Barry Humphries' Weimar Cabaret focuses on the degenerate (according to the Nazis) music of Berlin's Weimar Republic of the 1920s-30s. Humphries presents and performs this music with the talented international cabaret performer, Meow Meow, and with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, led by its artistic director and violinist, Richard Tognetti. Together, these talents delivered a wonderfully done, touching and mesmerizing performance at Tanglewood's Seiji Ozawa Hall in Lenox, MA last night.

John Williams returned to the stage at Tanglewood for 'Film Night', an evening where his scores, especially, 'Star Wars' gets flight from this renowned 84 year old iconic composer/conductor.

As news rooms and journals have shrunk or disappeared there are ever fewer resurces for established arts writers. In Boston William Marx has established the respected and ever expanding site The Arts Fuse. One of the sixty contributors, film critic Gerald Peary, wrote a memo to his colleagues. We have published an excerpt. We urge our readers to link to and discover this diverse and informative arts site.

Inon Barnatan is a premier pianist who is game to offer music in different venues. From Washington Irving High School to Poisson Rouge and every pocket of the Lincoln Center campus, he has engaged audiences in his art with a brilliant humility that stuns. His creation of a Baroque Suite with short dance pieces from Bach to Barber was a magical moment in the Stanley Kaplan Penthouse.

What are the options when patients opt to end treatment for devastating, excruciatingly painful terminal illnesses? With astonishing performances by the renowned actors Alfred Molina and Jane Kaczmarek the issues are explored in And No More Shall We Part by Tom Holloway at Williamstown Theatre Festval.

Located in the hamlet of Housatonic, is Pleasant & Main, a restaurant with charm, character and wonderful food at reasonable prices.

Based on last year's collaboration with Toshi Reagon's band Big Lovely yesterday's performance of Dorrance Dance was, for us, the most anticipated of the Jacob's Pillow season. Michelle Dorrance is celebrated for pushing the limits of the indigenous, vernacular art form of tap dancing. Collaborating with the musician and inventor Nicholas Van Young there seemed too much emphasis on sound at the sacrifice of dance.

A love story set against the backdrop of quantum physics. Brilliantly written and superbly acted, Kate Baldwin and Graham Rowat succeed in hitting the high and low notes of their characters' lives, moving seamlessly from one universe to another, and bringing the audience along with them.

For the anti-gentrification critics, urban deterioration should be left the way it is rather than reverse it through the introduction of art galleries, performance spaces, work/live lofts, and museums. This is an issue wrapped in controversy that underscores progress while perhaps marginalizing impoverished residents and pioneering artists. It is hard to determine if everyone is right or everyone is wrong.

Despite its title, Vern Thiessen’s play is the story of Fritz Haber (Chris Saunders), a German Jewish chemist who made important discoveries, one of which won him the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. That discovery—which synthesized ammonia for use in fertilizers and explosives — also became the chlorine gas that killed thousands of soldiers on both sides in World War I. In particular, it was the poison gas used in the 1915 Battle of Ypres, with 100,000 casualties.

Alice Austen is well-known to residents of Staten Island, where her family home, Clear Comfort was perched on a hill over looking the New York harbor. Like Vivien Maier her story attracts the attention now that it did not in her own lifetime.

In a traditional production of “Midsummer,” the setting of law and order is the palace of Duke Theseus. In this production, that setting becomes Hermia’s house and the nearby school.

Eighteen years ago Cellist Yo Yo Ma and a core of global musicians formed Silk Road Ensemble. Yet again their appearance was a musical treat and highlight of the Tanglewood season.

Tony and Pulitzer winning Wendy Wasserstein, who died ten years ago at 55, was among the most successful and admired playwrights of her generation. One of her lesser Broadway plays, An American Daughter, is being revived at Williamstown Theatre Festival. It features a strong woman and candidate for high office who, because of a gaffe on camera, is being crucified by the media. Does this sound familiar?

At Lincoln Center Paavo Järvi conducted the Mostly Mozart Orchestra softly yet he carried a big baton, from La Sidone which Arvo Part composed for the opening of the Olympics in Turin Italy. We are reminded that this year’s Olympics opened on the very day of this concert.

The play, “Stalking the Bogeyman,” by David Holthouse illustrates to what extent silence can aggravate, anger and agonize. The piece is a gripping, thought-provoking, bold theatrical work running through Aug. 28 in a riveting Southeastern premiere production by GableStage in Coral Gables, Florida.

In a couple of weeks Ultra Cosmic Gonzology will be hot off the presses. Already word is spreading on Facebook. There was a recent sighting at a taco joint in Vermont. The offical book launch will be staged with a reading at the Gloucester Writers Center, on Wednesday, August 31 at 7:30 PM. The address is 126 East Main Street, Gloucester.

In the late 1980s, the Canadian Pacific Coast city of Richmond, British Columbia, known to most as the location of Vancouver International Airport, welcomed a wave of new residents, mostly from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China. By 2013, Richmond had an immigrant population of 60%, with 50% of residents identifying as Chinese.

At the end of the hour long piece Ce que le jour doit à la nuit (What the Day Owes the Night) choreographed by Herve Koubi the cycle of a single day finds closure in gradual darkening signifying night.

Last year the one-man-show Cry "Havoc" by Stephan Wolfert was given a couple of performances at Shakespeare & Company. It has returned with a longer but limited engagement. A number of individuals during a post performance talk back indicated that they returned to see it again. This is an astonishing and visceral experience that one simply must see at least once. It is arguaby the most compelling show of the Berkshire season. It has been hinted that it may become an annual event for the company.

Dusting off a proud fact of VIrginia's history, playwright Richard Strand provides a hugely entertaining evening of theatre on the dour subjects of the Civil War and slavery.

Tanglewood On Parade is the yearly event that brings families and friends together for the day. Traveling musicians, clowns and musical activities lead up to the finale, the '1812 Overture', fireworks and canons being fired.

Grey Gardens” is once again being staged by the award-winning director Michal Wilson who helmed the production back in 2007. His cast in this 2016 production stars a sensational Rachel York as ‘little’ Edie Beale/Edith, and a terrific Betty Buckley as Edith Bouvier Beale.

In Norman Rockwell's 1961 Saturday Evening Post illustration "The Connoisseur" a dignified gentleman gazes on a simulacrum of a Jackson Pollock painting. It provided the impetus for a mishegos attempt to locate the representational populist illustrator as responding to the avant-garde art of that formative era.

MASS MoCA heads into the fall with the 6th annual FreshGrass Festival on September 16-18, a rollicking weekend largely devoted to artists in roots and acoustic bluegrass music — and powers through until December when Dinosaur Jr. takes the stage in a night of power-grunge. In between, swoon for Benjamin Clementine in the Hunter and Eisa Davis up in the Club — and witness what might be one of the most powerful, poignant, and political works we have ever exhibited.