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  • Bridget Kibbey and Friends at Merkin Hall

    WQXR's Terrance McKnight Hosts

    By: Susan Hall - Mar 07th, 2019

    Bridget Kibbey is a superb musician on her instrument of choice, the harp. She was joined by two friends on violin and flute/recorder to perform J.S. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, Orlando de Lassus and Tarquinio Merula in Merkin Hall at the Kaufman Center in New York. The event was hosted by Terrance McKnight of WQXR.

  • Boston Rock Archivist David Bieber

    Collection of 600,000 Objects

    By: Charles Giuliano - Mar 07th, 2019

    The vast archive of some 600,000 objects was a primary source for the Bill Lichtenstein film WBCN: The American Revolution. When in college David Bieber became a campus correspondent for Billboard Magazine. In graduate school at Boston University he wrote a thesis on the impact of WBCN and the growing counterculture media on changing the mainstream of Top 40 radio and the straight press. He became music director of WBUR and went on to work for WBCN and the Boston Phoenix. He provides an insightful overview of an era of social and poltical change for the vast college/ youth market in Boston.

  • Al Perry Talks About WBCN

    Former Station Manager

    By: Charles Giuliano - Mar 05th, 2019

    While many during the Golden Age of WBCN had their heads in the clouds former station manager, Al Perry, had his feet on the ground. Somebody had to stay straight and pay the bills. He is a talking head in Bill Lichtenstein's documentary film WBCN: The American Revolution.

  • Christie and Les Arts Florissants at BAM

    Jean-Philipppe Rameau Delights

    By: Susan Hall - Mar 04th, 2019

    William Christie and his Arts Florissant created two dance/opera entertainments by Jean-Philippe Rameau at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As usual, this group sells out in New York and it is easy to see why. Christie conducts with poise and precision. He enlists a first rate ensemble of musicians to perform period music. To this is added stylized dance and gorgeous operatic voices. In the second one act dance/opera, La Naissance d'Osiris, we saw and heard a divertissement of dances, the gavotte, sarabande and minuet among them.

  • WBCN and the American Revolution

    Bill Lichtenstein Discusses His Documentary Film

    By: Charles Giuliano - Mar 03rd, 2019

    On March 7 the documentary film WBCN and the American Revolution will have a sneak preview at the DC Film Festival. On March 9, 12 and 13 there will be screenings at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose. A world premiere is being planned for Boston in April. The day after wrapping the film Bill Lichtenstein discussed the project which started in 2006. The story of WBCN is set against events from the launch of the radical FM station in 1968 to developments surrounding the resignation of Richard Nixon seven years later.

  • Equity Tour Of Waitress

    Production Makes Stop in South Florida

    By: Aaron Krause - Mar 01st, 2019

    The national touring production of Waitress achieves mixed results. Lyrics were sometimes hard to hear during a performance at Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center . In the #MeToo era, Waitress should resonate with many. The musical adaptation of the 2007 Indie film contains heart, humor and humanity.

  • York Theatre Company's Musicals in Mufti

    Restaging Interesting and Worthy Flops

    By: Karen Isaacs - Mar 01st, 2019

    For 25 years, the York Theatre Company annually has done their “Musicals in Mufti” series featuring little know musicals, flops and those that closed out of town: Minimal sets/props/lighting, a small combo or just a piano, cast with script in hand and in their own clothes

  • Bauhaus in Chicago

    100 Years Celebrated at Elmhurst Art Museum

    By: Nancy Bishop - Mar 01st, 2019

    The Whole World a Bauhaus, the 100th anniversary exhibit of Bauhaus work, is now on display at the Elmhurst Art Museum. There are national and global Bauhaus exhibitions. This one is on view in Chicago.

  • Falstaff at the Met

    Verdi's Final Work

    By: Paul J. Pelkonen - Feb 28th, 2019

    "It's not going to be my favorite Verdi opera." This, from an attendee on the 1 train riding away from Lincoln Center after the Metropolitan Opera's Wednesday night performance of Falstaff, efficiently sums up the attitude of audiences toward the composer's final opera--and his only successful attempt at writing comedy. Falstaff is a masterwork, but one held in high regard not for its considerable qualities but for its place as Verdi's last musical utterance. On Wednesday night under the baton of Robert Carnes, the opera received a performance that just might change that gentleman's opinion.

  • Theater for the New City's Catapult!

    A Pithy Comedy by Matthew James Fitzgerald

    By: Rachel de Aragon - Feb 27th, 2019

    If you have ever walked into an art gallery and wondered why, or what, or whether about any particular piece – or the venue as a whole, be prepared to laugh! Fitzgerald's rapid-fire dialog and a versatile and well-cast cast make this visit to the gallery worthwhile. Mark Marcante, Mathew Thomas Burda, David Jones, Lytza Colon Kanako Nagayama and Quinn Therrault have set the scene; the stage becomes a most credible Gallery Zuzu replete with works of art. Director, Tony White knows his subject well. His characters walk out of the art gallery scene like pieces in the exhibition

  • New City Players A Raisin In The Sun'

    Lorraine Hansberry Classic In South Florida

    By: Aaron Krause - Feb 25th, 2019

    Director finds mounting the "monster" play A Raisin in the Sun a huge challenge. Mary Elizabeth Gundlach relies on cast members to help her direct them. Ft. Lauderdale-based New City Players is presenting the complex, layered play through March 10.

  • Race In Miami Lakes

    David Mamet's Scorching Play By Main Street Players

    By: Aaron Krause - Feb 25th, 2019

    David Mamet's Race ratchets up the heat in South Florida. A superb cast disappears into their roles in a production that immediately communicates the racial tension in this country. Miami Lakes-based Main Street Players continues to produce quality work as a professional company.

