Jean Bergantini Grillo was hired as a senior editor and columnist when The Cambridge Phoenix was launched by Jeffrey Tarter on October 9, 1969. She worked with renowned editor Harper Barnes trying to bring shape and coherence to a staff of hippie writers. Today she is writing a play about that era and its macho newsroom. She was one of three women on staff and knew how to use her elbows. She later wrote for The Village Voice, an experience described as chaotic, but loved four years with the Daily News.

Rita Kalnejais’ play, which premiered in London in 2015, is a gorgeous display of animal choreography, directed by Devon de Mayo. As I watched this zoo-rama of animals scuffle among themselves and fight their antagonists, both animal and humans, I was smitten with the energy and genius of their movements.

It is great to have Kelli O’Hara back on Broadway. As Lilli/Kate she once again proves herself a fine actress who can develop chemistry with every leading man she plays opposite.

Since the 1960s and Perry T. Rathbone I have interviewed every director of the Museum of Fine Arts. Sitting recently with Matthew Teitelbaum was refreshingly different. We were renewing a relationship that started in 1989 when he was a curator for Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. In 1993 he returned home to become senior curator at Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario. He became director there before coming to the MFA in 2015 as its eleventh director. While in the thick of staff changes and policy strategies he invites us to evaluate progress over the next five years.

Hershey Felder now takes on the life and works of Claude Debussy in a world premiere at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley. The great turn of the century composer is credited as the originator of the classical music genre of impressionism, though he didn’t care for the term

While sound issues require fixing, Measure for Measure Theatre's mounting of Murder Ballad offers an engrossing theatrical experience. Strong singing, emoting characterize this non-traditional theatrical experience. Murder Ballad, which featured Off-Broadway, centers on a love triangle gone wrong.

Lauren Yee manages to create a small miracle with her brave, heartwarming and funny play Cambodian Rock Band. Victory Gardens’ new production, directed by Marti Lyons, skims across two time periods—from present-day Phnom Penh to a 1975 Cambodian prison.

Bound, Huang Ruo's chamber opera, is produced at the Rose Nagelberg Theatre in the Baruch Performing Arts Center. Originally commissioned by Houston Grand Opera, this production is the New York premiere. It is a fresh take by Freshly Squeezed Opera. Ashley Tate who specializes in multi-media production, directs.

Ellen Reid has been a hot item this year. Four venues in Los Angeles commissioned work from her. Now Prism, a Beth Morrison production, has won the Pulitzer prize for music. We wandered her soundscape in Omaha created for her by Opera Omaha at the Josyln Art Museum. Distinguishing composing notes from the listener's experience, Reid brings new sounds to an audience.

Elizabeth Goldring, the widow of internationally renowned artist Otto Piene, recently donated 70 of his sketchbooks to the Harvard Art Museums and Archives. Piene sketched what he saw and what concerned and motivated him throughout his life. Now, researchers and the public can have access to this trove of drawings and ideas by contacting Harvard Archives.

Playwright Lauren Yee wins the Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award for her play, Cambodian Rock Band. ATCA adjudicators hail Yee's multi-faceted approach to her play as "absolutely inspired." Cambodian Rock Band explores the Cambodian holocaust. Yee is a previous ATCA award winner.

The Sheen Center's Black Box Theater is stacked with files containing the case records of 'defective' young people who are institutionalized and awaiting their death. All Our Children takes up a theme developed in Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck's latest film. The doctor in the film and the doctor running a clinic for children in the play, both are charged with duties best left to God. Who is to live, and who must die, is in play because upkeep is expensive and the State needs money for munitions.

Opera San José has mounted a stunning production of Madama Butterfly. Maria Natale leads the cast as Cio-Cio San, or Butterfly, with a remarkable performance.

The current Otto Piene exhibition at the Fitchburg Art Museum in Massachusetts will close on June 2nd with a conversation titled: 'Fire, Light and Protest.' Photographs by Joe Landry, 'The Summer of 1969' are also on view at FAM. The photographer and curator Lisa Crossman on the work of Piene will be in conversation. First, however, the museum is inviting the public to participate in an outdoor Sky Art Event on April 27 near the museum. Art that flies!

In 2017 San Fransicso celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. By 1968 the torch of the counterculture, with a radical twist, was passed to Boston. Cops and feds cracked heads when hippies and radicals protested in Boston and Cambridge. Just as in 1776, there were shots heard round the world. There has been no such celebration in Boston. In feisty increments there is ever increased interest and attention to a forgotten era. You can see it at The Verb Hotel, in the new film WBCN; The American Revolution, and books like Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968.

As part of a nine-play cycle, In Old Age and the multi-play aggregation from which it comes, beg particular analysis. The broader question is the standing of this Ufot family saga against other cycles. The obvious comparison is August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, which shares the commonality of exploring the African-American experience.

The Oldcastle Theatre season in Bennington, Vermont starts on June 7 with Red by John Logan. The 48th season features four plays through October 20.

Chicago critic Nancy Bishop hunkered down for an extended stay in New York. She toured museums during the day and attended theatre at night. Here she covers the Mexican modernist Frida Kahlo. She also reports on the Museum of Arts and Design at Columbua Circle.

The impact of DeCordova New England Biennial 2019 is its focus on inclusion and diversity. There is a spectrum from traditional forms of painting, sculpture and photography to social justice approaches to a range of hot button agendas. The latter work conforms to Marxist theories of art as agitation and propaganda.

Lottery Day is a party with a guest list of nine. Mallory (a sizzling J. Nicole Brooks) has invited them to her back yard to celebrate, but no one knows what the occasion is. With a rich and complex web of characters, Ike Holter’s play at Goodman Theatre brings together the threads from the other plays in his seven-part Rightlynd Saga.

Talented, veteran actor delivers a towering, multifaceted performance as Troy Maxson in Fences. Palm Beach Dramaworks' production of this Pulitzer Prize-winning play is riveting. Fences, which takes place in 1957, is part of August Wilson's "Pittsburgh Cycle" or "American Century Cycle."

Poet Anne Carson has a special touch, embedding a conversational tone in lilting lines. While Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is billed as a melologue in which some words are sung and some spoken. It asks the question opera composers always ask: what words should be spoken, and what words sung? As a struggling writer's secretary, Fleming becomes muse, moving from speech to song. She is glorious. So too is Ben Whishaw, who moves from writer to the embodiment of Marilyn Monroe.

I wish that I could say that Ain’t Too Proud turned me inside out and sent me directly to heaven. But if the truth be told the first act is a painful 30 minutes too long, and Dominique Morisseau’s mechanically written fact-filled book based on the group’s original founder Otis William’s 1988 memoir – lots of "I did that and he did that and then we all did that" – is as engaging as bad coffee and a failed omelet on a gray day.

Although the central plot line in Kill the Debbie Downers! is linear, the play changes tone, direction, time, and place frequently, resulting in a sense of mental chaos. But for those who can appreciate leaving a performance with more questions than answers, this is a fulfilling experience.

Directer Joel Grey delivers a rare and rich revival. Fiddler on the Roof has come back, a comment and conversation in Yiddish about a time and place that indeed did shake the world. In the language of the people who lived it, this production is more rooted in their world, earthy, funny, deeply-moving.