Barrington Stage Company will offer a Playwriting Workshop for Veterans under the direction of Barrington Stage Associate Artist and Award-Winning Playwright Mark St. Germain. In this 4-class seminar, students will explore the fundamental craft of playwriting with the goal of every student completing a ten-minute play. The culmination on the fourth and final day of class will be a rehearsal and performance by professional actors.

Stuart Brown, a theater critic and founder of a 24/7 online radio station devoted to musical theater, has created an escape room through which you strive to save Broadway from the Grinch. The escape room will go live around the first week of December. To access the escape room, go to https://soundsofbroadway.com/escaperoom. The "save Broadway" escape room will join two existing ones on the website.

Ric Haynes is an artist, arts therapist, humanist, and a storyteller. His life has brought him on journeys, both voluntary, and involuntary. Those experiences along with a vivid memory have given Haynes all of the source material he needs to tell his stories.

Appropriately, Theatre Rhinoceros presents “At the Wake of a Dead Drag Queen” in its new, intimate home in The Castro.  Their choice of play to christen the new venue fits like a glove. Thematically, the suitability is clear for the longest running LGBTQ theater company in the universe.  And in a setting where the audience can reach out and touch the performers, a small two hander where the actors’ every small gesture can be seen.

Across the country arts organizations are making a concerted effort to include Americans of color in their presentations.  The concert at Symphony Hall in Boston this week was a highly successful concert of  inclusion.

Arvo Pärt has celebrated birthdays at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His music is often performed at the Temple of Dendur where one wall dances with reflections from a pool of water, reflections that seem to move with the beat of the music. They soothe and elevate, a mood captured by the Nile River in the temple’s original Egyptian location.

Melia Bensussen demonstrates a sure hand with this Eugene O’Neill play set in Connecticut on July 4, 1906. In Ah, Wilderness!, O’Neill who is better known for his dramas of love, loss, disillusionment, self-delusion and alcoholism, shows his lighter touch. It is a family comedy about some of the same subjects but more upbeat.

Ceramic art works and products have increased substantially in size and expression over the last ten or more years. The sky is the limit here at the current MoCA exhibition and the energy was palpable in the galleries during a rainy Saturday.

At a time when we should all be thinking about how America’s history might be taught in all its blood and glory, Definition Theatre succeeds in tossing new ingredients into this steamy pot of burgoo. Its new theatrical film, America v.2.1: The Sad Demise and Eventual Extinction of the American Negro, is a raw, sad and funny story of a future America, told in four parts.

Over 96% of staff at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,voted to strike on Wednesday, November 17 in support of a fair union contract. Workers in departments across the Museum will picket at 465 Huntington Avenue that day starting at 8:30 am. The MFA Union includes curators, conservators, library workers, public-facing staff, educators, and administrative and professional workers.

Our panel discussion will consider ways in which the practice of Indigenous curation enacts sovereignty. We will address the various challenges of doing Indigenous curation within and, at times, against art institutions. Our discussion will take into account the difficulties of collaborating across various differences—cultural, disciplinary, educational, etc.—that are specific to exhibiting Indigenous arts.

Come from Away is docked in South Florida before heading north. The musical relates the true tale of a small Canadian town that welcomed and cared for stranded passengers on Sept. 11, 2001 and the days after.

Hue & Cry: French Printmaking and the Debate over Colors presents a wide array of French color prints from the Clark’s works-on-paper collection, by artists including Pierre Bonnard, Mary Cassatt, Paul Cézanne, Jules Chéret, Maurice Denis, Camille Pissarro, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Édouard Vuillard.

GableStage in Southeast Florida is opening its season with Arthur Miller's "The Price." New Producing Artistic Director Bari Newport is directing it, based on late Producing Artistic Director Joe Adler's notes. This production of "The Price" marked Adler's last directorial effort at GableStage, where he spent 20 years as Producing Artistic Director. GableStage has dedicated this production to Adler.

The big winners of the Berkies were A Crossing: A Dance Musical, presented by Barrington Stage Company, which won the Sally and Robert Sugarman Award for a World Premier of a New Work as well as many acting and design awards, and Nina Simone: Four Women, presented by the Berkshire Theatre Group. 

The funniest complication is that Mrs. Warren has steadfastly refused to reveal who is Vivie’s father; so there is the possibility that it could be Sir George or even the Rev. Samuel, who wasn’t always a man of the cloth.

Madama Butterfly inspires a deep look at its historical context through a contemporary lens. Internal and public discussions are part of the project dubbed The Butterfly Process by Boston Lyric Opera.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), opens a suite of seven newly renovated galleries that explore the rich visual culture of the Dutch Republic and Flanders during this time, bringing together nearly 100 paintings by the greatest masters—including Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, Gerrit Dou, Frans Hals and Anthony van Dyck—in addition to works on paper and decorative arts such as silver and Delft ceramics.

The Bay Area is blessed with many great performing artists, and Sam Jackson (for the sake of clarity – she!) and William Thomas Hodgson (he) are among the finest.  Jackson portrays both females, and Hodgson both males.  And both actors are scintillating.

Keenan Scott, playwright, objected to the widespread notion that black men don’t express themselves. In his play, Thoughts of a Colored Man, they do. Our conventional notions of black silence are shattered by a rich rhetorical tradition of the group that Eldridge Cleaver called the most challenged in American society. In some ways not much has changed since Cleaver made that statement over a half century ago. Black men have an expiration date that expires before everyone elses'.

During the wild and crazy days of WBCN, which is now celebrated with a movie and book, Al Perry functioned as the adult in the room. As station manager he kept the lid on. Respected and loved by those who knew and worked with him Al passed on November 6.

“Così Fan Tutte” was the last of three collaborations by perhaps the strongest composition team in opera history.  Composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and librettist Lorenzo da Ponte had previously written “Le Nozze di Figaro” and “Don Giovanni.”  Acknowledging the significance of this unplanned trilogy, San Francisco Opera is presenting them all over a three-season period. 

It's time for sweating to the oldies. Or is it time for oldies to be sweating. Ok gang, all together now. Get off the couch, Start with a five pound potato sack in each hand.

Theatre Lab, the professional resident company at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, is giving Jennifer Lane's two-hander, "To Fall in Love" its Southeastern premiere production. In the play, an estranged couple turns to a study that scientists claim can help people fall in love in order to save their marriage. The study features 36 questions that each individual asks the other.

Stephen Sondheim was a Class if 1950 graduate of Williams College. Regarded as an icon of American theatre he passed recently at 91. We repost tributes by several members of the American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA).