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Lauren Yee manages to create a small miracle with her brave, heartwarming and funny play Cambodian Rock Band. Victory Gardens’ new production, directed by Marti Lyons, skims across two time periods—from present-day Phnom Penh to a 1975 Cambodian prison.

While sound issues require fixing, Measure for Measure Theatre's mounting of Murder Ballad offers an engrossing theatrical experience. Strong singing, emoting characterize this non-traditional theatrical experience. Murder Ballad, which featured Off-Broadway, centers on a love triangle gone wrong.

Hershey Felder now takes on the life and works of Claude Debussy in a world premiere at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley. The great turn of the century composer is credited as the originator of the classical music genre of impressionism, though he didn’t care for the term

The current Otto Piene exhibition at the Fitchburg Art Museum in Massachusetts will close on June 2nd with a conversation titled: 'Fire, Light and Protest.' Photographs by Joe Landry, 'The Summer of 1969' are also on view at FAM. The photographer and curator Lisa Crossman on the work of Piene will be in conversation. First, however, the museum is inviting the public to participate in an outdoor Sky Art Event on April 27 near the museum. Art that flies!

Bound, Huang Ruo's chamber opera, is produced at the Rose Nagelberg Theatre in the Baruch Performing Arts Center. Originally commissioned by Houston Grand Opera, this production is the New York premiere. It is a fresh take by Freshly Squeezed Opera. Ashley Tate who specializes in multi-media production, directs.

Playwright Lauren Yee wins the Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award for her play, Cambodian Rock Band. ATCA adjudicators hail Yee's multi-faceted approach to her play as "absolutely inspired." Cambodian Rock Band explores the Cambodian holocaust. Yee is a previous ATCA award winner.

Elizabeth Goldring, the widow of internationally renowned artist Otto Piene, recently donated 70 of his sketchbooks to the Harvard Art Museums and Archives. Piene sketched what he saw and what concerned and motivated him throughout his life. Now, researchers and the public can have access to this trove of drawings and ideas by contacting Harvard Archives.

Ellen Reid has been a hot item this year. Four venues in Los Angeles commissioned work from her. Now Prism, a Beth Morrison production, has won the Pulitzer prize for music. We wandered her soundscape in Omaha created for her by Opera Omaha at the Josyln Art Museum. Distinguishing composing notes from the listener's experience, Reid brings new sounds to an audience.

The Sheen Center's Black Box Theater is stacked with files containing the case records of 'defective' young people who are institutionalized and awaiting their death. All Our Children takes up a theme developed in Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck's latest film. The doctor in the film and the doctor running a clinic for children in the play, both are charged with duties best left to God. Who is to live, and who must die, is in play because upkeep is expensive and the State needs money for munitions.

Opera San José has mounted a stunning production of Madama Butterfly. Maria Natale leads the cast as Cio-Cio San, or Butterfly, with a remarkable performance.

In 2017 San Fransicso celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. By 1968 the torch of the counterculture, with a radical twist, was passed to Boston. Cops and feds cracked heads when hippies and radicals protested in Boston and Cambridge. Just as in 1776, there were shots heard round the world. There has been no such celebration in Boston. In feisty increments there is ever increased interest and attention to a forgotten era. You can see it at The Verb Hotel, in the new film WBCN; The American Revolution, and books like Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968.

As part of a nine-play cycle, In Old Age and the multi-play aggregation from which it comes, beg particular analysis. The broader question is the standing of this Ufot family saga against other cycles. The obvious comparison is August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, which shares the commonality of exploring the African-American experience.

The impact of DeCordova New England Biennial 2019 is its focus on inclusion and diversity. There is a spectrum from traditional forms of painting, sculpture and photography to social justice approaches to a range of hot button agendas. The latter work conforms to Marxist theories of art as agitation and propaganda.

Chicago critic Nancy Bishop hunkered down for an extended stay in New York. She toured museums during the day and attended theatre at night. Here she covers the Mexican modernist Frida Kahlo. She also reports on the Museum of Arts and Design at Columbua Circle.

The Oldcastle Theatre season in Bennington, Vermont starts on June 7 with Red by John Logan. The 48th season features four plays through October 20.

Lottery Day is a party with a guest list of nine. Mallory (a sizzling J. Nicole Brooks) has invited them to her back yard to celebrate, but no one knows what the occasion is. With a rich and complex web of characters, Ike Holter’s play at Goodman Theatre brings together the threads from the other plays in his seven-part Rightlynd Saga.

Talented, veteran actor delivers a towering, multifaceted performance as Troy Maxson in Fences. Palm Beach Dramaworks' production of this Pulitzer Prize-winning play is riveting. Fences, which takes place in 1957, is part of August Wilson's "Pittsburgh Cycle" or "American Century Cycle."

Poet Anne Carson has a special touch, embedding a conversational tone in lilting lines. While Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is billed as a melologue in which some words are sung and some spoken. It asks the question opera composers always ask: what words should be spoken, and what words sung? As a struggling writer's secretary, Fleming becomes muse, moving from speech to song. She is glorious. So too is Ben Whishaw, who moves from writer to the embodiment of Marilyn Monroe.

I wish that I could say that Ain’t Too Proud turned me inside out and sent me directly to heaven. But if the truth be told the first act is a painful 30 minutes too long, and Dominique Morisseau’s mechanically written fact-filled book based on the group’s original founder Otis William’s 1988 memoir – lots of "I did that and he did that and then we all did that" – is as engaging as bad coffee and a failed omelet on a gray day.

Although the central plot line in Kill the Debbie Downers! is linear, the play changes tone, direction, time, and place frequently, resulting in a sense of mental chaos. But for those who can appreciate leaving a performance with more questions than answers, this is a fulfilling experience.

During a week in Boston we attended the First Friday gallery openings in SOWA the Harrison Avenue based gallery district. It proved to be a lively adventure catching up with so many artist and gallerist friends

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.