Front Page
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Les Blancs
Oakland Theater Project's Gender Bending Take on Lorraine Hansberry
By: - Jul 16th, 2025Having settled in London, Tshembe visits his African homeland at a time of unrest. Playwright Lorraine Hansberry plumbs conflicts among natives and colonialists with various philosophies. OTP's production casts a wholly black female ensemble to portray men and women, black and white.
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The Dao of Push Hands
Cultivating Suppleness and Wisdom
By: - Jul 15th, 2025At its core, push hands is a two-person training drill designed to develop sensitivity, balance, and the ability to neutralize and issue force. Partners maintain continuous contact, typically at the wrists or forearms, and engage in a gentle yet focused exchange.
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Trinity Irish Dance Company
Featured for the First Time at Jacob's Pillow
By: - Jul 14th, 2025Although American based, the world touring company Trinity Irish Dance Company is rooted in traditions of step dancing and music. The unique vision has been to expand the program from folk forms to creating works with progressive vision that puts it on level ground with leading contemporary companies. The dances are exquisite, unique, intricate, and challenging.
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Stephen Petronio Company at Jacob's Pillow
Signs Off After 40 Years
By: - Jul 15th, 2025As a highlight of the 93rd Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the world-renowned Stephen Petronio Company—one of the biggest names in the postmodern dance scene—will conclude their 40-year run with a highly anticipated program in the Ted Shawn Theatre, July 23-27. These capstone performances will feature a collection of Petronio’s favorite works, including MiddleSexGorge (1990) and American Landscapes (2019).
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fuzzy at Barrington Stage Company
A World Premiere Musical
By: - Jul 13th, 2025The musical fuzzy is a puppet show for adults. This inventive production breaks all the rules. The one act play has been written, it seems, by the main character. The charm of this production is that the audience comes to believe that.
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The Dishwasher Dialogues: Les Droits de l'homme
Patriotism and Passports
By: - Jul 13th, 2025I always felt the simple visitor’s stamp on my passport gave me just enough right to live in Paris until the next visitor’s stamp. I never contemplated the idea of citizenship or even having a carte de travail.
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Jurassiq Parq: A Musiqal Parody
A Fun Time with Raucous Theater at Oasis, San Francisco's LGBTQ Nightclub
By: - Jul 12th, 2025A spoof of the popular movie, this jukebox-musical-plus offers a great catalog of singalong pop and rock hits from the '80s and '90s along with broad and racy humor. The production values are impressive as Dr. Laura Dern and Dr. Jeff Goldblum try to save the world from the re-birth of dinosaurs.
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Fred Wilson Reflections
Rose Art Museum
By: - Jul 09th, 2025Fred Wilson has gained widespread recognition for his groundbreaking artistic practice, which challenges dominant assumptions about history and culture. Working across a range of media—including sculpture, installation, painting, and glass—Wilson is best known for his conceptual interventions that expose the ways museums, archives, and institutions shape our understanding of the past. By reframing cultural narratives and recontextualizing objects, often drawn from historical collections or everyday life.
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Opera Comes to the Williamstown Festival
Samuel Barber's Vanessa in a New Take by Heartbeat Opera
By: - Jul 12th, 2025Vanessa is the first opera to be performed at the Williamstown Festival, running from July 17 through August 3. It will be produced by Heartbeat Opera, a company known for revitalizing underperformed masterpieces and breathing new life into opera’s staples.
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Constellations
Pear Theatre Innovates a Two-Hander About Multiple Realities
By: - Jul 08th, 2025Marianne, an astrophysicist, and Roland, a beekeeper, strike an unlikely relationship. In Nick Payne's original realization, two actors repeat each scene three times, each variation having its own twist and suggesting multiple realities. The Pear uses three separate couples, increasing the dynamics with each couple reflecting different aspects of their character's personality.
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Gabielle Munter at the Guggenheim
First NY Museum Exhibition in Thirty Years
By: - Jul 08th, 2025Gabrielle Münter was a critical figure in the advancement of modernism in early twentieth-century Europe. Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World will focus on her heightened Expressionist production from around 1908 to 1920, while also highlighting her later developments.
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LA Company Bodytraffic at Jacob's Pillow
Fourth Visit Since 2013
By: - Jul 07th, 2025Bodytraffic was founded in 2007 in Los Angeles by Tina Finkelman Berkett and Lilian Barbeito. They made their Jacob’s Pillow debut on the outdoor stage in 2013. They returned two more times including appearing in the Doris Duke Theater. For this season they were invited to perform in the Ted Shawn Theatre.
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The Dishwasher Dialogues: Philosophy
Derrida, Wittgenstein and Love in Paris
By: - Jul 07th, 2025Stephen loved philosophy. I remember he and I arguing over Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations during the rehearsals for One Day in May. Well, it wasn’t so much an argument as me shouting ‘Wittgenstein, what do you know about Wittgenstein?’
