The consensus among critics attending the 38th Humana Festival in Louisville rated The Christians by Lucas Hnath as the best new play. It has now opened to strong reviews at New York's Playwrights Horizons. This is a reposting of our original review.

Our Chicago theatre correspondent, Nancy Bishop, recently checked in at the Edison Hotel in the heart of Times Square. She reports on several hot shows: Hamilton, The Flick and Desire.

Why not create opera in a warehouse like Andy Warhol's Factory? Take an over-the-top cast of characters familiar to opera goers, mash up classic and pop music, and fly? Why not? That's just what Opera Philadelphia and an intriguing cabaret group The Bearded Ladies have done. It is a wonderful opera.

This fall, under director Jill Medvedow, for the first time during her administration, the ICA will present a much anticipated historical exhibition surveying the impact of Black Mountain College on the post war American avant-garde. Under her predecessors, Milena Kalinovska and David Ross, there were many such projects. We spoke with Kalinovska about her Boston years as she prepared to depart with a three year contract as director of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery in her native Prague.

As “the Bet” plays itself out in this lighthearted, sort of silly but sweet rite of passage movie, Libby, Addison’s mom, also begins to date again after the death of her husband of several years ago.

Under a ton of makeup to get the look Johnny Depp is pretty good as Whitey Bulger. But, lets face it, when it comes to epic crime flicks he pales by comparison to Marlon Brando as Don Corleone in the Godfather. In directing Black Mass at best Scott Cooper is a Martin Scorsese or Mario Puzo wannabe.

The Big E runs for 17 days, September 18 through October 4th, at its permanent location, the fairgrounds in West Springfield, Massachusetts. The fair is open from 8am to 10pm daily. The carnival midway hours are from 10am to 11pm. Admission is $15 for adults and $10 for children 6-12 years old.

The International Youth Philharmonic Orchestra was founded to celebrate the universality of music. They note: Every person on the planet is a note in a greater symphony, telling his or her story of joy, sadness or peace. Notes may link together, turning into melodies and songs that are powerful and strong. The YPhil is a symbol of the voice of the world fraternity.

Non-stop bluegrass related music will take over North Adams Massachusetts this upcoming weekend. The Fresh Grass 2015 version invades the Berkshires for what should be a wonderful music oriented weekend.

Tom Sawyer is a coming of age story that walks children into adulthood and also reminds adults what fun it was to be a child. DTF's rendition captured the magic of it all.

Richard Maxwell's language is musical in the delivery of his tribe of usual suspects: Jim Fletcher, Brian Mendes, Tory Vasquez and Gary Wilmes. The actors are curiously contained and liberated at the same time, and they invite us into the flow of the story.

The 27th International Dance Festival was scheduled from 13 August to 4 September. The Artistic Director, Virve Soutinen, invited international dance companies, dancers and choreographers from more than 20 countries to present a fascinating survey of contemporary dance world-wide.

The ensemble cast of mainly Equity performers, make this touching 90 minute, no intermission production about the fragility of life and the quixotic-like hopes and dreams required to cope with its many difficult choices, a production not to be missed. It runs through September 13. 2015.

The last time Harry Connick, Jr. performed at Tanglewood there was a monsoon. Last night was a picture perfect evening as Connick and his nine piece band tore the roof off of the shed in a barn burner to close out the season during Labor Day weekend.

After a two year hiatus, Harry Connick, Jr returns to the stage at Tanglewood for a much anticipated Labor Day show on Friday evening, September 4th. Connick is a crowd favorite that hails from the 'Crescent City' (New Orleans).

Growing up as a teenager in Annisquam the arts were conservative or invisible on Cape Ann. During a recent visit we found that much has changed with a lively and thriving community of artists and writers. We also attended the venerable Gloucester Stage Company.

Beth Henley's 2012 play, The Jacksonian, is a bit of noir, a bit of Southern Gothic decay, and set in a nondescript motel of that name on the outskirts of Jackson, Miss., in 1964.

There is a distinctly Massachusetts flavor to Amherst based, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, Annie Baker's Flick at Gloucester Stage Company. In two acts and just under three hours it takes a long and slow approach to making us care about minimum wage workers at a one screen movie theater on its last legs.

Imagining life's end as you enter illusion, resistance and acceptance is difficult. It is also difficult to portray. In this imaginative take on the end of controversial Roy Cohn's life, Christopher Daftsios creates a memorable, tortured figure. Directed by Katrin Hilbe to both find intimacy in crucial relationships and a froideur in others, this complex man intrigues to his last breath.

Sylvia Plath knew that her life after death by suicide would be larger than her life in life. The confluence of great gifts and great sensitivity made her life difficult. So too her German parents and then her husband, Ted Hughes. This musical portrait pictures poet Plath in 50's culture, a study of contrasts.

“The Comedy of Errors” is a crafty selection, by Barry Edelstein, to close out the ‘summer season’ at The Old Globe. Under Director Ellis’ creative staging, the masterful production, has been moved up in time from an Elizabethan setting to the jazz-age, sexy, wide-open, ‘laissez les bon temps rouler’ lifestyle of 1920’s New Orleans (NOLA).

Season after season for twenty-eight years the Irish Repertory Theatre has produced plays which touch not only the soul of a nation, but the human soul. A culture in which everyone tells stories provides the bedrock for great story-telling literature. Plays like The Weir offer an artful slice of life and capture its poetry and pain. Playwright McPherson loves the monologue, and weaves four as individual stories into the stories of five residents of a small Irish town.

Jiminy Peak Resort, of New Ashford, Massachusetts, partners with Nexamp, a solar energy developer to construct a 2.3 megawayy solar energy facility that will tackle the majority of power used on the ski mountain and the neighboring community.

In nooks and crannies all over New York, talent is busting out in the 19th New York International Fringe Festival. Herrera is a percussionist who finds the beat wherever she is. In her entrancing concept of a kid in a warehouse music factory, buckets and bikes found lying on the floor offer opportunities for novel and instant sounds. They are even better than chocolate.

The circus came to town joining the Pops for perhaps the most fun and entertaining evening of summer at Tanglewood.