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Actors' Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre in suburban Miami is mounting a riveting production of John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer- and Tony-Award-Winning, scorching drama Doubt: A Parable. The play feels relevant in our divisive world and because the priest abuse scandal still remains fresh in our minds. Four of South Florida's finest stage actors fully inhabit the roles. It never feels like they are "performing." The production runs through June 9.

The Waverly Gallery by Kenneth Lonergan conveys how families are torn apart coping with and caring for elders with dementia. In a downward spiral Gladys Green, in another stunning performance by Annette Miller, is struggling to hold on. A small Greenwich Village vanity gallery gives her something to do. In a bold move Shakespeare & Company has launched its season with a slow and demanding drama.

The spirit and poetry of Jack Kerouac and his pal, Neal Cassady, permeate the Steven Dietz play, Mad Beat Hip & Gone, now being staged by Promethean Theatre at the Edge Off Broadway. There’s even a hint of the presence of a poet named Allen.

Almost 22 years after it bowed on Broadway, The Lion King still astounds with its astonishing artistry and stunning visuals. A National Equity touring production is making stops throughout the country. A South Florida crowd roared with applause during a recent performance in Miami.

The one person, one act play "Hold These Truths" by Jeanne Sakata focuses on the true story of Gordon Hirabayashi. After Pearl Harbor he was among 120,000 Japanese Americans who were relocated to prison camps in the South West. He was charged with the crimes of violating curfew and refusing to report to a detention center. He fought the charges to the Supreme Court. He and two other dissenters lost their cases. Invoking war powers as supreme commander Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9006 was upheld as constitutional. Decades later Hirabayashi, by then a professor of sociology, was cleared of all charges. In 2012 Persident Barach Obama awarded him The Presidential Medal of Honor.

The Orchestra Now (TON) is brave. In taking on two of the seminal composers of modern music, they tackled the presentation of developing ideas about sound as music, to which the 20th century composers have added new dimensions. Some composers took the sounds out of time. Anton Webern often composed suggesting different tempi measure to measure. While Morton Feldman did not go as far as John Cage, inviting musical artists to perform whatever, whenever, he often suspended his work out of time.

As an epic memento mori the 64-year-old British pop star has created “Annie Lenox: Now I Let You Go…” A huge mound of earth scattered with her memorabilia will be on view long term at MASS MoCA. The ambitious installation will be of great interest to her global fans.

Experiments in Opera was co-founded in Brooklyn in 2010 by composers Aaron Siegel, Matthew Welch and Jason Cady. They contributed Chunky in Heat to the New York Opera Festival. It was a wild, wacky and moving work.

The three main characters – Tracy Letts as Joe, Annette Bening as Kate and Benjamin Walker as Chris deserve the accolades they have received. Each has mined the character so that the subtext is revealed. Letts and Walker are totally believable as father and son

Today, June 5, friends will gather to celebrate the 75th birthday of the curator Calude Gosselin. Not having visited Montréal in some time we made plans for travel in the fall. That changed abruptly when we were bumped off a flight to the U.K. From the road we called Claude and told him we would arrive in a couple of hours. It was great to catch up. Since the 1980s he has curated major exhibitions including Les Cent jours d’art contemporain de Montréal and Biennale de Montréal. We covered many of those projects.

Veronica's Position is a meaty comedy with offering plenty to think about. Rich Orloff's comedy is an entertaining part backstage comedy, part problem play, part satire. It takes place at the end of 1989 and the beginning of 1990 in Washington D.C. offering eerie resemblances to today's political climate.

The world premiere of David Lang's prisoner of the state takes place in David Geffen Hall, home of the New York Philharmonic. The 106 member orchestra will perform, but this can hardly be called a concert production. Instead the Hall has been transformed into a prison. Even the instrumentalists on stage are in prison. Costumes, chains and handcuffs were ordered from Bob Barker, the country's leading detention supplier.

Last year was the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s landmark horror novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, which explains why we have been able to see four different versions of the Frankenstein story on stage in Chicago during this theater season. The final production of this series is Lookingglass Theatre’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written and directed by David Catlin. After August 4 it transfers for a three week run at Princeton's McCarter Theatre Center.

Darko Tresnjak is going out with a delightful, tuneful musical that will touch your heart. For his last show as artistic director at Hartford Stage he has directed the world premiere musical, The Flamingo Kid now through Saturday, June 15.

Carmen is conducive to fresh, modernized productions, often with changes in time period, geography, and more. Here we have a traditional approach, including the original spoken dialogue, which mark it as an opera comique. This rendition confirms why the opera has stood the test of time.

A major part of freshman orientation on many campus is about Title IX – sexual activity, consent, the school’s policies and the penalties that may result from violation of these.

The Ojai Music Festival in California is almost 75 years old. In this magical setting an hour and a half north of Los Angeles, music making is very much here and now. Each year, an artistic director selects a music director and works with her to program four days of performance, talk and film screenings. While coming for one program undoubtedly gives pleasure, the maximum effect of this festival is to be had by immersion. This is not your ordinary concert program. One performance follows another by design and relationships become more clear as the days pass.

Trident Gallery in Gloucester is presenting Gabrielle Barzaghi: The Tzar’s Children. There will be a discussion wth the figurative /narrative artist on Sunday, June 16, at 4 PM.

Artist and Activist Phil Sellers passed away in July, 2020. He and his wife Gail were part of the team behind the successful Faerie Festival. It is being presented in his honor on June 18. This is fun for the whole family.

Paul Pelkonen, a brilliant critic, died suddenly of heart failure at the age of 46. Paul was one of the great pleasures of reporting on music. He loved it as much as anyone could, and knew more about it than most people. His taste was impeccable.

Phenomenal Nature, the first American retrospective of the remarkable sculptures of Indian artist, Mrinalini Mukherjee, will be on display at the Met Breuer until September 29 and is well worth viewing.

Leo Mateo, the artistic and Executive Director of the Miners Alley Playhouse, is a fan of the podcast form. One day, he heard about Mae Brussell, a prominent conspiracy theorist who lived from 1922-1988. Her radio broadcasts were extremely popular. She dove into JFK’s murder, giving herself as a birthday present 26 volumes of the Warren Commission report. Her life and impact are explored in Josh Hartwell's highly entertaining and provocative new play.

The award winning play, America v. 2.1. The Sad Demise and Eventual Extinction of the American Negro, by Stacey Rose is a tough evening of theatre at Barrington Stage Company. It is the inaugural winner of The Bonnie and Terry Burman New Play Award, a new national play contest at BSC. The playwright has absorbed the spectrum of avant-garde theatre and deflected it as a timely theatrical screed about racism in America, past, present and future.

Come From Away renews our faith in the human race. The popular Broadway musical demonstrates people's innate capacity for kindness. An invigorating equity national touring production is playing in Miami.

A superb production of Sean O’Casey’s play, The Plough and the Stars, concludes the Irish Repertory Theatre’s O’Casey cycle. Charlotte Moore directs this subtly textured staging, deploying all the tools her theatre and actors have honed over the years.