Jacob’s Pillow will offer two weekends of free Pillow Pop-Up performances in Berkshire County during the last weekend in July and first weekend in August. Performances will happen on a uniquely designed portable stage and feature local performers, as well as the all-female intergenerational Ladies of Hip-Hop Dance Collective (July 31 – Aug. 1) known for illuminating the strength, power, and diversity of women in hip-hop, and Philadelphia-based Kulu Mele African Dance & Drum Ensemble (Aug. 7-8), dedicated to preserving the traditional dance and music of West Africa and the African diaspora.

Now available at opera box.tv, Boston Lyric Opera offers a mysterious, death-defying plunge into streaming opera. The eight part mini series stars Isabel Leonard and Talise Trevigne as a married lesbian couple who run a desert Inn, where people can be reunited with their dead loves, like a real world ouija board set in Palm Springs. The Inn sign is not missing a letter. The eerie Bates Motel missed some in the TV series. The kinky Chelsea, where traditional residents were like some of the characters in this series, also is distinguished by missing letters. What is not missing here is terrific music, drama and singing and not singing actors. James Darrah brings his film background and gifts to a wild opera moment.

The American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA) recently announced awards for authors of new plays.Her Honor, Jayne Byrne received the 2021 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award. SHIP, by Douglas Williams, takes home the 2021 M. Elizabeth Osborn Award. Runners-up for the ATCA/Steinberg honor were Khat Knotahaiku for Graveyard Shift as well as Jason Narducy and Brett Neveu for the musical Verboten.

Blending several different theatrical genres and making it all work is a challenge. Murder for Two, which is reopening Ivoryton Playhouse combines elements of farce, murder mysteries and musicals.

GableStage in Coral Gables will open its 2021-22 season with Arthur Miller's The Price. The nonprofit, professional theater company near Miami had planned to produce Miller's drama last season, however, the pandemic closed theaters. GableStage's 2021-22 season will be the first under new producing artistic director Bari Newport. Newport succeeds Joe Adler, a South Florida theater icon who has died.

“The Song of Summer” contains many stock situations, but they are written and performed with great flair, and the outcomes are not always as expected.  Importantly, the play’s subtext provides layers of depth that result in a thoughtful work.  Though the work doesn’t wallow in self-importance, this is not an episode of “Happy Days.”  

The National Academy of Design is pleased to announce the launch of the virtual Eastman Johnson Catalogue Raisonné on July 29, in recognition of the anniversary of the artist’s birthday. In this first phase, the catalogue raisonné is focused on American artist Eastman Johnson’s paintings. Subsequent phases will include the artist’s drawings and prints.

With “Katya Kabavona”’s powerful score and intense drama, Janácek expressed his full maturity in the vocal genre.  It is a classic, and West Edge’s production is well worth seeing.

And Away We Stared is an inventive and theatrically imaginative production, using text from the works of writers Charles Mee, Gertrude Stein and Matei Visniec, a Romanian-French playwright frequently produced by Trap Door. The theater is committed to “seeking out challenging yet obscure works and bringing them to startling life on stage” and they’ve succeeded here.

Harriet Harris has caught Eleanor’s mannerisms well, her physical motions exactly - living in the age of newsreels, her figure, her speech, her presence are indelible in public memory.

It's the final lap for the summer season at Tanglewood with more great concerts to come.

Kingston Gallery members Jeesoo Lee and Jamal Thorne, with guest juror Lavaughan Jenkins, read James Baldwin’s interview with Studs Terkel. Then, with the interview fresh in their minds, the jurors focused on what it means to be disruptive and all the stories that people have to tell.

The Mount is open for guided tours through October 31. Tours can be booked online at EdithWharton.org. The grounds are open, dawn to dusk, unless otherwise posted.

The Irish Repertory Theatre has expanded our notion of performance in their streamed productions.  A company with a small theatre (146 seats in the main house), now offers its consistently superior productions to the wide audience they deserve.

Everyone has an absolute right to place their own lives in danger.   The Darwin Award was created to recognize such people posthumously.  But no one has the right to place anyone else’s life in danger.  To do so is selfish and ignorant.  Even freedom has its limits – – fire in a crowded theater, for instance.

For many, public art  conjures up images of bronze statues of a soldier on horseback, images of historically significant and/or forgotten politicians or leaders, or symbolic (often mythological) figures of metaphoric significance. But these days public art takes a wide variety of sizes, shapes, and forms. It can be temporary or permanent.

The final concert of the season on Sunday, September 5, features the all-female Cassatt String Quartet and celebrated pianist Ursula Oppens. Opening the program, Oppens will play selections from Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s intimate cycle of piano pieces, Das Jahr (“The Year”). 

One hundred and thirty-nine years after Richard Wagner’s final opera Parsifal premiered at the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, it was performed in concert in this house that Wagner built for its performance. Apparently, Richard Wagner himself took the podium to conduct Act III of Parsifal at the Festival performance in 1883.  He died later that year in Venice. There is  no recording of the performance, but witnesses  commented on the extremely slow tempos and the majesty of the reading.

For many years and especially in this long period of Covid-19 isolation, Susan and Leslie have spent many days independently walking the beaches and woods of Cape Cod, Susan in Provincetown (and other far flung places), and Leslie in Brewster.  Confirmed tree huggers, they have been scavenging for weathered or fallen wood.

Maltz Jupiter Theatre in Southeast Florida will kick off this upcoming season by presenting "Jersey Boys" in a baseball stadium. The season opens on Jan. 11, with Jersey Boys running from Jan. 11-30. Maltz Jupiter Theatre will re-open following a $36 million expansion. Highlights of the theater’s expansion include a new larger stage.

We are all spokes on a wheel. We need to turn this wheel together and steer it towards our common humanity. The mask erased our face and revealed our eyes. Hopefully we can redress bias with new understanding when we take them off and see our faces again.

 Our Laundry & Machine Shop desperately needs a new roof. What's involved? 24,320 cedar shakes. 48,640 nails. 4,500 square feet of roof.

Here Martin Mugar considers two abstract painters. The gesture of Forge is one of the traditional hand-application of the brush to canvas. The notion of a painting existing in time took on some meaning when I saw the show of David Row at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. It is probably one of the more perfect installations I have ever seen.

When was the last time you listened to music that was composed by a piece of birch wood? Eve Beglarian, in collaboration with superstar bassist Robert Black, one of the founding members of the renowned Bang-on-a-Can All-Stars, has composed a fascinating new work entitled "A Murmur in the Trees."

One of the most accomplished artists of the Berkshire region, Pennie Brantley is displaying her crisply rendered painting at Real Eyes Gallery in September. She states that, "Perhaps ironically, my attraction to painting unpeopled structures, especially from travels to other cultures, is inspired by a keen awareness of those who have lived in or made them -- or simply the march of humanity past them sometimes over centuries.  The images that stir my need to paint them have made me more intensely aware of the connectedness people share..."