New York City Opera will present a season of four free, live performances this summer as part of their Park Series in Bryant Park’s Picnic Performances presented by Bank of America. Each performance features City Opera's brightest stars as well as members of the City Opera orchestra and will begin at 7pm on the Bryant Park Stage.

The Dishwasher Dialogues is a tale of being down and out in Paris in the 1970s. George James Light and Rafael Sinclair Mahdavi share tales of staying alive working at Chez Haynes a soul food restaurant. It reads like a hipster's Beggars Opera. Literally this is a saga from rags to almost riches.

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) and Odyssey Opera, two of today’s leading innovators on the classical musical scene, present the New England premiere of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis’s seminal opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1986) on June 17, 2022, at the Strand Theatre, a short distance from the house where Malcolm Little lived in his teenage years in Roxbury. This sprawling, genre-bending biographical opera unfolds the astonishing life of one of the most misunderstood men in history.

Long before Richard Powers wrote the mega bestseller "Overstory" celebrating man’s relationship with trees, Handel wrote one of the most beautiful arias in the history of song. The cruel King Serse (Xerxes in Plutarch)  opens the opera named for him with an aria celebrating a tree’s understory, its shade. Emily D’Angelo, a glorious mezzo who has graduated from Cinderella’s Prince to a role as King this season, was masterful in her presentation of this love song to a tree.  To be sure, it’s a bit weird.  So too the tangled love relationships in this opera.

The T?N orchestra will perform an adventuresome program twice in New York, this week and next.  They will feature the works of William Grant Still, Carlos Chávez, Witold Lutoslaski and Karl Amadeus Hartmann.  

Barrington Stage Company (BSC), celebrates the 10th Anniversary and Re-Opening of the Sydelle and Lee Blatt Performing Arts Center with Broadway’s Joshua Henry (The Scottsboro Boys, Hamilton, Carousel) in an Encore Concert, Joshua Henry Up Close, on Sunday, May 29 at 8:00 p.m.

The Rose Art Museum announced the acquisition of four significant works that will enter the museum’s permanent collection. Purchased with funds from the museum’s endowment, the most recent acquisitions include Jeffrey Gibson’s BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY (2021), Barkley L. Hendricks’s photograph Self Portrait with Black Hat (1980–2013), Peter Sacks’s mix-media work Without Name (2020), and Marie Watt’s Forerunner (2020)

Refrigerator Poetry is pleased to present the May 2022 Visual Art online group exhibition organized by archive director, Perri Neri. Refrigerator Poetry can be defined as a multiplicity of voices being created out of the experiences being had in the moment. The artists in this month’s exhibition come to us from all over the world with work completed since 2020. Stylistically diverse and from different generations and circumstances, these artists offer brilliant connections of our collective human existence.  

Palm Beach Dramaworks, which co-produced 'The Belle of Amherst' last year, will remount the production in front of a live audience. Last year, the pandemic prevented audience members and performers from being in the same space. The remount will run from May 20-June 5.

The New York Philharmonic returned to Carnegie  Hall, its home until 1962, for a splendid concert. Both works performed reference death.  Brahms had been close to Robert Schumann, who died during the composition of the composer’s 1st piano concerto.  Bartok himself was deathly ill when he wrote the Concerto for Orchestra at a Saranac Lake health resort. 

Amtrak just launched a new seasonal service that will make it easier to enjoy the quaint towns and majestic views of Massachusetts' Berkshires. The new route, called the Berkshire Flyer, will shuttle passengers between New York City and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, beginning July 8 and operate on weekends throughout the summer.

There are stars just waiting to explode into supernovas when Bob Fosse’s Dancin' opens in New York during the 2022-2023 season, as director and musical stager Wayne Cilento (who won the Tony Award for his star turn in the original production) brings his revived and re-imagined production back to New York.

Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) brings us Alice Childress’ 1962 play, Wedding Band.  It is set in a South Carolina backyard and the bedroom of Julia Augustine, a Black seamstress who is loud and proud with her neighbors, and a soft and loving companion to a German baker, Herman.  He is white. They are celebrating their tenth anniversary of not-being-married,. Miscegenation is banned by law.

Ferrin Contemporary is proud to present the solo exhibition by  internationally renowned sculptor, Sergei Isupov: PAST & PRESENT at our North Adams gallery. Isupov's new series of ceramic sculptures are overseen by a multi-dimensional, mixed-media wall installation that reflects on the past and considers the present by an artist originally from Kyiv, Ukraine.

Gallery NAGA is pleased to present our third major solo exhibition of paintings by Nicole Chesney. Albedo (Latin, noun) meaning reflective power. Specifically, the fraction of incident radiation (such as light) that is reflected by a surface or body. 

“Recent Paintings – Alvin Ouellet” is on display for all of May at Images Cinema, 50 Spring Street, Williamstown, MA. He is an Adams-based painter, printmaker and digital artist.

The artists Martin Mugar and the late Addison Parks often engaged in lively discourses about issues in contemporary art. This is reposted from Mugar's blog Painting from July 16, 2012. Arguably the content is still relevant; particularly in Boston where aspects of figuration have morphed from the Boston Expressionists of the 1930s through the present. The Museum of Fine Arts is currently presenting the controversial Ku Klux Klan paintings of Philip Guston who taught at the Boston University School of Fine Arts. Guston found a haven in Boston while on the lam and shunned as reactionary by the NY art world.

The Guild of Berkshire Artists has upcoming events. The History of Illustration with Bob Horvath. Plein Air Workshops with instructor Chris Morel.

American Buffalo, David Mamet’s great play, is running on Broadway now with a stellar cast.  Lawrence Fishburne, Sam Rockwell and Darren Criss give us Donny, Teach and Bobby, pacing the thrust stage chock full of junk like pieces of junk themselves. Bobby is a junkie. All three men have a false belief that they can alter the downward trajectory of their lives.

Participating cultural organizations include Barrington Stage Company, Berkshire Botanical Garden, Berkshire International Film Festival, Berkshire Theatre Group, Community Access to the Arts, The Clark, Hancock Shaker Village, Jacob’s Pillow, Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, MASS MoCA, The Mount, Norman Rockwell Museum, Shakespeare & Company, The Trustees and Williamstown Theatre Festival. 

Last Hermanos by Exal Iraheta, a Chicago-based Salvi-American, was developed as part of the Martha Heasley Cox Virgin Play Festival at Magic Theatre in San Francisco and was further developed by A Red Orchid Theatre, which produced it as an audio play last year. This is the play’s theatrical world premiere. 

Odessa Straub begins with sourcing and collecting materials, some of which have been in her possession for years and others acquired from online sites, thrift stores, junk yards and discarded refuse. Her searching and selection process is as intensive—and playful—as her making.

Take a star baseball player who is talented, thoughtful and charismatic and see what happens when he announces that he is gay. What is the effect on his longtime friend? the locker room? What happens later on when a red-neck rookie is called up from the minor leagues? Does this one announcement cause a championship team to struggle?

All’s Well That End Well is based on a tale from Boccaccio’s The Decameron. (It was tale  9 of day 3: the story of Giletta di Narbona.) Like a few other Shakespeare plays, All’s Well is considered a problem play, suggesting that it involves complex ethical issues that can’t be dealt with by simple solutions. Most scholars believe that Thomas Middleton, a noted playwright of his time, either collaborated with Shakespeare on the play or revised it later.

Charlotte Moore must have the same feeling for the Irish and their language that the playwright John Milington Synge did. In the W. Scott McLucas Studio Theater, a small venue located underneath the main house at the Irish Repertory Theatre, the people of Ireland are brought startlingly, truly to life. Two Synge One Acts abut each other.  As audience in this theater, you are so close that you feel a part of the action, the language invades and elevates you.  It is a thrilling experience.