Mirror Visions Ensemble commemorated its 25th anniversary with a concert at The Sheen Center. Their driving vision is that each composer will interpret a poem, passage or letters in his or her own way. The composer is to find the true musical equivalent for the poem. The variety of the setting is no less than the variety of the poem. The group often contrast two composers take on the same poem, mirror images.

The legendary rock and blues club The Boston Tea Party first opened its doors on Friday night, January 20, 1967. The Music Museum Of New England will commemorate the event on Friday, January 20, 2017, 5-8pm, at The Verb Hotel and Hojoko Japanese Tavern, 1271 Boylston Street (opposite Fenway Park)

A selection of fourteen rock portraits by Roman Iwasiwka will be on view at The Falcon – 1348 Rte 9W, Marlboro, NY through March 31. A reception for the artist will be held on January 28, from 5:30 to 7:30 PM.

Writer/director Michael Leeds presents an honest, funny, vivid and unapologetically shameless and bold play “The First Step: Diary of a Sex Addict.”

Opera is alive and well. New works are a-borning across our country and opera houses are mounting them. There is an audience for new work. Singers like performing it. Orchestras are delighted to give it a try. This is an exciting time for an old art form. Opera America, the national service organization for opera, is leading the way.

In the best of all possible worlds, the New York City Opera is alive and well at the Rose Theater, Lincoln Center. With Harold Prince at the helm in a production he has mounted for NYCO before, an exuberant romp through Voltaire's classic shows just how live NYCO is in its new incarnation.

First a New Year visit to Lonshan Temple for prayer and offerings to the manmy Gods. From there it was on to Snake Alley to choose one's favorite kind of reptile for fine dining. For the adventurous there are side dishes of turtle testicles and deer penis wine.

Jean Racine was one of the three great 17th century French playwrights, along with Molière and Corneille. He is known mostly for his adaptations of Greek tragedies and wrote Phèdre (inspired by Euripides’ play) in 1677. It’s considered his masterpiece.

During the holiday playwright Mark St. Germain visited his daughter Kate in Taipei. This is the second of three letters he sent to friends.They encounbtered a cab driver who "When he laughed revealed a black hole where his tongue and teeth would have been. All day he chews betel nuts."

Whether “The Most Happy Fella” falls more closely into the realm of musical theater or opera, the show has the necessary ingredients for success. Stage Door Theatre’s breathtaking production offers some of the strongest singing you’ll hear on a stage.

Currently Mark St. Germain is finishing a screenplay of his widely produced "Freud's Last Sessions." Recenty, he spent the holidays with his daughter Kate. This is the first of three letters from Taipei that he sent to friends. For those who know Mark and have enjoyed his plays at Barrington Stage and other theatres you will enjoy and recognize his familiar wit and insight.

Cate Blanchett can do anything, but her Chekhov is unique and apt. Following a triumphant run in Uncle Vanya in 2012, Broadway welcomes her as Anna, in what is probably Chekhov's first play.

Through January 29 there is still time to see the stunning and riveting retrospective at New York's Met Breuer. He is among the elite of African American artists of his generation. His work is fresh in its timely subject mater as well as traditional with roots in American genre and social realism.

The enigmatic modernist, Francis Picabia, suggested that artists change styles as frequently as their shirts. He is the subject of an eclectic and intriguing retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

Matt Windman, author of “The Critics Say…57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future,” led a panel discussion during the NY ATCA conference on the state of theater criticism in today’s world of social media bloggers and a decreasing number of full-time print theater critics

Wynton Marsalis, WIlliam Bolcom and Aaron Copland welcomed the New Year at the New York Philharmonic under Alan Gilbert. The Bolcom and Marsalis pieces were commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and helped to create a ravishing evening of music.

Lake Baikal is the largest and oldest body of fresh water on earth. Traveling along its southern shore by vintage steam train is a unique journey on a coastal precipice with lush mountains on one side and the lake on the other. Listvyanka, an old port town on the lake, is also close to a network of hiking paths. Irkutsk, the capital of Eastern Siberia, reflects a rich and varied cultural heritage as home to 120 nationalities, well worth the distance to get there.

Jewish music is often in the minor mode, but the enduring spirit of the people who sing it and live it creates a hopeful and joyous atmosphere.

Current non-equity national tour director Mark Bramble doesn’t disappoint in a mostly commendable production of 42nd Street that played a one-night stand in West Palm Beach on New Year’s Eve. The 16-week touring production will continue at Florida venues until Jan. 6, when it heads north.

“An American in Paris” is a musical composition by George Gershwin, which he referred to as an “extended symphonic tone poem.” The New York Philharmonic commissioned it and the piece soon became one of his most famous compositions. It was inspired by his visit to Paris during the 1920s.

In the beginning, almost a decade and a half ago, target audiences were young people whose lives paralleled those of the characters on stage. Princeton has just graduated from college with an unmarketable BA in English. Kate can't find a job to fulfill her teaching ambitions. Gary Coleman peaked at fifteen and is now a building superintendent. Today these characters can be any one of the 99 % that make up our nation.

In At the Cut author Peter Anastas tells of growing up in Gloucester during the war years into the 1950s. Gloucester was then an ethnically diverse thriving fishing community. Today the fleet is all but gone and this book vividly conveys the richness of what has been lost.

Between 1897 and 1914, Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin (Chtchoukkin) 1854 -1936, acquired 275 masterpieces, including 41 Matisses, 50 Picassos, 8 Cézannes, 13 Monets, 16 Gauguins, as well as works by his fellow Russian artists Malevich and Rodchenko. In 1918 the collection was seized by the government under Lenin. Some 127 works are now on view at the Frank Gehry designed Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.

Conor McPherson’s The Weir isn’t your typical Christmas play, but I’ll take it any day over any of the traditional treacly tales that grace our stages this time of year. The play, however, has a Holiday theme.

My daily wines cost under $10 a bottle. They are also the wines that are used for parties at our house-both Holiday parties and non-Holiday parties.