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With the passing of Arthur Polonsky (June 6, 1925 - April 4, 2019) the last link to the greatest generation of Boston artists has been broken. They are known and somewhat misrepresented as The Boston Expressionists.

Mark Dover and Jeremy Ajari Jordan worked Debussy, Schubert and angst into a wild evening of jazz. Jeremy Gill has a quiet about his work from which he builds and to which he then retreats. There is something satisfying in this bracket, in which we share in the rougher emotions of the interior.

Start with a shipwreck and twins tossed up far apart on a beach. Each assumes the other to have drowned. Add a bit of gender bending and a gaggle of outlandish characters and fools. Stage a bit of slapstic and add a welter of romantic subplots. Set it in New Orleans and serve Twelth Night as a spicy hot gumbo. From now to April 28 at Boston's Lyric Stage.

Marc Blitzstein was a critic of the music and politics of his time. Often expressing his dissatisfaction with the “privileged society” he felt dominated the creative impulses of his colleagues. As he wrote in 1936, “the unconscious (sometimes not so unconscious) prostitution of composers in today’s world is one of the sorry sights,” warning that “music in society, with us these many years, is dying of acute anachronism; and that a fresh idea, overwhelming in its implications and promise, is taking hold.” Prostitution, the exchange of one’s body for payment, became an important symbol for Blitzstein during the interwar period. It was a brash allegory for capitalism’s influence over (and failure of) the working class throughout the Great Depression.

Maestra Nichole Paiement conducts the chamber orchestra to its polished sound with energy and precision, finding a visual and aural expressiveness in the combining of the instruments, parallel to that of Georgia O’Keeffe combining her paints. Laura Kaminsky honors this great artist with her world premiere opera Today It Rains, commissioned and presented by Opera Parallèle.

Directer Joel Grey delivers a rare and rich revival. Fiddler on the Roof has come back, a comment and conversation in Yiddish about a time and place that indeed did shake the world. In the language of the people who lived it, this production is more rooted in their world, earthy, funny, deeply-moving.

Concerts at Saint Thomas continue their 2018-19 season with a guest performance by the acclaimed Choir of King’s College, Cambridge at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue. This marks the choir’s final North American tour with current Director of Music Stephen Cleobury, who will retire after 37 years in September. His position will be filled by current Saint Thomas Organist and Director of Music Daniel Hyde.

The current exhibition at Gallery 51 “Reconnecting: MCLA Alumni Show” is eclectic, fun, and here and there, somewhat whimsical

In a co-production with National Theatre and Neal Street Productions, the Park Avenue Armory is presenting a multi-generational story of the Bavarian family Lehman in America. Captivated by Ben Powers' Biblical translation of Stefano Massini's The Lehman Trilogy, director Sam Mendes has worked with three brilliant actors to create a cast of hundreds. It is a testimony to the talents of Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles that we believe one man can be a young woman, a child, and an aging patriarch if not all at once, certainly standing next to each other.

Lyric Stage Company of Boston announces its 45th season. The program of seven plays starts with a yet to be announced award winning musical from August 30 to October 6. The suspense is brutal.

Huntington Theatre Company announces the lineup of the 2019-2020 season, featuring three world premieres, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, a classic Tony Award-winning comedy by one of the world’s most celebrated playwrights, and two adaptations of powerful literary works.

The Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival will offer a round trip charter bus for New York patrons. The 2019 Festival program (Sept. 26 – 29) will feature plays by Tennessee Williams and the provocative Japanese author Yukio Mishima.

Nantucket Sleigh Ride by John Guare is a revised version of an earlier play, Are You There, McPhee?, produced at McCarter Theatre at Princeton in 2012. It’s a farce, a puzzle and a jumble of pop culture references with a lot of laughs, and may leave you feeling unglued.

Michael Perlman's From White Plains examines the effects of bullying decades after one's school days. Cast members largely shine in a South Florida regional production of this comedic drama. The play's characters are unable to escape the past in From White Plains. The set's centerpiece, which resembles a prison cell's gate, symbolizes this.

