Mass MoCA is home to the renowned Fresh Grass music festival. Over 50 bands will play on the grounds of the museum, during this three day event. It takes place from September 16th to 18th. Rosanne Cash and Ricky Scaggs are a few of the headliners.

For fabulous summer fun Let the Good Times Roll at Charleston's Music Hall.

"Foreign Affairs," the international performing arts festival at the Berliner Festspiele is history, literally. This year's festival was the last one of its five-year run. The last three years were under the artistic leadership of Matthias von Hartz and brought ever-expanding public involvement and an increasingly frenetic search for innovative alternatives to theater practices at large. Here is an overview and musings about the final festival as named.

Now in his 75th year pianist Chick Corea with a trio of jazz masters- bass player, Christian McBride and drummer Brian Blade- visited Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood. It was amoing the best of the many times we have heard him perform.

Fidelio is a political opera, but not politics rooted in biography, which John Adams and Philip Glass have undertaken. Here is an ordinary political prisoner, starving to death for his principles. Edward Snowden might be the model for the role today if the big guys could catch him.

Led by museum director, Joe Thompson, we joined a 'hard hat tour" of the final phase of MASS MoCA renovation and construction. The $65 million project will be completed with a Memorial Day, 2017 weekend of opening celebrations.

In the 19th century, no one musically-inclined would have imagined percussion as the central arbiter of musical taste two centuries later. Yet today no one could live without percussion and the So Percussion Quartet makes the case for striking objects of every imaginable variety, including flower pots and tea cups.

In A Room of One's Own, a speech delivered to college women, by Virginia Woolf, I first learned of Aphra Behn (1640-1689). During the bawdy period of Restoration comedy she was the first British woman to earn a living writing plays. In addition to a play about her Or, and a play by her, The Emperor of the Moon, through the efforts of Shakespeare & Company we now know a lot more about this pioneer of women in theatre.

An ambitious unpublished author is guided to meet his writing idol through an editor. What unravels reveals how fame can isolate, and how ambition can move one to do unexpected things. Judd Hirsch is a marvel, Kristin Griiffith shines and Rupak Ginn turns in a nuanced performance.

After 30 years with Balanchine's New York City Ballet, and a repertoire of some 50 works, Wendy Whelan has extended her career as a solo artist in collaboration with several choreograher partners. She premiered this direction at Jacob's Pillow in 2013. She has now returned with Some of a Thousand Words partnering with Brian Brooks.

Golem One looks part Botero in the lobby of the Time Warner building, where kids play with the tiny penis all day. Golem 2 is more like Chaplin in a St Exupery aviator outfit. Golem 3 is an amalgam of all the visuals we’ve seen. Intriguing. This enchanting theatrical drama uses every imaginable tool to achieve its ends.

After a public 'Appeal' for the renovation of elements of Naumkeag, the first phase of the project has finished. Newly restored Chinese Temple Gardens and an updated landscape project have been completed. The new project opened its doors at a ribbon-cutting ceremony recently. Yo-Yo Ma and wife Jill Hornor chaired the event.

The Mostly Mozart Festival is fifty years young. To celebrate the occasion, Lincoln Center put on The Illuminated Heart at David Geffen Hall. Singers were the A list of opera. It was like degustation at Sur Mesure. Like the All Star game, you wondered if another operatic music event could be going on anywhere. Seems like everyone who was anyone was on stage.

Artistic Director of Hubbard Hall Opera Theater, Alix Jones, talks to us about how small-scale opera started at Hubbard Hall, why is succeeded, and where it might go next.

Now 70 the artist Rafael Mahdavi, who lives and works on a farm in the Burgundy region of France, created a suite of nine narrative paintings. They have been handsomely reproduced in a book with 25 sonnets inspired by them from the Irish poet Rory Brennan. There are also critical essays by David Galloway and Jonathan Shimony. It has been interesting to follow the work which has changed in the decades during which I have had extensive critcal dialogues with artist.

Leon Botstein, music impresario of the first order, declared that if Mascagni’s opera Iris was good enough for Toscanini, it was good enough for him. Many of us feel that if it’s good enough for Botstein, it’s good enough for us. The music is gorgeous. Botstein hears Wagner. We heard Puccini. The descending fifth leap from Tosca started many a phrase. Yet it was Mascagni that preceded Puccini.

In a raucous, energetic, daunting production of Peerless by Jiehae Park Barrington Stage has boldly brought twentysomething, off off Broadway to the Berkshires. This assault to the senses may not be appealing to older audiences. It gives us a lively glimpse into the mind set of evil twns evoking Macbeth to murder their way to acceptance at the colleges of their choice. Does that make sense?

What happens when you conflate Old Miss and Brooklyn routed through Boston University? As a playwright Boo Killebrew draws on her childhood and the heritage of gracious Southern women with the here-and-now sexual politics of a single mother and her sister traying to get the shards of her life together. That illusion of a stay at home wife and mother came to a screeching end with the death of her husband. Now just 29 she is picking up the pieces in a misfired drama striving for comedy.

Man’s cruelty to man is central to this comedy. This production wraps the audience into its web with humor, shock and awe.

San Diego’s venerable Old Globe Theatre is currently staging a vibrant, engaging and thoroughly delightful production of Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility”.

It seems like a win win. Bright Ideas Brewing offers uniqely crafted beer, ale and root beer in a high concept industrial space on the Mass MoCA campus. On every level from eccnetric hours, to noise levels and a flub on food it's time to rethink the business plan.

War Paint is the story of two cosmetic industry pioneers, women who achieved corporate success in an era when it was even more difficult to do so than today. But once you get past the competition between the Polish Jewish immigrant Helena Rubinstein (Patti LuPone) and the sunny blonde Elizabeth Arden (Christine Ebersole) known for her pink color palette, there’s not much story left.

Although elderly and in poor health Ira J. Bilowit, who has passed away at 90, continued to cover and work in theatre. Just last November he was co-chair, with Sherry Eaker, of a New York conference of the American Theratre Critics Association. He was among the most respected and revered members of that organization.

Barbra Streisand is in this original and highly entertaining play – sort of, although you believe she really is, judging from the electrifying, hyperventilation-defying, incredible performance from award-winning actor Chris Crawford. He plays a handful of characters throughout the roughly one-hour, 45-minute play with no intermission.

Moiiere's gift for embedding comedy in character, and weaving the elements of musical theatre in a unified whole were on full display at the Gerald Lynch Theatre. We continue coverage of the annual Lincoln Center Festival.