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Broadway and cabaret star Carol Elaine Channing passed away today at the remarkable age of 97. She originated the iconic lead on the 1964 production of Jerry Herman's Hello,Dolly! It earned her a Tony award for which she was nominated three other times. She was still glamorous and forever young, but pushing 60, when I saw her in the late 1970s at Boston's jazz and cabaret club Lulu White's. That spectacular night evokes many fond memories.

From 1968 to 2000, first on WBCN and then for the last five years with WZLX, Charles Laquidara was one of the most beloved, outspoken, and controversial DJ’s during a golden era of counter culture in Boston. At his prime he was one of America's most influential, top rated DJ's. We dicussed his unique career during two lengthy calls to his home in Maui.

An uneven South Florida mounting of Romeo and Juliet needs more energy. The Bard's poetry mostly fails to land in Florida Shakespeare Theatre's production. Miami-area based troupe finds the humanity of the characters in Shakespeare's tragedy of star-crossed lovers.

Audience response to The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, a new entertaining, witty and historically incisive play was unusually enthusiastic. Ismael Reed's work was still in street clothes with scripts in hand. The actors, despite the trappings, delivered their lines with pathos and conviction, and Reed's vision shown through the bare-bones milieu.

Death hangs over the exuberant music/drama The Infinite Hotel. Jib sings of the pain of loss from beginning to end. Her music is lifeful, as is the music of Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley who gave new work to this production.

An older man decides he will read Marcel Proust’s iconic novel. As he reads all six volumes over the course of a year, he responds to Proust and reflects on his own life. And his audience may gain insights into their own too.That’s the sum total of an engaging solo production titled Charlie Johnson Reads All of Proust, now on stage at Chicago's Den Theatre

Ellen Reid has an unusual knack for drawing the colors of emotion from an orchestral ensemble and the human voice. Aware of this talent, the composer chooses to present a story with an emotional rather than a narrative arc. The rolling premiere of her new opera, Prism, is presented at LaMama in New York.

The Prototype Festival rolls on with a big production at Irondale, a Brooklyn venue which offers a large space and unusual opportunities for audience viewing. The Infinite Hotel by Michael Joseph McQuilken is having its world premiere. This is a rollicking, joyful and often touching production. It is full of surprises.

Caleb Teicher is no stranger to Jacob's Pillow. This summer he will perform More Forever, which had its world premiere at the Guggenheim Museum in New York this weekend. It is a glorious piece developed in collaboration with pianist, composer and actor Conrad Tao.

Festival stresses regional theater's importance in developing plays. Audiences learn they become "artists" during the process. Palm Beach Dramaworks' New Year/New Plays Festival launches with panel, staged readings.

A mysterious figure hidden in a huge poke bonnet parades onto the rear of the Mainstage Theater at HERE. She is trailed by figures bearing jeans, an icon of the American West. These are dropped to form a trail, like Hansel and Gretel's candies, leading to the pioneer, Leah Coloff's, seat on stage. Coloff with Ellie Heyman has created a lament modeled on a traditional cowboy ballad.

Phil and Chris Rose and their five siblings and extended family run and manage this rare family estate in the Marlborough region of the South Island of New Zealand. Besides bottling amazing wines, the winery is hailed as a mecca for local foods, all served in their Cellar Door restaurant. The food was so exquisite that a recipe is included in this article.

On Friday, January 11 at 10 AM the Berkshires will be going to pot big time. That's when the legal, recreational pot shop Theory Wellness opens for business in Great Barrington.

I discovered Brecht many decades ago, when I was just becoming a theater lover. I’m not sure I had ever heard of Bertolt Brecht when I saw what has become one of my favorite plays—The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui—at the renowned Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. It was 1968 (I had to look that up), one of the first years of the Guthrie’s existence.

4:48 Psychosis, an opera by Philip Venables, had its North American premier as part of the Prototype Festival in New York. It feels like exploding moments of Ophelia’s descent into madness. Based on a play by Sarah Kane, and often called her suicide note, musical moments of both beauty and anguish depict emotions leading to death by hanging.

Despite some apparent opening night issues, Main Street Players delivers a well-done production of Superior Donuts. Tracy Letts' play is sweet, but also has some meat to it. Superior Donuts was a finalist for the 2009 2009 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA (American Theatre Critics Association) New Play Award.

For those that loved Clueless, the 1995 cult movie starring Alicia Silverstone and Paul Rudd, watched the TV series (1996-99) based on the film, and perhaps read all twenty-one of the Cher young adult books, well, Clueless is back on stage, Off Broadway.

Adriana Lecouvreur was brought to New York most recently in a Carnegie Hall concert by Eve Queller’s Opera Orchestra of New York. Angela Gheorghiu came to sing the diva role and was delicious, both touching and full of haughty allure. When Anna Netrebko expressed interest in the Adriana role, The Metropolitan Opera joined with five partners and hired the stalwart Sir David McVicar to produce.

Saxophonist & composer Lucas Pino has released a title that even in the creative jazz world needs some explanation. “That’s a Computer,” released in the fall of 2018 with his 10-piece jazz band No Net Nonet, takes its title from a comment made by one of Pino’s’ professors at the Julliard School.

During a 1972 week in Copenhagen I had an aquavit infused, acid trip lunch with bop, tenor sax player, Dexter Gordon. He had lived in Europe for a decade and was relatively unknown in the States. Four years later he returned with a well staged comeback. He signed with Columbia, was featured in major festivals, and toured relentlessly. He performed an Oscar nominated role as the lead of the 1986 film “Round Midnight” by French director, Bertrand Travernier. The publication of “Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Times of Dexter Gordon” (University of California Press, 2018) by his wife Maxine Gordon jogged memories of close encounters with a consummate hipster.

This is list is based on shows I saw in 2018 – they may have opened officially in December 2017 and some current shows I’m not seeing until January. (Specifically Ferryman and To Kill a Mockingbird).

A Time for Hawking is a brisk-moving, well-explicated educational primer in the form of an involving comedy/drama. The playwright, Bruce Coughran, who also directs, has selected three contrasting characters whose real lives would intersect in significant ways. He has deftly integrated a panoply of scientific and philosophical milestones into their conversation.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is celebrating its 60th Anniversary. An improbable start at the same time the civil rights movement was heating up has led to the company's pre-eminent position in dance. Audiences are of all hues and all ages. This year has concluded at their City Center home in New York.

Hairy Who? 1966-1969 at Art Institute of Chicago features the work of Jim Falconer (b. 1943), Art Green (b. 1941), Gladys Nilsson (b. 1940), Jim Nutt (b. 1938), Suellen Rocca (b. 1943), and Karl Wirsum (b. 1939). The exhibit, displayed in two different gallery areas, celebrates the 50th anniversary of their final exhibit in Chicago.

In flagrant violation of the will of Isabella Stewart Gardner the museum's greatest masterpiece Titian's "The Rape of Europa" has been cleaned for the first time and is about to be loaned for up to two years. She stipulated that “[I]f [the trustees] shall at any time change the general disposition or arrangement of any articles which shall have been placed in the first, second and third stories of said Museum at my death,” then the entire collection, the museum building and property would be given to Harvard University to be sold.