We attended the Tennessee Williams Festival in New Orleans which inspired us to participate in TWF in Provincetown in 2015. Both festivals were thrilling in presenting rare and insightful works. For the 2016 festival in Provincetown works by Williams will be paired with plays by Eugene O'Neill. His first works we created and produced by the Provincetown Players. The annual event will occur from September 22 to 25.

The Threshold Repertory Theatre in Charleston, South Carolina presented the hilarious and zany "Fully Committed" as a 2016 Piccolo Spoleto offering which was a festival favorite with sold-out performances.

Harbor Me was choreographed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui to the music of Extension, Park Woojae Geomugo. This music sounded agonizing like a Yiddish kvetch. The stage was mostly dark with slight illumination from lights filtered through smoke.

“tokyo fish story” is a splendid production that performs, without an intermission, on the Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre Stage and runs through June 26, 2016.

If “Feeding the Bear” doesn’t exactly break new ground, it works primarily because it’s the type of story with which many can identify. It’s a work that will make you cry one moment and laugh the next. Sometimes, you’ll do both simultaneously.

Hershey Felder has made a career of creating the great musicians of the past three centuries. His Irving Berlin is touching, witty and very American.

Cramped into nose bleed seats it was excruciating to endure the experimental opera The Little Match Girl by Helmut Lachenmann. It was a presentation of the prestigious annual Spoleto Festival USA which is currently enjoying its 40th season in Charleston, South Carolina.

Constellations, the new two-character play at Steppenwolf Theatre, is certainly a nonlinear story. Marianne (Jessie Fisher) and Roland (Jon Michael Hill) at times seem to be in parallel universes. She, an academic theoretical physicist, and he, a beekeeper.

Artistic Director Barry Edelstein continues to provide San Diego audiences with first rate theatrical entertainment. “Camp David” performs on the Donald and Darlene Shiley Stage through June 19, 2016.

Pekka Kuusisto took on the challenging Ligeti violin concerto with gusto, humor, and a quiet modesty. This was an unusual, and unusually effective combination of qualities, especially in view of the pick he took to the violin to make it into a guitar, and his beautiful whistling. David Fulmer conducted like a poet of music. John Zorn in the audience appreciated the performance of his work by the Mivos Quartet. It was another brilliant program put on by Alan Gilbert, who credits cellist Jay Chambers with suggesting Ligeti and his influence.

Our coverage of Piccolo Spoleto in Charleston continues with Nunsense at Footlight Players. Saints preserve us.

Lauren Gunderson is widely renegaded as among the best and brightest of American playwrights. She can be thoughtful and provocative. With The Taming, however, which is being given an energetic and ambitious production, the comedy of brought down as too clever, thinky and talky for its own good. It was just too difficult to connect with and care for the unmanageable characters and their absurd situations.

The latter part of The Royale which played Broadway’s Lincoln Center Theater earlier this year, features one of the strongest, most powerful scenes of dramatic tension I’ve encountered in a theater in a long while

It's observed that great operas are often based on weak plays. Not so the new opera by Gerald Barry. While Barry cut about two-thirds of Oscar Wilde's perfect play, the spirit remains. The result is more like composers taking up Beaumarchais than Johm Luther Long..

Great Champagne and Great Cava are made in the same process. The only difference are the grapes and the lower Cava price points. Most wine critics agree that sparklers made with the methode champenoise style are the ultimate sparkling wines and have no rivals.

Currently Long Day's Journey Into Night, the masterpiece of Eugene O'Neill, is enjoying an all star Broadway revival. One of the last of his plays before a decade of illness he left instructions that it not be published until 25 years after his life. It was produced in Sweden within three years of his death. Based on the horrendous circumstances of his alcoholic, drug addicted family he hoped to avoid collateral damage to survivors. It begs the question of who owns the moral and legal rights when artists draw upon family and friends as material for their art.

Piccolo Spoleto Festival is officially the outreach arm of Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina. This year marks the fortieth anniversary of Spoleto Festival USA, and thirty-eighth year of Piccolo Spoleto.

Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra where he will continue, assumes the role at the Met Opera in the 2020-21 season. He is a wonderful conductor of opera. What remains to be seen is Peter Gelb's role as "artistic director" of the opera company. Many first-rate conductors have not accepted the role because Gelb has insisted on control. The Board may not allow Gelb to continue to assert himself in artistic matters.

The annual New York Philharmonic concert at St. John the Divine in New York was started a quarter century ago just as Kurt Mazur took the helm of the orchestra. The conductor was honored today in a wonderful New Orleans Funeral March led down the long aisle of the Cathedral by Wynton Marsalis and also a performance of Brahms' Second Symphony led by Alan Gilbert.

Having returned to Annisquam where she grew up during summers Lindsay Ann Crouse is performing annually with Gloucester Stage. We saw her launch the season with a lively and hilarious production of Lettice ad Lovage. As kids my sister Pip was Lindsay's age and I was a bit older than her brother Timothy. On a rainy day we met in her vintage village home and discussed a remarkable life in theatre with numerous stage, TV and film credits including an Oscar nomination and an Emmy.

Boasting a rich ethnic mix on the Caribbean coast, Belize attracts visitors to sun and sea. Lamanai, a 26-mile scenic ride away on the New River, is an ancient city within a subtropical forest, where the Maya lived for over 3000 years.

Spinning is notable for its fine direction and acting. Dan Waller is one of those solid Chicago actors who plays many types of roles and makes each one his own. His portrayal of Conor is wrenching and passionate as he gradually learns so accept his responsibility for his actions.

Devinssi Vineyard in Priorat, Catalonia, Spain gives its customers a chance to adopt a grapevine. This adoption opens doors ot the winery and community in rural, Priorat, Spain (only two hours from Barcelona).

If the Haymarket story is unfamiliar, you can read about it before you see the play. The creators do a good job of telling a complex story, but everything will make more sense if you read before seeing this production.

The Flick by Annie Baker is being staged all over America. Given the scale of the movie theater with a theater the length of the individual productions varies greatly depending upon how long it takes for the trio of actors to sweep up all the popcorn between screenings. This is a review of a Miami production where it weighed in at about three hours.