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On Friday, August 11th, the Trustees of Reservations and Naumkeag, located in Stockbridge, Massachusetts host a free day of fun and education for the entire family.

The music of The Chastity Tree is very much of its time and place. From the classic era, it still embraces baroque traces in tinkling harpsichord and clipped recitatives. The Bay Area is blessed with and attracts an abundance of great young opera singers, and West Edge always casts well from this enviable pool.

This concert at Mostly Mozart was billed as a musical offering from Brahms, Bach and Mendelssohn. It seemed a stretch to hear these works without the centerpiece composer featured, except as an artist who liked to spell Bach's name in notes. The spirit was Mozartian, full of joy and inviting melodies, Featuring Joshua Bell and Steven Isserlis as soloists, who brought Schumann to the table in the slow movement of his violin concerto, it was a rich evening of music. A delightful offering.

After development at music venues, the musical revue "Blues is a Woman" has begun a theatrical run at Custom Made Theater in San Francisco. In a memorable production, six women wail and moan and plead in a rewarding evening of blues standards and original music by lead singer Pamela Rose in a format that is as informative as it is entertaining.

Broadway and cabaret artist Barbara Cook was 80 wehen we first saw her perform at Ozawa Hall and several times after that. In Indiana we enjoyed a concert wth Michael Feistein and an interview for critics that followed. We have compiled a collage from those reviews.

Shakespeare-centric theater companies like Oregon Shakes must provide a balance of Elizabethan era works with other offerings to attract sufficient audiences. Sometimes, a hybrid, and especially a sophisticated comedy that is about Shakespeare or one of his plays can be well received. So it is with Shakespeare in Love, the U.S. premiere of the stage version of the highly successful film.

Moving on from an endemic fixations with plays about milennials Barrington Stage has progressed by a generation with This by Melissa James Gibson. The focus is on the trials and tribulations of friends who met in college. Add to this a dark and sexy stranger in a French doctor without borders,

A half century later in the spirit of the Summer of Love there is a revival of Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical. Two and a half generations of later it still casts magical spells. Nancy Bishop takes on a trip down memory lane.

Jiehae Park’s innovative and fast moving world premiere play, Hannah and the Dread Gazebo, touches on a dizzying number of themes including familial relationships, aspirations, wishes, creation mythology, international relations, cross-culturalism, and even a humorous twist on racism.

This is the second producton of the musical A Legendary Romance with music and lyrics, Geoff Morrow, book by Timothy Prager. While it needs more work, the norm for musicals, starring Jeff McCarthy and Lora Lee Gayer it is the best work we have seen this season from Wiliamstown Theatre Festival. It is a tragic love story set to music about lives and careers ruined during the 1950s when Holywood was on trial for its alleged communism.

St. Francis Gallery, once a church, hosts a gallery opening and artists reception this weekend in Lee, Massachusetts from 3-6pm on Saturday, August 12th

Issue-packed, yet taut play receives strong production at suburban Miami's GableStage. Informed Consent is unsettling, but is leavened with humor and optimism. Playwright Deborah Zoe Laufer directs a talented quintent of performers in a riveting production of her play.

Members of the JACK Quartet are scattered across the eighth floor exhibit space at the Whitney Museum in which many Alexander Calder mobiles hang and stand. In the center of the room on the south wall, cellist Jay Campbell and violinist Austin Wulliman are conventionally seated with their music stands before them. They do not seem to notice violinist Christopher Otto who stands at the east entrance, only a music stand dividing him from a roaming, and finally seated and standing-still audience. At another entrance Jay Pickford Richards, violist, is completely in his own world, oblivious to in your face cameras, and the wandering audience. John Cage wrote the Quartet they will perform, not for a quartet, but for four soloists.

Imagine nearly 14,000 attendees of the long awaited, Yo-Yo Ma concert of Schumann's 'Cello Concerto in A minor, Opus 129, in awe after the concert artist shuns the audience's applause, with an appeal for a concerted effort to help find Maestro David Zinman's lost puppy.

When Laurie Norton Moffett, director of the Norman Rockwell Museum, in a Berkshire Eagle op-ed piece asked the Berkshire Museum to "pause" in its plan to sell 40 works the story broke as national news. In daily coverage since then the pro and con has rocked back and forth. I seemed like game over when Joe Thompson, director of MASS MoCA, endorsed the sale and radical plans urging readers to "get real." Then lawyers waded in questioning that the works may or may not be "unrestricted." The controversy went into extra innings when the Rockwell family, in an Eagle letter, stated that the artist never intended for his works to be sold as a last ditch bailout for the poorly managed and curatorially aenemic museum.

Director Lilean Blais-Cruz does well with limited resources. Actors extract whatever drama and humor that the words allow. Lighting and sound achieve expected OSF standards. This production plays in the round and with a minimum of staging – the fixed portion being a number of vertical white pipes with light wands attached to a maze of pipes above.

This play is both entertaining and rich with messages. It deserves to be seen. At the same time, the playwright tries to accomplish a great deal, perhaps at the expense of cohesion. The tone changes often as dialogue alternates between Shakespearean tracts taken directly from the source and the naturalistic speech of the Old West.

There is always something provocatice going on at Gloucester's Trident Gallery. The arts are the visible cloak of the bonds -- both empowering and restricting -- of community and heritage. The cloak of the arts reveals the shape of the present, bears the patterns and must of the past, and declares ourselves on our journey into the future.

Berkshire Theatre Group announces additions to the fall and winter seasons, as well as casting for the Fall production of David Auburn’s Lost Lake at The Unicorn Theatre. Therde wlll also be a number of unique musical events at its Colonial Theatre in downtiown Pittsfield.

On Wednesday, August 23, there will be a reading and book launch of Gloucester Poems; Nugents of Rockport by Charles Giuliano at the Gloucester Writer’s Center, 123 East Main Street, at 7 PM. The event will be shared with poet Geoffrey Movius. They grew up together in Annisquam. That experience and inspiration will be a part of the event.

Percussion was the theme of the Mostly Mozart concert featuring also David Lang. Mozart used kettle drums to underiine a point. In his comic opera, Abduction from the Seraglio, he also used triangle, cymbals and a bass drum to suggest the exotic Turkish locale. Jean-Baptiste Lully added percussion for the elevation of a Molière character to noble man. It was an inspired selection of music to surround David Lang's "man made" created to show how elemental percussion instruments are heard by their fancier orchestral counterparts.

When ethical concerns and second guessing of its "reboot" plans surfaced the Berkshire Museum has spent money it doesn't have for expensive PR and marketing. Heavy hitters have been hired to deflect tough questions from the media and flack the museum's strategy to sell 40 works of art and change its mandate.

Indeed it was a long evening ending around 11 PM with the tradition arsenal of fireworks accompanying the climax ith a massive performance of Tchaikovsky’s energizing 1812 Overture. It evoked Moscow’s triumphant church bells and the thunderous boom of Napoleon’s captured canons.

In 1970 the Venezuelan dancer and educator, Tina Ramirez, founded the community based Ballet Hispanico. Under her administration the company commisioned 70 plus works. We saw one of them Palladium at MASS MoCA in October 2006, co sponsored by Jacob's Pillow Dance. This past week the company performed at Pillow in a program created by artistic director Eduardo Vilaro who followed Ramirez in 2009.

This is a classic comedy that still entertains with a spectacular cast and great timing! Arsenic and Old Lace ran for three years on Broadway starting in 1941 and still holds up. There is a lively production on Stage at Bekshire Theatre Group in Stockbridge.