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Gerry Bergstein is on the short list of leading Boston artists of his generation. Taking a leap on every level his monumental paintings will be show during February with a bonus day at Gallery Naga. Hood Museum director, John Stomberg, will provide an overview on the theme of Body Politic.

Sheepdog, by Kevin Artigue, Shattered Globe Theatre’s new production, crisply directed by Wardell Julius Clark, will have you holding your breath as details of the incident spool out over 90 minutes.

Kendra and Betty are southern women, together for six years, but their relationship is fraying, if not unraveling. As it turns dark, they’re stuck in a boat that won’t move. The Gulf by Audrey Cefaly is About Face Theatre’s latest production, directed by Megan Carney, now on stage at Theater Wit. The gulf, of course, is both literal and symbolic.

We are immediately struck by the lime color of the Rev 23 set: the walls, lights, desks in a school room in hell where God’s lessons are being taught, or unlearned. Clever James Darrah captures both the weight of Rev 23 and its surprising hopefulness in his production. Responding to an exuberant score by Julian Wachner, the Furies dance together across the classroom, lofting comments, instructions and denigrating the ideas of Lucifer. This is his world.

Although the playwright’s intent and narrative often lack clarity, the dialog is clever and the situations amusing. In the hands of a fine ensemble of actors, Custom Made Theatre offers a very funny and provocative production of How to Transcend a Happy Marriage.

First produced in Convent Garden in 1841, when Boucicault was 21, London Assurance, is a farcical comedy of manners, this time directed by Charlotte Moore. It is the cleverest and most enjoyable play to open this year.

Berliner Festspiele invited this young company, Gauthier Dance Company Theaterhaus Stuttgart, to dance for five exciting days and to great success. For the rest of the year they will travel and perform internationally, including at Jacob's Pillow, in Becket, Massachusetts, the week of July 13. The Pillow invites yearly for their three months long summer festival dance companies from around the world.

Ordinary Americans is a timely and relatable play about an early television sitcom which aired during the McCarthy era. Joseph McDonough's piece is world premiering in a strong co-production by GableStage and Palm Beach Dramaworks. The comedy-drama continues through Feb. 16 at GableStage, following a run at Dramaworks.

Graves are marked with sticks crossed. They seem to bend in the movement of the professional mourner and his followers. Light is spotted from the ceiling, sometimes two spots and at others six. The lights rhythmic entrances and exits fit perfectly with incessant beats of the feet. The brilliant South African choreographer Gregory Vuyani Maqoma has adapted Zakes Mda’s novel Cion.

Steven Dietz was among the five most produced playwrights in America during 2019. And now his latest play “Bloomsday,” is on stage at North Coast Repertory Theatre (NCRT), making its Southern California debut.

A national equity tour of Aladdin features spectacle and substance. Aladdin continues to enthrall with its magic and visuals. The Disney show is making stops in Florida.

The Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF), the third-largest film festival in America, began in 1989 as the dream of then Hollywood celebrity turned politician and former Mayor Sonny Bono, who had a dream of making his city a focal point for the motion picture industry by launching an annual film festival.

This year another Dutch film is in the Oscar hunt. It is a powerful, psychological, provocative thriller called “Instinct”. It’s set in a prison where a newly arrived, experienced psychologist Nicoline, (rivetingly played by Carice van Houten) is assigned to the case file of serial sex offender Idris (a clever psychopath scarily portrayed by Marwan Kenzari).

Jennifer Zetlan gets a full opportunity to display her extreme force of nature in voice and acting in Ricky Ian Gordon’s Ellen West. The work premiered at Opera Saratoga last summer. Cast changes have been made. The distinguished Nathan Gunn takes on multiple roles. He is featured as the doctor, based on Ludwig Binswanger who wrote the classic case study of his patient whose pseudonym was Ellen West.

Jo Sandman: The Photographic Work on view February 8–June 7, 2020 at the Fitchburg Art Museum explores Sandman’s turn to photography in the 1990s.

Barrington Stage Company will present two World Premiere musicals and new productions of a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical classic, a Tony Award-winning musical revue, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning play. BSC will also perform outdoors for the first time with free performances of one of the company’s World Premiere musicals and featuring the company’s popular Youth Theatre.

Noura constitutes playwright Heather Raffo’s admirable contribution to the confrontation between assimilation and tradition faced by foreign born in American life. The title character and her husband immigrated to the U.S. eight years before the time of the play.

We look forward to theatre in the coming months. This is what is scheduled for Connecticut.

Danielle Birrittella, the co-creator of Magadalene, has a rich, inventive lyrical delivery of the poet Marie Howe's words. She dares to explore the divide between feminine and erotic in Magdalene, a work having its world premiere at HERE in New York.

Iron & Coal is a live rock show presented as part of the Prototype Festival at the Gerald Lynch Theater in New York. The title refers to an iron will to survive, but also to the charred emotions that remain after a concentration camp incarceration. The songwriter Jeremy Schonfeld tells the story of his father’s arrival in America at 11. He searched for his place in our sun, and especially to answer the question: for what purpose did I survive when so many others did not.

American Son is a gripping tragedy about race in America today. Chistopher Demos-Brown's piece is a multi-faceted play in which marital, paternal and racial conflicts collide. A quartet of actors present impressively natural performances. American Son runs through Jan. 26 in Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center.

Blood Moon is a chamber opera created with consummate sensitivity and skill by a team of artists, including the composer, a passionate appreciator of Noh theater, and the prize-winning playwright, Ellen McLaughlin. One of McLaughlin’s specialties is the adaptation of classic dramas for our time. The composer also likes to jump off from the past, and react to a work created many moons ago in the present now.

The documentary filmmaker, David Sutherland, describes his approach as making portraits. The issues derive from the persona of his subjects which range from farmers, to teenagers coming of age in Appalachia, a battered Native American mother, to the artists Jack Levine and Paul Camus. In the past 20 years he has created 21 hours of film for long form documentaries featured on Frontline for PBS. His three-part series “The Farmer’s Wife” was a PBS hit with 18 million viewers.

In this two part play, that runs more than six hours, Matthew Lopez focuses on the modern generation of gay men whose current acceptance is built on the backs of earlier generations.

The conventional wisdom is that everyone is a critic. Which is an insult to those of us who pursue the difficult and complex craft. Why on earth would I give a fig about the year end movie list of former president Obama? I don't dabble in politics or take up brain surgery as a hobby. Having an opinion, and posting on social media, does not make you a critic.