With “Lizard Boy,” youth is served and age is respected.  This is a big tent musical that will please anyone with an open mind and a caring heart.  The auteur, Justin Huertas who wrote the book, music, and lyrics, and who plays the lead role, has fashioned an absolutely riveting theater piece that pulsates with emotion and extracts enormous empathy.

Duncan MacMillan’s award-winning, 60-minute, one-person play, “Every Brilliant Thing,” centers on a list reflective of obsessive compulsion.  The narrator/protagonist itemizes everything worth living for.  Remarkably, he starts the list at age seven. 

The American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA) announces The Helbing Mentorship Program. Under the program, LGBTQIA+ arts writers will work with leading theater critics to imrpove their craft and publish their work. The year-long program, which will begin in September 2022, includes a $5,000 grant.

What startet 1930 as the first opera cooperation between the playwright Bertolt Brecht and the composer Kurt Weill may well turn out to be the last big opera in the 2021/22 season. Mahagonny is being presented at the Komische Oper Berlin with Barrie Kosky as director. 

Blue grass and Appalachian music usually isn’t my thing, but my toes were tapping while enjoying the play-with- music, The Porch at Windy Hill now at Ivoryton Playhouse through Sunday, Oct. 17.

Island City Stage's first-ever production was of Tom Jacobson's play, The Twentieth Century Way. To kick off its 10th anniversary season, Island City Stage is reviving The Twentieth Century Way. The play focuses on two out-of-work actors in 1914 who hired themselves out to the Long Beach, Calif. Police Department to entrap "social vagrants (homosexuals)".

Experience the beauty and splendor of Edith Wharton’s beloved estate. The Mount is currently open Wednesday – Sunday for tours. We are open on Saturdays and Sundays in November & December. See the mansion all dressed up for the Holidays! Holiday House tours start November 27. Tours can be booked online at EdithWharton.org. Please visit our website for the latest calendar of events.  

On Saturday, October 16, Heather Bruegl, Director of Education at Forge Project, discusses the history of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, the indigenous people who once lived on these lands.

Israeli filmmaker Hagai Levi decided he wanted to do a more modern updated version of Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 seminal film “Scenes from a Marriage” that originally starred Liv Ullman, Erland Joseph, Bibi Andersson, Jan Malmsjo, and Gunnel Lindblom.  However, writer/adaptor/director Levi trimmed several characters for his 2021 version.

Little Girl, a 2020 documentary about a young French trans girl, would be a good introduction to what it means to feel you were born in the wrong body. It’s an exquisite film, a sweet story of 7-year-old Sasha, who lives in rural France with her incredibly devoted and supportive family. Unfortunately, not everyone around her is equally as understanding.

Arnie Reisman, a Martha Vineyard resident died suddenly. He was 79. Starting as editor of the Brandeis University Justice he was later editor of the weekly Boston After Dark/ Phoenix. He was a prolific documentary filmmaker and playwright as well as publisher of several books of poetry. With his wife Paula Lyons, he was also a panelist on NPR’s Says You!, the long-running comedy quiz show. His documentary The Powder and the Glory was the basis of the Broadway show War Paint.

Eclipse Mill Artists Annual Exhibition, Reconnections 2021, will present the work of 24 artist residents of the North Adams complex. The Annual is a long standing tradition for the artists loft building.

A. R. Gurney’s Sylvia had a 1995 production in New York featuring Charles Kimbrough, Blythe Danner and Sarah Jessica Parker.  It is one of Gurney’s most frequently produced plays.  A husband in mid-life crisis would prefer the compansionship of a dog to a mistress.

Tim Youd has been at work on his 100 Novels Project for about 10 years. The Jungle is #71 and he just finished retyping Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, on a early Remington typewriter at the Arts Club on Ontario Street. Anderson lived nearby (at the corner of what is now Wabash and Superior) when he was writing the book (a short story cycle), published in 1919.

In the playbill for Hang by Debbie Tucker Green, the setting is described as ‘Nearly now.’ How prescient the playwright is, to recognize old and new layers of fascism, terribly becoming everyday.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery had a long and personal relationship with George Wein and we remember and celebrate his kindness and spirit. In a recent letter to Michael Rosenfeld on the occasion of the gallery’s 30th anniversary, he wrote: “30 plus years ago, by chance I walked into a brownstone building on the Upper East Side. There was a sign outside that said: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery. That was the day I met you. And to say it changed my life, is putting it mildly.”

Steel Magnolias is staged by the Cherry Creek Theater in Denver, Colorado. This comic tragedy comes alive in a beauty parlor, whose window frames look out on the talk of the town parading by. In the South, men sit under a pecan tree and talk about affairs as if they all had PhDs from Harvard.  The women hunker down to have their hair and nails done.

While focused on a group of migrants this is the story of all of us. It conveys an America rooted in exclusion, violence and intolerance. This is a stunning new musical for all Americans.

It’s been almost a year since November 2020 when Mr. Trump lost his presidential reelection bid but secretly refuses to accept his defeat.  And “the big lie’ theory continues to poison the political well being of the nation.

The Gateways Inn in downtown Lenox has announced a new jazz series, starting in October and running Thursdays through Saturdays, with a special concert on Sunday, Oct. 24. Presented in association with Berkshires Jazz, Inc., the series underscores the venue’s ongoing dedication to live music.

Peer into hidden spaces, with guides sharing tales of ghosts that dwell here and the Shakers' participation in the Spiritualist Movement.

In Otto Zitko’s work, space determines form and content. The central design element is the seemingly endless line running across large-format picture panels, sheets, or walls, which is applied with paint rollers or thick oil pens. Behind the supposedly purely expressive character of his works lies a complex structure of self-organization, the sounding out of physiological movement in space, and different levels of consciousness and energy.

The Clark Art Institute’s popular First Sundays Free program returns on Sunday, October 3. Admission to the galleries is free to all visitors for the entire day, but advance registration is strongly recommended.

An invitation to a close encounter with very special music.  Paul Schoenfield’s runaway classical hit, Café Music for piano trio, sets the tone for a celebratory re-opening. Combining elements of classical, jazz, klezmer and whimsy, Café Music is caffeine-fueled and irresistible.

Cleo Parker Robinson is celebrating the 51st anniversary of the founding of her dance troupe. Covid buried the 50th. This celebration had added sizzle.  Live dance is happening at last.