Front Page
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Joshua Bell and Steven Isserlis Mostly Mozart
Reconciliation, Restitution and Reformation
By: - Aug 08th, 2017This concert at Mostly Mozart was billed as a musical offering from Brahms, Bach and Mendelssohn. It seemed a stretch to hear these works without the centerpiece composer featured, except as an artist who liked to spell Bach's name in notes. The spirit was Mozartian, full of joy and inviting melodies, Featuring Joshua Bell and Steven Isserlis as soloists, who brought Schumann to the table in the slow movement of his violin concerto, it was a rich evening of music. A delightful offering.
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Remembering Barbara Cook
Iconic Broadway and Cabaret Singer at 89
By: - Aug 08th, 2017Broadway and cabaret artist Barbara Cook was 80 wehen we first saw her perform at Ozawa Hall and several times after that. In Indiana we enjoyed a concert wth Michael Feistein and an interview for critics that followed. We have compiled a collage from those reviews.
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Hair in Chicago
Revisiting the Age of Aquarius
By: - Aug 08th, 2017A half century later in the spirit of the Summer of Love there is a revival of Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical. Two and a half generations of later it still casts magical spells. Nancy Bishop takes on a trip down memory lane.
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Emergence of St. Francis Gallery in Lee
Art With A Cause
By: - Aug 08th, 2017St. Francis Gallery, once a church, hosts a gallery opening and artists reception this weekend in Lee, Massachusetts from 3-6pm on Saturday, August 12th
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A Dog Day Afternoon at Tanglewood
Yo-Yo Ma's Missing Dog Appeal Steals The Show
By: - Aug 08th, 2017Imagine nearly 14,000 attendees of the long awaited, Yo-Yo Ma concert of Schumann's 'Cello Concerto in A minor, Opus 129, in awe after the concert artist shuns the audience's applause, with an appeal for a concerted effort to help find Maestro David Zinman's lost puppy.
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Hannah and the Dread Gazebo by Jiehae Park
Oregon Shakespeare Festival
By: - Aug 08th, 2017Jiehae Park’s innovative and fast moving world premiere play, Hannah and the Dread Gazebo, touches on a dizzying number of themes including familial relationships, aspirations, wishes, creation mythology, international relations, cross-culturalism, and even a humorous twist on racism.
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Informed Consent in South Florida
Play Pitting Science vs. Religion in Coral Gables
By: - Aug 08th, 2017Issue-packed, yet taut play receives strong production at suburban Miami's GableStage. Informed Consent is unsettling, but is leavened with humor and optimism. Playwright Deborah Zoe Laufer directs a talented quintent of performers in a riveting production of her play.
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This by Melissa James Gibson
Theatrical Thirty-Something Sitcom at Barrington Stage
By: - Aug 07th, 2017Moving on from an endemic fixations with plays about milennials Barrington Stage has progressed by a generation with This by Melissa James Gibson. The focus is on the trials and tribulations of friends who met in college. Add to this a dark and sexy stranger in a French doctor without borders,
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JACK Quartet at the Whitney Museum
Accompanying Alexander Calder
By: - Aug 06th, 2017Members of the JACK Quartet are scattered across the eighth floor exhibit space at the Whitney Museum in which many Alexander Calder mobiles hang and stand. In the center of the room on the south wall, cellist Jay Campbell and violinist Austin Wulliman are conventionally seated with their music stands before them. They do not seem to notice violinist Christopher Otto who stands at the east entrance, only a music stand dividing him from a roaming, and finally seated and standing-still audience. At another entrance Jay Pickford Richards, violist, is completely in his own world, oblivious to in your face cameras, and the wandering audience. John Cage wrote the Quartet they will perform, not for a quartet, but for four soloists.
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A Legendary Romance in Williamstown
Music and Lyrics, Geoff Morrow, Book, Timothy Prager
By: - Aug 06th, 2017This is the second producton of the musical A Legendary Romance with music and lyrics, Geoff Morrow, book by Timothy Prager. While it needs more work, the norm for musicals, starring Jeff McCarthy and Lora Lee Gayer it is the best work we have seen this season from Wiliamstown Theatre Festival. It is a tragic love story set to music about lives and careers ruined during the 1950s when Holywood was on trial for its alleged communism.
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Henry IV, Part One
Oregon Shakespeare Festival
By: - Aug 06th, 2017Director Lilean Blais-Cruz does well with limited resources. Actors extract whatever drama and humor that the words allow. Lighting and sound achieve expected OSF standards. This production plays in the round and with a minimum of staging – the fixed portion being a number of vertical white pipes with light wands attached to a maze of pipes above.
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Off the Rails by Randy Reinholz
Oregon Shakespeare Festival Reconfigures Measure for Measure
By: - Aug 06th, 2017This play is both entertaining and rich with messages. It deserves to be seen. At the same time, the playwright tries to accomplish a great deal, perhaps at the expense of cohesion. The tone changes often as dialogue alternates between Shakespearean tracts taken directly from the source and the naturalistic speech of the Old West.
