of Red Velvet at Shakespeare & Company behind him John Douglas Thompson had time for a leisurely breakfast in Lenox. It was the latest in a series of interviews about his classical and contemporary roles that started with Othello in 2006. This is the first of two parts of that recent dialogue

Three time Oliver Award winner Mike Bartlett's An Intervention is having its American premiere anchoring the Nikos Stage programming of the Williamstown Theater Festival. The clever and verbose two hander is being staged with two rotating casts. We saw it with Josh Hamilton and Justin Long.

John Douglas Thompson is astonishing in Lolita Chakrabarti's Red Velvet which continues until September 13 at Shakespeare & Company. It tells the true life story of Ira Aldridge the first artist of color to portray Othello on the London stage in 1833.

While director of the Williams College Museum of Art Tom Krens initiated plans for Mass MoCA. When he left for a 20 year career at the Guggenheim Museum in New York that project moved forward under Joe Thompson. Now Krens, a Williams graduate and Williamstown home owner, is proposing to create a for profit museum on leased land fronting the high traffic corridor between MoCA, Williams College and the newly expanded and renovated Clark Art Institute.

This is the fourth time that Long Wharf artistic director, Gordon Edelstein, has worked with the Eugene O'Neill classic Moon for the Misbegotten. To keep it fresh he has changed the tenant farmer Hogan family from Irish immigrants to African Americans. That allowed for casting multiply Tony and Grammy winner Audra McDonald. She appears with her real life husband Will Swenson. The resultant charisma is scorching.

This is the 10th WTF season for Michael Friedman, and 6th for Daniel Goldstein. They have created the world premiere of a musical Unknown Soldier which is one of the bright and promising productions this summer in Williamstown. The project was initiated through a commission from former artistic director Nicholas Martin. It has been brought to fruition by Mandy Greenfield .

For the fourth production of the season at Williamstown Theatre Festival yet again it is a world premiere with the casting of stars like Blair Underwood and De'adre Aziza. Unlike the prior three productions last night there was a genuine and encouraging standing O from the enthusiastic audience. There are compelling components in an uneven play by Dominque Morisseau. She aspires to do for her native Detroit what August Wilson achieves in his Century Cycle for Pittsburgh,

Given the all star casting a number of shows during Mandy Greenfield's first season as artistic director of Williamstown Theatre Festival have sold out. This is particularly true for the smaller Nikos Stage where Tony, Emmy and Grammy winner Cynthia Nixon is featured in the three-hander Kinship by Carey Perloff, directed by Jo Bonney. In an example of gender reversal, the apparent point of this play, a woman in power, a successful editor, mentors a rookie reporter and risks career and family in an obsession that turns as dark as the fate of the Greek queen Phèdre. Perloff was directing a production of the Racine classic when it inspired her to write this play.

Roger Rees, who has died following a medical procedure in May, had a long association with the Williamstown Theatre Festival. The renowned Tony winning actor/ director first came to Williamstown as an actor. From 2004 to 2007 he was the artistic director of WTF. He returned last summer for a revival of the Kander and Ebb musical The Visit which is currently on Broadway starring Chita Rivera.