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The Old Globe production of “The Twenty-seventh Man” written by novelist and first-time playwright Nathan Englander, has the very good fortune to be directed by Old Globe Artistic Director Barry Edelstein. Edelstein’s easy manner belies the intellectual rigor he applies to all of the productions he directs.

Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s latest play “The Night Alive”, is having its West Coast Premiere at The Geffen Playhouse, directed by Randall Arney. McPherson is famed for infusing elements of the supernatural and its subject matter into his plays. In his award-winning 2008 play “The Seafarer”, a poker game becomes the allegorical battleground of a Faustian bargain between the protagonist and the devilishly clever antagonist.

Brahms' German Requiem is closer to tone poem than the dramatic opera of Verid's Requiem. In the hands of Danniele Gatti, off book on a very complicated score, the Requiem moved and mesmerized. Soloists and choir were reverently perfect. The sound lofted into Carnegie Hall, and, as Brahms wrote, how lovely is that dwelling place.

Sherlock Holmes is a perennial favorite at the Indiana Repertory Theatre. The Hound of the Baskervilles is the latest in a line of successful adaptations of the infamous detective to hit their stage. This production runs through March 15.

Lissa Brennan’s new play For the Tree to Drop builds an existentialist drama that explores the webs of power in which antebellum slaves (and their owners) were caught.The play is being presented at PICT Classic Theatre in Pittsburgh.

My Irish mom loved corned beef and cabbage. Dad, a Sicilian, enjoyed more exotic cuisine. He insisted that we eat whatever was put in front of us. One night we went too far.
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Among other insights our science correspondent reveals that "Forty and fifty years ago, Iodine, in the form of Sodium Iodate, was routinely added to American bakery products, both as a dough conditioner and a nutritional supplement. Then, of course because it was cheaper, Big Food started adding Bromates instead. These not only contain no Iodine, but are also capable of displacing it. Our FDA likes to say that all the Bromates (which are banned in the EU and UK) in dough will become the less-toxic Bromides in the processes of flour “ripening,” rising, and baking.'" It is likely that you didn't know that.

The Solid Sound 2015 lineup features Tweedy (which features Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and his son Spencer), Mac DeMarco, Real Estate, Parquet Courts, Shabazz Palaces, Richard Thompson Trio, King Sunny Ade and His African Beats, Taj Mahal, Cibo Matto, Jessica Pratt, Luluc, William Tyler, Bill Frisell, The Autumn Defense, NRBQ, Stained Radiance (Nels Cline + Norton Wisdom), Glenn Kotche and Jeffrey Zeigler, and many others.

In March, WAM Theatre will be a beneficiary of Jayne Atkinson’s special event, Can You Hear Me Baby? Stories of Sex, Love and OMG Birth!, which is concluding this year’s Berkshire Festival of Women Writers. Adapted from true stories that come from the hearts of mothers and fathers, this event brings together birth stories and original music to dramatize the joy, challenges, personal courage, and profundity of birth. Can You Hear Me Baby? takes the stage at the Berkshire Theatre Group’s Unicorn Theatre in Stockbridge, MA on March 27 at 7pm and March 28 at 2 and 7 pm. Proceeds will benefit the National Perinatal Association, Berkshire Festival of Women Writers, and WAM Theatre.

In a terse press release yet another artistic director, Rick Dildine, has hastily departed Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass. At the end of the 2014 season the much liked and respected Tony Simote left without elaboration. Simotes, who followed the long tenure of founding artistic director, Tina Packer, was on the job for five years. In mid February Dildine met the media to present the program for 2015. Just a month later he's gonzo.

For the past decade Edmund Barry Gaither has been primarily focused on developing a mixed use parcel in Roxbury which will include a new home for the National Center for African American Artists. That has entailed suspending his projects as an adjunct curator to the Museum of Fine ares and maintaining NCAAA as a skeletal operation in a 19th century former mansion in Roxbury. Despite many setbacks he hopes to get the museum up and running in the next couple of years. This is the second and final part of a dialogue with Gaither..
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From the author of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, Intimate Apparel is a superb evocative portrait of Esther, an independent but lonely African American seamstress in early 20th-century New York. She earns her living sewing exquisite lingerie for wealthy white socialites uptown and whores downtown. After receiving a letter from a stranger who is laboring on the Panama Canal, she begins a long-distance courtship with him. Of course, he is not all that he initially seems. Disillusioned but unbroken, Esther reluctantly returns to her sewing to refashion her dreams. This is a wonderful Lyric Stage Company production.