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Rockwell Family Opposes Berkshire Museum Sale
Game Changer and Time to Rethink the Reboot
By: - Aug 05th, 2017When Laurie Norton Moffett, director of the Norman Rockwell Museum, in a Berkshire Eagle op-ed piece asked the Berkshire Museum to "pause" in its plan to sell 40 works the story broke as national news. In daily coverage since then the pro and con has rocked back and forth. I seemed like game over when Joe Thompson, director of MASS MoCA, endorsed the sale and radical plans urging readers to "get real." Then lawyers waded in questioning that the works may or may not be "unrestricted." The controversy went into extra innings when the Rockwell family, in an Eagle letter, stated that the artist never intended for his works to be sold as a last ditch bailout for the poorly managed and curatorially aenemic museum.
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Trident Gallery Update
From Sphere to Edge in Late Summer
By: - Aug 04th, 2017There is always something provocatice going on at Gloucester's Trident Gallery. The arts are the visible cloak of the bonds -- both empowering and restricting -- of community and heritage. The cloak of the arts reveals the shape of the present, bears the patterns and must of the past, and declares ourselves on our journey into the future.
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Berkshire Theatre Group's Fall Programming
Pulitzer and Tony Winner David Auburn's Lost Lake at the Unicorn
By: - Aug 04th, 2017Berkshire Theatre Group announces additions to the fall and winter seasons, as well as casting for the Fall production of David Auburn’s Lost Lake at The Unicorn Theatre. Therde wlll also be a number of unique musical events at its Colonial Theatre in downtiown Pittsfield.
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Gloucester Poems: Nugents of Rockport
Charles Giuliano Reading at Gloucester Writers Center
By: - Aug 03rd, 2017On Wednesday, August 23, there will be a reading and book launch of Gloucester Poems; Nugents of Rockport by Charles Giuliano at the Gloucester Writer’s Center, 123 East Main Street, at 7 PM. The event will be shared with poet Geoffrey Movius. They grew up together in Annisquam. That experience and inspiration will be a part of the event.
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Mostly Mozart at Lincoln Center
Mozart Embraces Lully and Lang
By: - Aug 02nd, 2017Percussion was the theme of the Mostly Mozart concert featuring also David Lang. Mozart used kettle drums to underiine a point. In his comic opera, Abduction from the Seraglio, he also used triangle, cymbals and a bass drum to suggest the exotic Turkish locale. Jean-Baptiste Lully added percussion for the elevation of a Molière character to noble man. It was an inspired selection of music to surround David Lang's "man made" created to show how elemental percussion instruments are heard by their fancier orchestral counterparts.
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Tanglewood on Parade
Popular Annual Event
By: - Aug 02nd, 2017Indeed it was a long evening ending around 11 PM with the tradition arsenal of fireworks accompanying the climax ith a massive performance of Tchaikovsky’s energizing 1812 Overture. It evoked Moscow’s triumphant church bells and the thunderous boom of Napoleon’s captured canons.
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Berkshire Museum Stonewalls Critics
Hires Costly PR to Spin Its Reboot
By: - Aug 02nd, 2017When ethical concerns and second guessing of its "reboot" plans surfaced the Berkshire Museum has spent money it doesn't have for expensive PR and marketing. Heavy hitters have been hired to deflect tough questions from the media and flack the museum's strategy to sell 40 works of art and change its mandate.
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Ballet Hispanico at Jacob's Pillow
From Indigenous to Mainstream
By: - Aug 01st, 2017In 1970 the Venezuelan dancer and educator, Tina Ramirez, founded the community based Ballet Hispanico. Under her administration the company commisioned 70 plus works. We saw one of them Palladium at MASS MoCA in October 2006, co sponsored by Jacob's Pillow Dance. This past week the company performed at Pillow in a program created by artistic director Eduardo Vilaro who followed Ramirez in 2009.
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Footloose the Musical in Fremont. California
Starstruck Youth Performing Arts
By: - Aug 01st, 2017"Footloose the Musical" is based on a film that was part of a strong cluster of movies that in some ways was a gentle echo of the youthful rebellion of the '60s. Hollywood struck a rich vein of teen and young adult musical films in the decade starting 1978. Some were based on earlier stage musicals, and others would later become live theater pieces. Starstruck Youth Performing Arts has selected a perfect vehicle for a large teen cast.
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Bad Jews in Miami Lakes
Main Street Players Stages Joshua Harmon Dramedy
By: - Jul 31st, 2017Bad Jews is a biting comedy/drama at South Florida theater. Joshua Harmon play marks Main Street Players' third professional production. Company excels in an intense, funny production.
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Arsenic and Old Lace by Joseph Kesselring
Making Family Insanity Hilarious in Stockbridge
By: - Jul 31st, 2017This is a classic comedy that still entertains with a spectacular cast and great timing! Arsenic and Old Lace ran for three years on Broadway starting in 1941 and still holds up. There is a lively production on Stage at Bekshire Theatre Group in Stockbridge.
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Dimitrij by Dvorak at Bard's SummerScape
Leon Botstein Conduts an Underdog Opera
By: - Jul 31st, 2017Leon Botstein, a great American educator and music polymath, makes the case for underexposed compositions by known and unknown composers. This year, he presents Anton Dvo?ák's Dimitrij as a feature of the Bard SummerScape Festival.
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Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow
Feiffer Deconstructs Chekhov in Williamstown
By: - Jul 30th, 2017Over 62 years of Williamstown Theatre Festival there have been 18 productions of the four best known plays by Anton Chekov; The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, the Seagull and Three Sisters. There have been five prior versions of Three Sisters and this season we have yet another. Well, not exactly.
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