Front Page

New Southern Florida theater company's production of Into The Woods is mostly a success. The director's approach suggests the innocence our youth has lost in the aftermath of tragedies. Mostly, this production leaves Into the Woods intact.

Florian Zeller’s latest play, a tragic/comedy with a translation from multi-award winning Tony and Oscar playwright/translator Christopher Hampton, practically guarantee’s one an evening of stimulating quality theatre. Hampton does all the translations for French/Iranian playwright Yasmina Reza of “Art” and “God of Carnage” fame, as well as Zeller’s plays.

Betrayal through informing is at the core of Athol Fugard’s masterful A Lesson from Aloes, one of several penetrating plays that earns the South African playwright a position in the pantheon of modern authors. First produced in 1980, the play is set in 1963, a full three decades before the end of apartheid. Weathervane Productions renders this classic with exceptional skill.

In their current repertory season, Repertorio Espagnol is presenting the two hander, El Credito by Jordi Galeran. We meet a loan officer who can’t say yes and a clever borrower with no assets. No one has heard Polonius’ advice: neither a borrower or a lender be. The setup is classic.

City Theatre's Summer Shorts is in its 23rd year of entertaining southeast Florida audiences This year's line-up is diverse. A pleasantly surprisingly, unseasonal "Short" opens this year's festival

Carnegie Hall ended its 2017-18 season Tuesday night with the last of three concerts featuring the MET Orchestra. This year, the pit band at the Metropolitan Opera has been playing under a succession of different conductors. This one was conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas.

Until recently the Museum of Fine Arts has neglected artists of Jewish heritage known as The Boston Expressionists. There were a handful of works that were burried in storage. Major works by Hyman Bloom and Karl Zerbe were included in a gift from Saundra B. Lane and William H. Lane. The museum is planning a major exhibition and catalogue for Bloom. It is likely that there will be other projects and publications. There are no current plans for showing or collecting works by Zerbe and Jack Levine.

David Hertzberg's opera, The Rose Elf, opened The Angel Space series, a collaboration between Unison Media and Green-Wood Cemetery. After whiskey amidst gravestones, the audience took a walk through the glorious grounds, where ancient trees are thick, tall and promising. The production in the Catacombs was thrilling.

In Mies Julie at Victory Gardens Theater, playwright Yaël Farber translates the relationship between a privileged young woman and a servant from Midsummers Eve in Sweden to the Karoo, South Africa, on Freedom Day in 2012, the day commemorating the end of apartheid.

Huang Ruo in music and David Henry Hwang in words ask: What will you do to become American? What will you endure? In a seamless wrought tale of a first generation Chinese American from Chinatown, we watch the world rect to a young man's wish. It is a horrifying story whose conseuqences we have only begun to grapple with. Huang Ruo and Hwang make great opera out of the story.

Seniors are now living longer, healthier and better lives. Add to that little blue pills and it's not just kids who are hooking up. Morning After Grace by Carey Crim explores what happens when the old lady you wake up is just that.

Trap Door Theatre’s production of Mark Brownell’s Monsieur d’Eon Is a Woman, directed by Nicole Wiesner, is a striking example of the company’s highly stylized, choreographed, madcap productions. Eleven performers are in constant motion.

Until a few years ago the vast Simmons Furniture Store anchored the Park Street business area of downtown Adams. The town has improved curbside cosmetics. Now that business has been revitalized as Real Eyes Gallery with two large spaces. One featuers an arts and crafts store while the other displays works by former Met Opera scene painter, Bill Riley. He and his wife Francine Anne Riley are now gallerists as well as continuing as arts activists and community catalysts.

There is an upcoming concert by Christopher Janney, who will present with fellow dancer and musicians works that will again push boundaries. The event will occur on June 8 at the Boston University Dance Theater.

The Kansas City Symphony is a superb group pf superb artists, who make their home in one the of the performance treasures of America Like Dallas and other smaller cities across the country, Kansas City community leaders decided to spiff up its arts’ presence, A decade ago they dtermined to build a new home for its Symphony Orchestra and somewhat larger hall for events on tour.

Arts leaders and the media met at Shakespeare & Company to hear good news about state and federal funding. With manufacturing long gone from the region cultural tourism is the major industry. The arts season attracts more than 400,000 visitors and generates 4,000 plus jobs. Congressman Richard Neal announced $348,000 in NEA funding for the Berkshires. The federal funding cycle provides $900,700 to the Massachusetts Cultural Council and $1,092,400 to the New England Foundation for the Arts to benefit cultural groups across the state. He reported that the NEA this year got an increase of $3 million for a total of $152,849,000.

Brokeback Mountain finally arrives at New York City Opera. The company originally commissioned the piece over a decade ago. It is a powerul and moving work.

Based on Mary Rogers’ 1972 novel of the same name, Freaky Friday’s popularity is validated by the three film versions that have appeared, with each variant tweeking the storyline. This is the first stage musical effort, and award winning playwright Bridget Carpenter’s adaptation is well suited to the theater with integrated subplots and laugh lines throughout. Tom Kitt’s music is tuneful and bouncy in keeping with the musical theater pop idiom, while Brian Yorkey’s lyrics consistently drive the plot and are full of insight and humor.

“Disobedience” is a mesmerizing, interior, fascinating, and affecting screenplay that carefully structures the movie to squeeze maximum emotional impact from its two stars, which it does in spades. It’s a bold and daring film even by today’s standards.

Love Never Dies, the sequel written by Andrew Lloyd Webber (music), Glenn Slater (lyrics) and Ben Elton (book) is based on the novel The Phantom in Manhattan. Of these, only Webber was involved in the original Phantom. It runs at the Bushnell, in Hartford, Conn. through Sunday, June 3

Fully clothed in an elegant summer suit, MASS MoCA director, Joe Thompson, during the opening of “A Cold Hole" by the artist Taryn Simon, jumped into her icy installation. That was truly shocking but what happened next is even more of a hoot.

Former MIT/CAVS Fellow, Ellen Kozak, and composer Scott D. Miller are presenting a 4-Channel Video Installation at the Hudson River Museum until September 9. The summer exhibition also includes monumental abstract drawings by Christine Hiebert as well as museum owned etchings that are titled: Donald Judd: Variations on a Theme.

The Album focuses on little-known collection of photographs of Nazis partying near Aushwitz.A play by Moisés Kaufman, of Tectonic Theater Project fame, is in development. South Florida audiences are seeing snippets of this new play, running for four performances.

Exquisita Agonía at Repertorio Espanol is a tour de force take on modern science mixed with the age old questions about who we are and what we leave behind when we die. Director Jose Zayas has provided a perfect rhythm to the two-act piece by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Nilo Cruz.

Hugh Ferris was a visionary ‘Paper Architect’ who influenced popular culture as well as a generation of architects through his heroic skyscraper renderings and delineation of construction projects. His influence can still be seen in popular culture..