Our staff pick is inspired by tagine Djaj Mqualli, from Meknes, one of Morocco's imperial cities and an incredible agricultural region producing and trading olive oil since Roman times. This dish is often featured as part of Iftar, the evening meal following 15 hours of fasting, prayer, and reflection that is eaten at sunset during Ramadan.

Irish Repertory Theatre is streaming its 11th production in the time of Covid. Today we seldom see heterosexual women of three generations loving their men, despite difficulties that boyfriends and husbands bring to a relationship. This is a tender, funny revelation.

Based on past and current research Steve Nelson posits that the designation for our species Homo sapiens be upgraded to Homo electric. While human anatomy evolves at a glacial rate the species responds to cultural and technological developments. None more-so than diverse uses of electricity. Prior to which we communicated face to face or by snail mail. It took weeks for news to travel across our nation. The telegraph changed that followed by the Atlantic Cable, wireless and telephones. During the pandemic kids are educated through remote learning and parents work from home. We have evolved through our electronic devices.

MIT List Visual Arts Center has organized This Way, a series of nine artist-designed walks and experiences that offer us diverse points of entry—some intimate explorations of physical embodiment and sensory experience, others guided modifications of scale, space, and geography, or novel considerations of language, architectures, or landscapes. Borrowing its title from a 1961 series by conceptual artist Stanley Brouwn, while also drawing inspiration from Fluxus and the dérive or “drift” of the Situationists, This Way takes up themes of movement and performance, ritual and meditation, and both abstract and concrete explorations of a range of spaces we occupy.

The Oscar winning actress, Olympia Dukakis, died yesterday at 89. She will be remembered in the Berkshires for two productions at Shakespeare & Company. Then in her 80s she was lured to Lenox by her former student the artistic director Tony Simotes.

Palm Beach Dramaworks (PBD) is seeking donations for an almost $1 million effort to implement COVID-safety measures. The Southeast Florida nonprofit, professional theater company will fund the work almost entirely through donations. The work includes installing a new HVAC system to ensure proper filtration. The project will precede PBD's 2021-22 season, which starts on Oct. 5.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. With the stage of the grand War Memorial Opera House dark for over a year, the San Francisco Opera fashioned a creative fix – not a permanent solution, but one which offers a measure of the thrilling artistry that only live opera can provide. In overcoming myriad technical, logistical, marketing, and public health issues, the company has produced a wonderfully charming “Barber of Seville” that will live in our memories. Gioachino Rossini’s 19th century imagination could probably conceive of people driving automobiles, but patrons attending one of his great comedic operas while ensconced in their vehicles would probably be beyond his wildest notions.

Live music is back at Music Mountain! On Sunday, July 4, Music Mountain’s 92nd Chamber Music Concert Season kicks off  with the Shanghai Quartet  -- called "utterly sublime" by The New York Times -- playing Beethoven String Quartet in B Flat Major, Op. 18 #6, Zhou Long Chinese Folk Songs and Smetana String Quartet in E Minor, “From My Life.” Chamber music concerts will continue every Sunday afternoon at 3pm through Labor Day.

Tanglewood’s Linde Center for Music and Learning received a 2021 Interior Architecture Award from the national American Institute of Architects (AIA) on April 16, 2021. The Linde Center was one of only seven projects nationally to receive this award that "celebrates the most innovative and spectacular interior spaces."

From May 7–October 11, 2021, an exhibition of new and recent works by artist Deana Lawson, winner of the Hugo Boss Prize 2020, will be on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Lawson’s presentation will include large-scale photographs and holograms. In addition, the museum is producing a film exploring Lawson’s practice that will be released in the early fall.

Five finalists are vying for the Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award. The annual honor recognizes playwrights for the best scripts that premiered professionally outside New York City during the previous year. At $40,000, Steinberg/ATCA is the largest national new play award program of its kind.

