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“I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.”– Harold Pinter, taken from his 2005 Nobel Prize Lecture

San Francisco Opera’s new production of Marriage of Figaro retains the time frame of the original (late 18th century) but moves the action from Spain to post-Revolutionary America. The shift in venue carries no significance for this opera.

Jason Hardink will perform at National Sawdust in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on October 20. This is an unusual concert celebrating the centennial anniversary of the premiere of Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra announces Tanglewood’s first-ever fall/winter/spring schedule of performances and activities to take place on the grounds of the famed music festival, October 2019 through June 2020.

Having reuturned from a monestary in China the North Adams based monk and teacher Michael McGrath resumes his writing. He says in part that " For the Daoist, the Longevity Practice is for the purpose of cultivating stillness. In stillness, we become fully aware of the present moment, and that awareness brings clarity."

Barrington Stage Company has announced three productions for its upcoming 2020 season – the musical masterpiece South Pacific by Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan and The Assembled Parties by Richard Greenberg on the Boyd-Quinson Mainstage, and Anna in the Tropics, the Pulitzer Prize winning play by Nilo Cruz, on the St. Germain Stage.

Actor shines as Wiesenthal in GableStage production of one-character play. Tom Dugan's piece is laser focused, touching and funny. The play centers on the end of the humanitarian's "career" bringing former Nazis to justice.

Laurie Anderson curated the New York Philharmonic NightCap at the Stanley Kaplan Penthouse on October 5. This nightclub event followed a performance of Hector Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique in David Geffen Hall. The host, Nadia Sirota, pointed out that connection between Berlioz’ and Anderson’s work. Both use narrative but that by Anderson and her friends tests the boundaries of sound.

LeKae, a black woman, plays the white boy Huck, and the viewer happily suspends disbelief, as she thoroughly convinces playing the role of the youth as he breaks away from the constraints of convention. They reproduce the escape from the fictitious town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, rafting down the Mississippi, wide-eyed and reveling in the beauty of the world and of freedom.

As the final production of the 25th season, artistic director, Julianne Boyd, is directing the world premiere of a timely social justice play American Underground by Brent Askari. It postulates a future when all American Muslims are treated as enemies of the state.

Seeing Eileen Atkins and Jonathan Pryce on stage together in The Height of the Storm by Florian Zeller is watching master craftsmen work. I wouldn’t care what the play was about; I want to marvel at their skills.

Joshua Gelb and Nehemiah Luckett do more than put on a good show. They ask us to look within the iconography and stereotypes of The Jazz Singer as props for the American story. The Henry Street Settlement's Abrons Art Center is the quintessential stage for this piece. A theatrical venue that reforms and reshapes itself to respond to an ever changing neighborhood demographic it is both old and new. The old playhouse in which the play was performed was built in 1915. It stands a block away from the historic Bialystoker Synagogue which opened in 1905 in a building originally built in 1826. The building was reputedly a stop on the underground railroad.

Boston Lyric Opera’s season opener Ruggero Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” brings inventive staging and design to their production. It promotes a carnival-like atmosphere that invigorates the storyline and engages the audience.

The days are long and arduous, the training, in rain or shine, warm or cold, difficult. The toilet is a trench. There are no bathtubs or showers - a face cloth bath with boiled water is as clean as you get. Everything comfortable and familiar in your life disappears, left below at the base of the mountain. Day, date and time dissolve in the mountain mists during the climb, and all you are left with is the moment, one after another.

Peter Brook andMarie-Hélène Estienne’s Why is playing at the Theater for A New Audience. The co-director-writer Brook’s work spans a century. Yet, as he starts this work, we are surprised and delighted by the answer to the question of the play’s title. The question is tucked away in a little box, on a little scrap of paper, like a note launched in a bottle on an ocean. It has landed at last in Brooklyn.

Elli Papapakonstantinou has created a masterful and absorbing re-telling of the Oedipus story at the Fisher Theater, BAM. Elements of the story we know are central to the production. The sense Papapakonstantinou conveys is the randomness of life. The gruesome drama of the events we hear sung and see danced are horrific. Presented with strong videos, smoke and mirrors, with live video-ing of the principal characters, the piece is larger than life.

By any measure the current exhibition at Gallery 51 in North Adams is superb. There is a compelling synergy that threads through work by five artists all of whom live and work in the Berkshires

Constellation by Emma O'Halloran was inspired by images of hands in the first cave drawings. Turns out that most of these were women's hands, and they looked like constellations, which was O'Halloran's jumping off point. Naomi Louisa O'Connell drew their pictures in riveting song.

Lackey is a master at bringing philosophy out of the dusty corners of academia and putting them on a very passion filled center stage. As with his previous works produced at Theater for a New City Daylight Precision (2014) and Arendt/ Heidegger; a love story (2018) Ludwig and Bertie is a victory for smart theater.

The New York Philharmonic became an opera orchestra for Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Bela Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle. A Swedish cast, including the incomparable Nine Stemme and directed by Bengt Gomer, provided new twists to the tales, emphasizing the real or imagined murder of an errant lover and possible survival of an eighth wife of Bluebeard. His beard is not blue, and attractions go beyond a castle and riches.

With poetic irony, visitors to Ouelett’s one man exhibition at Real Eyes Gallery in Adams literally walk past his subject matter. To verify the veracity of his depictions one need but stand and gawk about on Park Street.

The only Jewish family in a rural Texas town struggles with issues of illness and faith. How can the Jewish Yaweh allow the young and innocent to die of cancer while Jesus Christ offers cure and redemptio. Written and directed by Mark Harelik What the Jews Believe asks questions for which there are no answers.

Isn’t Free Fall supposed to be an adaptation of Strindberg’s masterpiece Miss Julie? Many adaptations of plays update the timeline and shift the locale to one that is familiar to the audience, but playwright Megan Cohen adds a new plot layer of climate change and turns the original play’s dark humor and sharp edges into farce.

Pianists Jenny Lin and Adam Tendler took on one of Franz Liszt’s early and most demanding compositions, alternating roles as performance artists and page turners. Yamaha had delivered a grand piano which just fit between the arched stone walls of the Catacombs at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. The lid of the piano was completely removed, allowing a bright, distinctive tone to emerge, even when so many notes cascaded that it might have been difficult to distinguish one from another. Erotic and religious ecstasy erupted.

Apparently the audience for the Sunday performance of Love for Three Oranges at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia was only the second best audience so far. The best, 1,300 school children who had earlier found this work irresistible. It is.