Now retired, professor John Hochheimer of Southern Illinois University, recalls undergraduate years at Boston University’s then progressive station WBUR. He started as a high school volunteer in New York at WBAI. During sophomore year at BU, in 1968, he started at WBUR. He was influenced by the free form programming of Tom Gamache, AKA Uncle T. Rock archivist, David Bieber, was a friend and flat mate. He once spent five hours on air with David Bowie and became friends with B.B. King and Elton John. The programming staff was fired not long after John Silber took over at BU in 1971.

The 2019 Popular Artist Series includes performances by Brian Wilson (6/16), Richard Thompson (6/21), Earth, Wind & Fire (6/28), Josh Groban (7/2), James Taylor and his All-Star Band (7/3 & 4), Train and the Goo Goo Dolls (8/5), Gladys Knight and The Spinners (8/28), Squeeze—The Squeeze Songbook Tour (8/29), Pat Benatar & Neil Giraldo and Melissa Etheridge (8/30), Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals and Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue (8/31), and Reba McEntire (9/1). American Public Media’s Live From Here with Chris Thile also returns on June 15, opening the 2019 season.

Although the first conductors were themselves composers, the wearing of both hats at the helm of a symphony orchestra is always cause for comment. On Wednesday night, the British composer Thomas Adès, who is currently in the new role of "Artistic Partner" with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, led that band at Carnegie Hall in a program featuring the New York debut of his Piano Concerto.

Little Lord transforms the Fourth Street Theater of New York Theater Workshop into a one room schoolhouse. We the audience get to face the demons of our early education where "Run Dick Run" at the very least bored us to tears. Based on the educational theories of William McGuffey, who after roaming the midwest as an itinerant teacher, created elementary readers for grades one to six, McGuffey's texts were used throughout the US for a hundred years.

DeSotelle Studios is committed to doing staged readings of eight Shakespeare plays in eight months. Richard II seems perfect for this form. Perhaps no Shakespeare play rests more securely in its lyric laurels. Rhymed couplets and parallel constructions abound for listening pleasure. The cast took full advantage under Katrin Hilbe's direction.

Aaron Sorkin received permission from author Harper Lee before she died in 2016. However, when Tonja Carter whom Lee had named as her personal representative, learned of some of the changes lawsuits ensued. Eventually the matter was settled.

Founded shortly after World War I in Germany, the Bauhaus was the most famous and influential avant-garde art and design school in the 20th Century. Its artists, architects, designers craftpersons and students generated a creative, all-encompassing conversation about the nature of architecture, art and design in the modern era. Over the course of its relatively short, 14-year history, Bauhaus was at first located at Weimar, then Dessau, and finally Berlin (closed by order of Nazi Party, 1932). Outside of Germany, Harvard University became the center for all things Bauhaus

Sean O’Casey, considered one of Ireland’s finest playwrights, was born in the Dublin slums and was involved in the Irish Nationalist cause for years. His Dublin trilogy focuses on the Irish wars and their impact on the Irish people. Irish Repertory, New York’s distinguished Irish theater company, is in the midst of its O’Casey Cycle, three plays by Sean O’Casey set during the Irish war for independence and the civil war that followed.

Theatre of Voices returned to Zankel Hall in Carnegie Hall to perform the music of Arvo Pärt alongside the New York premiere of visual poems accompanied by a picture poem by Phie Ambo. No Mickey Mousing was intended. Instead the pictures were suggested by changing seasons, and a farm in Denmark. Both Pärt and David Lang were beautiful, deep meditations on nature, man's the the world's.

Memphis the Musical sizzles in South Florida. Cast and crew shine in mounting by Actors' Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre. The show's themes resonate powerfully. This production features a mix of local and regional talent, as well as a member of the Broadway national tour of Memphis.

“CHESS,” is a musical written by three giants of the Broadway stage: librettist Richard Nelson, lyricist Tim Rice, and a musical score composed by two members of the world-famous Swedish pop music group ABBA: Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson. It was a glorious evening several years in the making, but the result is a stunning Broadway-like venue of comfortable 208 seats to please even the fussiest of theatre-goers.