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 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.

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.

Directer Joel Grey delivers a rare and rich revival. Fiddler on the Roof has come back, a comment and conversation in Yiddish about a time and place that indeed did shake the world. In the language of the people who lived it, this production is more rooted in their world, earthy, funny, deeply-moving.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maestra Nichole Paiement conducts the chamber orchestra to its polished sound with energy and precision, finding a visual and aural expressiveness in the combining of the instruments, parallel to that of Georgia O’Keeffe combining her paints. Laura Kaminsky honors this great artist with her world premiere opera Today It Rains, commissioned and presented by Opera Parallèle.

Concerts at Saint Thomas continue their 2018-19 season with a guest performance by the acclaimed Choir of King’s College, Cambridge at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue. This marks the choir’s final North American tour with current Director of Music Stephen Cleobury, who will retire after 37 years in September. His position will be filled by current Saint Thomas Organist and Director of Music Daniel Hyde.

Lyric Stage Company of Boston announces its 45th season. The program of seven plays starts with a yet to be announced award winning musical from August 30 to October 6. The suspense is brutal.

The current exhibition at Gallery 51 “Reconnecting: MCLA Alumni Show” is eclectic, fun, and here and there, somewhat whimsical

In a co-production with National Theatre and Neal Street Productions, the Park Avenue Armory is presenting a multi-generational story of the Bavarian family Lehman in America. Captivated by Ben Powers' Biblical translation of Stefano Massini's The Lehman Trilogy, director Sam Mendes has worked with three brilliant actors to create a cast of hundreds. It is a testimony to the talents of Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles that we believe one man can be a young woman, a child, and an aging patriarch if not all at once, certainly standing next to each other.

The Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival will offer a round trip charter bus for New York patrons. The 2019 Festival program (Sept. 26 – 29) will feature plays by Tennessee Williams and the provocative Japanese author Yukio Mishima.

Huntington Theatre Company announces the lineup of the 2019-2020 season, featuring three world premieres, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, a classic Tony Award-winning comedy by one of the world’s most celebrated playwrights, and two adaptations of powerful literary works.

Michael Perlman's From White Plains examines the effects of bullying decades after one's school days. Cast members largely shine in a South Florida regional production of this comedic drama. The play's characters are unable to escape the past in From White Plains. The set's centerpiece, which resembles a prison cell's gate, symbolizes this.

Now retired, professor John Hochheimer of Southern Illinois University, recalls undergraduate years at Boston University’s then progressive station WBUR. He started as a high school volunteer in New York at WBAI. During sophomore year at BU, in 1968, he started at WBUR. He was influenced by the free form programming of Tom Gamache, AKA Uncle T. Rock archivist, David Bieber, was a friend and flat mate. He once spent five hours on air with David Bowie and became friends with B.B. King and Elton John. The programming staff was fired not long after John Silber took over at BU in 1971.

Nantucket Sleigh Ride by John Guare is a revised version of an earlier play, Are You There, McPhee?, produced at McCarter Theatre at Princeton in 2012. It’s a farce, a puzzle and a jumble of pop culture references with a lot of laughs, and may leave you feeling unglued.

DeSotelle Studios is committed to doing staged readings of eight Shakespeare plays in eight months. Richard II seems perfect for this form. Perhaps no Shakespeare play rests more securely in its lyric laurels. Rhymed couplets and parallel constructions abound for listening pleasure. The cast took full advantage under Katrin Hilbe's direction.

Aaron Sorkin received permission from author Harper Lee before she died in 2016. However, when Tonja Carter whom Lee had named as her personal representative, learned of some of the changes lawsuits ensued. Eventually the matter was settled.