Front Porch Arts Collective and The Huntington announce the cast and creative team of K-I-S-S-I-N-G, their co-production of the world premiere play written by Massachusetts playwright and Huntington Playwriting Fellow Lenelle Moïse and directed by The Porch’s Co-Producing Artistic Director Dawn M. Simmons. Front Porch Arts Collective is in residence at The Huntington as part of a multi-year strategic partnership.

“Mah nishtanah, ha-laylah ha-zeh,mi-kol ha-leylot” (Why is this night different from all other nights?). This invocation, spoken by the youngest capable person at the dinner table at seder, is perhaps the most famous and evocative sentence in Judaism. Not only does the ritual that follows those words reflect on the traumatic history of the Jewish people, but it speaks to their very existence.

The exhibition highlights Behind Blue Eyes, a project started by Dima Zubkov and Artem Skorohodko, volunteers who distribute food and supplies to residents in liberated Ukrainian villages.

Rhiannon Giddens talks often of being comfortable in the crossroads of her art. The new configuration of Zankel Hall in Carnegie looks like a crossroads. The audience comes from every direction to focus on the world being presented. The stage is a hybrid space where different music from different times can exist side by side.

Barrington Stage Company (BSC), under the leadership of Artistic Director Alan Paul, will produce a 2023 season that will feature two major musical revivals, two world premiere plays, and two modern classic play revivals.

"Rotterdam" is an emotionally-rich play receiving a strong production at Island City Stage. The production runs through Feb. 19 at the company in Wilton Manors, near Ft. Lauderdale. "Rotterdam" opens Island City Stage's 2022-23 season.

“Cashed Out” takes place on the Gila River Reservation in southern Arizona, home to the Pima tribe, traditionally noted for their finely woven baskets – tightly twined bowls with crisp angular patterns.  While the compelling narrative gives interesting insights into the culture of the native people, universal themes abound – the power of love in family and friendship; internal struggle and external conflict; forgiveness and redemption.  The production is striking and highly appealing.

Dominique Morisseau has written a sometimes funny but always tense noirish drama which Director Dawn Monique Williams plumbs for all its nuance. The actors find the essence of each character and deliver a gripping entertainment.

Valentines Day is drawing near and the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, Germany, seems to bow to this occasion with its new production 'Amore' under the direction of Aram Tafreshian.

The "innovative, clever and thoroughly professional" BERKSHIRE OPERA FESTIVAL (BOF) announces its 2023 season in Great Barrington and Pittsfield, MA, and for the first time in New York City. The only company of its kind in the Berkshire region, BOF produces opera at the highest level under the vision of esteemed co-founders Brian Garman (Artistic Director) and Jonathon Loy (Director of Production). The festival has "destination" status. Others write: "No longer need we confine our opera-going to HD films—now we have the highest quality productions and performers in our own backyard." 

For all of human history and eons before, Mount Everest has stood as steady as a rock – literally. In its eight years, the opera “Everest: An Immersive Experience” has had three very different realizations, even though under the baton of Nicole Paiement for each version. The genesis of the opera’s narrative is a real-life tragedy about three members on an Everest expedition in 1996, two of whom never came back.

 The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) announces that longtime museum supporters James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes have made a significant donation to enhance PEM’s 120,000-square-foot Collection Center in Rowley, Massachusetts.

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame is enjoying a must-see run at the Irish Repertory Theatre.  Starring Bill Irwin, the clown and Beckett aficionado, as Clov and John Douglas Thompson as Hamm, here uncharacteristically for Thompson, the “insider.” He is bound to a wheelchair, blind and dependent on painkillers, yet the clear force of the moment. Clov lurches around him. 

Concurrent solo exhibits at Boston's Moakley Courthouse, present new abstract watercolors by Erica H. Adams and abstract Lexan wall reliefs by Marjorie Minkin that share transparency, color-light and layers that reveal content.    

For Rockport psychologist and playwright, Lawrence Hennessy, art imitates life in his new play Annisquam. Is the playwright moonlighting as a shrink or the other way around? Tickets for the three performances are available at Gloucester Stage.

New York Festival of Song Presents  Amor: A 50th Anniversary Celebration of Steven Blier's Professional Debut at Kaufman Music Center on February 15, 2023

Vaclav Havel’s Audience circulated widely in a sanitized form during the Soviet occupation of his country after the Second World War. During the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August, 1968, Havel provided a narrative of the invasion on Radio Free Czechoslovakia and was banned from his work in the theater. To survive, he took a job in the Kraknos brewery in Trufnov. This is the setting of Audience.

"Ivanov" was Anton Chekhov's first play. It opened in 1887 and had been modified several times by the writer/playwright himself, vascillating between comedy and tragedy. 

Broadway at LPAC presents an invigorating "42nd Street" in South Florida. The professional production runs through March 5. Lauderhill is near Ft. Lauderdale.

Miss Julie by the Nobel laureate playwright August Strindberg was initially set on Midsummer’s eve on an estate in 19th century Sweden. Could it work set in 21st-century America? Playwright Hilary Bettis’ clever adaptation shows that it can.

What a thrill it is to bring NEA Jazz Master Delfeayo Marsalis to the Berkshires, as guest soloist with the UMass Jazz Ensemble 1. A scion of New Orleans’ fabled music family, Delfeayo Marsalis’ appearance in the March 11 concert (Shakespeare & Co., Lenox) marks the first time that he has appeared with the UMass big band.

Following the work over a number of decades, Louis Risoli has been among Boston’s foremost artists. He is long overdue for a museum restrospective. His work is on view in March at Boston's Gallery Naga which has represented him for many years.

“Bill Finn and James Lapine’s A New Brain has long been deserving of rediscovery, so it is a wonderful opportunity for our theatres to join forces for the first time to present it for our audiences this summer,” commented BSC Artistic Director Alan Paul and WTF Interim Artistic Director Jenny Gersten, in a joint statement.

There are three examples of a new look to Boston’s skyline: Boston University’s Center for Computing and Data Sciences or “Jenga Building” near Kenmore Square; Harvard’s John A. Paulson Science and Applied Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) Building in Allston; and the One Congress Street Building at the Bulfinch Triangle next to Government Center.

In its essence, the opera is an intimate triangle of love, predation, betrayal, and murder. Yet the intimacy of “Tosca” plays against a grand canvas of three unrelated settings, which LVO executes deftly.