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L. Frank Baum’s beloved “The Wizard of Oz” has become an American touchstone and introduced a bevy of memes and tropes that define our narrative.  While it is easy to sit back and enjoy it as an entertaining pastime, in its richness, it is also a fable of the American spirit.  Dorothy, despite being young and female, represents the prototypical hero on an odyssey, a quest to find her way home after defeating the odds, aided by trusty sidekicks she has met along the way.  Together, using brains and hearts and courage, they conquer fears and earn their way to becoming what they had aspired to be.

The Clark Art Institute debuts a five-part outdoor concert series this summer. The Clark presents Hermanos Gutiérrez on June 28, Joe Henry on July 5, Makaya McCraven on July 12, Darlingside on July 19, and Kathleen Edwards on August 8. All performances are free and take place at 6 pm near the Reflecting Pool.

You may recall the 1981 movie that starred Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn with Jane Fonda playing the daughter. The 1979 play by Ernest Thompson (he also wrote the screenplay) can be sentimental and predictable. But with Naughton and Dillon in the leads, you will be willing to suspend your critical judgment about the play.

“Madame Butterfly” integrates the best of the earlier "La Boheme" and "Tosca" and overlays pentatonic scale Japanese folk melodies to add a whole new dimension to the score. The popularity of this beautiful and exotic wonder should be no surprise. San Francisco Opera’s wonderous creative and visually striking production is led by four powerful singers - Karah Son, Michael Fabiano, Hyona Kim, and Lucas Meachem.

A freak June storm, an ever-more-common aberration in these times of climate change-induced storms, befell the northern Berkshires last week.  It offered five inches of rain, and an hour’s worth of half-inch hail that left the ground looking as though it had snowed.  The results were devastating to the meditation garden I have been building for 4 years.

 A charming throwback, or, The High School Musical version,  of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at Deutsch Oper, Berlin

About 200 hardy souls braved a damp and chilly Sunday at Shakespere & Company in support of a fundraising event for Berkshire Immigrant Center. In every sense it was a wicked cool event.

Alfred Uhry’s musical Parade, co-conceived by Hal Prince with music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown, is now playing to sell-out crowds and rave reviews, and back on Broadway after 25 years (for a limited run through Sunday, August 6) at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre in New York City.

"Soul Doctor," a film about the unlikely relationship between an Orthodox rabbi and a musical/Civil Rights icon, will be shown at movie theaters nationwide on Tuesday, June 13. Nina Simone introduced Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach to Soul and Gospel music, which influenced the kind of Jewish music that he composed. Taping of the film took place in Israel five years after the original Broadway production of Soul Doctor opened in New York in 2008.

 Celebrated for creating diverse, timely and relevant opera, activist opera company White Snake Projects (WSP) and its founder Cerise Lim Jacobs today announced its 2023-24 season comprising all original operatic works including two fully-staged operas, a quartet of holiday operas as part of its annual Let’s Celebrate! series, and two WSP’s community engagement showcases: Sing Out Strong and Show Out Boston!

Pablo Picasso was the most famous and influential artist of the 20th Century. The marking of fifty years from his death has created numerous global exhibitions. Critics have waded in with evaluations that acknowledge the work but deplore the man. Simply put it begs the question. Was Pablo Picasso and asshole?

In 1944, African-American military units were always commanded by white officers, with black non-coms, and enlisted men, reflecting the plantation structure that preceded it by a century and more.  This organization represents the natural order to Captain Charles Taylor, a West Point grad, who happily manages and cajoles a platoon comprised of talented black baseball players who will get to play the Yankees if they continue to win all of their games.  To this day, a common condition persists, that racists like Taylor often carve out exceptions to allow minority peoples to reflect glory on their white overlords.

Gallery NAGA’s 46th season concludes with an exhibition by two mid-career painters working in exuberant colors and venturesome compositions. Rick Fox: From Feral Footing and Masako Kamiya: Kaleidoscope are both on exhibition from June 9 through July 14. 

Master of Puppets suffers from problems that afflict many new works. It doesn’t know what it wants to be or what it wants to say.  Is it a comedy? Satire? A thriller? It tries to be all of these, which results in uneven shifts in tone.

This summer, the Harvard Art Museums present over 100 years of dazzling and imaginative artistry through the medium of watercolor. American Watercolors, 1880–1990: Into the Light showcases more than 100 watercolors by over 50 well-known and historically underrepresented artists selected from the museums’ deep and diverse holdings—a rare opportunity because of the light-sensitive nature of these works.

About 2,500 years ago, the Acropolis of Athens was filled with statues of young women, called korai. Raised on high bases, these dedicated offerings created a forest of shimmering marble women honoring the goddess Athena. One of the finest examples of these objects, known as Kore 670, which rarely leaves the Acropolis Museum, has traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), where it is on view through January 8, 2024.

Curtis Stewart is a man for all seasons.  He took over Merkin Hall at the Kaufman Center this week. When you hear him, you know that Nietzsche was right: without music, life would be a mistake.

Jack Torrance, an unstable recovering alcoholic and unsuccessful writer, hires on as caretaker of the Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies during its off-season. He hopes that the seclusion will not only give him undistracted time for writing but also allow him to rebuild his relationships with his wife, Wendy, and son, Danny. What the parents don’t realize is that Danny possesses “the shining,” which is the psychic ability of clairvoyance. This attribute will allow the boy to see the hotel’s sordid past and set the stage for the horrors to come.

A longtime Pillow favorite, Mark Morris Dance Group will bring audiences The Look of Love, an homage to the music of the late Burt Bacharach, which had its world premiere in 2022 and which Fjord Review called “a breath of fresh, brilliant, joyous—and much needed—air.” A towering figure of popular music, Bacharach is known for his soaring melodies and unique orchestrations influenced by jazz, rock, and Brazilian music.

The new Flying Dutchman at the Metropolitan Opera transports.  Grounded shortly after its debut as the pandemic erupted in March of 2020, the cast has changed. Like many of the Met's new productions, singing is excellent across the board and gives great pleasure.

The show is based on the novel of the same name by Frances Hodgson Burnett, which was turned into a fine film in 1993 and a more recent film in 2020. The young adult book, as it would now be described, was written in 1911.

Barrington Stage Company presents another world premiere by Mark St Germain on the stage that bears his name. The Happiest Man on Earth is a one-man show based on the holocaust memoir The Happiest Man on Earth published by Eddie Jaku when he was one hundred years old. It is profoundly performed by Kenneth Tigar.

An example of Department of Play’s approach was recently on display at Northeastern University’s Gallery 360’s exhibition At Play. The collective views its mission as fostering group discovery and involvement in the thoughtful (playful?) envisioning of an evolving urban environment.

Lately I've been writing little metaphysical screenplays for dolls, dogs and humans. My friend Roy Rallo - with whom I work in opera - has been shooting them with my help.

Whenever it's on the menu I generally order osso bucco. I have enjoyed it from Palm Beach to Bologna. Even made it from time to time at home. The version at Frankie's in Lenox was among the best ever