While the physical Boston Cyberarts Gallery interior remains closed due to COVID-19, we are organizing a series of art events and exhibitions to be seen from outside the gallery. The Window Show is an ever-changing art exhibition in the Boston Cyberarts Gallery windows taking advantage of two of the strengths of our space, numerous windows facing the street and the stream of foot traffic due to the proximity of the Green Street T stop.

Blue Heron Gallery Online, a virtual art gallery, will be presenting the art of Vermont artist Jackie Sedlock beginning at noon on Tuesday, May 11 2021.  The show, appearing on www.blueherongallery.online, will feature her pottery, her massive wood kiln, and present the artist in photographs and her Artist Statement.

Barrington Stage Company has been approved for a $30,000 Grants for Arts Projects from the National Endowment for the Arts. This project will support a World Premiere production of The Supadupa Kid, a new musical based on the children's book of the same name by local Pittsfield author Ty Allan Jackson. 

June at the Clark Art Institute brings the opening of one of its main summer exhibitions, Nikolai Astrup: Visions of Norway, and a variety of programming—in person and online—offering opportunities to explore art, ideas, and creativity in exciting new ways.

Does listener friendliness in music depend on melody?  John Adams, on whatever musical journey he takes, is haunted by melody, sometimes explicitly and at others, finds it in minimalist repetition where a base line beats and also sings. 

At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on Evans Way in Boston, representatives of Mrs. Gardner welcome you to her home. In the original Palace, art is hung by her direction. The work of contemporary artists in residence hangs in the new wing. You are richly rewarded by a visit to Isabella's place.

This series of black basalt-ware ceramics was created by James Turrell in collaboration with Irish potter Nicholas Mosse of Kilkenny, Ireland.  The ceramics collection absorbs light as opposed to refracting it; pitch black and unyieldingly dark, Lapsed Quaker Ware exerts a visual gravitational pull, drawing in the viewer with a visceral sense of the sublime.

Get Your Pink Hands Off Me Sucka and Give Me Back by Daniella De Jesús, is the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bonnie and Terry Burman New Play Award. Directed by Taylor Reynolds it will be presented June 4-6, 2021.

Beginning May 29, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), will lift mask requirements for visitors and staff, in alignment with reopening plan updates from the City of Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Berlin’s cultural life is slowly awakening.  One of the early highlights of this development was the 58th Theatertreffen (theatre festival) of the Berliner Festspiele from May 13 to May 24.

Emergence is the debut exhibition of North Adams Contemporary—an evolving collaboration of its four professional artist members, who meet regularly for discussion, critique, and the development of opportunities for exhibiting and marketing artwork.

IN SUPPORT OF REGULATIONS SET BY THE TRI-TOWN HEALTH DEPARTMENT AND THE LENOX AND STOCKBRIDGE HEALTH BOARDS, TANGLEWOOD WILL LIMIT ATTENDANCE CAPACITY TO 9,000—50% OF ITS USUAL CAPACITY OF 18,000; THIS REPRESENTS A SIGNIFICANT INCREASE OVER THE PREVIOUSLY ANNOUNCED ATTENDANCE CAP OF 25%.

The list of artists included in the exhibition are:  Joseph Barbieri, Gerry Bergstein, Peter Brooke, Lana Z Caplan, Nicole Chesney, Alice Denison, Robert Ferrandini, Rick Fox, Lorie Hamermesh, Dinorá Justice, Jaclyn Kain, Masako Kamiya, Martin Kline, Mary Kocol, Keira Kotler, Bryan McFarlane, Todd McKie, Joseph McNamara, George Nick, Richard Raiselis, Louis Risoli, Terry Rose, Henry Schwartz, Peri Schwartz, Peter Scott, Robert Siegelman, Cheryl Ann Thomas, Peter Vanderwarker  

 “It has been a long time since we were all together in a theater, and we need this now more than ever—artists and audiences alike,” says Terrie and Bradley Bloom Artistic Director Diane Paulus. “We have spent the last year in deep learning and reflection at the A.R.T., and we are excited to share our 2021/22 programming, which welcomes audiences back in person and reflects our core values, from centering anti-racism to embracing regenerative practice that promotes the health of our planet, our organization, and each other.”