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The Metropolitan Opera website is down for the third day in a row. Griner freed. Met Opera now captive?

“There’s no better way to start the new year off than by making sure that our doors are wide open for our community and for all visitors to the area,” said Olivier Meslay, Hardymon Director of the Clark. “We believe that the chance to engage with art is a truly fulfilling and enriching part of life and we want to make sure that everyone has plenty of opportunities to visit the Clark and to get to know us better.”

Geoffrey Richon is a major contractor and philanthropist in Gloucester. He co-founded Gloucester Stage Company. For artistic director he hired and later fired the playwright Israel Horovitz. He was outed as a sexual predator, first by the Boston Phoenix in 1993, and then by the New York Times in 2007. The company has been through rough times but Richon sees a bright and expanded future.

On a drawing board of mixed media, live at the Blue Building on 44th Street, Art Bath gives New York talent a chance to experiment.  Six times a year, twice in the spring and twice in the fall, Art Bath presents programs in which artists mix and match new and daring forms. These are enchanted evenings. 

Confocal microscopy, also known as confocal laser scanning microscopy, is a specialized optical imaging technique that provides contact-free, non-destructive measurements of three-dimensional objects. For this website, plants considered sacred by indigenous groups of the Americas were scanned at St. Lawrence University’s Microscopy and Imaging Center.

Okay – let’s cut straight to the chase.  The unique chronical of “Little Shop of Horrors” is laugh-out-loud funny; the music is foot-stomping energetic; the production is superb; and the performances are great.  Did I miss anything?  If you see this TheatreWorks production and disagree, check with your physician to make sure you have the pulse rate of a sentient being.

New City Players in Southeast Florida has mounted a solid production of a live radio play adaptation of the Christmas classic film, "It's a Wonderful Life." The production runs through Dec. 18. The adaptation, while charming and heartwarming, is too similar to the source material.

This rendering must be measured by a very different yardstick than traditional versions. By a calculation based on contemporary sensibilities, Adaptor/Director Emma Rice’s innovation succeeds in providing a multifaceted entertainment executed with top rate professionalism.

Palm Beach Dramaworks (PBD) in Southeast Florida is preparing to mount a production of the classic courtroom drama, "Twelve Angry Men." The play's basis is the Academy Award winning 1957 film with the same title. PBD's production will run through Dec. 24 at PBD's intimate venue in West Palm Beach.

Phil Kline's Unsilent Night has been presented in 150+ cities across five continents since its debut 30 years ago on the streets of Greenwich Village. Free as always.

The exhibition, Promenades on Paper: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, includes a selection of eighty-four studies, architectural plans, albums, sketchbooks, prints, and optical devices that expand our understanding of drawing as a tool of documentation and creation in the age of Enlightenment.

Two compelling exhibits are on display at Wrightwood 659, the Lincoln Park gallery dedicated to exhibiting socially engaged art and architecture. Michiko Itatani: Celestial Stage celebrates the work of the Chicago painter and her fascination with science and culture. The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity: 1869-1930 offers the first multimedia survey of early works of queer art.

Dorothy's Dictionary is a funny, touching piece of theater about two contrasting people developing a bond over time. The play's word premiere production is running through Dec. 11 at Theatre Lab, the professional resident company of Florida Atlantic University. Theatre Lab is dedicated to producing new work.

Christoph Willibald Gluck’s contributions to opera extend beyond the merits of his individual operas. Like Richard Wagner a century later, Gluck conceived an intellectual framework that changed the opera landscape.

What happens when you combine A Christmas Carol and Sherlock Holmes? You end up with A Sherlock Carol which is returning to off-Broadway. In this version through Sunday, Jan. 1, Holmes is called in by an adult Tiny Time to investigate the death of Scrooge.

All about quarries, ponds and rocks! This article presents a photo and word essay - in the format that I have exhibited at the Eclipse Mill as well as this summer/fall at the Berkshire Art Museum in North Adams, MA.

Leave it to Gil Rose, Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Odyssey Opera to present one of the most important operas of the last decade. At Jordan Hall in Boston, Rose and his company gave a superb concert production of  John Corigliano’s “Lord of the Cries.”  Commissioned by Santa Fe Opera, this was its east coast debut. Corigliano’s first opera, The Ghost of Versailles met with consistently rave reviews and was not performed often after its premiere. Corigliono swore off the form.  He wanted to write music that was heard.

Whether this is autobiographical or only suggested by Stoppard’s family, it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the brilliant acting and story-telling.

OUT magazine suggested an opera based on the film The Hours back in 2014.  At the time, Fabian Brathwaite wrote: (wishful thinking) Based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the 2002 Stephen Daldry film is basically two hours of “EMOTION!” Tears, breakdowns, more tears and a prosthetic nose — ingredients for operatic gold. And look no further for casting. Just give Meryl three weeks and a pack of lozenges. Renee Fleming now takes on Meryl Streep's role.

George Fifield, founder of the Cyberarts Festival and Boston Cyberarts, curator, scholar, arts administrator, creative mentor, videographer, educator, and a major champion of fusing art with technology, passed away on November 11 at the age of 72 from complications that followed a devastating fall that occurred at his Martha’s Vineyard home early last summer

Before he writes in the morning, Michael Cunningham as always listened to PHilip Glass's music. Serendiptiy brought Glass's score to the Stephen Daldry film based on Cunningham's book, The Hours. He discusses the works with Berkshire Fine Arts.

The Cape Ann Museum’s auditorium was packed for a Sunday afternoon book launch. Edited by Martin Ray, Gloucester Encounters: Essays on the Cultural History of the City from 1623-2023, is a compendium of 37 largely community based essays on aspects of Gloucester’s lifestyle, issues and concerns.

It was fun to revisit our old haunt the Gloucester Writers Center. Much has changed since we were residents several years ago. Last night we attended a reading by Joe Rukeyser and Kathleen Williams.

We're returning to the world of Jane Austen-inspired theater with a costumed, staged reading of Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley, written by Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon, and directed by Ariel Bock! 

Eddie Allen has worked with such jazz greats as Art Blakey, Billy Harper, Randy Weston, Dizzy Gillespie, and Benny Carter. He has recorded and performed with, as well as composed for: Louis Hayes, Lester Bowie, Jack McDuff, Etta Jones & Houston Person, and Mongo Santamaria.