  • Wadada Leo Smith’s latest CD

    Rosa Parks: Pure Love. An Oratorio of Seven Songs

    By: Doug Hall - Feb 24th, 2019

    On his highly acclaimed and awarded release, America’s National Park (2017, Cuneiform Records), Leo Smith won DownBeat Magazine’s Best Album of the Year, 2017. It also earned DB’s Annual Critics Poll in 2017 for best artist and trumpeter.

  • Twilight Bowl by Rebecca Gilman

    World Premiere at Goodman Theatre

    By: Nancy Bishop - Feb 24th, 2019

    The play is Twilight Bowl by Rebecca Gilman, in a world premiere at Goodman Theatre, directed by Erica Weiss with an all-female cast and crew. Bowling is a backdrop throughout—the sport is a symbol of the working class life these young women dream of escaping or are complacent about.

  • Tacos Ring the Bell

    Route 20 Out of Pittsfield

    By: Charles Giuliano - Feb 24th, 2019

    Meeting on a Saturday afteroon in the dead of winter the agenda was a wine stating at Spirited in Lenox. First lunch at a new taco joint just up the road from Pittsfield.

  • Irish Repertory Theatre Celebrates O'Casey

    Shadow of a Gunman

    By: Susan Hall - Feb 24th, 2019

    The Irish Repertory Theatre captures the quotidian of life in Dublin, 1920 as it plays out in Sean O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman. We sit in the extension of a room in a tenement which a poet and a suspender salesman share. Above us, laundry hangs from a window. Charlie Corcoran’s set brings us completely into a day-in-the-life of a wouldn’t-be gunman.

  • BMP's Next Generation at National Sawdust

    Composers Michael Lanci and Emma O'Halloran

    By: Susan Hall - Feb 21st, 2019

    National Sawdust, a leading venue for new music, mounted the work of two finalists in the BMP Next Generation Competition, Michael Lanci and Emma O'Halloran. Last March, their compositions were selected from a field of ten, winnowed down from 75 applications.

  • A New Work by Yale Drama Graduate Karen Hartman

    Good Faith – Four Chats about Race and the New Haven Fire Department

    By: Karen Isaacs - Feb 21st, 2019

    Good Faith – Four Chats about Race and the New Haven Fire Department now having its world premiere at Yale Rep through Saturday, Feb. 23 fits into the category of documentary theater. It is also referred to as theater of witness or theater of fact. This form combines elements of documentary – reliance of interviews, documents and media reports of an event.

  • Brian Coleman’s Buy Me Boston

    A Picture Book of Local Ads and Flyers

    By: Charles Giuliano - Feb 20th, 2019

    Brian Coleman has published several successful books on hip-hop. The latest of which is a picture book “Buy Me Boston: Local Ads and Flyers, 1960s – 1980s, Volume 1.” It is compiled from thousands of scans of pages of vintage publications.

  • Violet the Musical in San Francisco

    Book and Lyrics by Brian Crawley and Music by Jeanine Tesori

    By: Victor Cordell - Feb 20th, 2019

    The year is 1964. Violet, a young woman with suitcase in hand, is about to board a Greyhound bus to leave her hometown of Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Her destination – Tulsa, Oklahoma. Bay Area Musicals offers a lively and well-staged representation of a journey that changes its central figure in unexpected ways.

  • Victoria Bond at the Cutting Edge

    Barnes, Glass, and Enchants

    By: Susan Hall - Feb 19th, 2019

    The program at Cutting Edge Concerts at Symphony Space opened with a delightful bird romp by Maria Newman. Hal Ott on the flute, Scott Hosfeld on viola and the composer on the violin created pictures of four different birds. Olivier Messiaen recorded birds in their native habitats, focusing on their identifying songs. Newman widens the frame to include pictures of the birds' movements and suggests purpose, like the melancholy watchfulness of a snowy owl and the ravenous detection of prey for the falcon.

  • Salonen Conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra

    Strauss and Bartok Featured

    By: Paul J. Pelkonen - Feb 19th, 2019

    In recent seasons, Esa-Pekka Salonen has shifted his emphasis from conducting to his first love, composition. However, Friday’s matinee program at the Philadelphia Orchestra at Verizon Hall featured none of Salonen’s own catalogue. Rather, the composer led a program consisting of workers by Béla Bartók and Richard Strauss, two very different composers who are each in their own way, touchstones of the twentieth century.

  • Fulfillment Center by Abe Koogler

    A Red Orchid Theatre Production

    By: Nancy Bishop - Feb 19th, 2019

    Abe Koogler’s play, Fulfillment Center, is the story of four working people (two of them educated ex-New Yorkers) trying to get by in a mid-size New Mexico city. Jess McLeod smoothly directs an excellent cast of four.

  • Indecent In South Florida

    GableStage Production Of Popular Paula Vogel Play

    By: Aaron Krause - Feb 18th, 2019

    Coral Gables theater company presents robust production of play about a controversial 1920s Yiddish work. Indecent tracks the path of The God of Vengeance' success across Europe, until its shut down on Broadway. Music, dance and dialogue combine to celebrate Yiddish language and theater while exploring a dark period in theater history.

  • I Due Foscari by Verdi

    Produced by West Bay Opera

    By: Victor Cordell - Feb 18th, 2019

    Like much early Verdi, I Due Foscari lacks the memorable arias and ensembles that appear on compilation recordings. However, it may be that we just haven’t heard these enough to become familiar with them.

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