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Camelot at Barrington Stage Company
Utopian Message for Hard Times
By: - Jul 04th, 2025Camelot, a lesser work by Lerner & Loewe with its utopian vision of a medieval kingdom, came to signify the youthful and energetic presidency of John F. Kennedy. It has been revised by Alan Paul and Barrington Stage Company as contrast to the current evil empire and faint hope that a better America has been and will be again.
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Vincent Valdez at MASS MoCA
Contemporary Social Realism
By: - Jul 06th, 2025A second generation Mexican American, Victor Valdez, was a prodigy who with a mentor was painting public murals at the age of 10. Now at mid career the remarkable artists is the subject of a riveting retrospective at MASS MoCA. It features a 30' panorama of hooded Ku Klux Klan members.
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The Last Goat
Central Works' Premiere About Isolation and Desire
By: - Jul 03rd, 2025On a desolate Greek island in the Bronze Age, only an older woman and her granddaughter remain. An exhausted, disheveled young man appears, claiming to have been shipwrecked. His presence prompts revelations, creates new dynamics, and imposes new decisions to be made.
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Jacob's Pillow Week Four
Doris Duke Theatre Repoens
By: - Jul 03rd, 2025Jacob’s Pillow welcomes Andrew Schneider and collaborators to present the world premiere of HERE in the Doris Duke Theatre from July 16-20, marking the first week-long performance run in the newly-opened venue, and the first time since 2019 that the summer dance festival has presented works in all three venues on its iconic site in the Berkshires.
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Aztlán
An Intriguing World Premiere of Luis Alfaro's Latest at Magic Theatre
By: - Jul 02nd, 2025A still young Aztlán has been released from nine years in prison but must deal with a sadistic parole officer who makes it difficult to meet parole requirements and a landlord who tries to take advantage of his vulnerability. Having been diagnosed as violent even as a pre-teen, this environment is hardly conducive to rehabilitation. Against this personal story is overlaid the myth and spirit of the Aztec empire.
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About Time by Maltby and Shire
At Goodspeed
By: - Jul 05th, 2025About Time, the new Maltby and Shire revue that recently completed a run at About Time, the new Maltby and Shire seems inevitable, given that the pair previously composed the revues Starting Here, Starting Now (1976) and Closer Than Ever (1989).While Starting Here’s songs dealt with starting out in a big city and finding romance, Closer Than Ever’s songs dealt with subjects related to mid-life.
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Shakespeare & Company Gala 2025
Honoring Annette Miller and John Douglas Thompson
By: - Jun 30th, 2025Gala 25 of Shakespeare & Company honored alumni of its Center for Acting Training, Annette Miller and John Douglas Thompson. Both are distinguished “lifers” who have been with the company for more than 20 years.
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The Center Will Not Hold: A Dorrance Dance Production
Launches 2025 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Season
By: - Jun 28th, 2025The 2025 Jacob’s Pillow season was launched in the Ted Shawn Theatre by a Festival favorite the Dorrance Dance company. Although the signature tap dance of Michelle Dorrance was an element, the evening long performance “The Center Will Not Hold” was unlike anything previously presented by the company.
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Americans in Paris 1970s
Dishwasher Dialogues
By: - Jun 29th, 2025Chez Haynes had a counterpoint, of sorts, in the American Center in Paris. Not only by virtue of it hosting jazz concerts in its heyday a decade earlier, but also because of its focus on experimental theatre, dance, and poetry and its welcoming of young writers and performers. The Center was down on my side of Paris, 261 Boulevard Raspail, not far from the Tour Montparnasse; back then a brand-new monolithic beast (which ended up saving Paris from further skyscraper assault).
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Legacy of Three Architects
Robert Campbell, Ricardo Scofidi and Graham Gund
By: - Jun 23rd, 2025Over the past few months, three notable architects have passed, and they left our shared built environment an impressive inheritance. Interestingly, each of their bequests may differ from what might be expected based on an initial look at their professional careers.
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An Uncarved Block
Awareness of Being
By: - Jun 24th, 2025The pure awareness of being. You leave yourself behind, and become part of the whole of creation; leaving your ego behind, you simply are. Nothing to strive for, nothing to become, there is only presence. You simply are. No longer trapped in your mind, you can observe your thoughts, emotions and reactions without being swept away by them. You are not your thoughts, you are the observer of them.
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Berkshire Festival Opera to Produce La Traviata
Exciting Programs in Berkshires' Backyard
By: - Jun 26th, 2025The Berkshire Opera Festival has restored world-class, fully-staged opera to the Berkshires. Their tenth anniversary season in Great Barrington features Giuseppe Verdi's masterpiece La Traviata at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center on August 23, 26, and 29.