The protest artist Dana C. Chandler, Jr. was an activist who charged the Museum of Fine Arts with institutional racism. That initiated the special exhibition African American Artists from New York and Boston and the appointment of its curator, Edmund Gaither, as an adjunct curator of the MFA. Chandler was later instrumental in forming African American Master Artist-In-Residence Program for Northeastern University. This is the first of a two part interview with the artist.
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In 1973 the studio of Dana C. Chandler, Jr. was looted with most of his work destroyed. The studio was then torched. He was assisted by a dean of Northeastern to find adequate space. That led to establishing the African American Master Artist-in-Residence Program (AAMARP). It continues to exist although Chandler relocated to New Mexico where he has lived for the past decade.
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As a part of our research and oral history of modern and contemporary art and culture, some time ago, I contacted Kenworth Moffett. At the end of the tenure of Perry T. Rathbone as director of the Museum of Fine Arts, in 1971, a department of contemporary art was created with Moffett as its founding curator. He asked me to send him some questions and this essay is the result of that correspondence. During the years when he was director of the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art we always enjoyed an annual lunch when vacationing in nearby Palm Beach.
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While a graduate student at Brown University, in 1970, the art historian Edmund Barry Gaither was recruited for a shared appointment as adjunct curator of the Museum of Fine Arts and working with Elma Lewis as director of the National Center for African American Artists. He still holds those positions. In this first part of an extensive interview Gaither describes jumping in to curate the major MFA exhibition African American Artists from New York and Boston. He was soon multi- tasking while being pressured by a diverse range of individuals and groups.
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On view from March 31 to August 30, 2015, Ralph Pucci: The Art of the Mannequin is the first museum exhibition to explore the work of renowned New York-based designer Ralph Pucci, widely regarded for his innovative approach to the familiar form of the mannequin. The Museum of Arts and Design is located at Columbus Circle in New York City.

Woodie King Jr. was an usher in the Cherry Lane Theatre when the then Leroi Jones' Dutchman was first produced. Sets for the second one acter, The Toilet, were designed by Larry Rivers, and everyone went to a warehouse to claim them when Rivers made a name for himself. Estimated to be worth $1,000,000, they have never been found. But the play Dutchman lives. King makes very clear its connection to the Wagner opera, as the overture and excerpts are played as prelude. Incidents in Ferguson and New York keep the issue of racial violence very present.

I have curated a show of painting at the Kimball Jenkins School of Art 266 Main St in Concord,NH(right off I 93). It includes Susan Carr, Martin Mugar, Addison Parks, Paul Pollaro and Jason Travers. It will be up for the Months of March and April.The opening reception is 5-7 on Friday March 14th.

Calling Kirsten Flagstad the voice of the century is an understatement. The Norwegian soprano had a voice for the ages. Even in rachtety recordings of her performances, the big, beautiful clean sound is revealed. In a monodrama developed and directed by Einer Bjorge, a deeper picture of the famed singer is revealed by actress Nina Bendiksen.

Some years ago we bonded while touring Spain. On the bus Ric Haynes and I discussed the art and culture we experienced. There was another such adventure in Italy. This latest of many dialogues explores the soul and resources of his oeuvre. The new work will be shown at the alternative HallSpace in Boston. The exhibition Where Am I will be on view from March 21 to April 25.

The ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance’s CenterSeries presents Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Anne Bogart’s SITI Company as they join forces for A Rite. These two celebrated companies examine The Rite of Spring, Igor Stravinsky’s groundbreaking masterpiece. There will be one performance only, on Tuesday, March 17th, 2015 at 8:00 PM on the ’62 Center’s MainStage.

The Clark Art Institute will consider the history and politics that inspired many artists working during and between World Wars I and II in the exhibition Machine Age Modernism: Prints from the Daniel Cowin Collection. Inspired by such prewar movements as Futurism and Cubism, and using innovative techniques developed by artists associated with London’s Grosvenor School of Modern Art in the 1930s and 1940s, artists of the Machine Age defied aesthetic and technical conventions in order to convey the vitality of industrial society and changed printmaking in the process. Machine Age Modernism will be on view in the Clark Center February 28–May 17, 2015.

Ricardo De Lima, Vela Phelan, Sandrine Schaefer and the collective kijidome were named the 2015 James and Audrey Foster Prize Artists, the museum announced today. Performance, public art projects, and artist-run galleries are enjoying a resurgence in Boston. The work will be on view at the ICA from April 21 through August 9, 2015.

The Ports of Los Angeles and Hamburg are two of the busiest and most important harbors around the world. One in the USA, the other one in Europe where I lived nearby for the first 20 years of my life. The word and photo essay allows for a glimpse at both ports. One series of photographs were taken in a matter of minutes, the other one during a visit of Hamburg Harbor in 2011 along memory lane.