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Hubbard Street Dance Chicago celebrated its 40th anniversary with yet another visit to Jacob's Pillow. At two and a half hours, with works by four choreographers, it was one of the longest, most diverse and best received programs of the Pillow season.

The Chinese Lady by Lloyd Suh with stutter steps, in a single 90 minute act, morphs from a side show curiosity to harrowing social justice theatre. It is a world premiere co production of Barrington Stage and Ma-Yi Theatre Company. It moves this fall from Pittifield to a run Off Broadway.

Now 89, legendary Boston jazz impresario , Fred Taylor, is busy booking one nighters for the Cabot Theatre in Beverly, Mass. Asked if it is time to retire he replied with the title of his memoir "What and Quit Show Biz." It's a work in progress with Dick Vacca. They hope to publish the book in spring, 2019. With typical wit and insight it recaps a career booking clubs like Jazz Workshop/ Paul's Mall, and Sculler's. He founded the Tanglewood Jazz Festival and produced concerts at Symphony Hall and other venues.

Seared by Therese Rebeck is her third play to permiere at Williamston Theater Festival. Set in a 16 seat boutidue Brooklyn restaurant Seared is a hillarious sendup of trendy foodie fanatacism.

Leon Botstein is presenting Anton Rubenstein’s The Demon at Bard’s Summerscape. Annually, he offers meritorious works, long buried or ignored by opera companies. He makes the case now for Rubenstein.

The House That Will Not Stand, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz at the New York Theater Workshop, is a lyrical journey through the last days of French Louisiana. Playwright, Marcus Gardley, gives us a lush and evocative script filled with humor, bite and innuendo. New Orleans Creole society developed the custom of Placage, which under French [and Spanish] law allowed a quasi- legal position for inter-racial unions and a legal status for the children. Families of mixed racial heritage held important social and financial positions. It is within this context that Gardley's drama unfolds.

Valpolicella has always been a favorite wine of mine, probably due to my father. At a very young age, under ten years old, he introduced me to Valpolicella and Cream Sherry. Over fifty years later, my love for both wine varieties still lingers.

The Big Bang is presented as a backer's audition for a musical behemoth that's destined to be a sure-fire flop. This musical-within-a-musical returns by popular demand for the third time at Actors' Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre in Coral Gables. Two actors, accompanied by a talented musician on the keyboard, deftly play multiple roles in a whirlwind theatrical experience. The Big Bang is one of Actors' Playhouse' most loved shows in its 30-year history,

Repertorio Español, the superb repertory company in Manhattan, is presenting El Coronel No based on a story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez adapted by Jorge Ali Triana and Veronica Triana. It is a Spanish version of Waiting for Godot. It is also a delicious take on insanity – for forty years, the Colonel has expected a letter each Friday acknowledging his pension. For forty years it has not come.

Fleeing the Russian Revolution Tamara Lempicka (born Maria Gorska, 16 May 1898-18 March 1980) settled in Paris. Initially the couple with an infant girl survived selling the last of family jewlery. Her husband, Tadeusz Lempicki, a lawyer and aristocrat at first refused to get a job. She took up painting society portraits as a means of supporting their daughter. During the 1920s she was a leading exponent of the Art Deco style. It fell out of fashion during the depression and war years. Williamstown Theatre Festival has a world premiere musical about her life and career.

With an up-to-date LED screen and a full house, 'West Side Story' , the movie version, was in synch with conductor David Newman and the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood. The score and movie hold their original lure with flawless tour de force.

New Conversations (live music world premiere) choreography, Roland K. Brown with music by Arturo O’Farrill & Resist was developed during a residency of the Roland K. Brown/Evidence company at Jacob's Pillow. It was founded in 1985 and this was their first Pillow peformance in more than a decade.

Director Rob Ruggiero has done the same thing with this production of Oliver! now at Goodspeed Musicals through Sept. 13. Perhaps you have forgotten or never knew the basic plot of the show. Oliver Twist is a young orphan who escapes from a workhouse where food was scarce and love non-existent, into an underworld of pickpockets and worse.

James Lapine’s book of Sunday in the Park with George focuses on change, not just change in art, but in life. Stephen Sondheim is noted as perhaps the most intellectual among composers of musicals

Cuckoo's Call, is an exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Wayne Hopkins and Cathy Wysocki that reflects on the sea of humanity, ever restlessly heaving up and down. It opens at the Eclipse Mill Gallery in North Adams on August 3 and runs through September 3.

Arthur DeBow did a super job of curating and installing my retrospective Heads and Tales at Gallery 51 in North Adams. Some 150 plus friends and strangers passed through.

The historic home of the Choate family, Naumkeag, located in the beautiful Berkshires of Massachusetts hosts their annual Garden Party, this Saturday. With beautiful grounds, a historic 34 room house and tours daily, this gem in Stockbridge is the place to be on July 28th.

Lawrence Brownlee names his performance in July "Up Close and Personal". Brownlee is a singer who feels up close and personal on the stage of the great opera houses of the world, because his voice is warm and inviting. As we listen to a program which begins the iconic ‘single tear’ from L’Elisir d’Amour of Gaetano Donizetti, we too have "our hot pulses beating", like Adina, whose tear is addressed. Andrew Ousley of Unison again produces a gem.

As magnificently performed by Kristin Wold, her Tesla, in Strindberg's Creditors is a strong, complex, progressive woman. For the first time Shakespeare & Company in Lenox is producing the modernist Swedish playwright. In his own words, however, he stated that "... a woman is a scaled down man, a form whose development was arrested between adolescence and full manhood. ...Woman is inferior to man.”

Nicholas McGegan and his San Francisco-based Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra performed Handel's Atalanta at Caramoor. The pastoral opera was written to commemorate the marriage of Frederick, Prince of Wales and son of King George II to a German princess. This is Handel the craftsman at his best, with enchanting melodies, cascades of inventive orchestration and vocal fireworks.

A great day trip that enlightens and enriches the soul is as close as Berkshire county, home of Hancock Shaker Village. Spending a day learning about the Shakers, sharing dinner and thought with Peter Jennings son, Chris Jennings, and attending a concert with members of WILCO and transplanted local troubadour, Johnny Irion, can turn any day into sunshine.

The Swedish realist/ naturalist playwright, August Strindberg (1849-1912) published Creditors in 1889. Some 129 years later it is the first play by the Swedish modernist to be produced by Shakespere & Company. Since it is a must see play of the Berkshire season you wonder what took them so long?

A forty year retrospective by Charles Giuliano "Heads and Tales" opens Thursday, July 26 at MCLA Gallery 51 in North Adams, Massachusetts. It will be a part of the monthly Downstreet celebration, The artist will give a talk at the gallery on Wednesday, August 8 from 6 to 7 PM. The exhibition, curated by gallery director Arthur Debow, surveys 40 images of jazz and rock musicians from the Rolling Stones, to Marvin Gaye, Miles Davis, Yoko Ono and Frank Sinatra.

The storyline of Pericles is the odyssey of the title character. It shares devices with other Shakespeare comedies, such as Twelfth Night’s shipwreck separation of characters then thought dead. But in the clever opening challenge, opera lovers will find what may have been the inspiration that ultimately led to Puccini’s Turandot.

Based on a real life incident, the informal push for diversity or inclusion in the arts motivates James Ijames’s (pronounced I’ms) complex, provocative, and entertaining play White.